That was the way my mother’s life ended, with a grave in New Mexico and a stained-glass window in the Methodist church in Madison City.
That fall Margaret’s second child, Nina, went off to school. Money was a lot easier now and so she went to an expensive girls’ school in Vermont (she eventually won the school’s prize for figure skating, though she’d never had a pair of skates on before she went North). She wrote, more often than Robert, and she sent pictures. But she never saw her mother again. And Margaret didn’t write. My grandfather answered her letters and Robert’s, and though he must have given them news of their mother, it was as if she were dead or a million miles away. He went to see both Robert and Nina now, and he went twice a year. Margaret never went at all.
She stayed with the last one, the baby, Crissy.
It seemed to me that Margaret was a lot more affectionate with her. I noticed that whenever she passed, she’d scoop her up and give her a hug—something I don’t ever remember her doing with either Robert or Nina. And in a way Crissy was the nicest of the lot. Her red hair was sort of curly and it was always sticking out in wisps around her head; her eyes were more green than blue, and she had a string of freckles across her nose and her chin. She was even-tempered and happy and almost never sick. She was also the brightest, a lot brighter than Robert, though everybody encouraged him more. She’d learned to read from the old magazines my grandfather gave her, and long before she was ready to go to school she was reading from my old story books. She’d curl herself up in the crotch of a tree with a book and she’d be settled for the whole morning. I liked her. She was just the sort of child you couldn’t help liking.
My grandfather liked her too, and evenings he would play with her by the hour. He’d never done that with the other children. Maybe he’d never had chance before. With my mother dead, he seemed to find more time for the last baby in the house.
Still—when I was sixteen and in high school—and Crissy was eleven, she went away, like the others. And like them, she never came back. Not even on vacation.
This time, because I was older, I asked about it. One day when my grandfather was repairing the pickets of the fence that enclosed the dooryard, I asked him straight out: “Don’t you miss Crissy some?”
He had a couple of nails in his mouth and he took them out slowly. “You could say I do.”
He had gained back the weight he lost during my mother’s illness, and he was a big heavy man again. His face was smooth and pink and unlined; his eyes were the same bright light blue. I was always surprised at how bright their color was—exactly like a winter sky in the soon of a morning.
“Why didn’t you let her go to school here,” I asked, “if you miss her?”
He yanked up a rotten picket and tossed it aside. “You know as well as I do, lady.”
“No,” I persisted, “I want to know why.”
He wasn’t bothering to look at me. “I reckon you want me to put it in words for you. … Seems I can remember when I was little I hated to put a thing in words. … Scared of the words somehow.”
He took the new picket and fitted it against the railing with the others. “You know what it’s like for a nigger here. And those kids, they fall right in the middle, they ain’t white and they ain’t black. …” He put a nail in place, gave it a few whacks with his hammer. “And what they go to do around here? The war don’t last forever. The plants’ll close and the shipyards. We’ll all go back to sleep again.”
Another nail and the picket was in place. He moved down the fence, shaking each as he went, looking for the rotted-out ones.
“There’s hardly a living for the people we got here now,” he said. “And they’re bright kids, they got a way to go.” He found one, knocked it free with the side of his hammer, and twisted it clear of the fence. “Since I got no place here, I’m sending ’em where they got room.”
“Oh,” I said.
“Seems I got the money to do it.” He stopped working and looked straight at me. “Happens you’re all that interested … Robert goes to Carnegie Tech this September.”
“That’s Pittsburgh,” I said, just to show I knew something.
“That what you wanted me to say for you, lady?”
“Well,” I said, “I can’t help wondering.”
“No,” he said, “I reckon you can’t.”
“What does Margaret think with all her kids gone?”
He was looking at me levelly, the bright blue eyes light and clear. “Our kids,” he said quietly.
It was the first time he had ever said that. It was as if my mother’s death had made things more open to him.
“Matter of fact,” he said, “it was Margaret’s idea.”
At the time I didn’t understand. I just thought it was odd. I thought all mothers always wanted to keep their children around them until the children themselves wandered off. I didn’t see what Margaret was doing.
I was sixteen and I was in love. It was a boy in my class. His name was Stanley Carter and he had great luminous brown eyes—mostly because he was very nearsighted. His father was the new druggist and they came from Memphis. I didn’t really get to see too much of him, because he lived in town, while I lived out on my grandfather’s place. So I spent most of the long afternoons and evenings—when I ought to have been studying—writing long letters to him, which I tore up afterwards. I wrote long poems too, about stars for eyes and clover breath and so forth. I pulled the curtains in my room and turned on one very small light and stretched out on the bed and wrote on a clipboard I held up—as if I were writing on the ceiling. Since I couldn’t write for long that way—my arms would start to ache and I’d have to let down the board—I spent most of the time staring at the cracked ceiling and the stained strips of wallpaper.
“Let her be,” my grandfather told Margaret, “it’s love and she’s pining.”
I tried to glare at him, but it’s hard when the other person is grinning right straight at you. “Nobody in this house,” I told him, “understands a single thing. Not a single thing.” And I flounced upstairs and started to write an epic poem about unrequited love and star-crossed lovers and all that. Pretty soon I got tired of fitting words into meter, so I read Romeo and Juliet straight through again, crying at the saddest passages.
Sometimes I’d climb to the top of the scuppernong trellis by the back door. I’d lie there for hours, staring into the sky and eating the soft yellow grapes. I’d try to see straight on up and through the sky, I’d try to see what was beyond the blue shell. Sometimes I’d think I could, that I was just about to. And then sometimes I knew I couldn’t and the sky was a hard china teacup clamped down on the world.
I was busy with things like that and I wasn’t paying attention to anything else. So it was only by accident I saw something one day.
That was one of the times I had not come down to supper. Margaret knocked on my door and I yelled that I was busy writing poetry and couldn’t possibly stop. (My grandfather never argued.) By nine o’clock, long after supper, I got hungry. I padded downstairs in my socks, the boards smooth and cool and silent to my feet. I remember hearing the faint crackle of wood in the living-room fireplace—it was late fall and the nights were sharp and damp. I came down the stairs carefully, silently. (I was still young enough to get a thrill out of moving without a sound, a hang-over from my days of playing Indian.) The hall was dark; the lamp that usually burned beside the mercury-spotted pier glass had been turned off. The only lights were in the living room, where Margaret and my grandfather were. They couldn’t see me in the dark hall and they hadn’t heard me. He was reading one of his papers, and she was sewing. I recognized the material—my dress. The whole room looked like a set, or a picture. Margaret stopped sewing, her hands fell into her lap. Her head lifted and she stared across the room into the fire. He must have felt her move because he folded his paper and laid it aside. She did not turn. Her masculine head on its thin neck held perfectly still. The wood of his chair creaked as he got up, the
boards of the floor sighed under his weight as he walked over to her and bent down. Then because he was still too tall, because she was sitting in the low rocker with the swan-head legs, he knelt down and put his arms around her. She turned her head then, dropping it to his shoulder, pressing it into his neck.
I backed away and ran upstairs, still keeping perfectly silent. I was afraid. No, it was more than that. I was just plain scared.
That was the only gesture I ever saw pass between them.
I finished high school, and my Aunt Annie took me and her grandchildren on a driving tour of the West. The whole thing was decided quickly. “You should go,” my grandfather said firmly. “Good for you.” And the very next day, Aunt Annie and four grandchildren drove over from Atlanta in a big new black Cadillac and picked me up. I was absolutely delighted. Her oldest grandson, the one who would help with the driving, was extremely handsome. Six weeks touring around the country with him sounded pretty terrific.
Later, much later, I found out why they had been in such a hurry to spirit me away. That was the summer my father came to see me. My grandfather found out his plans somehow, and off I went to the Grand Canyon and the Painted Desert. I wonder what they had to say to each other, when my father came to Madison City and found that I had been spirited away.
In a way I’m sorry I didn’t meet him, at least to see what he looked like—I had long since forgotten. (My mother angrily had not kept any pictures.) But on the other hand I wouldn’t have known quite what to say to him; you can’t very well talk about blood. Or maybe you can. … But I didn’t. I was away traveling.
All I remember of the tour is a jumble of mountains and snow peaks, ice-cold lakes and endless deserts, strange flowers and an ocean that didn’t look real. On the way home, I stopped in Atlanta. I was to buy things for my first year at college.
“Child,” Aunt Annie said, “your clothes are appalling. How could Willie let you go around looking like that?”
“I bought my own clothes, with Margaret.”
Her face went blank. “This time I think I’ll take Margaret’s place with you.”
We took Ellen, her oldest granddaughter, along—she’d been to the state university for three years and had just quit to get married. We were doing a trousseau for her, and a college wardrobe for me—it was all very wholesale and grand, like the West we had seen a few weeks before, and just as confused. My Aunt Annie was an energetic woman and she enjoyed every minute. Once when I hesitated over a sleek black suit, she bristled with annoyance. “What’s the matter now?” she said. “What are you waiting for?”
“It’s kind of expensive,” I told her.
“Child, child …” she hissed her exasperation, the way so many fat women do, “he can afford it. … But it would be just like Willie not to tell you anything. … If he complains about the bills, just you ask him about his lumber business and he’ll hush up.”
That night after dinner, she decided that I must have a car. “Living way out there, you have to have an easy way to get back and forth.”
“I can’t drive,” I told her.
“Well, learn,” she said emphatically. “Really now!” And I was quiet, because nothing like this had happened, ever before. “I’m going to call Will about it right now.” She went directly into the hall to telephone.
My Uncle Howland said quietly from his chair: “Annie is a driving woman.”
“I just never thought about it like that.”
He lifted his brandy glass. “Taste—no? You can’t hide down on that farm all your life, honey, and Willie can’t keep you there.”
“I live there.”
He waved the glass at me. The light danced on the bubble caught in the stem. “You got to be what you are, the granddaughter of one of the richest men in that state.”
I looked shocked. And he chuckled. “War money, maybe, but money all the same.”
Annie came back beaming. “Willie is such a tight stubborn man you just have to talk him down.”
Later that evening, when she too was a little flushed with brandy, she told her husband: “I asked Willie if he were fixing to come to Ellen’s wedding.”
“He said no, I reckon.”
“Too busy. … You know, Howie, I just worry about him. He doesn’t ever want to come off that place. He doesn’t want to leave that Margaret.”
“Shush,” my uncle said.
So I went to college. I had a new blue-and-white Ford convertible and a mink stole and a terrible quaking fear that woke me up in the middle of the night I would often lie in my bed in the cheerful chintzy sorority house and shiver with longing to get in that new car and drive home. I never liked college. I just got to dislike it less the longer I was there.
When I came home for my first vacation—at Christmas that year—my grandfather said: “You’re not beholden here, if there’s any place you’d sooner go.”
“Stay away for good like Margaret’s children?”
His eyes didn’t even flicker. “No,” he said, “you can come back. … You can but you might not want to, someday.”
I hugged him then, because I was sorry I’d reminded him about his other children, and because he’d begun to look old in the hard morning light I’d been up all night driving and I felt fine.
“I’d like to live here,” I told him, “all the rest of my life.”
He was pleased and I could see it but since he wasn’t demonstrative he only rubbed his chin and said: “Depend where your man’ll live.”
“I haven’t got a beau.”
“You will,” he said. “You will.”
It was crispy cool and I was wearing the new mink. I rubbed my fingers up and down the long fur. “Maybe we could live here.”
“Maybe,” he said, “if you found the right kind of fellow.”
“Won’t marry any other kind.”
“You got to be careful,” he said heavily, “your mama married for love and it ran out on her and she was left with nothing to hold her heart together.”
“Not me,” I said, “not me.”
“Well,” he said, “you need a cup of coffee. Come inside and we’ll see what Margaret’s got.”
I spent four blurred vague years at college. Green lawns, white-columned buildings, and flowerbeds. Fingers that ached with note-taking, head that ached with cigarette smoke, legs that ached with long hours in spike heels. The unfamiliar singing of alcohol in my ears, and lips that went suddenly numb. And parties.
There was a place on a TVA lake, a pretty spot with woods close all around except for the single road that led to the landing. It was called Harris Pier and it had rowboats moored in lines on each side. At the very end was a large float with a diving board. It was where you went on Saturday nights after the restaurants and cafés and clubs had all closed. It was always jammed—not that anybody particularly wanted a big group, but there was only one float and everybody crowded on it. Sometimes there’d be a guitar and we’d sing. Once Ted Anderson brought a harmonica. He didn’t play too well, not nearly like I’ve heard Negroes play. But it was good enough. And the soft sad reedy sounds drifting out over the still water and softening their edges on the pines—well, you remember things like that.
And you remember how warm bourbon tasted, in a paper cup with water dipped out of the lake at your feet. How the nights were so unbearably, hauntingly beautiful that you wanted to cry How every patch of light and shadow from the moon seemed deep and lovely. Calm or storm, it didn’t matter. It was exquisite and mysterious, just because it was night.
I wonder now how I lost it, the mysteriousness, the wonder. It faded steadily until one day it was entirely gone, and night became just dark, and the moon was only something that waxed and waned and heralded a changing in the weather. And rain just washed out graveled roads. The glitter was gone.
And the worst part was that you didn’t know exactly at what point it disappeared. There was nothing you could point to and say: now, there. One day you saw that it was missing and had been
missing for a long time. It wasn’t even anything to grieve over, it had been such a long time passing.
That glitter and hush-breath quality just slipped away. The way most things do, I’ve found out. The way my mother’s life did, gently, bit by bit, until it was gone and I didn’t even have the satisfaction of mourning. And my love too. There isn’t even a scene—not for me, nothing so definite—just the seepage, the worms of time. Like those wedding dresses my cousins and I found so long ago in the old storage trunks. They looked all right. But when you picked them up, they fell of their own weight, without even a breath touching them, and even the bits of pieces you held in your fingers crumpled.
That’s the way it happened with me, during the years. Things that I thought surrounded me have pulled back. Sometimes I wonder if I am not like an island the tide has left, leaving only some sea wrack on the beaches, useless things.
I look at my children now and I think: how long before they slip away, before I am disappointed in them. …
But it doesn’t matter. Not really. Not to me. Not any more. I have come to expect no more than this. At least I am not disappointed. …
But in those days at college, everything glittered and gleamed and my nerves quivered at the slightest breeze, and I still trembled with delight when I had a chance to wear my date’s coat. After my first real dance, I didn’t sleep at all. I lay in my bed and shivered and remembered until I saw dawn break and sun pour in the window.
It was all part of it, it all went together: the slight bobbing movement of the float, the sad sobbing strains of the harmonica, the dark moon-crusted trees. Ted Anderson only brought that harmonica once. Maybe that was why it sounded so good.
I nearly died, too, one of those lovely nights.
The Keepers of the House Page 17