by James Villas
Betty Jane, who couldn’t have weighed more than a hundred pounds and dressed in expensive skirts and blouses even when at home, now had a stunned look on her face. “That’s right. Baking dog biscuits for dogs in the neighborhood. Can you imagine?”
“Sounds more like something Goldie might do,” Olivia uttered.
“Listen,” Earl added facetiously, “if Mama decided to dynamite the Charlotte Coliseum, that damn squaw would be right there to light the fuse.”
“Well, one thing that really does bother me is how Mama seems to be having more of her strange spells,” Olivia said with more concern. “Haven’t you noticed recently she sometimes just stares into space like she doesn’t know where she is?”
Earl leaned back from the table, sucked in his ample gut, then ran a hand over the almost totally bald top of his head that betrayed his forty-nine years. “Honey, that’s part of what’s worrying hell out of me.”
Olivia’s expression became even more serious. “Lord, you’re not saying you think Mama could be headed for something like a bad stroke or…Alzheimer’s?”
“Who knows?” he grunted in exasperation, shaking his head and reaching for a handful of potato chips. “She’s got that heart murmur, and Dr. Singer’s been begging her for ages to have some more tests, but you know how bullheaded Mama can be when it comes to doctors and tests and all that.”
“Have you talked to Tyler recently about this?” Betty Jane asked, pulling at the large, pear-shaped diamond ring on her finger.
There was another clamor on the TV, which moved Earl to jump up and peer around the corner for a minute to see what was happening at the game.
“Tyler?” he muttered as he sat back down, a disgusted frown on his slightly tanned face. “How could I talk to Ty when he and lover boy were living it up over in Paris? Last time I brought up the subject of Mama’s health, he said Mama knew what she was doing and started to raise Cain, so I just let it drop. Of course, Big Brother sits up there in New York with all his fancy friends living high on the hog while we watch out for Mama and wonder what will happen next.” He leaned back in the chair, trying to hear the sports commentary, then fixed his bulging eyes on his sister. “You know Mama can do no wrong in Ty’s eyes, but, dammit, one day he’s gonna have to face reality about what it’s like for us down here. As if he ain’t already brought enough disgrace to this family.”
Little Earl made no pretense about the way he felt about his older brother—not to his sister, or his wife, or his mother, or anybody else in the family except maybe Tyler himself. Not that there’d ever been any real open strife between the brothers, or that the two weren’t civil enough to one another in a respectful Southern way on the rare occasion, usually at Christmas, when Tyler flew home to North Carolina to visit his mother. But it was no big secret that Earl had little use for Tyler and his way of life, or that the two couldn’t have been more different in their sophistication and even in their physical characteristics.
Happily married to Betty Jane for nearly thirty years and the proud father of a fine son and daughter, Earl was the president of Charlotte’s largest and most prestigious printing and engraving company. Founded by his father and a partner when Big Earl and Ella moved to Charlotte back in the forties, Creative Graphics had been a highly lucrative success over the years, and from the day Little Earl began working at the company after graduating at State in Raleigh with a degree in business management, it was taken for granted that he’d inherit the whole enterprise when Big Earl passed on.
Little Earl knew everything there was to know about printing and engraving, and nobody could ever have accused him of not being even more ambitious and industrious than his daddy had always been. As a result, he not only commanded the utmost respect throughout Charlotte’s business community and his health club, but he and Betty Jane enjoyed considerable social status at Christ Episcopal Church and Quail Hollow Country Club, as well as prized seats at Lowe’s Motor Speedway and all NFL Panthers games. Although heavyset like so many Southern men who eat three square meals a day, he had always been called Little Earl within the family, not because of his size but to distinguish him from his daddy. Most friends simply called him Earl, but at the company he was respectfully addressed by employees as either Mr. Earl or Mr. Dubose, and at work he was never seen without a jacket and tie, much as he hated dressing up. Like many prosperous Charlotteans, he and Betty Jane had a weekend retreat up at Lake Norman near Davidson College, and that’s where Earl could really relax in a pair of jeans, or cutoffs, or bathing suit without compromising his image as one of the city’s more reputable citizens.
Tyler, on the other hand, couldn’t have been less interested in family or civic activities, religion, social clubs, and certainly not sports and quaint lakeside cabins. Almost two years older than Little Earl and much more independent by nature, he had received a PhD in comparative literature at Duke in the early seventies, landed an assistant professorship at Princeton, and might well have become a leading scholar of English Romantic literature had an unfortunate and well-publicized indiscretion with a male student not suddenly ended his promising vocation and sent him fleeing to Manhattan to pick up the pieces of his life and try his hand at writing fiction. News of his disgrace that leaked back to Charlotte shocked and embarrassed Big Earl and everybody else except Ella, and even after Tyler’s first popular novel became a best seller all over the country and launched what would develop into a phenomenal career, most Charlotteans still chose to dwell with disapproval on the mostly fabricated gossip about his private life up North rather than on the hometown boy’s literary success.
Rather elegant in demeanor and still remarkably handsome for his age, Tyler, no doubt, had spread his wings far and wide in younger days, as revealed in his new juicy book of memoirs. But the truth was that, for a number of years, he had been living rather conventionally with Barry, an intelligent, successful fine arts dealer originally from Chicago with whom he shared both a well-appointed duplex apartment on East 67th Street in Manhattan and a comfortable but modest home out in Amagansett on Long Island, where Ella would occasionally visit the two. What possibly caused the most resentment in his Charlotte family, in fact, was the deep affection that Tyler and his mother had always shown toward one another, a love and devotion that bordered on adoration and that many felt was simply based on their mutually rebellious, liberal, and downright eccentric personalities. Even as a teenager, Tyler had never been very close to Big Earl, since the two shared very few interests, and it’s for sure that he never had much in common with his younger brother. As for Olivia, Tyler had always been rather protective of his sister when they were growing up, since she was never the most popular girl with the boys in her class, but after she eventually got married and began raising a family, the relationship with her older brother became more and more remote and impersonal.
Such friction had undoubtedly caused Ella some distress, not only because she loved every member of her family but because she considered the large family home on Colville Road to be a happy haven where she and Big Earl had lived since the fifties, the house where Tyler, Little Earl, and Olivia had all been reared, and the house where everybody should be able to gather together any time in total harmony. The white Colonial Revival structure was certainly not as grand as the stately mansions along Queens Road West or even some of the more modern spreads out in the Providence Plantation area of town, but it was a gracious, comfortable, two-story home with attractive grounds in a fine old neighborhood. Ella loved her house, and as long as she was physically and mentally capable of faring for herself, she planned to remain there till, as she often proclaimed, they carried her out feet first. And except for a slight heart murmur and the first signs of mild glaucoma, which she occasionally combated by secretly smoking a little home-grown marijuana, Ella was still more fit, energetic, and alert at seventy-three than many women ten years younger. It could even be said, in fact, that she could conceivably outlive Tyler, who, unbeknownst to everyone in the family
and to practically everyone up North except his doctors and Barry, had been waging a nasty battle with colon cancer for much of the past year.
“Of course, you know what really drives me to distraction is Mama wheeling that big car all over Charlotte day and night—even when she’s been drinking,” Earl went on, popping the tab on another Diet Coke. “I mean, I don’t know when her eyes were last checked, and all we need is for somebody to call and announce that she’s just plowed into three or four cars and killed God knows how many people.”
“Mama really shouldn’t be driving at her age,” Olivia said in her simple way. “Lord, what if she had one of her spells out on Independence Boulevard?”
Betty Jane chuckled. “Well, all I can say is I don’t want to be around when somebody so much as suggests to Mama Ella that she should give up her white chariot.”
“B. J., I don’t find one thing funny about this,” Earl scolded his wife. “The point is, we gotta have a long talk with Mama and try to convince her to at least go to Dr. Singer for a thorough checkup. Then we might have some clue to what we’re dealing with.”
Betty Jane pretended to fan her face with one hand. “Boy oh boy, the fur’s gonna fly.”
Chapter 3
DULL GOLD
Rising from her chair at the inn overlooking the sparkling ocean, Ella decided to take a nap before getting dressed and going downstairs with Goldie for drinks and dinner. But since the thought of that fretful lunch with her younger son and daughter back in Charlotte continued to prey on her mind, all she could do was lie wide awake on the bed, stare at the ceiling, and reflect further on that and the real reason she’d decided so compulsively to flee to the beach. Then, as if overcome by a strange urge, she got up and went over to the bureau, opened the top drawer, and nervously rummaged beneath a pile of carefully folded elegant silk scarves for the discolored package of tattered letters tied together with frail string that, back home, she’d kept concealed with other old mementos in a shoe box. Since the yellowed envelopes had been mailed from U. S. Army bases in England and France during World War II, there were no postmarks, and since the writing on the timeworn, creased pages was all in pencil, many words and parts of whole sentences were now too smudged or faded to read. Still, sitting at the foot of the bed, Ella opened a few of the letters at random, and as she began to scan the contents for the first time in nearly forty years, she was so gripped by a terrible wave of nostalgia and confused emotions that she could feel her heart pounding.
“My darling Ella, Tonight, in…seemed like a hundred years…in that pretty polka-dot dress as the train pulled out.”
“Over two dozen casualties to handle today, but we know the job must be done, and all we pray is the unit…before you know it.”
“My sweet Ella, Do you remember when you got that bone caught in your gum at Perditas? Well, yesterday when we were on patrol near Louviers, a very…farm woman offered…began laughing my head off.”
“…promise when this hell is finally over and we’re back together, we’ll…teach me how to tango like Valentino. How I miss you. Always yours, Jonathan.”
For a while longer, she continued to look through the troubling letters, but when the exercise seemed to produce more anxiety than revelations that might help her carry through her self-imposed mission, she tucked them back into the drawer and purposefully distracted her thoughts back to the present by once again pondering the annoying implications revealed at lunch with her two youngest children.
When, in fact, Little Earl and Olivia had arrived at their mother’s shortly before noon, Ella had still been wavering over whether her system was yet up to eating at Bull’s. But after Little Earl coaxed and coaxed, and again mentioned the onion hush puppies, and added that he and Liv were both hungry as dogs, she had finally given in if for no other reason than to stop all the bickering and make her children happy.
And, just as Earl had promised, there was indeed a booth ready for the Dubose family, even though at least a dozen other customers milling about the lounge area were waiting patiently to be seated. Almost immediately, Earl and Olivia both ordered the chopped barbecue platter that included coleslaw, french fries, and a cup of Brunswick stew, and Earl told the waitress to bring also a basket of hush puppies and a pitcher of iced tea. Overcome by the aroma of smoky meat that filled the entire restaurant, Ella dropped all her defenses and decided to have a barbecue sandwich. Then, after asking the pretty waitress if she could have just a glass of ice water, she began rummaging in her dark green leather pocketbook and slyly pulled out a small silver flask that she furtively cupped in her wrinkled hand.
“Oh, Mama, you’re not,” Earl whined disparagingly, shifting his eyes to see if anybody close by was watching.
“I most certainly am,” Ella said, “and I don’t want to hear a peep from either one of you. You know I enjoy a little nip when I go out, especially when I’m getting over an upset, and if your friend Bull Godwin would have the gumption to get a liquor license for this place like every decent restaurant in Charlotte has, maybe I wouldn’t be reduced to having to bootleg my own.”
“Mama, what if the waitress notices the color of the water?” Olivia asked nervously, rubbing the front of her V-neck rose cashmere sweater.
“Well, honey, have I ever embarrassed you in public?” she answered indifferently in her rather raspy voice. “I’ll simply tell her it’s a medication I have to take before eating—that’s what. Now, for heaven’s sake, would you two just mind your own business and tell me what this is all about?”
Olivia, sitting beside her brother, glanced up at him.
“What’s what all about, Mama?” he pretended confidently, laughing.
Before Ella could answer, there was a muffled beeping inside the left side pocket of Earl’s jacket, and when he pulled the cell phone out, his mother frowned in disgust.
“Hi, Frankie,” Earl drawled. “Naw, I’m busy this afternoon with my mama and sister. Maybe next Saturday. Yeah, I’ll give you a call. Thanks, ole buddy.”
“Lord, I hate those vulgar contraptions,” Ella said as he rammed the phone back into his pocket. “Oughta be outlawed—like computers.”
“Mama, why do you hate anything modern and practical?” he commented. “Cell phones are here to stay, so you better get used to them. If you’d let me get you one, you’d see how convenient they are—and what they could mean in a bad emergency.”
“Over my dead body,” Ella mumbled, feeling the side of her hair.
After the waitress returned with a pitcher of tea and the water, Ella very deftly poured from her flask into the glass of water, stirred the ice with a spoon, and took a sip.
“Now listen, you two, you don’t both sacrifice a perfectly nice Saturday just to eat barbecue with your old mother—not without Betty Jane or Jesse or one of the kids. So what’s up?”
“Oh, Mama, don’t be like that,” Earl said, reaching over and playfully popping her arm. “The three of us haven’t been together by ourselves in a coon’s age, and I don’t think you realize how much Liv and I worry about you being over there alone in that big house all the time and not getting out more.”
Ella put her glass on the table, reached again in her pocketbook, and took out a dull gold cigarette case with the engraved initials EPH barely discernable on one side.
Olivia looked surprised, almost shocked. “Mama, you told us—you promised—you’d stopped smoking those filthy things.”
Ella lit a cigarette with a small gold butane lighter and took a long, delicious draw. “Oh, honey, I have—almost. I’ve been quitting for the past forty years, as you know, and now go days without smoking. But when I have a cocktail in a restaurant, or my nerves are really on end…” She took another drag, then picked her glass back up and gazed at Earl. “And, Son, I don’t know what in this world you’re talking about when you say I’m not getting out of the house enough. I mean, I go to the beauty parlor every Friday and to church every single Sunday, and have my charity league and Bible clas
s, and go to the store with Goldie at least twice a week, and have lunch with Lulu Woodside, and Folly, and Jinks Ferguson, and…Why, the very idea that I don’t get out enough. You two just don’t know what all I do. I stay busy as a bee, and maybe if you called more often…”
Earl twisted his mouth to one side and said, “I’ve never understood what you see in that Mrs. Ferguson.”
“Why, I don’t know what you mean, Son. Jinks Ferguson is a very nice lady who devotes lots of time to the charity league.”
“Well, I just don’t trust any of those Catholics with all their sick hang-ups.”
“Now, why would you make an asinine remark like that?”
“Well, we could start with Mrs. Ferguson breeding six children and then mention her love affair with the gin bottle, couldn’t we?” He chuckled. “People at the club still talk about the night she got so tanked that one of her sons had to be called to come take her home.”
Ella drew back indignantly like some startled exotic bird. “That is absolutely not true, not a word of it—just malicious gossip. I happen to know that, at the time, Jinks was still getting over her husband’s tragic death, and that she was simply on the verge of a bad nervous breakdown. I’m sure Jinks enjoys a social drink from time to time like the rest of us, but I can tell you that at our meetings I’ve never seen her touch anything but a nice glass of sherry.”
Earl twisted his mouth again smugly and raised an eyebrow. “Yeah, with a float of gin on top. Those Catholics are crazy people—just eaten up with guilt over everything.”
“Son, sometimes I think you’ve lost your mind when you make ugly remarks like that. None of that nonsense about Jinks is true, and, besides, it’s not one bit of your business what she or any other of my friends do.”