“You haven’t killed anybody?”
“As a matter of fact,” he said levelly, “it’s got something to do with you.”
“Did Papa John tell you that?”
“He’s not the only one hearing,” John said, “that there’s something funny about Mrs. Tolliver.”
“Well,” I said, remembering Papa John and his close-set blue eyes and his leathery wrinkled face, “I don’t have a lover and the children have all been normal, and I don’t have any close family still alive.”
“I’ve been asked about it four or five times in the last few days. Nobody knows what, but they all know it’s something.”
“We’ll just have to wait and see what it is, if it’s anything,” I said. “Maybe you’ve got a bad case of nerves.”
John whistled quietly in and out of his front teeth. “It’s something,” he said, “and they’re leaking it out, while they check back to be sure they’ve got it right.”
“If they’re going to lie about you, why would they check?”
“It’s not going to be a lie this time,” John said grimly. “And I wish to God I knew what it was.”
The cigarette he had just tossed into the ash tray fell to the rug. I picked it up, ground it out. “It would have to be a lie.”
He stopped dead in his tracks, stopped stock still in his pacing. He looked at me as if he had never seen me before, as if I were something under a microscope. We had been married fifteen years and he simply stood there and stared at me, cold blue eyes and strain lines pulling around his mouth. “Are you so sure?” he said.
I didn’t believe it. I just sat staring at him, in a bit I opened my mouth and then closed it again. I couldn’t think of anything to say.
After a minute, he said: “Go on home, I’ve got work to do.”
Mechanically I got up. As I left, he asked quietly: “What have you done?”
The door was open, Miss Lucy heard. Behind their heavy glasses her eyes jumped toward me.
Why did he do that, I thought, why did he do that?
I only said: “Thank you for keeping the baby. I hope she didn’t interrupt your work too seriously.”
Her lips smiled and her eyes didn’t. She’s in love with John, I thought, but there must be a lot of women around the state who are.
“Will you be home for dinner?” I asked him.
“I told you,” he said, “I’m speaking in Longview.”
“So you did. … Wave bye to Daddy.” I pumped the fat arm up and down. At our car I looked back. John was standing in the open door watching us leave just as he had watched us come. And he wasn’t seeing his wife and his youngest child, he was seeing some dark nameless horror.
Marge settled in her seat beside me. I studied myself in the car mirror. I didn’t look different. I always looked this way. I had the sort of face nobody remembered an hour after seeing it. (They remembered John, of course: he was dark and thin and striking. He looks a good bit like a monk, one flower-hatted lady had told me not too long ago.) Though no one had ever bothered telling me, or probably even thought of it, I knew from my pictures that I had been a plain child. And I was still plain. No, I was pleasant-looking. Brown hair, neither light nor dark, just the color of a mouse’s coat. Blue eyes, no black-streaked depths (like John’s), no brilliant china flash (like my grandfather’s), just ordinary eyes, under straight brows. Nice teeth, fine skin tanned lightly by the sun. And my figure, well, breasts that were too small and hips that were too large—a matronly figure: I carried myself that way, and I knew it. And this was why I had got on so well with the women. I was motherly. … I knew what John meant: I was the perfect wife for a candidate. He had chosen and trained me well.
I wondered what the rumors were about. Nothing, I told myself furiously. I had done nothing. Nothing anyone could object to. I had chosen the wrong man, but nobody would know that but me. And I had just found out. …
I drove home, wondering how many hundreds of times I had gone that same highway. I hardly heard the baby drooling and jabbering beside me, I was busy with my own bitter thoughts.
They all ran more or less in this path. John had married a wife for his career. Had there been anybody else? Was it the girl he’d been dating when he first met me? The date he had broken to take me to dinner that first time. And did he remember her, the girl he had given up because I had been able to offer him more? … I had bid for him, all that openly. Those long spring evenings when we sat in my car. Never putting in words, but fighting my unknown competition silently, listing wordlessly the things I would give to him. …
I knew it then, of course I did. But I hadn’t minded. I really hadn’t. It just seemed the way of things. And now I wasn’t so sure. Thoughts will do that sometimes. Once they have gotten close to you, you can never push them off to the old comfortable distances again. It wasn’t new, but it hurt now. It hadn’t ever before.
Are you so sure? What did you do? … John would never have said that, had he not been upset and afraid. But they were said, and that was that. The old structure of innocence—childish, it was—disappeared. He was no longer the husband I loved, he was simply the man I had married. I think now that it was amazing that it had lasted those fifteen long years.
Like my mother, I thought, only hers didn’t last this long. Everything ends sometime, I told myself as I drove up to the house, and the hounds came running over to plant their muddy feet on the fenders.
There were two more days of waiting. The first day John called, as he always did. “Tell him I’m in the shower,” I said. He said he would call back later if he could. He didn’t.
On the morning of the second day, quite early, before the children had gone to school, I noticed a car come up the front drive and stop. The butler had not yet got to work, so I answered the door myself. It was a young man, and I had never seen him before. I didn’t even recognize the different family strains in his face as I can so often do. He was just a neat young man in a grey suit. The black Chevrolet behind him wasn’t familiar either.
“I was to deliver this,” he said, and handed me a plain brown envelope, unmarked and very clean.
The children were laughing over breakfast in the dining room. I closed the door on their voices, and stood and watched the black Chevrolet drive down the bill. I sat down in one of the rockers and studied the slopes tending off toward the river, the river the first William Howland had named for his mother. And finally, I looked in the envelope: two pieces of paper, clipped together. One was newsprint. I looked at it first. It was the front page of the capital’s evening paper, dated for the coming afternoon. There was a picture of a man getting off a plane, blurred as newspaper pictures always are. The headline was larger than usual: Negro returns to visit his legal white family. And then a subhead: Past of prominent citizen comes to light. Gubernatorial candidate involved.
I didn’t read the fine print. Instead I looked at the second piece of paper. It was a photostat of a certificate of marriage. Between William Howland and Margaret Carmichael. The place was Cleveland. The date was April 1928, two months before Robert’s birth.
I sat on the bright sunny porch and heard John’s words over and over again: “Are you sure? What have you done?”
I phoned John’s office. Miss Lucy sounded like she had been crying. “Will you tell my husband that I have seen the papers.” Luckily I had no more to say, because she hung up on me.
I put the clipping and the photostat back in their crisp clean brown envelope and slipped them under the phone, thinking what I had always known: that my grandfather had been a good man. That he had found a woman to fill the last decades of his life and that he had married her. A good man. And when I thought of what would happen now, I felt sick.
I kept the children from school. I sent them down to the barns to amuse themselves with Oliver. I could see them riding their ponies in the near pasture lots, clumsy figures on fat clumsy ponies. The phone rang. “I’m not home,” I told the butler. “Unless it’s Mr. Tolliver.
”
Not that I expected him to call. I wasn’t even sure that he’d come back. He might, when the hurt and shock had lessened. But not soon.
All around the house things went on as if it were just another day. The gardeners came and mowed the lawn and set out new daffodil bulbs in the azalea beds. They brought up two large drums of gasoline from the pump by the barns—they parked tractor and flat-bed trailer out of sight behind the bathhouse. Tomorrow they would use that gas for their equipment. They would mow the large front field, they would grade the road too. Bringing the gas drums to the work area had been John’s idea—save time and trouble, he said. He’d had a lot of good ideas. The greenhouse, for one, that he had built outside the library door. He grew lovely exotic plants, tending and propagating them himself whenever he was home. The glaziers were repairing some cracked panes there now—any cold leak would ruin the plants—their hammers were tapping gently. In the house itself there were the comfortable familiar sounds of vacuum cleaner and floor polisher, the smell of furniture polish and floor wax. I sat in a chair in the living room, the big one by the fireplace, not doing anything, not even thinking. Just waiting. I was cold. I went to the hall closet and took the first coat I saw. It was my fur, and I huddled inside it, one hand holding the mink tight at my throat. I sat quite alone in an empty room, wrapped in the skins of dead animals.
Oliver came up from the barns and peered in the living-room window, tapping the sill. “I reckon I would close the gate.”
“Yes,” I said. I watched him walk down the graveled road to swing shut the heavy wood gate, locking it. He came back and handed me the key. “Oliver,” I asked, “did you know?”
He shook his head.
“Keep the children close enough to the house.”
I put the key on the hall table. The phone rang—almost under my hand—and I picked it up without thinking. It was my cousin Clara in Atlanta. “What is going on, Abigail?” she demanded breathlessly. “What is going on? What’s all this we’ve been hearing?”
“Where’s Sam?” I asked her. “I thought you all always talked on the phone like Tweedledum and Tweedledee.”
“He hasn’t heard. He’s working on next week’s sermon and I haven’t dared tell him.”
I laughed in her face and hung up. I kept on chuckling, because it really was funny, when you thought about it. She was in for such a bad time. She was jibbering right now. … She hadn’t liked John’s white supremacy speech. But how would she like having a jet-black Negro for an aunt? …
I sat on the fragile little rosewood chair and reached under the table to the telephone box at the baseboard. I pushed down the handle and turned off the bell. I’d had enough.
More cars than usual seemed to be driving by on the state highway. They’d come to see. Of course. When the paper came out at noon, there would be even more.
I wasn’t angry or hurt. I wasn’t anything except numb. I didn’t seem to be in my own body any longer. I was very far off, watching, curious, but not involved.
I had lunch with the children. We talked about horses and about the new Shetland their father had promised them. I said I would order it by phone that very afternoon. Then they went back outside.
I drifted through the afternoon and the evening in the same way, detached and quiet. After dinner, the servants went away, leaving only the children, their nurse, and me. When the doorbell rang, I opened it, and stood blinking in the sputtering flash of bulbs.
I would have recognized him anywhere. He was a red-haired version of William Howland. “You must be Robert,” I said. He stood and let me look. “I’ve been expecting you.” When I said it, it seemed true. And I suppose I had, all day in the house, all the long day’s waiting. “Come inside.”
There were two photographers, standing to either side. Their bulbs had blinded me. “You too,” I said. “It will be chilly waiting on the porch.”
We went into the living room, the four of us. “It’s changed,” Robert said.
“We remodeled. Would you like some coffee?” I asked the photographers.
“No,” they said.
“There is plenty,” I said. “I really expected more people. … but then there were more out there, weren’t there? I think I saw someone dodge back.”
“I suppose they’ve gone back to the car,” Robert said.
“The gate was locked. Did you drive through it?”
“We walked,” Robert said.
“Would you like a tour of the house? It’s so different, I don’t think you’ll recognize much.”
“I didn’t come for that,” Robert said.
I looked at this child that my grandfather and Margaret had produced. You could see both of them there. The heavy-boned figure was my grandfather, all Howlands had those heavy stooped shoulders, and that same shaped head. And the blue eyes were my grandfather’s too. Robert looked like my grandfather, feature by feature, but there was a mist of Margaret spread over everything. There was nothing of hers you could put your finger on and say: that came from Margaret. She was everywhere, in his face, in his movements, intangible but all-present, as much as her blood running in his veins.
He told the photographers bluntly: “I’ll meet you at the car.” They went quickly. Robert nodded after them. “They’re glad to go. Seems they were scared.”
“Not scared, Robert,” I told him. “Just disgusted. You’re a Negro to them.”
His skin, which already had a waxy cast to it, went dead white. I think at that minute he wanted to kill me.
I didn’t care. All through the long empty day I had been preparing for this, and now that it was here, I wasn’t tired, I wasn’t afraid. I felt elated and strong—it was something in Robert’s face. It was something that told me. …
“Killing me wouldn’t help,” I said. “And your mother and your father are already dead.”
“Did she really kill herself?”
“That’s what the people say who found her.”
It bothered him, the way it bothered Crissy and the way it bothered Nina.
“Do you know why? Was she sick?”
“I expect she got tired of living alone.”
“She wasn’t alone. You said she was living with a cousin.”
“But alone. …” I got up and went to the bar. “A drink? Bourbon or Scotch?”
“No,” he said.
“For old times’ sake.” I fixed two bourbon-and-sodas. “In memory of the time your mother gave you pneumonia taking you out in the sleet with chicken pox.
“She didn’t.”
“Of course she did.” I waved the two glasses around, and for some reason I slipped into my best ladies’ tea party accent. “She was going to educate you or kill you.”
“I know that,” he said quietly, and he took the drink I offered.
His tone stopped me. “Robert,” I said seriously, “why did you come back?”
My grandfather’s face looked up at me, misery-streaked and lined with pain. “I suppose it was a clipping from an Atlanta paper.”
“Oh,” I said. “Oh God, that one.”
“I suppose I couldn’t stomach that.”
“John said that, sure,” I told him, as patiently as if it would make a difference, “but did you see what his opponent said? Did you?”
“No.”
“You’ve been out of the South too long. … The papers don’t usually pick up what is said at those small rallies.”
He just sat staring at his drink.
“You look incredibly like your father,” I said.
“I never doubted my mother’s word.”
“You’ve even got the marriage certificate to prove it.”
“You’ve seen it?”
“Couldn’t you guess? That was the first thing they sent out to me.”
“I suppose.”
“You married, Robert?”
He nodded.
“Black or white?”
Again the flash of anger under his skin. “Don’t provoke me.
”
“How would I know? Nina married a Negro.”
He appeared not to have heard. I went on, innocently, beginning to see already what it was I should do.
“I’m curious,” I told him. “I can’t help that. After all, we did grow up together, in a way.”
A short nod of agreement. He was staring at a small heavy table. “That was in the upstairs hall.”
“I remember. It’s really quite a fine Seignouret piece, so I had it refinished.”
“There were two up there.”
“The other one was too far gone. … What’s your wife like?”
“She’s fine.”
“What does she look like?”
“Something like you. The same color hair, and light blue eyes. Her name was Mallory and her father is a radiologist in Oakland. She’s about your age too.”
“I’m a million years old,” I said. “Drink your bourbon. It will help.”
“Yes.”
“John will lose,” I said abruptly, “because of you. For the first time in fifty years the results of the Democratic primary will be upset in the election. There’s no doubt in the world that the Republican will win by a landslide.”
“I suppose.”
“You said that before. … Do you know the Republican candidate?”
“I don’t even know his name.”
“That’s a pity,” I said. “You should.”
Again he didn’t seem to hear.
“Do you know about the schools in Tickfaw County closing last year.”
“I don’t even know what you’re talking about.”
“But you should. … They closed the schools rather than integrate under court order.”
“Oh.”
“They opened private schools for the whites. I don’t think there are any schools for the Negroes.”
He shrugged. “I heard of something like that in Virginia.”
“This is right here. And the moving spirit of that particular bit was Mr. Stuart Albertson.”
“Who the hell is that?”
“The man you just made governor.”
I allowed myself a chuckle. Things really were funny if you looked at them right. “Child of my heart,” I told him, “you have really done it this time. You got rid of John and got something ten times worse. …”
The Keepers of the House Page 25