Shortly before the party, the news got out around town that the president was fixin’ to give a big televised speech on civil rights that same night. John F. Kennedy and his brother Robert were no icons in the white community of rigidly segregated Sebastion; liberal idols to be toppled, was more like it.
“This is goin’ to be painful,” Eulalie observed to Clayton as they dressed in their rooms upstairs before the party. “Even worse than it usually is. I am truly dreading it. We’re going to have to turn on that big TV so everybody can watch the speech, and then we’re going to have to listen to those bigots hoot and holler at our president.”
“We have to do it, Eulalie,” Clayton reminded her.
“Well, I think I knowthat,” she snapped back at him.
He was dressing in baby blue and white seersucker; she was slipping on a soft white dress. They were in their early forties then, he the president of a local bank, she the obvious next in line to be the social matriarch of Sebastion when her generation’s turn came ’round. They had no children. Clayton was a deceptively mild man, practiced at foreclosing on small farmers with a personal sympathy that belied his impersonal task; she was deceptively intimidating, accustomed to getting her way without coating her “requests” with sugar as other women did. Some people found him mealymouthed; many people thought her bossy. Nobody said that to their faces.
Just as they regularly did, Eulalie and Clayton were going to stage, on this evening, a little show of hospitality for the local bigots, people they had grown up with, played under the eyes of nannies and mammies with, gone to school with, “come out” into society with, joined the country clubs with, done business with, and all with false smiles to fool the fools who thought them friends. They felt they had to do it, just so the segregationists couldn’t suspect how far the Fishers and a few others like them—theGoodwins, the Reeses, the Wiegans, and the Folletinos—had traveled from being one of them. And just so they wouldn’t suspect that those same white families associated with some of the black people in Sebastion—people like Rachel and her fiancé, Hubert, who both worked for the Folletinos—in ways that went beyond employer/employee into something perilously close to friendship. While it was true that, if asked for either Rachel’s or Hubert’s last names, neither Eulalie nor Clayton could have provided them, at least they would have felt bad about it. There was still a gap, but it was perhaps the narrowest that Sebastion had seen since its founding.
“If we don’t fake it, we’ll destroy Hostel,” Clayton reminded her, apparently oblivious to her earlier warning shot. “If people start lookin’ at us suspiciously, we won’t be able to hide anybody anymore, and then what good would we be to anybody, Eulalie?”
“Well, I’d like to know why you suddenly think you need to lecture me about this, Clayton Fisher! Lord in heaven, I think I know we aren’t doing this for our own amusement! If it were up to me, I’d tell them all to their faces what I think of them, but then we’d have to shut down Hostel.”
Her husband patted the soft June air in a conciliatory way.
“Yes, yes, Eulalie, settle down now.”
She hated being told to “settle down,” as any woman would have.
“Do you think I’m a horse, Clayton? Are you going to tell me to giddyup and go, now?”
He did privately think that his wife needed to be “reined in” now and then, but he’d sooner kick himself in his own side with spurs than to tell her so. Instead, he did what he was best at—putting a benign interpretation to almost anything. Clayton made a show of shooting his cuffsand looking at his watch. “You’re right, Eulalie, we’d both better giddyup and go! That doorbell’s going to start ringing any minute now.”
They both, and quite realistically, feared getting shot up or burned out, if the secret of Hostel escaped into the community at large. Social standing wouldn’t help them then. Money wouldn’t save them. Their home, Clayton’s ancestral mansion built before the Civil War, could go up in flames. Even the bank might go down. But if the worst ever did happen, if their “friends” and neighbors found out they were traitors to the precious status quo, the Fishers knew it would be much worse for the black folks in town, because everything always was.
Clayton and Eulalie descended to greet the fifty or so guests they were expecting for supper. It seemed like a coincidence at first when their backyard filled with only Hostel members and townspeople who didn’t claim an allegiance to either side but only went about their business hoping to be undisturbed by history. People had been invited for six o’clock cocktails, followed by a seven o’clock picnic, but by six-forty-five there wasn’t a known Klan member in sight, nor any known white council members, either. Although the absence of those people relieved a bit of tension, it did seem odd, to say the least.
“Where arethey?” Eulalie whispered to Clayton.
He shrugged imperceptibly, and sipped his mint julep.
“Why aren’t they here yet?” she insisted.
“I don’t know, dear. Why don’t you go call them and find out?”
“I’m not going to call my invited guests to ask why they aren’t here!”
“Well, then, I suppose we’ll just have to wonder.”
The hosts weren’t the only ones who were beginning to wonder. “Where iseverybody?” Marty Wiegan’s wife askedClayton. By “everybody,” he knew exactly what she meant: the majority, the people on the other side, the ones who weren’t supposed to know.
He smiled his gracious smile and joked, sotto voce, “Maybe my wife forgot to mail their invitations, accidentally on purpose.”
“I did no such thing,” Eulalie remonstrated, coming up behind them. “And where are Michael and Lyda, I’d like to know? At least if theyweren’t coming, you’d think they’d let me know before now!” She clapped her hands to get the attention of her guests. “Hello, hello! Clayton has an announcement, ya’ll!”
“I do?” he asked, turning toward her.
She gave him a little shove. “Of course you do. Tell them to start eating!”
“Start eating, folks!” he called out with good humor.
Slowly the eighteen people who were there began to form a line and then to fill their plates from the abundance that Eulalie’s own “colored help” had put out. But the conversation was desultory, as if none of them could keep a topic going. What had looked like coincidence was beginning to look unnervingly like a plan.
Was Eulalie’s party being deliberately snubbed?
Heads kept turning toward the house whenever one of the help pushed through a doorway with more food or plates. When the garden gate clicked loudly shut, several voices stopped in midconversation and people turned to stare to see who was coming, but it was only Lackley Goodwin, who had stepped into the front yard to have a smoke with Austin Reese. The two men looked startled when they saw how many faces—expectant, apprehensive faces—were turned their way.
“It’s just us, folks!” Austin called out, with a wave.
But once everyone had turned back to their plates and uneasy chatter, he and Lackley moved over to Clayton, whowas standing with Marty Wiegan. Austin said quietly, “Why aren’t Michael and Lyda here? Have they called? You know we delivered a package to them last night.”
Clayton patted the air in his habitual way, to silence such dangerous talk.
“I’m sure they have their reasons, Austin,” he said. “The baby may have colic.”
“You’re taking a lot for granted, Clay,” Marty Wiegan said. It was sharply put, but then he was northern-born. Nervously, he patted the long dark strands combed across the top of his head. “Have you called them to find out?”
“No, Eulalie wouldn’t let me.” Clayton smiled at a passing guest and said to her, “You need to refill that drink, darlin’!”
“Clayton Fisher, you’d get me drunk!” she trilled back at him.
He smiled, turning the warmth of it onto his male friends and fellow Hostel members. “But that needn’t stop anybody else from callin’ who might de
sire to do so.”
Marty Wiegan turned at once to go into the house to call the Folletinos.
“I wonder if one of us ought to just go over there and see,” Lackley Goodwin worried out loud. “Austin, why don’t you come up with a sudden need to make sure you turned off your garden hose before you left home?”
“I wouldn’t do that,” their host said quickly. He looked around and then lowered his voice so only they could hear him. “If there’s trouble, we can’t be associated with it, you know that, Lackley.”
They all knew that. It was their agreement: they stood together, but they fell alone. It was the only way to protect one another and the purpose of Hostel. But none of them had ever “fallen,” not yet. Was it happening to Michael and Lyda, even as the rest of them stood in the Fishers’ backyard pretending to be having an ordinary party?
Austin stabbed at the bridge of his eyeglasses. “We can’t just—”
“Yes,” Clayton corrected him, and suddenly the bank president was standing there in the place of the genial host. “We can.”
By the time that Eulalie ordered Clayton to shepherd everyone into the television room to watch the speech, some of the “neutrals” were starting to come up with excuses to go home. They may have been ignorant about the existence of Hostel, but they were exquisitely attuned to social nuance. For so very many of Sebastion’s most respected couples to boycott this party could only mean that Eulalie’s social ship was sinking. The “neutrals” had no intention of going down with it.
“Sucha lovely party,” they assured her. “ ’Bye-bye, Eulalie.”
“Should we send everybody home?” Clayton whispered to his wife as they stood in their open front doorway staring at the departing backs of four guests.
“Not on your life,” she hissed back. “Nothing is wrong.”
“My dear, something is—”
“We will act as if nothing is wrong, Clayton. Turn up the sound so everybody can hear it. Make sure everyone has a drink who wants one.”
He shook his head—an unusual display of disagreement—and obeyed her.
5
Marie
By the time I have lunch ready, Deb has read it all.
She bounces into the kitchen looking pretty bug-eyed.
“Wow, Marie. That’s an amazing story!”
“Are you hungry? Sit.”
She obeys. “I have a million questions for you.”
I put a plate in front of her and a platter of sliced cheese and fruit, with crackers between us, and then I sit down across from her. “Okay. Shoot.”
“Are you sure you don’t mind? It won’t bother you to—”
“Nope. Ask.”
“Well, one thing I wondered as I read it is, are they really sure your mother was involved the same way your father was? I mean, if she was always a rebel, the way Mrs. Fisher describes her, then why would she fall in with the segregationists?”
“My parents may not have done it for a ‘cause.’ ”
“What for then?”
“I don’t know. For money, maybe.”
“Oh.” Deb looks shocked at the idea of that, and I don’t blame her. It is shocking to think of selling out people—especially ones engaged in a risky and righteous struggle—for a mere material reward. I’d almost rather they had done it because they believed in something, even something reprehensible.
“I come from a long line of traitors, Deb,” I tell her gently.
“What do you mean?”
“My grandparents on my father’s side were Hollywood screenwriters, like Nathan, only they were Communists who gave up their friends’ names to the House Un-American Activities Committee.”
“The McCarthy committee?”
“Yes. In the fifties.”
She looks nearly as shocked as when I suggested that my parents might have done it for the money.
“Like father, like son,” I say, lightly. “It makes a kind of sense.”
When she doesn’t seem to know how to go on tactfully from there, I help her along a bit. “What are your other questions?”
“Well, I have another one about your mother.”
“Okay.”
“It doesn’t make sense to me that she did this terrible thing, and that she also warned James and helped him escape. Does that compute to you?”
“No, now that you mention it, but maybe that wasn’t her.”
“What wasn’t?”
“The woman in white who ran in to warn James.”
“He said it was—”
“No, he said he thought he met my mother.”
“But have you seen pictures of her?”
“A few. And they do look like the person he described to me,” I admit. “Short, blond—”
“Beautiful?”
“Yes, she was very pretty.”
Deb puts a square of cheese between two crackers and smiles at me. “Like mother, like daughter.”
I smile back a little grimly. “God, I hope not.”
“Oh, I’m sorry, I only meant—”
“I know. Thank you. That was ungracious of me. But that’s only a couple of questions, Deb. You’ve still got 999,998 to go.”
She laughs a little, looking embarrassed.
“Deb, it’s okay, really. This is helpful to me.”
“It is? It doesn’t, like, make you feel bad?”
“Not at all,” I lie. “What else?”
“I guess . . .” She spreads out her hands in a helpless gesture. “I guess it could all be summed up by just a few questions—what happened next, what happened to them, and where’s the rest of the book so I can finish reading it?”
“That’s all there is.”
“That’s all? You haven’t written the rest of it yet?”
“No, that’s all of the story there is. I don’t know any more.”
This is not entirely true. There is a little more that I’ve written down, but I’m not going to show it to her. I’m probably not going to show it to anybody. It’s too personal, there’s too much about me in it. Plus, some of it is so . . . sentimental . . . that it’s even hard for me to believe.
“You don’t ?” Deb exclaims, eyes wide. “What the tabloid said is true ?”
“I’m afraid so, if you mean—is it true that my parents were never seen again. If they were, whoever saw them has never said so. If you just want the basic facts about it, I can tell you in three sentences. That same night, June twelfth, I was left in Sebastion for my aunt and uncle to raise. My parents were apparently dropped off somewhere at a crossroads just out of town, by a friend who didn’t know what they were up to. And that’s the last that anybody has ever heard of them, as far as I know.”
“Marie! That’s awful! How old were you?”
“About seven months.” I smile at her. “But I’m bigger now.”
She looks across at me with so much sympathy and concern in her eyes that I have to avert my eyes; I look down at the slice of orange dangling from my fork. “What do you think happened to them, Marie?”
I take my time raising the fork to my mouth, eating the slice of orange, swallowing, dabbing at my mouth with a napkin. Then I finally look back at her. “Some say they were murdered bymembers of Hostel, out of revenge for the betrayal, but I don’t think I believe that. For one thing, the members of Hostel were otherwise occupied that night, to say the least. And for another, it would just be so antithetical to the very nature of people in the civil rights movement, or so it seems to me.” I take a breath. “Of course, I don’t actually know what every single one of those members of Hostel—the white ones—did after they were released from police headquarters. And I don’t know if there were any black members who escaped the net. So I can’t swear that’s wrong. But it just doesn’t feel right to me, for whatever that’s worth.”
“What else could have happened?” she asks me quietly.
“Maybe they were killed by somebody in law enforcement to keep it from coming out that there was any campaign aga
inst integration. Or maybe they just ran away, Deborah.”
She looks horrified. “And left you? A baby?”
I shrug. “They betrayed lots of people, not just me. If they escaped somewhere, I would have been an encumbrance, I would have slowed them down and made them more easily identifiable.” I laugh a little. “Hell, they could be living under a witness protection program. Maybe they’re your next-door neighbors. Maybe they’re mine.”
“So, you think they’re still alive somewhere?”
I look up, startled. “Oh, no. I don’t. I think they’re dead.”
Her eyes start to fill with tears on my behalf, and I can’t have that.
“How about some iced tea,” I suggest, getting up from the table, “and a bowl of frozen custard with sliced peaches?”
Like me, Deborah can almost always be distracted by food.
What I have, that I’m not going to show her, isn’t even written up in proper true crime book fashion yet. It’s still in the form in which I heard it from the black people I interviewed who used to work for my parents. One of them was Rachel Anderson. Another was her fiancé, Hubert Templeton. Both of them were important members of Hostel. I also talked to an old woman who used to cook for my mother and a part-time housecleaner who was there that night, but both of them were already too old to remember much, or perhaps they didn’t want to. Rachel’s memory was a little better—she confirmed most of the story that James told me, the parts she had reason to know, like bringing him food, and feeling a little scared of him.
But it was Hubert who claimed to recall almost everything. While Deb is dealing with journalists who have seen the tabloid story and who have my home phone—fobbing them off for now, but promising that I’ll call them—I pull out the remaining pages in their original rough form, and privately read them through again.
BETRAYAL
By Marie Lightfoot
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The Truth Hurts Page 5