More flowers and platters of food were arriving as Father Menefee left the house. “Give my love to your mother,” he said, putting on his white straw hat at a slight angle. “And tell her that I would be happy to see her at any time she would like to see me.”
Mallie was aware that her mother hardly knew the Reverend Carl Menefee. She never attended services at Holy Trinity, unless it was Christmas or Easter or the boys were somehow involved through Holy Trinity School. Her mother had no affiliation with a church in Memphis and her father wanted nothing to do with the Catholic Church. Holy Trinity had become Mallie’s church connection for the whole family. It was ironic that since she had been going to St. Michael’s Chapel on Sundays, she had stopped attending any services at Holy Trinity herself.
From the time Mallie walked into her mother’s house that morning, the telephone and the doorbell had continued to ring. Someone—a friend of her mother’s, a friend of hers or her sisters’—was always there to answer the phone or the front door and to take the food to the refrigerator, or place the flowers around the house.
All the tabletops in the living room were already covered with various sizes of vases. The dining room table, filled with silver trays of cold cuts, cheeses and crackers, stuffed eggs, fruit and nuts, looked as if a wedding buffet had been planned. One efficient friend had placed a white leather book, opened like a guestbook, next to the front door for friends to sign. Another notebook was kept in the kitchen to record the names of those sending flowers or food with a full description of each offering. Joan Malcolm or someone in the family would be responsible to write thank-you notes later.
Except for her meeting with Anne and Father Menefee in the quiet of the sunroom with the doors closed, Mallie felt as if she and her family were observers—or maybe props—on the stage of a theatrical production. In Memphis, a funeral for a member of an old, ruling family was a theatrical production. Along with their genuine grieving in most cases, friends had an opportunity to prove their connections and their societal solidarity through their participation in events surrounding funerals.
When Anne’s husband arrived from Atlanta, he went straight to the liquor store to stock the bar with bottles of gin, scotch, vodka and Jack Daniels. Kye went to Seessel’s—her mother’s preferred grocery store where she had always had a charge account—to buy tonic, soda water and soft drinks.
Joan Malcolm, impeccably dressed, as she always was, remained secluded in her room for most of the day. It was apparent, however, that the show revolved around her. “Is Joan okay?” “Would Joan like lunch, do you think?” “Where do you think Joan would like these flowers to go?” “Should we wait for Joan to set up the bar?”
Whenever Joan appeared, her friends were reverential to her—telling her that she looked so well, or that she should get some rest, or have some lunch, or sit down and put her feet up. Occasionally they squeezed her hands without words.
Mallie looked at her watch. Four thirty-five. It was time for her to go home and wait for Tom. She felt a flutter in her stomach. She wanted to take a shower, change her clothes. What should she wear? She walked quickly through the house looking for Anne and Kye to tell them that she would be back later, that she had something she had to do at home. Both of them were occupied with other people and decisions about the ever-more-crowded refrigerator—whether to chill the wine in a large bucket with ice cubes. Neither of her sisters seemed concerned that she was leaving. Mallie had a momentary thought of the Emily Dickinson poem about death called “A bustle in the house.”
Chapter Thirty-four
Through the open blinds on the windows in her living room, Mallie watched Tom’s dark green Chevy sedan rush up the driveway. Relief poured over her. She had been standing there rigidly poised for twenty minutes after their appointed meeting hour had passed—waiting, stifling sweeps of dread that he would not show up. Possibly he had changed his mind about coming to her house. He would have his reasons. He would sound very apologetic when he finally called her on the phone. Perhaps he would tell her that he thought it best to wait a day and have her come to meet with him in his study at St. Michael’s.
But Mallie had jumped too quickly to a conclusion. As he shut the car door behind him, her mind let go of all the negative presumptions. She felt the tension in her body release. It was only five minutes to six. She smiled as she reminded herself that he was always late, always rushing to his next appointment, but he always came. She walked to the front door to greet him.
Without saying a word, Tom put his arms around Mallie and held her in the open doorway. She wanted to burst with happiness. Even as she felt the hard, starched, white collar band pressing against her forehead—usually a reminder of the barrier between them—she reveled in the pleasure of his embrace. With her face in his neck, she breathed in the scent of his skin. She knew that smell, so unlike Larry’s athletic, masculine odor that had once intrigued her. Tom’s smell was comforting, like baby oil, and at the same time, provocative, sensuous, like musk. She wanted time to stop. She wanted to stay in that position forever.
“Mallie, Mallie.” Tom repeated her name so softly, so sympathetically. “Such a shock for you. I’m truly sorry.” He loosened his arms from holding her and tried to take one of her hands. “Had your father been ill?”
“No, not really,” Mallie said, wanting to resist his release, but taking his hand. “He had very high blood pressure, and, I suppose, a lot of stress lately. I know he had been drinking more than usual.” She remembered how devastated her father had sounded on the phone when she told him about her separation from Larry. She had been surprised at his reaction, knowing that her father had become disillusioned, angry at times, with Larry—probably more than he allowed her to know. “It’s just so hard to believe he is really gone,” she said.
“Your father will never be gone from you, Mallie,” Tom said.
She recognized his Episcopal priestly stance, his words of comfort that the spirit never dies. As if they both knew the time had come to move from the front door, they turned and started into the house. Mallie let go of his hand.
“Can I get you something to drink?” she asked.
“A drink of water would be fine,” he said.
He followed her through the short side entrance hall into the kitchen. “What a lovely home,” he said. He walked past her to look out the window at the back yard. Mallie cringed at the vision of her brown grass and dead flowers.
“Ice?” she asked.
“Just plain,” he said.
She fixed two glasses of water and walked ahead of him into the library. It seemed both natural and strange that Tom was in her house. She had never been with him anywhere other than in his study at St. Michael’s. Mallie’s heart raced with ideas. She tried to imagine what sort of house he lived in, and in the same breath, she tried to calculate how long he might stay with her. Maybe he would spend the night. No, no, that was a ridiculous thought. That was too much to hope for, but her whole body felt alive with the possibility. She sat down in the corner of the sofa. To her disappointment, he sat on a chair across from the sofa, rather than next to her.
“Have you made plans for the funeral yet?” Tom sipped his water as he spoke.
“It’s day after tomorrow at Holy Trinity,” she said. “Eleven o’clock. Anne and I met with Father Menefee this afternoon.” It occurred to Mallie to ask Tom to be a part of the service along with the Reverend Carl Menefee, but she knew that was not the right thing to do.
“Is there anything I can do to help?” he asked. The tone of his voice was earnest, caring, his expression one of deep concern for her.
Suddenly Mallie felt overcome with desire for Tom. Everything flew out of her mind—her father, his death, the funeral, her children—everything. She reached her arms out to him. “Oh Tom, I have so needed to be with you.”
He rose and went over to her on the sofa. In a second his mouth melded with hers, his tongue, his breath became intertwined with hers. She thought she would los
e consciousness, dissolve into him. He put his face next to hers, skin on skin, and wrapped his arms tightly around her. “I love you,” she said, her eyes closed. “I love you too, Mallie,” he said quietly. He tried to pull away as he said the words. She held her face next to his. In a desperate voice she said, “Please, please Tom. I need you.” In an abrupt, definitive move, he released her, shaking his head and attempting to stand. “I can’t, Mallie,” he said, his voice a pleading declaration. “You must understand. I can’t.”
As if the moment that she had rehearsed a million times in her mind had arrived, Mallie sat up and jerked off her blouse. She wore no bra. Her pink nipples were high and rigid. “I want you, Tom,” she said.
Tom’s head fell forward, the flush in his face drained to white. “Oh no, Mallie. Oh God, no—I’m so sorry. You must understand.” He kept shaking his head.
“I don’t understand,” she said, feeling sick with confusion.
He stood up in front of her. “I have to go, Mallie.” He bowed his head and closed his eyes. “Know that I love you, Mallie—just know that. But I have to go.” He turned and fled from the living room.
Within seconds Mallie heard the side door slam shut and the sound of Tom’s Chevy engine start up. She could not move. In her mind’s eye she trailed the car down her driveway and away from her house—away from her. She crumpled into a ball on the sofa, holding her scrunched-up blouse to her chest, feeling utter despair. Frustration. Confusion. Fear. The timing had been wrong. She feared that she had ruined everything with Tom. She fought the recurrent accusation against herself that she had consciously planned to take off her blouse—although she knew she had not worn a bra on purpose, hoping that he might touch her breasts and the surprise might excite him. She had never done anything so brazen in her whole life. She tried to deny that she had made an overt plan to seduce him. But in her heart, she knew that was exactly what she had done—and the worst part of it all was that she had failed. She had once again been rejected.
Chapter Thirty-five
Dinner at Joan Malcolm’s was always a sit-down formal affair. Even with the funeral of her husband pending, the evening meal was served as usual. Amelia, her mother’s daily housekeeper, had stayed on to help out with the cooking and serving. Mallie’s Aunt Peggy, her mother’s sister from Chicago, and her husband Pete were there, along with several cousins and two of her mother’s childhood friends who had flown in from other places.
Mallie had outwardly recovered from her reckless debacle with Tom. She kept herself busy going back and forth to the kitchen, finding it difficult to make light conversation at the table with the group. Internally she kept returning to what she knew she had done. Over and over she played out the scene in her living room, trying to stop herself at the last second before taking off her blouse. She felt as if she were existing on two levels, one part of herself completely detached from the reality of all that was going on around her in her mother’s house.
“Are you okay, Mallie?” Anne whispered the question next to her sister’s ear while they walked together, carrying empty soup bowls from the first course back to the kitchen.
“Fine,” Mallie said, not looking at Anne, handing two bowls to Amelia. There was no way she could tell Anne about Tom.
“I’m worried about you. You keep so much inside—and you’ve got to be still exhausted from your trip home from England.”
“I’m okay, Anne. Thanks. Not to worry.” Mallie pushed through the swinging door to the dining room.
Aunt Peggy was telling a story about her father. “You remember that old Stutz Bearcat Sam used to drive when he was at Vanderbilt?”
Joan Malcolm smiled. “Do I!” she said. “I thought that was the jazziest car I had ever seen. Sam even wore his raccoon coat when he drove it to Chicago to ask me to marry him.”
“Well, you weren’t aware of this, Joan,” Peggy said, “but he was so scared you might say no, he drove that car over to my house and had two martinis before he came to see you.”
Everyone at the table laughed. Mallie’s parents’ generation always responded to drinking stories with laughter. Maybe it had something to do with living through the Prohibition years. All their stories about bathtub gin, sneaking into speakeasys without their parents knowing. They loved to tell tales of a teenage boy’s first “harmless” encounter with too many beers, a young man making a blunder in front of his girlfriend’s father while discovering stingers as an after-dinner drink, or an older man still trying to be the life of the party with his off-color jokes or by wearing a wastebasket on his head. Anyone doing or saying something ridiculous while drunk was always a joke and always forgiven. Martinis—straight up, or with olives, or tiny white onions—Gibsons, they were called—were a particularly good source for amusing stories. Her father had once called martinis “infuriators”—an appropriate term for his own behavior. According to him, nothing short of murder—or failure to pay a gambling debt—could be held against a good man when he was drunk.
Mallie pushed the ancient, fearful memories of her father’s drinking out of her mind. At that moment they no longer had any hold over her. He would have loved the dinner table conversation about drinking and about him. Maybe he—or his spirit—was listening.
Mallie had never been certain of what happened to a person after death. Somehow the spirit lived on, she was sure of that. But “the resurrection of the body” seemed impossible to her. It was one thing for Jesus Christ—whether or not he was really the only true son of God, he was surely the most godly person who ever lived. But she couldn’t imagine any place—even heaven—full of all the resurrected bodies of regular people who had died. She repeated the words in the Nicene Creed whenever she attended an Episcopal service with communion, but the idea of the resurrection of the body was one among several tenets of the church that she had to gloss over. Like myths, she had once read, they were both true and not true at the same time.
When she had questioned Tom about his belief on the subject, he said that the “body” in resurrection meant the essence of being, not the actual physical body. It was more the idea that we would know one another in death the way we would know a loved one in life if we were deaf and blind. We would sense that person’s essence of being. Mallie had liked his explanation. She had never been able to accept the prospect of nothingness after death. A person’s spirit—his essence—leaving his body and living on as a form of energy, as a part of all living things forever and ever, felt more likely. Surely her father’s spirit lived on somehow, somewhere. Maybe he was present at that moment in the dining room.
Tom. She closed her eyes reliving the afternoon’s scene with Tom. She knew that she had lost control and gone too far. Now he was gone. She could not bear to think that he was gone forever. She would call him—or maybe she should wait for him to call her. She looked at her watch. Eight thirty. She had to be home by ten. Larry was bringing the boys home from the airport. At least she would not be at home alone overnight again.
“Would anyone like coffee?” Amelia asked.
The three sisters cleared the table after dessert, while Amelia made coffee to be served in the living room. The group was still telling Sam Malcolm stories, laughing to the point of tears, as only family and close friends can laugh in the height of their grief. Mallie regretted that she was so preoccupied with thoughts of Tom Matthews that she could not even hear the stories. If her father’s spirit were alive and observing her, she hoped that he would understand and forgive her.
Chapter Thirty-six
Breakfast with the boys the next morning brought a sense of normalcy back into Mallie’s world. Her emotional life had been turned upside down by her father’s death and by her impulsive behavior with Tom Matthews. The future seemed even more unpredictable and frightening than before she went to England. But here she was in her own kitchen on Walnut Grove Road, cooking the boys’ favorite food: silver-dollar blueberry pancakes with melted butter and maple syrup, a breakfast treat she had made a thousand t
imes before.
As she watched her sons silently devouring the little round pancakes, she was comforted by their appearance, each one true to form: David’s rumpled red hair, seemingly always in need of a haircut; Troy’s buttoned-down neatness, his alligator shirt and khaki shorts; Sammy, still in his pajamas, always the last one up and the last one dressed. How gratified she had been when she kissed them all goodnight and David told her that their experience in Watch Hill had not been the same without her.
Breaking the silence and looking straight at his mother, Troy raised the question each of the boys was thinking. Why did their grandfather Poppy have to die?
“I don’t know why anyone has to die, Troy,” Mallie said. As she said it, she had an instant vision of the way she had felt when Bernice died. Just like Troy, she’d wanted to know why. Her mother told her at the time that Bernice was in heaven with God. At fourteen, the idea had been helpful to Mallie. That very day, she went to Immaculate Conception Church and lit a candle for Bernice, envisioning her without scars and happy in heaven.
“As much as we will miss him, we shouldn’t worry about Poppy,” Mallie said. “He’s with God in heaven.”
“I don’t believe in heaven,” Sammy said, barely looking up from his pancakes.
Mallie was shocked. All of the boys had gone to Sunday school and studied the Bible from first grade. Something must have happened to Sammy at St. George’s, an Episcopal school where she was told the students went to chapel every day. She sat down at the table. “What do you mean you don’t believe in heaven?” she said.
“I thought about it on the airplane coming home yesterday,” Sammy said. “We were up in the sky and all I could see were some clouds and more sky. No sign of heaven. And besides, in my science class we’ve been studying planets and galaxies. Mr. Waters says the galaxies go on forever. A man walked on the moon. It’s silly. There’s just no heaven up there.”
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