“You remember Liz Reese, LuAnn,” Jane continued ominously. “She started her own business when her son was young and then her husband killed himself”
“She had a daughter, Jane,” my father said harshly. “And that’s not why her husband killed himself Stick to the Junior League and don’t go yapping about things you know nothing about.”
“You’d just think that if you are blessed enough to have children you’d want to be home with them,” Jane said. Her last few words were barely audible. She crossed her legs and, resting her elbows on her knees, dropped her face into her hands and started to cry.
Jane had lost a little more perspective on the subject of children with each of her four miscarriages, and I didn’t blame her. It was a horrible fate for any woman, especially one like Jane, who believed her sole purpose in life was to have children. I worried sometimes that the ease with which Eddie and I reproduced had increased her suffering and contributed to her growing bitterness.
“Liz Reese was just about the best mother I’ve ever known,” Newell said. “If you and Buck ever have children, Jane, you’d better pray you’re half as wonderful a mother, half as devoted, as Liz Reese was to her daughter. And your sister is doing a damn fine job too. She just needs more help so she can do something with her own life.”
“Who is this Liz Reese anyway?” I asked. “She doesn’t live in Tallagumsa, does she?” I was relieved to move to a subject other than the Steak House deed.
“She did,” my father said. “After her husband, Dean, blew his brains out, she and her daughter moved away. She’s the founder and owner of Miss Reese’s Pies.”
“You’re kidding,” I said. “She’s the Miss Reese! Wow! I read all about her in Newsweek last year. But I don’t recall her mentioning anything about Tallagumsa.”
“She was only here a year. She left town as fast as she could and never looked back,” Mother said from across the room, where she stood next to Eddie at the bar.
“Just the way you should, LuAnn,” Eddie said. “Follow her example and run.”
“How can you even consider this, LuAnn?” Eddie asked as soon as we got into the car to drive home.
“Can we talk about it when you’re not drunk?” I wedged myself behind the wheel of our old Buick Skylark and pulled out of the parking space. Eddie was in the front seat and Jessie in the back. I drove west to the end of the street, circled the block, then picked up First Avenue going east out of town.
“I’m not drunk,” he said. “Maybe I was, but I’m sober as a judge right now. We are not moving here.”
We spoke in angry, loud whispers, hoping that Jessie, who had waked up when Eddie carried her from the Steak House to the car, wouldn’t hear what we were saying.
“Did I say we were?” I asked.
“No, but I know how your mind works.”
After a brief silence, he spoke again. “We could sell the Steak House and keep the money.”
“No, we couldn’t.”
“Why not?”
“We either run the Steak House or we thank Daddy and give the restaurant back to him. I guess he’d sell it to someone else.”
“You sell it. Your name is on that goddamned piece of paper. You own the place!”
“I’m well aware of that.”
“I can’t believe you’d even for one second think about raising our children in Klan country, redneck heaven.”
“What happened to the gallant defender of the South ready to die for her honor in front of that reporter?” I asked. “Or did you just not like him?”
“As I said then, I’m allowed to give constructive criticism because I’m a Southerner. Same as family secrets, you know, they should be kept in the family.”
“You’re hardly an expert on family secrets,” I said. I knew that was below the belt, but I couldn’t help myself “Everyone in Tupelo knew each and every time your father was out on a binge. Your mother made sure of that. And you aren’t that far behind him drinking-wise, Eddie.”
“This isn’t about me and my father, LuAnn. Your father has been trying to get you to move home since the day you left. He thrives on being surrounded by his admirers, and you’re one of his most devoted. He’s probably thinking of the campaign coverage he’ll get-the dashing mayor, his very beautiful adoring young daughter, and all those precious grandchildren. Don’t fool yourself This isn’t for you or the kids. It certainly isn’t for us. It’s for him. Just like everything else he does. And he hadn’t even told Gladys! What kind of marriage is that?”
“He wanted it to be a surprise.”
“More like a nuclear detonation. You saw your mother. She was stunned. You know what she said to me? That he had no right. Those were her words: ‘No right.’ From a doormat, those are pretty strong words.”
“It’s his money.”
“Bull. He wouldn’t have any money if it weren’t for your mother, but you’d never know it, the way he acts.”
“Do you hold that against him too, that Mother’s family had money and his didn’t? That’s ancient history. What else did Mother say to you?”
“That taking the restaurant and moving to Tallagumsa would be the biggest mistake you could make.”
“Look, Eddie, he offered us a business and a house and a wonderful baby-sitter-Jolene, who raised me and Jane.” We stopped at a red light and I looked at him. “This would mean no more day care. Can’t you step back even for a second and see how generous he is?”
“Manipulative, you mean. Controlling, you mean. And then there’s the rest of them. I couldn’t live in the same state as your sad, frumpy sister and her fool of a husband. Buck can’t prostrate himself enough when it comes to your father. And what’s all that celebrity crap? Paul Newman? Clint Eastwood? The Marlboro man? He’s so full of it.”
“That’s just how Buck talks. It’s his way of complimenting people he likes. Besides, you do look like the Marlboro Man,” I said.
Eddie shrugged and smiled slightly. “Love is blind, I guess.”
“You’re even more handsome than the Marlboro Man,” I said. I had vague hopes of chamling him out of his anger.
I looked in the rearview mirror. Jessie had fallen asleep again. The light changed. I stepped on the gas and drove in silence for a few minutes.
“Stop!” Eddie shouted. “Turn right here.”
“Why?”
“Just do it,” he said.
I turned right onto Old Highway 49, a two-lane highway rarely used since the expressway was built. “This is the long way home. There’s nothing on this road, Eddie.”
“How quickly they forget.”
“What?”
“The memorial, the tree.”
My shoulders sagged. “What do they have to do with any- thing?” I asked quietly.
“You used to believe they had to do with everything.”
“I meant, why go there now? Jessie’s asleep. I’m tired.”
“I want to remind you of what the people here are capable of”
“Sometimes lately I think you’re losing your mind. The town did not kill them, Eddie.”
“I guess those boys shot themselves that night.”
“Someone shot Leon Johnson and Jimmy Turnbow. It wasn’t me or anyone I know. I grew up here with a lot of fine people. Look at me. Am I a bigot?”
“When we met, I had my doubts, but I saved you from all that, taught you some of the things they don’t teach people around here.”
“Don’t flatter yourself.”
“Come on. You were an incredibly naive country girl who’d never even met a black person who wasn’t your maid or gardener, LuAnn. Not one. You had no inkling of the world outside the narrow-minded one of Tallagurnsa, Alabama. Who got you involved in the civil-rights movement? Who got you interested, active in the antiwar movement?”
“It was 1970, Eddie. I think I might have found my way without you.”
“Are you claiming that organizing the memorial fund for Leon and Jimmy was your idea?”
“Here we are. Pull over.”
“No!” I shook my head and set my eyes on the road ahead, determined that we wouldn’t stop at the memorial “This has nothing to do with our problems, Eddie. It’s past four now; I want to get home. I’m not interested in thinking about tragedy right this minute.”
He grabbed the steering wheel and turned us sharply onto the side of the road.
I slammed on the brakes.
“What happened? Where are we?” Jessie asked, waking up. “Are we home?”
“Daddy needs to stop. Everything’s fine,” I said.
Our car stopped not far from the huge old pine tree that bore a large barkless gash a few feet from its base. The tree. No one had expected it would live after taking the full force of a head-on collision fifteen years ago when, not long after Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, two young black men were shot driving to the state university a few hundred miles to the south. The school was under a federal court order to integrate, and had they made it there, Jimmy Turnbow and Leon Johnson would have been the first black students to attend a white Alabama college.
They never got there. Leon was shot in the head and died instantly, crashing his car into the tree. Jimmy was shot crawling away from the wreck.
“Let’s get out and look at the memorial,” Eddie said. “Maybe it will jar your memory.”
“No, thanks.” I locked my door and left my seatbelt on.
“I want to see,” Jessie said.
“You’re really being a shit, Eddie,” I said.
“I think it’s important to see the tree and the memorial and remember what happened here, because I know you and I know you want to take your father up on his offer-the restaurant, the house, Jolene. I understand that the Steak House is an opportunity for you, but moving here is the wrong opportunity for us. You can’t just pretend that Tallagumsa is the perfect little place to live and raise a family; it’s not. You can’t ignore all the bad things that have happened here. Didn’t I hear you say something along those lines today? Or was that just to irritate Jane and Gladys?”
“Maybe you don’t know me at all anymore if you think I need to listen to this stupid little lecture,” I said. “My point was that I want to honor the past, but that doesn’t mean I can’t look to the future, that I can’t see how much has changed. The county has doubled in size over the last fifteen years, and look at the state college. Teachers from all over the country would not be here if Tallagumsa was the town it used to be, if Alabama was the state it used to be. That’s why that reporter Ben Gainey is here. The New South, Eddie.”
Eddie got out of the car, came around to my side, and waited.
I gave up, got out, and unhooked Jessie from her car seat.
We all walked to the tree.
On this lonely stretch of roadside, the dirt closest to the road gave way to clumps of grass and dandelions. Old beer cans cluttered the landscape. Down the road a ways was a house, a barn, a shack, and more farmland. Adjacent to the tree were several acres of land that had recently been turned in deep furrows for planting, probably corn or alfalfa. In the distance were the green foothills of the Cumberland Plateau.
Jessie picked a dandelion, blew on it, and watched as its seeds sailed away, carried into the air by a light breeze.
Near the tree was a large commemorative iron plaque on two waist-high steel posts. I didn’t have to examine the raised metal letters on the plaque to know what they said. A young college student home for the summer in 1972, I’d organized the effort to raise the money to purchase and install the memorial.
The simple but compelling inscription had been suggested by Leon’s mother: “Leon Johnson (1943-1963) and Jimmy Turnbow (1944--1963). They had a dream.”
CHAPTER FOUR
I was a college junior and Eddie a senior when we moved in together. In 1971 living together was still regarded by most of the adult world as “living in sin.” In the college community, however, it was common, and with our friends Hildy and John, we moved into one of the furnished apartments owned by Violet Crawford and her mother, Iris Ann Crawford. Over the next two years, Hildy and I exerted enormous amounts of energy hiding the true identity of our roommates from our parents.
Unlike our parents, Violet and Iris Ann didn’t give a hoot about marital status. The sole qualification for moving into one of their five decaying Victorian homes in the Little Five Points section of Atlanta was a southern birthright. “Where were you born, dear?” was the first question Violet, a frail, elegant woman in her fifties, asked each of us when we answered the newspaper ad about the apartment. A good portion of the former Confederacy was represented by the four of us, and at the end of the interview we were invited to join the other college and grad students who rented their units.
The Crawfords had subdivided their houses into apartments with an eye toward minimizing cost and maximizing rent-generating units. The result was that each of the furnished apartments was peculiar in one way or another. In carving up the house we lived in, they’d transformed the dining room by adding a closet, a dresser, a vanity, a bedroom light fixture, and a double bed, then advertised the unit as a two bedroom. The front door of the apartment opened into a living room, which was not unusual. But all the other rooms-the kitchen, the bath room, the other bedroom, the truncated hallway-were accessible only through this ersatz bedroom. Hildy and John and Eddie and I were so happy to find an apartment we could afford and a landlady who would have us that we gladly overlooked this design flaw. We drew straws to determine who got stuck with the walk-through bedroom and who got the bedroom with privacy. Eddie and I won. Six years later we were still in the same bedroom.
Jessie now occupied the walk-through room that had once been Hildy and John’s. There was no third bedroom for the twins, who would have to reside in bassinets in the corner of our bedroom until we figured out something better. Knocking out the flimsy wall that separated our apartment from the second floor, the stairs, and the hallway and taking over the entire house was Eddie’s latest plan for handling our impending space needs. I saw several flaws in this approach: He hadn’t broached it with the Crawfords; we didn’t have the money to pay for the extra space; and the upstairs was home to Adrienne and her six cats.
Adrienne, the only one of the Crawfords’ present tenants older than we were, was a thirty-year-old flower child, a veteran of Haight-Ashbury’s Trips Festival and Be-In, who had arrived here via Sweden and Drop City, Colorado. All Violet and Iris Ann cared about, though, was that she’d been born in Charleston and that her mama’s maiden name was Davis. It turned out that they actually knew Adrienne’s mother’s brother’s wife.
Adrienne made ends meet answering phones at Radio Free Georgia a few blocks from the apartment and doing astrological charts for friends and friends of friends. Not long after she moved in a year earlier, she did my chart in exchange for a pair of Grateful Dead tickets a co-worker at the City Paper had given Eddie. Eddie and I briefly toyed with the idea of going to the concert, but felt too old, too tired, too married, too busy.
So I gave the concert tickets to Adrienne, who was a Dead Head, and one evening a few weeks later she invited me upstairs to look at the ten-page astrological chart she’d prepared. In her living room, by the light of the thirty or so candles she preferred to light bulbs, I read about houses, squares, past lives, retrograde planets, and ascendants.
Somehow Adrienne had gleaned from this star and planet data that I was idealistic, romantic-though I would have only one true love, she predicted-impulsive, proud, energetic, and hardworking. I put those attributes in the positive category. On the somewhat negative side, Adrienne had written that I was stubborn and loyal to a fault, that I held a grudge far too long, and that I should learn to let well enough alone.
It was dusk. The muted light of Adrienne’s candles illuminated her second-floor windows as Eddie, Jessie, and I pulled into the driveway. After the initial argument and the detour to the t
ree and the memorial, neither Eddie nor I had spoken of the possibility of moving to Tallagurnsa and taking over the Steak House. I had the sense, though, that my father’s offer had become a living, tangible thing. I could almost feel it hovering over us in the car, as we walked up the front steps, and as we stood on the front porch.
While I searched through my purse for the front-door key, Jessie sat in one of the wicker porch rockers and Eddie, his tie stuffed in his shirt pocket, raised the lid of the small metal mailbox hanging to the right of the front door. He pulled out a bunch of mail. A Salem hung from the corner of his mouth while he shuffled through the pile: two bills, a magazine, a catalog, and a letter. He put everything but the letter back in the box.
“Here it is!” he said, holding up the letter to his face as if he might be able to read what was inside without opening it.
“Universal Media?” I asked.
“Who else?” he said. “They write me, they ask for all my latest work, they tell me how great syndication is, and then they ignore me for a month. But here it is. At last.”
“Open it, Eddie,” I said, laughing. “Come on, come on, come on!”
He stood there studying the envelope. His jaw muscles tightened.
“Don’t you want to know?” I asked.
“Yes, and no.”
“Well, give it to me then.” I put my hat, Jessie’s toy bag, and Eddie’s jacket on the empty porch rocker, took the envelope and ripped it open. How our lives would change if Universal Media made Eddie a good offer. I began to read. I didn’t have to read too far. I sighed heavily and looked at him. He could see the rejection in my face. I wished that I hadn’t opened the letter, but I had been absolutely sure the envelope carried good news that would make Daddy’s Steak House proposal irrelevant.
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