Belle City

by Penny Mickelbury

  "We're as surprised as you are," Faye said.

  "More so," Evie said. "We certainly had no expectation of being included in your grandfather's will. After all, we're no relation to him."

  "But we did like him," Faye said. "We liked him very much. And he liked us because he thought we were like Catherine."

  "I guess it was his way of holding on to her," Evie said. "He really and truly loved your mother, and he missed her terribly, and he appreciated that we kept in touch with him over the years."

  "You kept in touch with him?"

  "Oh, yes," Evie and Faye spoke in unison and looked at JayFar like he was something in a specimen dish, the same way that Richard had eyed him earlier.

  He learned that his grandfather and his mother's sisters had exchanged birthday and Christmas cards and phone calls every year since his mother's death, that his grandfather never forgot to send them mother's day cards and that they never forgot to send him father's day cards, and that every couple of years, until they all got too old for it, the aunts and their husbands and Grandpa had met at a hunting and fishing lodge in the North Carolina mountains where they spent a month laughing, talking, drinking, eating and "catching up on family." JayFar tried to remember his grandfather being away from home for a month at a time and could not. Yet he had, every couple of years for—how long? Twenty years? Thirty? Forty?

  "I'm sorry, what did you say?" He realized that Aunt Faye had asked him something.

  "Mack and Eulalee McGinnis. Do you know them? Or their sons, Jack and Beaudry?"

  JayFar shook his head. "Who are they?"

  "Good friends of Jonas's. They used to join us up in the woods sometimes, and you should have heard the whooping and hollering when they did. Jonas had known them all his life, had grown up with Mack's people, back when Carrie's Crossing was still just the country, and the tales they used to tell on each other." Faye's eyes filled up, and she produced an embroidered lace handkerchief like a magician, catching the tears before they spilled.

  "He wouldn't know the McGinnis people anyway," Evie said and gave Faye a look that JayFar couldn't read but which her sister obviously understood very clearly, because she quickly and neatly changed the subject.

  "Anyway, JayFar, we just came to tell you that whatever Jonas put in his will, we make no claim to it," Aunt Faye said, getting to her feet.

  "That's right," Aunt Evie said. "That's what we came to tell you." She stood, too.

  JayFar jumped to his feet. "Don't go. I didn't offer you anything. I'm sorry, my manners." His heart was thudding, and his brain couldn't process all the thoughts running through it quickly enough. One thing he knew about being Southern, though, was that good manners covered a multitude of sins, including bad manners. "Please, let me get you something. Are you hungry? You know I've got more food than I'll eat in a month. All that food from after the funeral." He'd given away a refrigerator full and still had a refrigerator full of food left.

  This made his aunts very happy—the thought of eating and the knowledge that they were needed to organize the feeding, for they had unnerved their nephew and they knew it, and they wanted to make things right with him, Catherine's only remaining child. They couldn't stand to see him upset. They followed JayFar into the kitchen and, after they oohed and aahed over its gleaming stainless steel-ness, they made themselves at home. Seventy-something year old Southern women could make themselves at home in any kind of kitchen, he thought, recalling those who had so deftly taken charge of Grandpa's kitchen as the food came rolling in within hours of the old man's demise.

  "Uncle Pete and Uncle Terrell didn't come with you?" JayFar asked, just to get the conversation going again.

  Faye was slicing roast beef, and Evie was scooping green bean casserole and corn soufflé into pans for warming, and both shook their heads at the question. It was Evie who answered. "We had barely gotten home from the funeral when we got that registered letter telling us to come for the will reading. Terrell had too much work piling up, and Petey just plain hates traveling, so he wasn't about to get on another plane."

  Evie's husband, Terrell, was a Dean Emeritus at the University of North Carolina, a man so erudite that he spoke an academic brand of English difficult even for the educated to understand. When he was younger, JayFar had thought him silly and pretentious. He was wrong. True, Terrell operated on a higher plane than Everyman, but he descended often enough and long enough to father five children and to receive regular doses of Evie's doting, which he clearly enjoyed. Faye's Petey, a good ol' boy made good, didn't enjoy any occasion that required a tie, dress shoes, and shaving, especially if he had to travel to get there. So the sisters had flown into Belle City, rented a car at the airport, and come directly to JayFar's to tell him that they didn't want anything that was rightfully his.

  "I really don't know what to say," JayFar said.

  "No need to say anything," Evie said.

  "That's right," Faye added. "Except we're mighty grateful for this delicious repast. I don't care what anybody says, hotel food just doesn't measure up."

  There also was enough Southern left in JayFar for him to be appalled. "Hotel?"

  "The Ritz Carlton."

  "Oh, no. Certainly not. You'll stay right here. I've got plenty of room."

  "We couldn't put you out," Faye said.

  "It's just for two nights," Evie said.

  JayFar held out his hand. "Give me the car keys. I'll get your things. Unless—" he looked from one to the other of them as the thought took hold. "Unless you'd rather stay at Grandpa's?" And the delight on the old women's faces actually made him blush.

  "Oh, yes," Evie enthused.

  "I love that old house," Faye said. "We had such good times there." Her eyes misted again, and for the first time, JayFar recalled huge family gatherings at his grandfather's place, back when there still were stables and horses, when they ate what they raised and grew—chickens and hogs and fruits and vegetables—before Carrie's Crossing land became too valuable for that kind of simple use. There were July 4th celebrations with fireworks that lit the night sky, and Christmas celebrations with lights and adornments that made the house and outbuilding look like something out of a fairy tale. The last such fete had been the week before his parents and sister died.

  "You want to eat in the dining room or in here?"

  JayFar drifted back to the present to find himself holding a plate with slices of rare roast beef, buttery scalloped potatoes, and a crisp green salad. He was about to opt for eating in the kitchen but a glance at the high stools at the counter changed his mind. That and Faye's "Is that all right? We know you don't like Southern food."

  "The dining room," he said. "I'll open a bottle of wine. Red or white?"

  "Red," his aunts said in unison and surprised him again by knowing the Cabernet he opened. Then they surprised him with their appetites—both had plates piled high with roast beef, fried chicken, corn soufflé, green bean casserole, yams, and yeast rolls—and they ate with gusto. They clearly enjoyed good food and good wine, and he realized, as he looked more closely at them, they enjoyed the good life in general. Their clothes were tasteful and expensive, as was their jewelry. They looked healthy. They looked interesting, and JayFar wished that he knew more about them. He ran his hands through his hair a couple of times, a habit so practiced he wasn't aware of it.

  "Your mother used to do that," Evie said.

  "Do what?" JayFar asked.

  "You've got hair like her," Fay said. "Thick and dark and heavy."

  "We miss her, too," Evie said. "We've never stopped missing her."

  "How did you know?" JayFar asked, then hurried to explain when he saw the puzzled looks on his aunts' faces. "What to put on my plate. That I don't like Southern food. How did you know?"

  Evie threw back her head and laughed. It was a sweet, tinkly sound, delicate like wind chimes. "Everybody in the family knows that. From when you were a little boy, you never liked anything Southern. Just like your Grandma in that respect."<
br />
  "My Grandma?"

  "Audrey, your father's mother, not Clemmie, our mother. She was Southern through and through. Fought the Union Army until the day she died." The sisters chuckled and shook their heads at the memory of their Confederate-loyal mother while JayFar struggled for some memory of his grandmother. Either of them. All he could come up with were photographic images, and those blurred in his memory. Which was Audrey and which was Clemmie? And if he was so like one of them, why didn't he know that?

  The aunts cleared the table, put the plates, glasses and utensils in the dishwasher, freshened themselves in "the powder room," and met JayFar at the front door, insisting that he really didn't need to escort them; they knew "by heart the way to Jonas's." But he didn't mind. He wanted to go. He wanted to look again at the photographs of Audrey Thatcher, Jonas's wife. His grandmother. The one he was like.

  "The forsythia are beautiful," Faye said, standing on the sidewalk and looking back at the house. "And that crepe myrtle is a lovely touch."

  JayFar looked back at the house, too. The gardener was worth every cent.

  ***

  – 5 –

  Ruth Thatcher McGinnis's lawyer, an elderly, sweet-faced woman improbably named Jag Badenhoff and possessor of the kind of Southern accent that marked her a native despite the name, stood behind the lectern in her firm's conference room, looked out at the one hundred and thirteen people seated before her, cleared her throat, and told a bawdy, hilarious story about her late client. Ice broken, she then got down to the business at hand: The reading of Ruthie's will.

  All eyes were on the lawyer, especially those of the cousins who really hadn't believed that Sissy Nelson wasn't in charge of the will reading. Sissy sat at a table off to the right of the lectern, slightly behind Jag. She had a copy of the will but hadn't read it. She considered that the time she'd spent with Grandma before her death, and the fourteen hours of recorded memory, were more than sufficient legacy.

  The will dispensed with the bequests to charities first, and there were some surprises: A battered women's shelter, a drug treatment center, a private music and arts academy, and a South African orphanage, none of which any of the family had ever heard of, got the most money, and the United Negro College Fund and the National Council of Negro Women, the least. The room was quiet as Jag read the bequests of personal items: Dozens of pieces of jewelry, hundreds of books, a collection of old record albums, several hand-stitched quilts dating back to the Emancipation, thousands of photographs, a hundred year old family Bible, a 1952 Buick Roadster, dozens of pieces of crystal, sterling silver table settings, china and glassware, and the baptismal gowns of dozens of grandchildren, nieces and nephews. The reading of this section was followed by considerable sniffling and nose-blowing, and Sissy wondered how long it had taken her grandmother to craft the detailed and very personal list. Certainly she had known and understood and appreciated her progeny.

  Jag told another story about Grandma to get everybody settled down again so she could read off the money bequests. The gasps and shouts grew with the recitation of the dollar amounts, and when it was over, Ruthie McGinnis had left her offspring more than half a million dollars in cash. Not only didn't anybody know she'd had that kind of money, all were amazed at the evenhanded dispensation of it. Those who needed the most money, got the most money. Those who didn't need any, including Sissy, her mother, and two of her brothers, didn't get any. Teddy got twenty thousand dollars, and his facial expression wavered between glee and expectation: He welcomed the money and waited for the house. Sissy found that she couldn't look at him, so she looked at the lawyer, whose strands of silver-streaked hair gradually were freeing themselves from the tight bun at the nape of her neck: They'd been restrained too long.

  She adjusted her glasses, sipped from a glass of water, and read a letter from Ruth to her family that started the sniffling again. Nellie was so moved that Doug and Du became flustered, and Sissy had to hurry to her mother and calm her. Then it was she who needed calming as she heard herself named as the recipient of her grandmother's home "and all other real property, wholly owned or in part with others." Sissy was too stunned to be aware of Teddy's reaction. She vaguely registered the conditions of the bequest: That her home never be sold as long as a blood relative lived; that if Sissy didn't live in the house, she should choose among the relatives the one most likely to care for the house properly; and that she study carefully a private memo regarding her rental properties.

  "What rental properties?" floated in the air around the room as relatives looked from one to the other in amazement. Truly, Ruth Thatcher McGinnis had been a more complex and layered woman than any of her relatives realized. And she wasn't finished with them yet. Her surviving children—Nellie, Thatcher, Mack Jr. and Wilton, whom nobody had seen or heard from in a quarter century–were to share the contents of one safety deposit box. The contents of another safety deposit box were bequeathed to Jonas Farley Thatcher of Carrie's Crossing, Georgia. There was no quieting the room after that, though the more astute of those gathered did finally understand the presence of the tiny, old and distinguished looking white gentleman sitting all the way in the back of the room.

  ***

  "Who the hell is Ruth Thatcher McGinnis?" JayFar jumped up from the chair with such power and speed that he knocked it over, earning him a look and a sound of reproach from Willie Cummings. "I asked you a question," JayFar bellowed.

  Willie Cummings snatched his glasses off his nose, squared his shoulders, and glowered across the podium that almost totally concealed him. "Your behavior is totally unacceptable, Mr. Thatcher, and I'll not read another word of this will until you change it."

  Somebody grabbed one of JayFar's arms, and he swung wildly to loosen the grip, only to discover that he'd practically knocked Aunt Faye to the floor. He lunged toward her, caught her, and steadied them both. Then he released her and turned back to face the lawyer, who was ready for him. "I'm almost finished. If you'd sit down, I will finish, and I'll present you with your copy of the will."

  Jay sat, and it was just as well. He felt nauseous and dizzy and terribly confused. His grandfather had left the house to somebody JayFar had never heard of, Ruth Somebody. True, he'd left Jay almost ten million dollars in cash and securities, considerably more than the twenty-five thousand dollars each of the nieces and nephews received. But the house and its acreage! Worth close to ten million dollars as the centerpiece of his and Richard's real estate development plan. More if they decided to retain any of the units.

  "Are you all right?" Aunt Faye asked him.

  He shook himself, literally, like a wet animal. Aunt Faye and Aunt Evie were leaning over him. His other aunts and uncles and cousins were standing around him. Only Faye and Evie looked happy.

  "You can challenge it, you know," his Uncle Gill said. "He was old. You could argue that he was mentally incompetent."

  "He most certainly cannot." Willie Cummings pushed his way through the small knot of people and stood in front of JayFar who immediately stood up. "In the first place, young man, you know as well as I do that your grandfather never had an incompetent moment in his waking life. And in the second place, that will was written over twenty years ago." He thrust a copy of the will at JayFar. "There's also the matter of Mrs. McGinnis's bequeath to your grandfather. Call me at your convenience to make an appointment to discuss it," he said and turned on his heel and began to push back through the crowd that had closed around him.

  "Mrs. Who?" JayFar said, thinking that another surprise surely would kill him. "Why would she leave anything to Grandpa? Who is she?" JayFar yelled.

  "Read the newspapers," Cummings yelled back without turning around, and he hurried from his law firm's conference room, his hand on the elbow of a woman of gentle middle age who had attended the reading of the will but whom none of the Thatcher family knew.

  "She's an old Colored woman," his Aunt Georgia said, and her mouth turned down so sharply that the corners of her lips seemed to touch her ch
in. "She died the same day as Paw Paw Jonas."

  "They went on and on about her on the TV and in that stupid ass newspaper. More than they talked about Paw Paw," Gill said. "Just 'cause she had a bunch of relatives."

  Jonas Farley Thatcher's relatives, the thirteen of them summoned to the reading of his will, were silent for a moment. They stood in a tight circle around Jonas Farley Thatcher III, whom they had known would be the principal beneficiary of his grandfather. Faye Jenkins McCullough and Evelyn Jenkins Langley, who had inherited a collection of first edition books, old maps, artwork, and diaries and memoirs of a dozen unnamed Southerners from the deceased, had been pushed to the outside edge of the circle, despite the fact that the dollar value of their bequest exceeded everybody's but JayFar's. Emotionally and sentimentally, the gifts were priceless. They wanted to be close to their nephew to comfort him, to tell him that he could keep Jonas's things if he wanted them, and to tell him who Ruth Thatcher McGinnis was. But JayFar thought he was beginning to figure it out, and it felt like the heart monitor was screeching like a banshee in his head.

  ***

  Richard Gayle had known JayFar for over forty years—they'd met in nursery school—and not only was he certain that he knew his friend better than any other living person, he would have bet money that he'd seen JayFar express every emotion that he possessed. Until this moment. Pacing, cursing, muttering unintelligibly, and finally weeping, JayFar appeared more despondent than Richard would have imagined possible, and it unnerved him. He certainly never would have imagined JayFar shedding tears. JayFar, Richard would have said, didn't care enough about anything to shed tears over it—no, not even money. Yet, as Richard watched him and listened to him, it certainly seemed that the loss of his grandfather's property had opened in JayFar a wellspring of untapped emotion. Richard had never seen him really come unglued before, had never seen him this...angry. JayFar's tears were pure anger. Irrational, uncontrollable anger. A tantrum. JayFar was having a tantrum.