Fannie Flagg

by Baby Girl! Welcome to the World

  She peered at the gaunt figure before her and was puzzled. “Who are you? Do I know you?”

  Now that he was actually face-to-face with the woman, Theo began to shake all over and struggled to get the words out. “Why … why are you doing this … why did you ruin my life?”

  Suddenly Mrs. Chambless sensed who he was and sat back in her chair with a smug, mocking smile on her face. “Well, well, well. Look who we have here. If it’s not the great Theodore Le Guarde himself.”

  Then her expression changed and her eyes narrowed as she lunged forward and hissed at him with a voice filled with contempt. “Listen … if your life got ruined it was you that ruined it, not me. You and that high-and-mighty family of yours. You think you’re too good for me? Well, Eleanor Roosevelt doesn’t think she is too good for me … now, you get out of here!”

  She dismissed him with a wave of her hand and turned back to her typing. As an afterthought, she added, “And tell that sister of yours she’s next.”

  At that moment something deep inside Theo broke loose and he heard a roaring in his ears so loud that he could not hear Ida Baily Chambless’s screams as he grabbed her by the throat and squeezed. Something was erupting; a terrible, red-hot, boiling rage came rumbling out. He was choking and shaking the very life out of the woman and he could not stop it.

  The next thing he remembered he was outside in the cold, wringing wet with sweat. He walked for a mile, not knowing where he was going until he was at the Lincoln Memorial. He looked up at the statue of the man and suddenly heard a woman’s screams in his ears and saw the grotesque face of Mrs. Ida Chambless, her tongue hanging out, her huge eyes bulging, and he retched and threw up in the grass until nothing was left but yellow bile. He looked down at his hands, and he began to sob.

  He had to make his way to his father’s house. He had to find his sister; she would hide him. He would be safe with her.

  When he reached the house every door and window was locked. The sun was coming up. Desperate, he went to the back and crashed through a basement window and crawled in. He made his way in the dark up to his father’s den. Almost everything was packed in boxes. He went to his father’s desk and broke open the lock. He could feel papers and letters still there. He lit a match and found his own letter to his father, and one more envelope. It was addressed to his father, too. Although the name on the return address was strange, he recognized his sister’s handwriting. The letter was postmarked Elmwood Springs, Missouri.

  Living a Lie

  San Francisco, California

  1942

  Dena’s mother, Marguerite Le Guarde, had not intended to lie about who she was. It had just happened. She had taken a trip to New York to help a friend shop for her trousseau. When she spoke to the owner of the shop in German, Lili Carlotta Steiner recognized at once that the young girl had been raised in Vienna, as she had. Delighted with the pretty young woman who obviously knew about fine clothes, Steiner offered her a job on the spot. Excited, Marguerite wrote her father and asked him if she might stay for the summer. Her father wrote back and said yes. Her mother had just died and he thought the change might be helpful.

  The first lie was when she went for her work permit. She gave the made-up name of Marion Chapman, the first name of one friend and the last name of another. Why take the chance of someone recognizing the name? By now her father was well known in medical circles and his name had appeared in the paper numerous times connected with various Negro organizations. Why go through the humiliation of trying to convince people that she was the daughter of a famous Negro doctor? No one ever believed her, and besides, the job was only for a few months.

  But as the weeks went by, she found she liked working for Lili. She liked being Marion Chapman and not having to deal with anything other than being an ordinary working girl. Lili had found her a small apartment in the Yorkville section in a predominately German neighborhood. She ate German food, heard familiar music, and, as she wrote to her father, “it was somewhat like being back home in Vienna.”

  She had been completely unaware of Lili’s political activities. To her she was just a nice woman who had given her a job. All she knew or cared about that summer was that as much as she missed her father, she was happier in New York. She liked being around her own people again. But it was only to last a short time. When she read in the newspaper about Theo losing the award, she was devastated for him. She knew he would be crushed. Music was his life. She loved her brother, but he had never been a strong person. He had always been delicate and high-strung and she was frightened of what he might do to himself. She tried to call, but could not reach him so she immediately took a train to San Francisco. She had to find him, to be with him, but by the time she arrived he had disappeared again. She stayed in San Francisco and, using her previous place of employment as a reference, took a job at a department store, hoping Theo might come back. But he didn’t. She finally gave up waiting and was about to go home to her father in Washington. Then she met Gene Nordstrom. She had not meant to fall in love, but from the first time they went out and he ordered that silly pink champagne, there was nothing she could do about it. From the beginning she had every intention of telling Gene about her father and her brother. She wanted to, but after what had happened to Theo when people had found out about him, she was afraid to tell him, and the more deeply in love she fell, the more and more frightened she became of losing him. She did not know how he might feel about her having Negro blood, even if it was only a drop. He was so open, he might not care, but she had learned in matters of race, you could never be sure. Since she had been passing, she had heard people who had seemed perfectly nice say the most horrible things. So she continued to put it off.

  She was apprehensive every time they passed a black person on the street or saw a group of black soldiers, concerned that Gene might say something derogatory. But he never did.

  Then he proposed. She knew she had to tell him before they married. She had to give him a chance to back out if he wanted, but there was a war going on and everything was happening so fast. The whole city was in a frenzy, boys were shipping out every day now. That year it seemed that everybody in San Francisco was in a mad rush to get married, desperate to have a few days together before the men went off to war, maybe never to return. After they got word that Gene’s unit was shipping out immediately, there had been no time to tell him, or so she told herself.

  When they arrived at the courthouse the next morning, couples were already lined up around the block, anxious and looking at their watches. She told the clerk she did not have a birth certificate, that it had been lost in a fire. The clerk was annoyed but he issued them a license anyway and passed them through. She should not have lied, but that day she was hopelessly in love, and Gene was leaving. She and hundreds of others were not thinking too clearly about tomorrow; they just wanted to get married today.

  It was not until Gene had been gone for a week that she realized the seriousness of what she had done. Then she became filled with remorse. What had she been thinking of? Why had she done it? Had she been in such a daze that she had begun to actually believe that she was Marion Chapman, that there was no such person as Marguerite Le Guarde? Had she been foolish enough to think he would never find out?

  Gene had to know, but this was not something she could put in a letter. She thought about just disappearing, but she couldn’t do that. She loved him too much for that. She had to tell him herself. She made a vow that she would tell him the minute he came home. But he never came back.

  Gene had been dead only a month when she discovered she was pregnant. After many nights of crying and wondering what to do, she finally decided. She could not go back to Washington now. She did not want this child facing what she and Theo had, never knowing in which world or to what race they belonged. She wanted her baby to be raised free of those problems, free of her. It was the least she could do for her and Gene’s child. After the baby was born, she would take the child home to Gene’s parents in El
mwood Springs. When she had written and told the Nordstroms, they could not wait for her to come.

  So it was settled. She would take the baby and after a few days she would just leave, disappear, and it would be as if Marion Chapman had never existed at all.

  Her plan was to go back to Washington to her father and resume her life as it had been. He was old and ill and he needed her. She took her daughter to Elmwood Springs, but the one thing she had not planned, had not realized, was just how much she would love the little blond baby girl with Gene’s eyes.

  As hard as she tried, she could not leave. Each day that passed she knew she should, but she didn’t. Finally, she wrote her father and told him what she had done and why she could not come home. It broke her heart to do it. But her baby needed her. The Nordstroms had taken her in with open arms and without any questions about her past. This was Gene’s wife, and Gene’s baby; that’s all that mattered to them. She found small-town life out in the middle of the country to be as wonderful as Gene had described. She had a job at Morgan Brothers department store and was enjoying seeing her child grow up such a happy little girl. Dena had just had her fourth birthday party when suddenly her mother’s world fell apart again.

  Five days after Dena’s party, Theo was in Elmwood Springs and came to the house looking for her. At first she was upset at him for just showing up like that without any warning; then, Theo showed her the column Ida Baily Chambless had written about her, wanting to know her whereabouts. He then broke down and confessed that he had murdered her, and that the police might be after him. When she heard that, Marion was terrified that he might lead the police right to her door. He begged her to hide him, to let him stay, but she refused and sent him away. As much as she loved her brother, her first thought was of Dena. She could not let the Nordstroms be dragged into a murder investigation, find out who she really was, that she had been lying to them all along. She had implored Theo to please stay away from her, but in the state he was in she could not be sure he would not come back.

  The next day, she took Dena and left Elmwood Springs. She had to get them as far away from Theo as possible. But where to run? She could not leave the country. Her Austrian passport was issued under her real name, Marguerite Le Guarde, and she could not get a new one as Marion Chapman. No such person existed. She had no records she could use as identification and she didn’t want Dena connected to the Le Guarde name. She was trapped by her own lies. So she and Dena began moving from place to place, so Theo would not find them, but it wasn’t easy. Time and time again, he found her. Each time he became more desperate, needed greater sums of money. And each time she told him it was the last time she would give him money, but it wasn’t. And as frightened as she was, it broke her heart to send him away. She was all he had now that their father had died. Not a day went by that she did not think of him and she was consumed with guilt. But it was too late to undo the past. She had to think about Dena now. She had done everything she knew how to protect her, including turning her back on her brother and father. She had gone back to using the name Chapman instead of Nordstrom at work, so if there was to be trouble, she and Dena would have different names. She destroyed all pictures of Gene and herself and burned their marriage license.

  For the next few years she lived in secret fear that one day her brother would be arrested. She had played out that horrible scenario a thousand times in her mind. Theo would be caught, and all the details of the murder and his family would come out. They would hunt her down and expose her, spread her picture all over the newspapers and the scandal would follow her and Dena for the rest of their lives. She could confide in no one, not to her one friend, Christine, not even her own daughter. She lived in a world all alone and it began to take its toll on her.

  Without anyone she could trust or talk to her fears grew worse and worse over the years. Simple, innocent gestures of friendship from coworkers, or anyone attempting to get close to her, frightened her. She did not want anyone to have too much information in case the police might be looking for her brother. She was getting exhausted from continually looking over her own shoulder at things that in reality were not even there.

  Her brother, Theo, fared no better. Over the next decade he had fled from imaginary police all over the world. Everywhere he looked he saw them lurking in the shadows, waiting to grab him. In 1953, with money from his sister, he somehow managed to cross into Canada and sneak onto a steamer headed for South America, and after two more years he worked his way back to Vienna, where he was now living, hiding in a damp basement in a seedy part of the city.

  Although the brother and sister had no way of knowing, the Washington police had closed the investigation of the murder of Mrs. Ida Baily Chambless two months after it had taken place. The police had no particular interest in the case. As far as they were concerned, those people were always killing each other and as long as they didn’t bother any white people, the police couldn’t have cared less. There had been a few reports that a white man had been seen in and around the neighborhood that night, but the police had immediately dismissed it as rumor. No white man in his right mind would be roaming around that neighborhood at that time of night, unless he was after one thing. And after they viewed the body, they knew that she had not lured any man, white or black, for that. One of the policemen had remarked to his partner, “That woman is so ugly I’m surprised somebody didn’t kill her sooner.”

  Vienna, City of My Dreams

  Chicago, Illinois

  December 1959

  Marion Chapman had been jumpy and on edge more than usual. The phone call she had just gotten a few days before from a stranger wanting to use Dena’s picture on the cover of Seventeen magazine had rattled her so that she was having a hard time trying to get things together for Dena’s Christmas. It was only a week away but the same nagging questions were gnawing at her: Why did that woman really want to put Dena’s picture in a magazine? And why had she mentioned a mother-and-daughter photograph? Was someone trying to connect her and her daughter? And why had the Mother Superior given out her number to that woman? Did she know something? Had she said anything to Dena? Her thoughts raced in a hundred different directions. She was so distracted that she had to wrap and unwrap the last of Dena’s presents, something she was usually expert at doing. Lately, even at work, the simplest of tasks seemed so difficult that she could hardly get through them.

  She had just put the last box in the closet when the phone rang and startled her. Who could be calling at this time of night? Could it be that woman again?

  But it wasn’t. It was long distance from Vienna. Theo was in the hospital, dying. The man said Theo had given her name as next of kin, and if she wanted to see him she had better come right away.

  When she put the phone down her heart was pounding so hard she could hardly think. All she knew was that she had to get to him. He needed her and there was no time to waste. She quickly packed a bag, ran out in the freezing rain, and hailed a cab for the airport. Thank God she had kept her Austrian passport. Eighteen worried and sleepless hours later, she arrived at the hospital.

  When she was led into the ward where they had him, she was shocked to see the person the nurse pointed out. At first she could not be sure if it was her brother. The man lying there was so small, his face was so old and drawn. It couldn’t be Theo.

  But it was. As she got closer she recognized his hands, his long, delicate fingers. They were the only part of him that was still young, still beautiful. Tears ran down her face as she sat by his bed and held the hand of what was left of her brother. She sat there with him for the next three days until he died.

  She could not be sure if he had even been aware that she had been there or whose hand he had been holding, but at least he did not die alone in a charity ward.

  For those three days she had felt so helpless, such a sense of deep despair. To think that Theo, of all people, who could have brought such joy and beauty to the world, should have ended up like this. That he would have been
so tortured, been driven to murder all because of that one drop of blood. Poor Theo. Every bone in her body ached with regret that she had not done more to help him.

  Two days later she stood alone, shivering in the bitter cold in a small cemetery on the outskirts of Vienna, looking down at the small headstone that read:

  THEODORE KARL LE GUARDE

  MUSICIAN

  1916–1959

  It was all over. She had done everything she had to do. Now she could go home to Dena.

  As she walked back through the cemetery, a sudden wind kicked up and she thought she heard a small limb or twig snap off a tree. She turned to look but she did not see anything. She had not slept for days and was now burning with a raging fever, but as she continued on she began to feel a strange, almost euphoric feeling, an odd sense of relief, almost as if all the stress and tension had suddenly been lifted. At that moment she looked up and suddenly noticed for the first time how blue and clear the sky had become.

  She rode the streetcar back past the botanical gardens near Schönbrunn Park, where she and Theo had been taken so many times as children. When she got off near her hotel, she did not go in. Instead she walked.

  She had been so occupied with Theo that today was the first time she actually realized: she was home! Suddenly it seemed that the entire city had come into sharp focus. Colors looked brighter to her and sounds seemed strange and amplified, almost as if they were coming from an old radio or phonograph.