‘Charles has a first-aid kit in the glove compartment, since he takes this pickup when he hunts.’ He reached across me, his arm touching my knee, and pulled out the kit.
I was angry and embarrassed. ‘It’s just a little cut,’ I said through tight teeth.
Cully was already pulling a gauze pad from the kit. He pulled my arm over as if it weren’t attached to a body. Dabbing carefully, he blotted the blood with the gauze. His eyes flashed sideways once, but his look bounced off mine and back to the cut.
It came to me that Cully was a wound healer. That was a beautiful trait in a psychologist, or a brother, or a bosom friend; but fairly dismaying in an object of lust. If I could manage to survive a pretty bad car accident, I conjectured, I might even rate a kiss.
‘What did you start to say to me that day that Alicia was over at the house?’ I asked, just to remind him that I was indeed at the end of my arm.
‘Oh.’ He was absurdly intent on the little cut. He got out a bandage and ripped off those irritating strips of paper that guard the adhesive. ‘I just wanted to tell you to be sure to lock up at night, and just sort of watch out in general for Mimi.’
I frowned. ‘Maybe I’m being dense, but why?’
‘Well, she’s been through a lot lately; Grandmother and Richard and all.’
Mimi was about as frail as an innerspring. Though Cully might not see her that way; after all, he was her dearly beloved and only brother. There’s more here than meets the eye, I told myself wisely, and twirled an imaginary mustache until Cully looked up and caught me.
‘What on earth are you doing?’
‘There’s something you’re not telling me,’ I parried.
He straightened and looked thoughtful. I wondered if I could have my arm back, since it was obvious this was not going to be one of those electric movie moments when the hero suddenly gives way to passion after touching the girl, usually when she’s dismounting. I didn’t have a horse to slide off of; the best I could do was cut my hand.
‘No,’ Cully decided out loud. He bent back over my cut, meticulously applied the bandage, and handed my arm back to me.
‘No, what?’ I asked nastily. My muscles were aching from the weight of the garbage bag, the cut began to throb, and there were about seventy-five things I had to do before I could retire for my much-needed preparty nap.
‘It wasn’t important anyway,’ Cully said, and started the pickup bucking along the road.
We were halfway home when I turned to him and said with absolute honesty, ‘Cully Houghton, you are one of the most aggravating and frustrating people I have ever known.’
He looked considerably surprised, as well he might. I think it was the first time I’d ever said something really personal to Cully.
‘That’s interesting,’ he said after a moment.
We didn’t speak again; but oddly enough, the silence wasn’t uneasy. I blocked him out of my mind, and I was half asleep by the time we got home.
* * * *
Attila was pressed in a hot purring bundle against my leg when I woke up. He’d definitely adopted me, which showed sheer ingratitude to Mimi, who’d found him as a starving kitten and fed him to his present enormous size.
He sat on the toilet lid as I showered and dried my hair. The sound of the blow dryer made him nervous, but he tolerated it to satisfy his curiosity. He even endured my tuneless humming, the closest I will ever come to singing. The nap and hot shower had banished the worst of my soreness. The cut looked clean and small. I felt refreshed and in a mood to party. I tickled Attila under the chin, and he followed me to my vanity table to watch me put on my makeup.
I was thinking sweet thoughts about little furry friends when (via the mirror) I observed Attila carefully and deliberately shoving one of my earrings over the edge of the table. He tried hard to look innocent when he realized I’d caught him at it, but the look didn’t come off.
‘You’re going to have to learn my ways,’ I said grimly, ‘if we’re going to cohabit. Bad cat!’ I whacked him on his broad beam.
He instantly bit me and began purring like a chain saw.
We stared at each other.
The cat’s schizophrenic, I concluded. I knelt to grope under the bed for the earring. (Of course it had bounced under the bed – don’t they always?) Attila descended from the vanity with a thud and dived under the bedspread to see what I was doing. He spotted the gleam of gold a split second before I did and quickly sat on my earring. We stared at each other again. It looked like a Mexican standoff.
Fortunately for one of us, little Mao stuck her head around the door to investigate my room. Attila was off the earring in a flash, pursuing the smaller cat with yowls of fury.
Dressing went more smoothly after his departure. Soon I was all ready except for the top layer, and that required some thought.
Before going upstairs for her own nap, Mimi had advised me on what to wear: ‘Something that doesn’t show a whole lot of boob. Wait till they get to know you, for that. But don’t condescend, either; they’ll all know where you’ve lived and what you’ve done for a living.’ As if I needed that advice, after my never-to-be-forgotten gaucherie years ago.
Now I searched through my closet nervously, sliding hanger after hanger across the rod in search of something absolutely appropriate. It suddenly occurred to me how ludicrous my anxiety was. I recalled some of the parties I’d dressed for in New York. Some – not a lot, but some – had been the kind that got written up at great length and talked about for years.
Unfortunately my old ego boosters (Famous People I’ve Drunk With, Publicized Parties I’ve Attended, Beautiful Men I’ve Dated) didn’t seem to weigh an ounce now I was back home. They might as well have been social distinctions on the moon, for all they counted here and now. I gave myself the green light on being nervous. I had every reason to be.
I finally lighted on a dress that mingled every shade of blue and green and covered my chest pretty thoroughly without being in any way virginal. I pulled it on and got everything settled. Then I turned around in front of the mirror and looked over my shoulder. My partially bare back told me my tan was holding up pretty well.
‘Great!’ Mimi applauded from the doorway. She was wearing true red and she looked like a million dollars. She came and stood beside me, and I revolved to look at our reflections in the mirror. We had gazed into many mirrors together across our friendship’s span of thirteen years. I liked this reflection better than any I’d seen.
We were as sharp a contrast as ever – Mimi small and dark, myself tall and fair. Some of the arrogance was missing in the way she stood and held her head; it had been pared off by the divorces. Some of the self-conscious power vested in me by my face had been knocked off my shoulders. Mimi was not so wild and willful. She was not so trusting, either. I was less defensive; and I knew now I would never conquer the world.
I don’t know what Mimi was thinking during that long moment. Maybe her thoughts were traveling the same road as mine. But somehow I was convinced that she saw us as we used to be; not as we were.
She put her arm around my waist and hugged me close, then loosed me to lift my hair on my shoulders and rearrange it in a drift she liked better.
‘Let’s get this party rolling,’ she said briskly.
I blinked, and the moment was gone.
4
PARTIES IN KNOLLS started (and ended) earlier than I was used to. About eight-thirty I decided that the entire population of the town was crammed into Mimi’s house. At least the entire white population of Knolls – some things hadn’t changed much in the years I’d been gone.
Aside from their uniform skin color, our guests ran the narrow gamut of Knolls society. There were friends of Mimi’s with their husbands in tow, women I vaguely remembered, most of them giddy with the excitement of a night off from the kids. There were plenty of college people. I met the cowardly college president, Jeff Simmons, and found him charming. He had a beautiful head of wheat-blond hair for wh
ich most women would’ve sacrificed their microwaves. And there were people unaligned with either college or society cliques, whom Mimi just knew and liked. Town and gown and independent.
I hadn’t been to see Mimi’s parents yet, so I was glad to see them come in the door. Sleek, dark Elaine was still one of the most attractive women I’ve ever known. She swept me up in a carefully loose embrace and brushed her cheek against mine, bombarding me with questions it would take me a week to answer. Not that Elaine intended to stick around and listen if I did. She was wearing a beautiful dress that revealed a lot of still-prime cleavage. If Elaine subscribed to Mimi’s dictum, the people here tonight must know Elaine very well indeed.
Elaine’s husband Don was close on her heels, as always. I hugged Mr Houghton with far more enthusiasm. I’d always been very fond of him, a fondness compounded both of pity and of gratitude for his kindness. I believed it was not easy to be married to Elaine, and I sometimes thought it couldn’t be too easy to be Cully’s and Mimi’s father. In social situations Don was always overshadowed by his family. But he did have his own flair; Don could make money, and he was shyly proud of that, I’d discovered years ago.
‘How’s the man with a finger in every pie?’ I asked lightly.
Mr Houghton looked pleased and embarrassed and altogether like a great teddy bear. He’d lost some hair and gained some weight since Mimi’s last marriage, but his face wasn’t deeply lined and he still had a bounce to his walk.
‘Well, I can’t complain,’ he admitted proudly.
I led Mr Houghton over to the bar, where Cully mixed his father a gin and tonic. They shook hands with an odd formality, but they looked glad to see each other.
‘What are you up to now?’ I asked in a whisper.
‘Well, Nickie,’ Don began slowly, taking a sip of his drink, ‘I’ve bought me a restaurant.’
‘Which one?’ This was sure to be a secret. In addition to owning a big insurance agency, Don was a silent partner in many Knolls businesses.
Don whispered back the name. I recognized it as one of the few good restaurants in Knolls.
‘You demon,’ I said with a grin. ‘You’re going to own this town before too long.’ Don loved that kind of talk; he grinned like a twelve-year-old with a frog in his pocket.
We chatted for a while, and at first I enjoyed it thoroughly. But as usual, Don (bless his heart) began to bore me just a little after a while. I caught myself looking wistfully at guests I hadn’t had a chance to visit with.
Mimi whipped up to rescue me in a swirl of red.
‘Daddy! You let Nick talk to other people. You can have her over to lunch soon and hash over old times. There’s Jeff Simmons over there. You better go tell him that Houghton needs some more insurance, after that awful thing this summer!’
Her father obediently headed in Jeff Simmons’s direction, his face becoming purposeful as he thought of business.
‘You’ve always been such a favorite of Daddy’s,’ Mimi told me as she whisked me away. That pleased me, of course; Mr Houghton had always been a favorite of mine, too. But this evening, as we’d talked, I’d caught a little gleam in his eye that was quite unwelcome in the father of my best friend.
I shrugged to myself. Oh, well, Don had always been an appreciator of women. He bragged about Elaine’s looks all the time, as if he were personally responsible for her attractiveness.
Mimi introduced me to white-haired Mrs Harbison, our next-door neighbor, who immediately assured me she’d ‘just dropped in for a minute.’ Mrs Harbison’s minute stretched to twenty as she filled me in on the details of her widowhood. Her house was as large as this one. I wondered how the old lady managed by herself. As I listened, I found out. Mrs Harbison had few free moments. She gardened, kept the house up, canned, embroidered, played mahjong, and was active in the church. And she took some pains to find out what church I belonged to.
It had been so long since anyone had asked me that, I hardly knew what to say. I’d forgotten that this was always one of the first questions to be settled in the South. I remembered I’d been an Episcopalian once upon a time. I breathed a sigh of relief when Mrs Harbison turned out to be a Baptist. She couldn’t enlist me in any of her church organizations, and she was a little disappointed about that. To my dismay, she told me she’d be sure and tell a mysterious Mrs Percy that I was in town. I assumed Mrs Percy was Mrs Harbison’s Episcopalian equivalent, and I shook in my shoes. Church-minded ladies are as incontestible as gravity.
Mrs Harbison finally wandered off home. I made my way back to the makeshift bar where Cully presided. We’d borrowed two sawhorses, laid some planks over them, and covered the whole with a tablecloth now sadly stained with spilled cola and bourbon.
‘Got any Blue Nun left?’ I asked.
‘Coming right up,’ Cully said, and poured me a glass. He looked at me a little doubtfully, and I thought he was remembering that long-ago rehearsal dinner when I’d had too much to drink. I looked him straight in the eye and gave him the smile that had formerly cost so much per hour. For a gratifying second he looked stunned. I decided to leave while the going was good.
‘See you later,’ I called gaily, and wriggled through the crowd to join Barbara Tucker and Stan Haskell by the mantelpiece. They were standing close together and alone, looking like a pair of shy sheep. It was obviously my duty as a cohostess to cheer up this corner of the party.
I bellowed at Stan and Barbara over the noise of the room and got them livened up. Soon another Houghton professor wandered over and began to deliver a neat character assessment of his department head. I fixed my face in attentiveness, but my mind drifted. I listened to the party booming all around me. This was my first southern party in years, and I began to notice a difference in it. The voices were certainly as boisterous, the throats as dry. Of course these voices had a different cadence, for the most part; some Houghton people from the North and Midwest added variety. But many of the topics of conversation I could hear were the same – the president, the economy, children, personalities.
But there was a difference. Finally I had it. Most of the people I’d known in New York were on their way up or already there, in one of the most competitive cities in the world; a city in which making the grade locally meant making the grade all over the world.
Incredibly, these people at this little party in Knolls, Tennessee, were more assured. They had a place; and by God, they knew it. With the exception of the imported college people, the crowd in Mimi’s living room was interrelated, interbred, and interdependent. And with rare exceptions they would always be accepted in the place they’d been born to, no matter what any one of them did.
That had its advantages and disadvantages, like any other given condition. But this evening, in the flush of successful party-giving and the warmth of homecoming, that assurance seemed almost divine. In this society I felt an incredible safety that I’d felt nowhere else. I sank back into it as if it were a soft couch. Back in the fold. No need to prove myself. My struggle in New York seemed ludicrous.
Barbara shouted something in my ear then, and I snapped to. I couldn’t make out what she was saying, but I did hear enough to tell her she was acquiring a southern accent. Barbara laughed so much that I realized she was certainly appreciating the liquor. She was flushed with the heat of packed bodies and a good dose of bourbon. Stan, her Chaucerian lover, looked mildly embarrassed by Barbara’s noisy good cheer, but it appeared he was matching her drink for drink. Maybe later in the evening I would get to see shy Stan Haskell let his hair down. What a prospect.
Right now he was gesturing wildly to someone beyond my left shoulder. I twisted to see who it was. My rescuer from the cloister of the English and Administration building was making his way to our little group.
‘Nickie Callahan, Theo Cochran,’ Barbara introduced us. ‘Nickie, Theo is our registrar at Houghton.’
I beamed at Theo. ‘We already met, in the dark,’ I told Barbara. Barbara laughed immoderately again.
Theo smiled and nodded to me, then craned toward Barbara. He was looking rather handsome this evening, in his Roman senator/well-fed way. ‘Congratulations, Barbara! On the tenure!’ he said. ‘I haven’t seen you since I heard.’
‘Thanks, I’m celebrating! Where’s your wife?’
Theo pointed toward the farthest corner of the room. His wife seemed to be the intelligent-looking woman wearing a dress that would have made any designer throw up.
‘How’s Nell?’ Barbara asked. I must have looked blank. Stan bent over to tell me that Nell was Theo’s little girl. I nodded. There was that special inflection in Barbara’s voice that signaled a delicate subject, so I sobered my expression appropriately.
‘She’s doing as well as we expect,’ the registrar told Barbara through stiff lips.
And that was the end of Theo’s stay in our company. He stood there the second longer required for courtesy, then nodded curtly and moved off to rejoin his wife.
‘You shouldn’t have asked,’ Stan told Barbara. I got the feeling that perhaps I should edge away. Stan was obviously more than a little aggravated with Barbara.
She accepted his irritation as just. ‘You’re right, that was dumb. Nell’s his little girl, Theo’s only child,’ she explained to me. ‘She has leukemia.’
‘Oh, that’s horrible!’
‘He doesn’t like to talk about it at all. It was really stupid of me to ask. But I do want to know how she’s getting along and show some concern. It’s okay to talk to Sarah Chase about it – that’s his wife’s name – oh, didn’t you go to Miss Beacham’s?’
Bewildered by the abrupt change of subject, I nodded.
‘Theo’s wife is Sarah Chase Beacham.’
‘Miss Beacham has relatives?’ I said in amazement.
‘Well, a brother anyway,’ Barbara said. She was beginning to smile again. Stan took her glass and his own to get a refill, but I shook my head when he gestured toward mine. ‘Sarah Chase’s father is Miss Beacham’s brother. He’s in education too. I think he’s dean of men at Pine Valley Methodist College, and Sarah’s brother is a high school principal somewhere, and she herself used to teach. But with this illness of Nell’s – well, Sarah Chase just had to quit work. She’s changed beyond recognition. She’s older than you, so I doubt she was at Miss Beacham’s when you and Mimi were.’
A Secret Rage Page 5