A Tangled Mercy

by Joy Jordan-Lake

  Curling back into her chair now, Kate tried to ignore the elderly woman and the waitress who kept glancing Kate’s way.

  “Mm-hmm. From somewheres up north,” the waitress attempted to whisper and smoothed a hand over a platinum helmet of hair.

  “Dear Lord,” said the elderly woman, newspaper lowering. “Incredible, really.”

  Startled, Kate turned to find the woman staring directly at her. And quite unashamed to be caught.

  Kate sat like that, twisted around, for several seconds, returning the stare.

  She opened her mouth to ask what, exactly, happened to be incredible, really.

  But maybe it was nothing to do with her after all. Nothing but the out-loud musings of an old but still beautiful woman staring off into the distance and simply distracted by Kate’s sitting there in her line of sight to the palmettos and bay beyond.

  Turning back, Kate knocked bagel crumbs from the scarf that fell in a loop from her neck and brushed still more from her faded jeans. Sitting up straight, she returned, pointedly, to squinting at the archived Charleston Courier on her screen.

  “And, Miz Rose, were you wanting cream with your coffee this morning?”

  The elderly woman surveyed the waitress from under half-lowered lids.

  “No coffee worth drinking requires cream.”

  “Well, now, if I didn’t up and forget.” The waitress turned to Kate with her pot. “You getting good and ready for a warm-up yet?” She stepped closer and whispered, “More cream?”

  Kate shook her head. “I’m all set.” Rifling through her backpack, she pulled out the booklet from the 1991 Spoleto exhibit Places with a Past, something Sarah Grace might have saved because she saved everything—or might have kept because it had added to some sort of case she was trying to build. On one of the dog-eared pages, she’d circled a picture of a newly created sculpture in black marble, four children gazing innocently out, two of them with their chins resting on one hand, and two of them with their heads resting on crossed arms—the effect very much like Raphael’s cherubs replicated on valentines and mugs.

  The sculpture of the four children seemed somehow related to the Vesey revolt, though Kate would have to read this page more carefully later—when she wasn’t being scrutinized from the side. And a long string of numbers scribbled at the bottom caught her eye, too, with one too many digits for a Social Security number—so a phone number, perhaps?—beneath a name that began with Ch but was hard to read: Chris, maybe, or . . . ?

  Was this someone related to the exhibit somehow or possibly someone who studied the Vesey revolt, or both? Or maybe it was just the phone number of a friend, and Sarah Grace had simply jotted it there.

  To her right, the elderly woman’s silver chignon was bobbing, as if she were already agreeing with what she was about to say. “I swan. Incredible. That’s what it is.”

  Poor muddled woman.

  Muzzied, that’s what Sarah Grace would have called her. Bless her sweet, muzzied heart.

  The older lady was rising now and sweeping toward the café’s door. She was precisely what Kate’s mother had described these Charleston types as: sleek and perfectly pressed—and with one eyebrow that seemed perpetually raised.

  From behind her, an arm reached for the door. The runner guy from the seawall. Nike T-shirt wet through with sweat. He held the door farther open.

  The elderly lady looked the young man up and down, a sizing-up stare that would’ve been rude in a person less far along in years. Or wearing less pink.

  As she swept forward, he gave a small bow.

  At that, she paused with a nod, deliberate and regal, to acknowledge his service.

  “I’ve not seen a man bow in years—not since my debutante ball in ’51, when the world looked to be set right-side up once again.” She nodded, agreeing with herself. “Rubber, and lots of it, and gabardine and gasoline and handsome young men who weren’t being shipped off from my very harbor to war.”

  War. Pronounced wah. The old lady spoke like Kate’s mother had: soft syllables, anchored deep into iron. Only this was a Low Country woman born into money. Generations of money.

  Kate could hear her mother’s voice—with that accent, too. Sarah Grace reeling off old Charleston family names as part of her bedtime stories: Rutledge. Rhett. Huger. Manigault. Middleton . . .

  Understand, Katie, her mother had said, brushing Kate’s curls from her eyes and onto the pillow. These sorts only mate within their own pedigreed club. Like royalty. Or registered dogs.

  But what about Drayton, Mommy? You told me the Draytons were part of that club. Can you tell me a story about that? Kate had pulled the plastic tiara from her bedside table, clutched it tight in both hands on top of her chest, and snuggled deeper into the blankets.

  Once upon a time, Sarah Grace had whispered, a handsome but very proud prince fell in love with a chimney sweep girl.

  Little Kate had clapped her hands. That’s good, Mommy! Did she love him, too?

  Sarah Grace’s voice had come back slow through the dark. At first, maybe she fell in love with the idea of being a princess. He brought her gifts. He was dashing.

  What kind of gifts?

  Oh, princess gifts, pretty white dresses and fountains and flowers.

  Chocolate, too?

  Oceans and oceans of chocolate, right outside her door.

  So what happened? Did she learn to love him at last? Did they live happily ever after?

  She did learn to love him, yes. Sarah Grace ran a hand through Kate’s curls. Happily ever after, though . . . no, they did not.

  But, Mommy . . .

  Her mother had kissed Kate on the forehead—too hard—and hauled the bedroom door all the way shut, even though it swelled and jammed in its frame in summer.

  Kate would lie on the fold-out couch that was her bed, springs poking her back, and wonder about Charleston. About why her mother had fled that place but in her mind seemed never to have gotten away.

  Her mother still checked out books from the library about Low Country Carolina history—not exactly in abundance where they lived in Great Barrington, Massachusetts—and snagged them from yard sales when she made the rare find. She looked up from these books, her face a mask, if Kate ventured a question about what Sarah Grace was reading and why, since they lived in the North now—and the North had some history, too.

  Kate had learned early not to press too hard for answers. Sarah Grace rarely got angry at her daughter when Kate wanted to know about Charleston or about her father or about their life before they’d left. Instead, she would take Kate in her arms, hold her close, and stroke her long hair.

  I’m so sorry, she’d murmur. I’m no excuse for a momma. I’m sorry.

  And then, oblivious to anything Kate might say after that, Sarah Grace would send her to bed.

  The bump and scrape of the stool on the kitchen’s linoleum floor meant she was dragging the stool to reach where she kept the bottles—the strongest stuff was all Kate knew to call it back then—that she sometimes, on a good day, did not want to reach . . . but could not bring herself to throw out.

  On these nights that Kate had asked too many questions, she would clutch her covers up to her nose and pray for a miracle—that maybe the stool would somehow have shrunk, would not help her mother reach that top shelf. Or that the bottles all would have been drained since the last time. That there’d be nothing left to sweep her mother someplace far away from where she would come back when she woke up sadder than ever.

  So Kate had learned early not to ask questions about her father or Low Country history or present-day Charleston or whether, perhaps, they had aunts or uncles or cousins left there. But she learned early, too, that there were questions that cried out to be asked.

  But now the silver head dipped. “You, young man, possess gracious manners.”

  “My pleasure, ma’am.”

  “Surprisingly so,” the lady added. And swept through the door to the café’s interior.

  The run
ner guy stood there a moment, holding the door open with one hand and touching a stubbled jaw with the other, his neck dripping with sweat. He shot a glance sideways at Kate—and she could see that he also recognized her. One eye crinkled in a flicker of a smile. But Kate looked away.

  Which might be rude here in the South, but better to trust no men at all than to trust the wrong ones. And weren’t they all the wrong ones in some way or another?

  Which was when Kate’s phone rang.

  As soon as she saw the caller ID, she spoke before she’d gotten the cell fully up to her mouth: “Dr. Ammons, this place is a gold mine for research. I’m linked in right now, as a matter of fact, with the online archives of the South Carolina Historical Society.” Maybe if she spoke fast enough, he would not have time to give her bad news. “And I’ll drop by there in person later today.”

  “Ms. Drayton. We appear to have a problem.” Ammons was speaking—as he did when the issue at hand was a delicate one—through teeth set lightly together: Katharine Hepburn in a bow tie.

  In the pause that followed, Ammons allowing her time for the storm clouds of panic to gather, Kate could picture him at his mahogany desk, dark hand stroking a brindled beard. Decades ago when he’d been hired, he’d been the only African American in the History Department. A handful of others had joined him over the years. But he remained its token, and mostly closeted, Southerner, a product of Alabama who’d tutored himself years ago out of all trace of a Birmingham accent.

  “If it helps to know that I’m working hard here, I’m up to late April of 1822 now in the library’s old Couriers online, and no sign city leaders had any inkling yet of a revolt being planned—at least not before May.” With her free hand, she scrolled through the next issue. “There’s one participant in the revolt I’d like to pursue particularly: Tom Russell.”

  “Blacksmith,” Ammons offered. “Weapon maker.”

  “Exactly. I’m surprised you know about him. He’s pretty obscure.”

  A pause.

  “A historian’s task, Ms. Drayton, is to seek the obscure.”

  She cringed.

  “However, I will add that my knowledge of him ends there. Do enlighten me further.”

  “Tom Russell’s name appears nowhere so far, by the way, for any reason.”

  “No,” he said.

  Kate set down her coffee. “No . . . what?”

  “It wouldn’t, of course. The blacksmith’s name. It wouldn’t appear.” Ammons’s voice deepened and slowed: a grandfather’s voice for a not-very-bright toddler. “A black artisan slave, no matter how accomplished at his trade, would hardly be advertising his shop, now would he?”

  In the background Kate could hear the crunch of footsteps on snow, the blare of a car horn, the distant rumble of the train underground. Which meant Julian Ammons was where he went every morning before office hours: to the Au Bon Pain in Harvard Square to sit with his coffee outside—especially on the days he expected would be difficult.

  Best not to think about that in relation to this phone call.

  Kate sank lower still in her seat. “I don’t suppose so. But, Dr. Ammons, I think you’ll be pleased with the progress I’ve made in plowing through pages.”

  Plowing. Bad word choice—too much like she viewed research as a chore. As opposed to a privilege. A delight. Her reason for living. You didn’t say plowing to the head of the department. “That is, I’m getting to uncover all sorts of intriguing new angles on the revolt.”

  Sweat trickled between Kate’s shoulder blades, and she uncoiled the scarf from her neck, letting it drop to the table. Stomach clenching, she dug frantically in her jeans pocket for loose bills. Whatever this conversation was going to be, since it could herald the end of her world as she knew it, she didn’t want to have this particular chat in public.

  Leaving a pile of crumpled cash she didn’t bother to count on her table, she stuffed her laptop into her backpack and turned toward the street. Waiting to cross East Bay, a crowd had gathered, heads bowed in a row over phones clutched in cupped hands like communicants at the altar rail.

  “Dr. Ammons, thank you so much for the opportunity to lecture to your seminar.”

  She paused for him to say something—perhaps that everybody gets nervous and it hadn’t been the unqualified disaster she’d thought.

  But only silence came from his end of the line.

  “I’m not sure,” she went on, “that it went as well as we’d both hoped.”

  “Ms. Drayton, I really must ask: Were you quite sober?”

  Kate covered her eyes with one hand. “So it was the complete, surround-sound failure that I think it was?”

  “Cataclysmic, I’m afraid.”

  “So I really did . . . just walk out.”

  “With the parting line ‘It’s time, past time, I got to the truth.’ I’d wager it’s a closing line my students won’t hear again during their years at Harvard.”

  Closing her eyes, Kate let this sink in a moment.

  “Ms. Drayton, I must be honest with you. Would it be fair to say you have missed appointments with senior faculty members who might once have been candidates for your dissertation committee?”

  Kate hesitated. “That . . . might be fair.”

  “And that there have been times you failed even to make an appearance to lead undergraduate sections? Or to grade papers on time? Or include any kind of meaningful comments on those papers that a first-year student might use to improve?”

  Kate slumped against the nearest brick wall. At other schools she might have bought silence with the grades she’d tossed out: far higher than the papers deserved. But Harvard first-years wanted notes in the margin to explain any minus to the right of an A. She’d been ratted out.

  The clatter and bang of something falling inside the shop next door made everyone outside the café jump. Kate had to cover one ear to hear Ammons’s voice.

  “What on earth was that, Ms. Drayton?”

  “Given the direction of this conversation, it could be the sound of my future falling down around my ears.” And my present, Kate had to bite her lip to keep from adding.

  She wanted to beg. She wanted to tell Dr. Ammons that modest as her grad assistant stipend was, it paid her bills for her closet of a studio apartment and groceries heavy on ramen noodles. And while she might not have genuine friends in Cambridge, she had colleagues, at least. People who knew her name. Who noticed if she did not show up. Who assumed she was smart—perhaps not smarter than they were but smart enough to have worked her way there.

  As opposed to this—her hitting this wall. The mangled mess she’d made of her life. She managed just enough of a voice to choke out, “Is there a final chance?”

  “I’ve no intention of being utterly heartless. Yours has been a most difficult year.” He sighed. “I am trying to be on your side here. I just need to know that you are on your side.”

  “You mean . . . wait. I’m not already kicked to the curb?”

  He ignored the question. “The truth is, Ms. Drayton, I shall remember your disastrous closing long after I have forgotten yet another demonstration of self-satisfied brilliance.”

  Her back turned to the café, Kate jumped when something brushed her shoulder.

  And there was the elderly woman, who’d just re-emerged from inside the café. She stood with one hand stretched out—Kate’s scarf coiled over a veined, delicate hand. “I think,” she drawled, “this might be yours.”

  “Oh.” Kate let the phone drop a few inches. “I hadn’t noticed I’d left it.”

  “I am Mrs. Lila Rose Manigault Pinckney.”

  Pinckney. One of the Pinckneys from the jumble of wedding-gift tags in the boxes? Maybe. Although there might be scores of people here with that name.

  Kate shook the woman’s hand quickly. “Kate Drayton.”

  “I thought so. Yes. Dear Lord in heaven.”

  “Excuse me? Wait. How—”

  “But how rude of me, sugar. Here you are on the phone.�
� The woman was already sweeping back toward her table. “I do hope that you cotton to Charleston.” The city’s name came rolling soft off her tongue, the r opened out to the breeze of an h: Chahlston.

  “Cotton to?” Kate murmured. From the hand she’d dropped to her side came a voice through the phone: “Ms. Drayton.”

  Kate jerked the phone to her ear.

  A door was groaning open in the background. Heels echoed on a wood floor. Which must have meant Dr. Ammons had reached his office.

  And now, like every time she’d seen Ammons enter his office, he would be skirting its perimeter, one finger running absently over the spines of leather-bound books.

  “Sorry. I’m sorry. Which is all I seem to be saying to you this morning.”

  “Did someone there just say the name Pinckney?”

  “What? Oh. Yes. A fairly strange interaction.”

  “An old name there, Pinckney. At any rate, Ms. Drayton, there was a time when I might have soft-pedaled the truth for a young woman struggling to make her way in the academy. Now, thanks to the triumphs of feminism, I am free to tell a student, female or male, when that student’s work merits abject despair.”

  “Despair?” She echoed the word in a squeak.

  Ammons’s tone softened. “I assume for the near future, you’ll be staying in Charleston.”

  “For a few days, yes. But the semester’s not over yet. There’s the discussion group I’m the TA for. I couldn’t sabotage my standing in the department.”

  “Allow me, then, to put your concerns to rest. So far as this department is concerned, you are in a very deep hole.”

  Kate leaned against the brick wall of the shop where the hammering had finally ceased. “That was putting my concerns to rest?”

  “Sugarcoating the truth is no favor to you. The good news of your new status, academic probation, is that you can hardly hurt yourself more at this point by taking some time away. So stay in Charleston. Find some of the answers you need.”

  “So my standing in the department is . . .”

  “Dire, Ms. Drayton. And probably, though not assuredly, irredeemable. But do stay in touch. Should you happen to unearth something utterly new regarding the Vesey revolt and should you write about it in scintillating language, thoroughly documented, and should that research be publishable in one of our discipline’s leading journals . . .”