Refuge

by Dot Jackson

  About a week of awful mornings later I went to the doctor, privately, and found out what was the matter. I had to go home and tell it, but I couldn’t believe it. Neither could Miss Lilah. “I don’t believe Hubut could…” she commenced, in shock. But he was sitting there and she thought better of it. Foots caught it and smiled wickedly. “Oh, no, it couldn’t be mine,” he said. Louise was absolutely stricken.

  “Oh, my poor little sister,” she said, gathering me into her arms.

  I was not anticipating a joyous experience. So I was not disappointed. Very shortly Foots woke me up one night, he was mumbling and thrashing around in the bed, wrestling the covers and kicking left and right. I raised up and put my hand on his head. And he flailed out and back-handed me in the eye. Well, ’course I yelled, and here comes his mama. “It’s his fevah! It’s his fevah!” she was hollering. “Get a col’ rag fo’ his head!” He felt cool as a mullet to me. But he muttered and thrashed and I went and got two cold rags—one for his head, and one for mine, and sat in a chair the rest of the night.

  When I went downstairs the next morning Mit threw up her hands and yelled, “No, Jesus!” It was an accident, I said. But I don’t think we were either one convinced. At dinnertime that day, Louise was sitting across the table, having to look at me, trying to make pleasant talk. All of a sudden she excused herself, weakly. She made it into the hall before she fell; it was the first seizure she’d had, when I was with her. That afternoon the florist’s boy brought a box of red roses, with a card, “To my dear wife, from your loving Hubert.” It looked a lot like Miss Lilah’s handwriting. In a few days I got the bill.

  All that excitement was over the first two-week black eye I ever had. It sure was not the last one. Any little frustration, like being out of fresh towels or good port, could work Foots into a “fevah.” When he would have an “attact,” as his mother would say, he would be all elbows, knees and fists and heels. When I got tired of looking like a spotted dog, I took to sleeping in the room with Louise.

  All that is surely of no consequence now; it’s just a blur, all the years I lived with him I remember very little, in this stage of my existence. Only a few incidents come back; they are like sharp rocks sticking out of a peaceful fog. I guess predictably the worst were over money, and the children.

  Pet, our little girl, was born right after Christmas that first year. We named her Natalie Pettigrew; we had such a time with that birthing that we were pretty sure there would be no little boys to be named Pettigrew later. She was a pretty little baby, as newborn babies go; right from birth she was the image of my mother, except her eyes were muddy, and we figured they’d be dark. Her father was real proud of her, when we first brought her home. While I still stayed mostly in the bed he would trot her out and show her off to all the people that came calling. It really pleased me to the heart; it was like we really were a family.

  And then one night when the baby was about three weeks old she had the colic, I guess; anyway she cried. And cried. We had all walked the floor, even Miss Lilah had held her and patted, and put her down, thinking she was asleep. We had no sooner all dozed off than she set up a howl again. And Foots jumped up and grabbed her, out of her basket, and threw her at me. Threw her like a football, halfway across the room. “Get this brat out of here,” he yelled. “I’ve got to have my sleep.”

  Well, by God’s grace I caught her. I was too astonished not to. One thing I will say, it shut her up; her eyes were big as saucers. And I sure did get her out. We fled to Louise’s room and finished out the night, and in the morning I gathered up some necessities and moved us over to Mama’s. In that instant I had learned to be afraid of him, in a way I’d never dreamed of.

  Oh, yes, I told my mother. And we considered all kinds of things. But to make my options clear (and her attitudes), you have to know that the state had no divorce law. If you wanted a divorce you just endured. If you had to have a divorce you went to Georgia and set up residence. And if you came back home you took the consequences. In Charleston society there was hardly a divorce that was not scarlet. You simply didn’t tell that your husband beat you black and blue and nearly killed your baby. You found some way to go along and keep the surface smooth.

  The prudent thing to do was simply stay away. We stayed with my mother most of the time until Pet was walking. Of course Mit and Camp had gone with us, and things were rough back at the house in town. Inevitably, one day when the spring gardens were all blooming here comes Foots, driving up to take his “precious little family” home. He was taking some new medicine, he said. And had I not promised to love him in sickness and in health? How wretched a man was he, he lamented, to have such an illness that had so turned his loved ones against him.

  I packed up all my misgivings and took them back with me, to the mainland. But things went on fairly calm for a while; we had Denby with us for several weeks after lightning came down the chimney of his house and set the place on fire. Denby was a pacifying influence; he was a good audience to Foots’ bitchy observations, a bland companion who de-fused his boredom. Besides Denby was good help around the house. He was a fussy cook and splendid with cut flowers. I felt real let down when his house was fixed and he left us.

  The buffer was gone. I felt worse when I had to go to the doctor again. That time I told nobody until the fact was obvious. Miss Lilah was incensed. She glared at my waist one day and rammed out her jaw and said, “Don’ tell me you ah goin’ to burden my boy wid anothah baby. I-o-wa can tell you he don’ need mo’ responsibility in his condition.”

  It was the night of Valentine’s Day when that baby came. It was real chilly; Mit was sick in the bed and Louise and I had gone out to her house with some supper and were coming back through the yard when I had the first hard pain. Foots had been mad at me for something, I don’t remember what. When we got to the house he had locked all the doors. We hollered and banged; we could hear Pet trying to turn the knob, inside, but she was too little, and she started crying. Finally Louise went to a neighbor’s and lied that our phone was out of order, and called the doctor, and then we got Camp to take me to the hospital. “If Hubert doesn’t let me in to take care of that child I shall call the police,” Louise said.

  The baby was a little boy. I named him Hugh McAllister. His hair would always be black as ink and his eyes a bright, deep blue.

  Most of their young lives, even after they went to school, the children lived with my mother. I might have to keep up appearances. But I wouldn’t have them suffer for the error I had made. Mama was a goodnatured, off-hand kind of granny; actually she had money and help and wasn’t too much bothered except when she chose.

  On our side of the inlet, we had problems. We were not rich people, at all, but that was never understood by some. I found myself going to the lawyer’s for advances from Mackey’s money until there was hardly anything to advance. I also found myself extremely grateful that our house was still in Mama’s name, so Foots couldn’t go and borrow on it. Foots was a gentleman, you see, and gentlemen were due their funds, from some celestial source. He never hit a lick at a snake.

  In time I found we were in straits. There were not many things a lady could do in Charleston that made money. I didn’t know how to run a tea room or a millinery. I wasn’t equipped to teach school. Louise had her piano students; that helped to buy the groceries. And then something occurred to me: I thought about Madame Alexandra’s creaky limbs and fakey French and hennaed corkscrew curls. “Old lady,” I thought, “I’m about to beat your time.” Genteelly as I could I put out the word that I was taking dancing pupils.

  Afternoons and Saturdays they came to the sun room, swinging their little bandboxes. They came from miles around. Some came from out of town. We got along; it blessed my mind more than my pocketbook. It embarrassed the life out of me at first to take their money, but I got used to it. Nothing was going to keep us out of debt, as long as Foots could sign his name. But at least I was doing something active to help.

  Aunt Mit and U
ncle Camp worked mostly at my mother’s since she had the children. I couldn’t pay them. Camp insisted still on keeping up the yard. Mit would march her bulk right in and take over, anyway, if I needed her badly and she knew it. But mostly Louise and I kept house. You know, ladies never washed, in Charleston. So we rubbed out our wash at night and dried it in the attic.

  The winter Pet was ten years old, Dr. Rehnwissel’s sister wrote from Germany that she was very frail and poorly and begged him to come home. Mama was all for it; they had not seen Europe since before the war. They made haste to get themselves together and shortly they were gone. Then Pet and Hugh were with us all the time.

  All things began to close in on me, right then. I could not make enough money. My mother had been paying the dentist and the shoe store and the tuition at the Latin School. She had no concept of my plight; I hadn’t quite told her. I had held onto stock that was paying dividends. I would have to sell it.

  I was coming back from the broker’s with the money, when Foots came driving up in a nearly new Auburn Phaeton, 1928. “Is this not the most gorgeous thing you ever saw?” he hollered, as he rolled it into the garage. He had talked a comrade at the Bon Homme Club into selling it; the comrade would not miss it since he had just bought a ’29 Duesenberg on a trip north. Foots had only had to sign a note. I was aghast. I was furious. I was just killed. “Take it back this instant,” I said. “We can’t afford it.”

  “Quit screaming like a yahoo,” he said. His eyes were flashing. He was getting very pale. “But then,” he added, “blood will tell…”

  There was a scythe hanging on a nail right by me. I snatched it down and raised it over my head. “No, no, my girl, you’d better not,” he said. “How dis-GRACE-ful it would be, to hang.” He turned and strutted into the house, pocketing, as he went, the key to the most gorgeous mechanical thing, indeed, I almost ever saw.

  I stood there shaking. I was so mad. So hopeless. Louise had heard the commotion; she came out and when she saw what it was over she started to cry. “Don’t let him get by with it, Sister,” she said. “Put your foot down.”

  I had meant to go and pay off the grocer and get something for supper but I was too spent. The little girls were coming in, with their little round boxes. Louise said she would find something to cook and I went on and got ready for class.

  The first bunch I got through all right. The second class, I heard Foots swearing in the kitchen. I put a record on the Victrola; over the Chopin I could hear him. “I am Goddamn tired of living like trash. Where is that niggra? Why can’t we have some decent food in this house?” And then the dishes started to crash. The girls looked at me, alarmed. I went right on, facing them, going through the class, not missing a beat. Oh, the serenity. Oh, the perfect order. When we had done our hour, I bowed to them, and they to me. And when they were gone I went to face the chaos.

  Foots had thrown a bowl of butterbeans at my mother’s red velvet portiers. The soup was dribbling down them, onto the carpet. He had broken up all the china Louise had set out for supper. Louise was sitting on a kitchen stool, with her head in her hands, sobbing. Pet and Hugh were hiding somewhere.

  Foots had taken his wrath upstairs and slammed the door. His mother was up there knocking, begging him to let her in.

  I kissed Louise on the top of her bent-down head and went to the sun room and got my shoes, and I put on a hat and the light spring coat I had worn downtown that day, over my dancing class clothes, and went out the front door, and out the gate, and down the street to the sea wall. I walked slowly, watching the light fade. I walked on in the dark. I stood a while and watched the ripple of the lights on the blackness of the water. With no feeling, at all, I wondered who would find me, floating. I closed my eyes and I could see that pink silk billowing modestly over stiff, pink-stockinged legs and my hair loose and floating, just a wash below the surface. The picture pleased me. No more pain, no more humiliation. How might it be an accident? A decent way to die? There was no decent way to live. I am not afraid, I thought. I will be with my father. Mackey.

  I sat down on the concrete ledge and started to cry. I cried till I choked and rasped for breath. I could see my father crying under the wisteria, helpless and lost in the wilderness. We were both lost and he had left me. I would never forgive him. I stretched my toe down but the water would not reach it. Cold and indifferent. You are nothing to me, I said to it, and yet here I am ready to give my life to you. I reached into the pocket of my coat for a handkerchief, and felt that envelope with the stock money. Good heavens, I thought. My whole estate, here in my pocket. If I leave it here on the sea wall, the wrong person will surely find it and the children will be left penniless. The only thing to do was to go home and leave it, and put some things in order, and then come back.

  My ears were ringing, all the way home. My feet went like a wind-up toy. My head was not in control. I slipped in quietly as I could and went upstairs to the old room where my parents had slept, so as not to be disturbed, and sat down on the bed, to compose a proper note. First I addressed the money to Louise. “I am sorry to leave you with no more,” I said. “It is the best I can do.” And then I licked the end of the pencil and wrote on a note-pad, “Dear Pet and Hugh…” What should I say? “I am about to have an accident?” I lay back on the bed to think about it. I was so very, very tired. I closed my eyes and saw the water shimmering, and lapping, and soon was sound asleep.

  Now some people would say I dreamed this, except I still heard it when I woke up. I woke up and sat up in the bed, and I still heard it. My skin crept up my collar bones and temples. My hair stood straight up on my head. Somebody in that house was fiddling. It must have been three o’clock in the morning and somebody was playing, like I hadn’t heard in my grown-up life. It was like it was there in the room—what was the tune? I listened in the dark, with my heart pounding and my eyes bulging. Then it was like it was moving away; I jumped up and ran to the window, making the words then with my mouth: “Shady Grove, my pretty little pink, shady grove my love, Shady Grove my blue eyed gal, I’m bound for the Shady Grove…”

  It was gone. I stood there stood clinging to the windowsill till my fingers were numb. And then like something led, I turned around and tipped out, and into my own room, past Foots, who was sound asleep, to the closet and took down a few clothes, in the dark. I went to the attic in the dark and got an old suitcase and slipped into Pet’s room. I closed the door gently and turned on the light. Hugh was curled up under the coverlet, at the foot of her bed. I knew then how worried they must have been.

  “Get up,” I said, “we’re going on a trip.”

  “Good,” Pet said. “Where?”

  “We’re going to Grandpa’s,” I said.

  Hugh yawned and rubbed his eyes. “How long will it take to get to Germany?” he said.

  “We’re going to another grandpa’s,” I said. “We’re going to my father’s.” Hugh really was alarmed, then. He pulled the cover tight around him. “I thought that grandpa was dead,” he said.

  “We are going to his house,” I said. I opened my mouth to promise we would find somebody there alive, and knew I could not. “It’s not as far as Germany,” I said.

  “Are we going on a ship?”

  “No, no, we’re going on the train.”

  “Why didn’t you tell us before?” Pet said.

  “I didn’t know, before,” I said. “We have only just now been invited.” That sounded matter-of-fact, but they both looked warily at me, and then one another. I’m sure I did look glassy in the eyes.

  “Get on up,” I said. “Be very, very quiet. We don’t want to say any long goodbyes. Just pick out a few clothes and get on something you’re not ashamed to travel in.”

  As I started out, Pet called behind me, in a tentative little voice, “Are we ever coming back?”

  “Oh yes,” I said. “I’m sure. Sometime.” I hurried out and started to get dressed. I wondered how we’d best go to the train station. Camp and Mit were staying a week
at Mama’s doing spring cleaning. I could call a cab. But the driver would know we’d gone, like this. All Foots would need to do would be to find out from the ticket agent where we had gone. In that case we might see him coming any time.

  I remember I put on a green voile dress, with a lace bertha, and some silk stockings, and black patent shoes with a strap across the foot. All the while I was thinking. I knew it wasn’t wise to take the train. I took my shoes back off and tipped into the room where Foots still slept, hoping he wouldn’t snore and alarm his mother. I felt around for his pants, on the back of a chair, and inched my hand into his pocket, trying not to jiggle the change. Finally my fingers closed around the key to that Auburn Phaeton, that most beautiful thing. I stole $33 back from the envelope I’d leave for Louise, and left her not quite five thousand.

  Once ten years ago or so Camp had tried to teach me how to drive the Buick. I had killed nobody that day; everybody we had charged was quick and nimble. “Get your pillows and your blankets,” I said to the kids. As casually as I could, I said, “I think we’ll take the car.”

  They were horrified but I dared ’em to cheep. I prayed nobody would hear the engine crank and probably they didn’t; it was soft as a whisper. They might have heard the gears grinding, while I learned again about the clutch. They might have heard the gentle bump, on the garage wall, while I looked for the gear that went backwards. But then I found it. We were off. The first two blocks in reverse.

  It was an hour before daylight, on the first day of May; der Winter was aus. Over. I had one moment of guilt, as I got us going forward, again, and passed by our sleeping house. I was committing a grave offense against the society of Charleston. I was going out without my hat.

  3.