Belle City

by Penny Mickelbury

  "What the hell are you laughing at, Richard? If you can't take this seriously, go home. Just get the hell out of here and leave me alone."

  "I'm sorry, ol' buddy," Richard said, recovering his own equilibrium as he found himself able to understand the source of his friend's imbalance. And as if to prove that he had, indeed, recovered, he strolled over to the drinks cabinet to pour himself a much-needed libation. "I guess I'm living that old saying, laugh to keep from crying. And speaking of old sayings, I'm reminded of another one: 'You can't miss what you never had.' But I swear I'm feeling the loss of my multimillionaire status. I do believe I'd actually started to think of myself as rich." And Richard laughed again as he realized the truth of his statement: He had assumed JayFar's excitement at the thought of inheriting old Jonas's land and the notion of what that would mean to their real estate development company.

  "How could he do this to me? I'm his family."

  "So's Ruth McGinnis."

  "Goddammit, she is not, Richard, and don't you say that to me again."

  "Anyway, Jay, you can't stand kin and connections and all that sort of thing, and the old man knew you didn't care, so he probably thought—"

  "Thought what? That I didn't care whether or not I inherited one of the most valuable pieces of land in the state of Georgia? In the entire southeastern United States? Since you knew him so well, tell me: Is that what he thought? And what does Miss Nelson think? That I'll just meet her at old Willie's office, shake her hand, tell her it's nice to meet her, and then hand over the keys to Grandpa's? 'Cause if that's what she thinks, she's got another think coming, and I don't give a damn about her being a New York lawyer."

  Richard had never seen JayFar so intensely angry, and it frightened him: Not the anger itself but what it could lead to, for Richard was a descendant from a long line of intensely angry people, and he knew firsthand what unchecked or, worse, misdirected rage could unleash, and not only was JayFar angry, he had taken to raging against Barnett Nelson, Ruth Thatcher McGinnis's granddaughter, the executor of her will, and, as fate and chance would have it, the heir to the property that Jonas Thatcher willed to Ruth Thatcher McGinnis. Surely Jay couldn't be thinking that he didn't have to honor the bequest. "Maybe she'll take pity on you and deed the land over to you. After all, she's richer than you are."

  "What are you talking about? Who's richer than me?"

  "Barnett Nelson. That's who we were discussing, isn't it? Old Mrs. McGinnis's granddaughter." Richard swallowed hugely from the heavy crystal highball glass. Being sober when JayFar was angry took way too much effort. "You looked her up, didn't you?"

  JayFar stopped pacing and looked hard at Richard, a sign that he was cooling off a bit. "No, I didn't look her up. Why would I do that?"

  "Because you'd know that she's more than just a 'New York City lawyer,' that she's one of the best probate and estate lawyers up there—and in that town, 'best' means best paid. She's a partner in one their top-drawer firms, and she's earned more than a million dollars a year for a few years running. On top of that, she belongs to one of the richest Black families in Georgia. And on top of that, your grandfather left her property worth..."

  "I know what it's worth. To us. Question is: What's it worth to her?"

  "Might not be about money, Jay."

  "It's always about money, Richard. Who has it, who doesn't, how to get it, how to keep it. You say Miss Nelson's already got money. I say she'd like to have more. It costs a lot of money to live in New York, right?"

  Richard didn't attempt to soften his anger. "What is the matter with you? No wonder your grandpa didn't leave you the damn land. You just flat-out don't deserve it."

  JayFar looked as if he'd been hit. Felt as if he had. Richard had never spoken this way to him. He'd never have thought it possible. He was, literally, shocked speechless. So, too, was Richard, who couldn't think of a way to mitigate that rare and difficult moment, so he allowed it to pass in silence—a silence that JayFar broke first.

  "You really were more like him than I saw or knew," JayFar said, his voice without expression or emotion. He went behind his desk and picked up a cardboard box—the writing on it said that it once had held shelled pecans from a farm that hadn't existed for a least twenty-five years. JayFar extended the box to Richard, and he took it without asking what was in it, though he knew it wasn't shelled pecans. "These are his diaries. There's twenty-five or thirty of them; I lost count. I didn't even know he kept a diary, though you probably did, huh?"

  Richard put the box down so he could open it. He was mesmerized by the thought of the old man's journals; he wanted to see them, to touch them, even as he realized that he could never take them, and he said that to JayFar. "I take it you haven't read them." It was a statement, not a question. "You should, you know."

  "That's why I'm giving them to you, Richard: Because you think they should be read and because you'll read them, first page to last. Probably stay up late nights too."

  Richard lifted a stack of the books from the box. They were old and worn, some of them worm-and-moth-eaten. He could see that books at the bottom of the box had covers of fine leather, while those he held definitely were cheaper—begun, no doubt, when the writer was young and without the funds to spend good money for a book of empty pages. "I wish I had something from my ancestors—something of what they thought and believed, what they saw, what they did, what they wanted to do."

  "You can read these and find out what my ancestor thought and did."

  "Maybe if you read them you'd find out why the old man left his land to..."

  "Don't say her name in this room again."

  "At least admit that it's a possibility before you give away these books."

  Jay reached out and snatched the diary that Richard held and the old book tore in half. Ignoring the destruction, he flipped it open. "Some possibility. The first entry is dated, 'Summer 1917,' and it looks like an illiterate wrote it."

  "My God, Jay, he'd have been just a boy then." Richard leaned into the box and lifted out one of the leather volumes. It felt as smooth as his favorite driving gloves. The initials JFT were embossed in gold on the cover and beneath them, also in the same gold, 1985. He opened the book at midpoint. "Look at the difference between the writing of a boy and that of a man," he said, taking the torn book—tablet, really, the kind used by school children of the day—from JayFar and giving him the leather-bound volume. "You can see how important his diaries were to him. I wonder when he started buying these fancy ones?"

  "Who knows? Who cares?"

  Richard's anger was rising again. "I care. It's a life, told in a man's own words as he was living it. Why can't you understand how valuable that is?"

  "Land is valuable. Land that should have been mine. Land that would be worth millions if it were mine. Instead, it belongs to a big-city lady lawyer—what's her name again? You seem to have a knack for remembering the names of people who inherited my inheritance right out from under me."

  "Barnett Nelson," Richard said, his eyes squinting with the effort of reading the penciled script of a twelve-year old boy on lined paper in an almost seventy-year old journal. "And Jay? You really should get to know her 'cause your granddaddy sure as hell knew her grandma. Listen to this: I want to marry Ruthie but I know I can't. She is the most beautiful girl I ever saw. He wrote that in 1917, Jay. My God, wait 'til Margaret sees this stuff!"

  ***

  "I can't see why it's taking you so long to make up your mind, Sissy. Either you're gonna keep the Carrie's Crossing property or you're not. Either you're gonna keep Grandma's house or you're not. Just decide for Chrissakes."

  Sissy watched her baby brother watch her. He'd made his pronouncement and issued his order and now it was her turn, and he really and truly expected that she would respond and when she didn't, his anger rose swiftly, as it seemed to do with greater and greater regularity since their grandmother died. Sissy knew that death—and more specifically, the process of sorting out and disposing of the various
components of a life—brought out the worst in the best of people: Her work as a probate attorney had shown her more than she ever cared to know about people's desire for dollars and things to which they felt themselves entitled.

  Before Grandma's death, if asked, Sissy would have described her youngest brother as sweet and funny and fun and fun-loving. He was none of those things, she realized. He was spoiled and quite possibly lazy and almost certainly an opportunist. Of course, the fact that she only saw Teddy a couple of times a year could be used as a excuse for her failure to see him as he really was, but she knew that the real reason was that she hadn't wanted to accept her older brothers' assessment of the family baby. They both were so smug and self-righteous and...and...correct. They always did everything just right—the exception being, in Doug's case, his marriage—and even then, Carolyn certainly looked the part—she was poised and elegant—even if she had relinquished the role in the middle of the second act.

  "I haven't decided what I'm going to do, Teddy, but I'm certainly not going to be rushed or pushed into any decision, so do me a favor and don't ask me again."

  "You are so fucking selfish," he screamed at her.

  "How does that make me selfish?" she asked, really wanting to know.

  "You've already got a house. Or a condo or whatever it is in New York, And now

  you've got Grandma's house and that old dude's house in Carrie's Crossing. You can't live in but one place at a time. How does it hurt you to give me something? That's how it makes you selfish: If you just keep all of it to yourself. You could give me the Carrie's Crossing house."

  "I thought you were head over heels to have Grandma's house," Sissy said.

  "I don't want to live in the ghetto if I don't have to," he said, crossing to the window to look out at the world he'd just reduced to a stereotype.

  "Is that what you think this is? A ghetto? Your mother was raised in this house. Your grandfather built this house with his own hands."

  "Save your breath, Sis, I already know the ancient history lesson. And maybe it wasn't a ghetto back then, but it is now. I mean, just look out the window."

  Once again, Teddy expected his sister to follow his command, but Sissy didn't move. She didn't need to look out of the window to see the street outside, any more than she needed to survey the wide living room in which she stood with its gleaming oak floors, wood cut and laid by Mack McGinnis. The fireplace, open on two sides—living room and dining room—was an inspired act in the days before central heat, expensive firewood and atmospheric concerns. The built-in, floor-to-ceiling bookshelves that flanked the fireplace in the living room were testament to a mind that loved learning until Ruthie McGinnis breathed her last. The other downstairs rooms—the parlor, a bedroom with its own bathroom, a kitchen which ran the length of the back of the house, a pantry and a laundry room—displayed the same gleaming hardwood floors and sparkling white walls. There were photographs everywhere and vases that would have held fresh flowers if Ruthie were still alive. Sissy had finally thrown away the dead ones that had filled the vases, but she hadn't been able to force herself to buy replacements. All she'd done since Grandma died was walk around, from room to room downstairs, then up the wide staircase to the second floor and down the hallway, pausing at each doorway and looking into each of the three bedrooms and the large, square, white-tiled bathroom, until she reached the bedroom at the end of the hall. Grandma's room, its door still closed. Sissy hadn't opened the door. Not yet.

  "I'm probably going to live in this house, Teddy. At least for a while. And I'm probably going to rent out my condo in New York. At least for a while. And I don't know what I'm going to do with the house in Carrie's Crossing. Not yet. But what I won't be doing is giving it to you, so please stop asking."

  Sissy stood in front of the bookcase that held Grandma's collection of first edition books by Black American authors: Contemporary works by Toni Morrison and June Jordan and Octavia Butler and Samuel Delaney and earlier works by Langston Hughes and James Baldwin and Dorothy West and Zora Neale Hurston. How had Ruthie McGinnis known that these books one day would be priceless? But, of course, she hadn't known that; she wouldn't have bought or kept them for that reason. Sissy touched the books, ran her fingers over their spines and envisioned the empty spaces that she would have to fill when her cousin the literature professor came to collect her inheritance. Sissy would, she decided, replace the first editions with copies of the same works, then begin reading them again, one by one, until she'd read them all.

  "You're doing this just to spite me, aren't you?" Teddy's fury was a presence in the room—a poltergeist or a decaying rodent trapped behind the wall—ubiquitous and unpleasant and unwelcome.

  Sissy left the living room, crossed the dining room, and went to stand in the kitchen. She looked out into the backyard for a moment, seeing not a ghetto but the memory of Grandma tending her garden—pulling weeds or checking leaves for the presence of aphids or cutting flowers to bring inside to fill the many vases—on her hands and knees more often than not. The memory brought tears, and Sissy hurried to the sink, turned on the water and splashed her face, as much to clear the tears as to prevent her eyes from becoming red and puffy; she had an appointment with Jonas Thatcher and his lawyer to see the Carrie's Crossing property, and she didn't want to arrive looking grief-stricken, since she'd most likely leave looking that way. Besides, she was more than just a legatee—she was a New York lawyer. She had practiced law in New York for more than fifteen years and had never been called that. Since the funeral and the will readings, she'd been nothing but—on both sides of the Thatcher family. So, she thought she'd look and act the part. Whatever that was. She wasn't entirely certain, but it no doubt did not include red, puffy eyes.

  Sissy pulled paper towels from the roll above the sink and dried her face, then she turned from the sink to the pantry and opened the door. She ignored the shelves of food and, instead, stepped all the way in. She didn't open the secret door all the way in the left side corner, the door that was invisible unless one squeezed into the pantry, which is something nobody would do—unless opening the secret door was the objective, and as badly as Sissy wanted to get away from Teddy, she didn't want to share this secret with him. This door inside the pantry would remain Grandma's for a while longer...maybe even forever. Because, after all, secrets have power.

  ***

  – 6 –

  One good thing about the absurd traffic that Sissy confronted on her drive across town to Carrie's Crossing was that it took her mind off the reason for the journey. She'd often heard her mother complain that traffic in Belle City rivaled that of Los Angeles, but she'd thought that was just her mother being her usual dramatic self. Sissy knew that her hometown had grown, that it even thought of itself as an international city, but the density of the traffic congestion that mirrored the density of the residential and commercial development lining both sides of the wide boulevard suggested that Belle City's bragging rights were well earned: Not only was there a lot of development, it was bright and shiny and prosperous looking. Sissy thought that buying a condo in one of the dozens of buildings she passed would likely cost as much as the two million she'd spent on her own Chelsea loft. She also thought she'd likely get a lot more for her money here in the glass and steel canyons of Carrie's Crossing.

  She slowed to a crawl as the computerized navigational voice alerted her to the approaching right turn which she couldn't have missed if she'd wanted to—not by driving too fast anyway. How or why anybody would drive every day in traffic like this was a mystery to her, whether in Los Angeles or New York or Belle City. True, few cities had the kind of public transportation networks enjoyed by New York and Chicago and London and Paris, but, Sissy thought, next time she came to Carrie's Crossing she'd take a taxi. Then she scanned the traffic surrounding her: Not a taxi in sight. Maybe she wouldn't be returning to her roots after all.

  Willie Cummings had an office on the top floor of an older but more elegant building in an older
and more elegant section of Carrie's Crossing that Sissy actually had some memory of. She didn't know why, exactly, but she was certain she'd been on this street at some time. Or perhaps she was creating a memory based on those long hours of listening to her grandmother reminisce? No, Sissy told herself, that couldn't be true. Her grandmother had left Carrie's Crossing almost eighty years ago and she'd never returned, had never even mentioned the place of her birth. In fact, for most of her own life, Sissy had thought that her grandmother's birthplace was Belle City. Only in recent years did knowledge of Carrie's Crossing surface, and that only because of proposals to change the town's name.

  Sissy stopped at the parking garage entrance, got a ticket, drove into the underground lot, and followed directions to a parking space with her name on a placard directly adjacent to the elevator. Jag Badenhoff had told her that Cummings was "a gentleman of the old school," but she hadn't expected a reserved parking space. She definitely wasn't in New York anymore. She checked her face in the mirror: Eyes bright and clear, not a hint of puffiness or redness. She gathered her purse and briefcase, exited and locked the car, and was on the elevator, riding up to the top floor one minute ahead of her scheduled appointment.

  Cummings didn't just have an office on the top floor, his office was the top floor, a warm, welcoming mix of Old South meets English gentleman's club. As might be expected, the only people immediately visible when Sissy stepped off the elevator and sank into the plush crimson carpet were women. But unlike the brash, polished twenty-to-thirty-something blonds preferred by law firms on the East Coast, the women here were elegantly attired and coiffed fifty-somethings who probably knew as much law as the people in the offices on the other side of the massive double doors. There were four of these women, each seated at a desk skillfully concealed behind a brass and wood-fitted partition. Phones buzzed politely, barely audible beneath the classical concerto that wafted down from the discreet ceiling speakers. Sissy chuckled to herself as she recalled that Willie Cummings had referred to himself in their several telephone calls as "just an old country lawyer."