The After Party

by Anton Disclafani

  Ciela shook her head. “It’s a silly old dress. What about you, Cece? Are you bearing it?”

  “I miss her,” I said.

  “Of course you do. And not knowing . . . where she is.” She chose her words carefully. “And poor, poor Mary Fortier. Joan was her life.”

  “Yes,” I said weakly.

  Ciela continued. “She was your life, too, wasn’t she? I used to envy you and Joan your closeness,” she said.

  “And now?”

  “And now I feel sorry for you.” She let go of my hand, smoothed her hair behind her ears. She wore ruby and turquoise starburst earrings. She could wear jewelry that would have looked gauche on anyone else.

  I didn’t mind Ciela’s pity; I welcomed it. I wanted her to touch me again. I reached for her, but Ciela turned and I let my hand fall into my lap.

  “Cece, I have to ask you something. I know you saw Joan before she disappeared.”

  Everyone knew that. It had been in the paper, and even if it hadn’t Ciela would have known. Word traveled fast in our circle, and Ciela knew everything anyway.

  “Did she tell you anything before she disappeared?”

  Later, I appreciated Ciela’s cleverness. If she had asked if I knew where Joan had gone, I could have told her no, honestly.

  But she’d asked the right question, which meant she suspected. I felt grateful that she assumed Joan had confided in me.

  I almost told her.

  But no. I looked Ciela straight in the eye, and lied.

  “She did not,” I said.

  Ciela nodded. “Poor Joan,” she said.

  “Why?” I asked.

  “She was never really happy. We were never really enough for her, were we?”

  My legs, gleaming in the sun, were already turning darker.

  Ciela waited for me to answer.

  “Do you think she’s dead?” I whispered.

  “That’s what everyone thinks,” Ciela said. “I’m sorry. It’s just that the longer she’s gone, with no word—it’s not promising, is it?”

  I didn’t answer. Promising. What an odd way to put it.

  “What do you think?” Ciela asked softly.

  “I don’t know,” I said truthfully. “I thought I knew her,” I said slowly. I wanted to tell her something, something true. “But in the end, I did not.”

  The glass door slid open. Ray was home.

  “Hi there, Ciela,” he called from behind us, in his easy, considerate way. “Did Cece offer you a cocktail?”

  • • •

  That afternoon I lay in bed, the curtains drawn. I hadn’t turned on the fan. Tommy was napping, I’d let Maria go home early. Ray was in his study.

  Then the room was flooded with light.

  “Someone here who wants to see you,” Ray said. The mattress shifted under his weight as he sat down. A hand on my back. I didn’t want to be touched. I wanted to be alone with my grief.

  But this hand was small, the touch light.

  I turned over. “Hi,” Tommy said, which he had been saying a lot lately. He was already in his footed pajamas, his hair damp and combed sweetly away from his face. He smelled of baby powder. I held out my arms and he came to me without hesitation.

  “Hi,” I said back. “Hi.”

  • • •

  The next day the news was about Sid’s previous arrest, years before, for tax fraud. There was nothing violent in his past, not officially, but who knew? Houston loved to speculate.

  I had just come in with the paper when the phone rang. I don’t know what compelled me to answer it.

  “Cecilia,” Mary said, after I had said hello.

  “Yes,” I said, “this is she.”

  I pressed the receiver to my ear, half expecting to hear the sounds of Evergreen—a servant, taking away a cup of coffee; Joan, scampering in the background. I heard nothing, of course. Those were the old sounds of Evergreen.

  “Mary?” My voice was tentative. She turned me into a child so easily.

  “I trust you have seen today’s issue of the Chronicle.”

  “Yes.” It was in my hand, the musty scent of newsprint in my nose.

  “You have a child of your own.”

  “Yes,” I said softly.

  “Then you can imagine—” She stopped short. “I called to say that I know you don’t know anything, Cecilia.”

  I said nothing.

  “About where Joan might be. Because if you did, you would have told me. Told someone. You love Joan too much not to.”

  I clutched the phone.

  “Cecilia? I am correct in these assumptions?” Still, I couldn’t speak. “Cecilia? Are you there? Please.” Hearing Mary Fortier’s voice break—she sounded, finally, like what she was: a distraught, sixty-seven-year-old woman—allowed me to respond. She had brought it on herself. She had helped ruin Joan.

  “Yes,” I whispered. And again, louder: “Yes. I would tell. Of course I would tell.”

  “I thought so,” Mary said wearily. She sounded so old. “I thought so, Cecilia. I thought so. Joan is lucky to have a friend like you.”

  I think I would have pleased Mary Fortier had I been her daughter. I wanted the same things she wanted: to stay put, namely. Was it Mary who had ruined Joan? Perhaps it was Furlow, who had made Joan believe in the fiction of her own power. In this way, he had treated her more like a son than a daughter, letting her believe that she could have anything. Everything. She had only to want it, and it was hers. For a while, it had been true: a pony, a diamond, Furlow’s endless adoration. But then Joan was no longer a child, and her needs became more complex: she began to want a world that Furlow could not have predicted. And he had not given her the means to move within this world, because he hadn’t truly wanted her to. Furlow had given Joan plenty, but he had not given her a bank account in her own name.

  Or was it David who had ruined Joan? A child who could not help the fact of his own life. A child born of his mother’s reckless desire. It might have been a fantasy, but I wanted to believe that David had given Joan something. That Joan might have regretted her life, but not her child: that she could separate one from the other, the pain from the gift. David had given his mother his trust, even when Joan had not deserved it.

  But who knows?

  None of us wanted Joan to leave. She was a daughter. We—her parents and I—believed she belonged to us. Daughters sat tight. Daughters abided. They never left.

  But in the end, Joan was no one’s daughter.

  Ray found me at the kitchen table, staring out the window.

  “It’ll be all right,” he said.

  It might be, I thought, or it might not. Only time would tell. But there was this: Tommy’s warm hand in mine, every day. Ray’s solid presence next to me, every night. Joan’s life was unknown to me now. But Tommy and Ray were alive, safe. Mine.

  Chapter Thirty

  1958

  I lived a year without knowing what had happened to Joan. Alive or dead, I had no way of knowing. Houston moved on, as it always did; I’d overestimated the city’s interest in Joan Fortier. I should have known better—I’d lived here my entire life, after all. Sometimes I thought it was better that Joan left when she did. There were younger, fresher girls rising up to take her place. At first, when the girls and I resumed going to the Petroleum Club for our monthly dinners, we were a spectacle. Joan’s friends. Then, gradually, people stopped looking. They would have stopped looking at Joan, too, though now I knew she wouldn’t have cared.

  I never spoke to Mary Fortier again. I tried, once. I went back to Evergreen, when I was four months pregnant and just starting to show. I’d gotten pregnant in the month after Joan left, and at first I’d feared for the child growing inside me, that I might ruin this new life with my sadness. I was sick, as I was with Tommy, but this sickness was different. I
t felt cleansing. I spent entire days sprawled on the cool tile floor, only rising to my hands and knees to vomit. My misery served a purpose, in stark contrast to the futile longing I felt for Joan. My longing would not bring her back.

  I never knew what Mary understood of Joan’s disappearance. And in the end, I couldn’t decide which was worse: never to know your daughter’s fate, or to know that your daughter had swindled you. That your daughter had staged her own disappearance, at least in part, because she never wanted to see you again.

  I’d read Furlow’s obituary in the Chronicle. There was to be no funeral, no service. The picture that accompanied the obituary was the same one I had seen so many times: a young Furlow standing in the oil field, his life ahead of him, Joan not yet a thought in his head. It was a mercy, that Furlow’s mind was lost before Joan was lost. He would not have survived her absence. I hoped he’d died living in a world in which his daughter was present and beautiful and loved him.

  I began to forget. It is either the mind’s greatest mercy or its worst trick: that we forget those we love. If I thought about her a thousand times a day in the months after she disappeared, then I thought about her nine hundred ninety-nine times in the year after she disappeared, and so on, until I had to look at a picture of her to remember her face. But her voice—deep, a little gravelly—I could always call up her voice.

  I went to Evergreen to pay my respects. Ray waited in the car, with Tommy. I touched my stomach constantly now, evidence of what I had gained in sacrificing Joan. And Tommy—Tommy blossomed after Joan left. I wished she could see him, wished so badly she could take pleasure in the little boy he was becoming. He spoke beautifully now, had preferences I could not have imagined: he delighted in the birds that fed at the birdfeeder outside our window, hummingbirds especially. He loved music, the sound glasses made when they clinked together, which Ray and I had discovered one night as we toasted our anniversary with flutes of champagne. He toasted our water with his milk every night before we ate. I no longer hid him away; I felt guilty for ever doing so.

  Dorie answered the door.

  Mary was in Galveston.

  “That’s where she lives now,” Dorie said.

  “Alone?”

  Dorie nodded. “All alone.”

  I stepped away—Dorie had not invited me inside—but then I changed my mind.

  “I want to see a picture of him. A photograph.”

  “Of who?”

  “You know who,” I said, in a low voice.

  Dorie did not move. She’d never really liked me, even when I was a child.

  “I know one must exist,” I said.

  She nodded, almost imperceptibly. When she returned, a minute later, she carried a small silver frame, polished to gleaming.

  She opened the screen door and dropped it into my hand.

  “David,” I said. Joan’s eyes, the curve of her mouth. “He was beautiful.” And he was.

  “You don’t know the half of it,” Dorie said, but her voice was soft.

  “He looks like Joan. A miniature Joan.” He was smiling, looking to the side. He looked around four years old—no longer a baby, but not quite a child. I wanted to think he was staring at his mother, at the woman who had only really loved one person, her entire life: him.

  He looked like any child. He could not have conceived of the depth of his mother’s love. I handed the frame back to Dorie.

  “Where is this kept?” I asked.

  “On my bedside table,” she said. “Mrs. Fortier had one on hers, too. She took it with her.”

  I nodded, and took a step backward. Being here, at Evergreen, undid me. I half expected Joan to walk around the back of the house in her red bathing suit, smile, wave me to the pool.

  “He was loved,” Dorie said, with fervor in her voice, before I turned to go. “He was adored.”

  • • •

  My daughter was born in April, as the azaleas were blooming. We named her Evelyn, after Ray’s grandmother. Ray asked me if I wanted her middle name to be Joan, but I did not. I wanted that name to die with Joan, with me.

  When Evelyn was six months old, and Houston was no longer so hot you felt half in hell, I opened an envelope with no return address. I almost didn’t see it: Joan’s necklace, the one Furlow had given her so many years ago. I hadn’t seen it since that night in high school.

  “Look,” I said, and dangled the delicate chain from my finger. The star was tinier than I remembered, the diamond smaller.

  Evelyn reached for it.

  Author’s Note

  I spent a great deal of time researching the colorful, storied past of Houston’s Shamrock Hotel, and though I’ve tried to be, in most instances, faithful to the historical record, fact always serves at the pleasure of fiction in this book. One instance of note: In March of 1957, the Cork Club was moved out of its location in the Shamrock Hotel to a spot in downtown Houston. In the book, of course, it remains a part of the Shamrock. I didn’t have the heart to move it.

  Acknowledgments

  Thank you to my agent, Dorian Karchmar, whose dedication to writing in general—and, to my great fortune, my writing in particular—is so passionate I am still occasionally astonished by her commitment.

  Thank you to my editor, Sarah McGrath, whom I feel lucky to work with. She made this book so much better. There is no eye more discerning. Without her patient, calm presence, along with her incisive, brilliant editorial suggestions, this book would not have gotten written. I am forever grateful to her.

  At Riverhead, thank you to the entire spectacular team, but especially to Geoffrey Kloske, Jynne Martin, Danya Kukafka, and Lydia Hirt.

  Thank you to my publicist, Liz Hohenadel, whose love for books is infectious, and who is so good at getting them noticed. I don’t pretend to understand all the hard work that goes into publishing a book, but I am incredibly thankful for all the effort Riverhead and Liz have put into mine.

  At William Morris Endeavor, thank you to Tracy Fisher, Anna DeRoy, Simone Blaser, and Jamie Carr.

  Thank you to the English department at Auburn University, where I am surrounded every day by fine students and colleagues.

  Thank you to Tim Mullaney for reading a draft.

  Thank you to Roy Nichol, for his generous help in explaining the world of River Oaks.

  Thank you to my mother and father and sister, as always, for their love and support.

  Thank you to my husband, Mat Smith, for everything.

  This book is for the two Peters in my life: one past, one present and future.

  {1}

  I was fifteen years old when my parents sent me away to the Yonahlossee Riding Camp for Girls. The camp was located in Blowing Rock, North Carolina, concealed in the Blue Ridge Mountains. You could drive by the entrance and never see it, not unless you were looking, and carefully; my father missed it four times before I finally signaled that we had arrived.

  My father drove me from Florida to North Carolina: my parents did not trust me enough to let me ride the train alone.

  The last day, we ascended into the upper reaches of the mountains, at which point our journey slowed considerably. The road looked half made, narrow and overgrown; it twisted and turned at sharp angles.

  My father spoke little when he drove; he believed one should always concentrate on the road ahead. He’d bought his first car, a Chrysler Roadster, five years earlier, in 1925, so an automobile was not a habit for him but an innovation. We stopped in Atlanta on the first night, and after we checked into our hotel, my father told me to dress nicely. I wore my lavender silk dress with the dropped waist and rosette detailing. I carried my mother’s mink stole, which I had taken despite Mother’s instruction not to do so. When I was a child I was allowed to wear the stole on special occasions—Christmas dinner, Easter brunch—and I had come to think of the fur as mine. But now that I wore it on my own, it felt like
a burden, an accessory too elegant for me. I felt young for the dress, though it was not the dress but my body that made me feel this way. My breasts were tender and new, I still carried myself in the furtive way of an immature girl. My father, in his gray pinstripe suit, didn’t look much different than usual, except that he had tucked a lime-green handkerchief in his coat pocket. Not the lime green of today, fluorescent and harsh. We didn’t have colors like that then. No, I mean the true color of a lime, palely bright.

  At the entrance to the restaurant, I took my father’s arm like my mother usually did, and he looked at me, startled. I smiled and tried not to cry. I still clung to the hope that perhaps my father would not leave me in North Carolina, that he had another plan for us. My eyes were swollen from two weeks of weeping, and I knew it pained my father to see anyone cry.

  The country was in the midst of the Great Depression, but my family had not suffered. My father was a physician, and people would always pay for their health. And there was family money besides, which my parents would come to depend on. But only after my father’s patients were so poor they couldn’t even offer him a token from the garden in exchange for his services. I saw all this after I came back from Yonahlossee. The Depression had meant something different to me when I left.

  I rarely ventured outside my home. We lived in a tiny town in central Florida, named after a dead Indian chief. It was unbearably hot in the summers—this in the days before air-conditioning—and crisp and lovely in the winters. The winters were perfect, they made up for the summers. We rarely saw our neighbors, but I had all I needed right there: we had a thousand acres to ourselves, and sometimes I would leave with a packed lunch in the morning on Sasi, my pony, and return only as the sun was setting, in time for dinner, without having seen a single person while riding.

  And then I thought of my twin, Sam. I had him most of all.

  My father and I ate filet mignon and roasted beets at the hotel’s restaurant. Plate-glass windows almost as tall as the restaurant were the central decoration. When I tried to look outside to the quiet street, I saw a blurred reflection of myself, lavender and awkward. We were the only people there, and my father complimented my dress twice.