Family Linen

by Lee Smith

  “I guess I’ve been in what you might call a reverie, Doc,” says Arthur.

  “I guess you have,” says Don. “Let’s go upstairs, why don’t we, and see if there’s not something you can use.”

  “Such as what?” Arthur does not want to participate in this grabbing of objects, not a bit, this greedy ghoulish parceling out of his mother’s things. He’s only here at all because Don and Mr. Constantine told him he had to be, or the others wouldn’t be able to do it, and claim what they wanted.

  “The stuff I want is ephemeral, Doc,” Arthur says.

  “Well, that’s true for most of us,” Dr. Don says, steering Arthur toward the stairs. “But a sports coat is not a bad thing.”

  Myrtle, looking distracted, flies down the stairs as they go up. “Sybill wants the flat silver!” she announces in obvious exasperation.

  “Draw straws,” says Arthur. “Play hot potato.”

  * * *

  “Ooh!” Myrtle rushes on, then halts on the landing. “You know that’s not such a bad idea,” she says, looking back at them. “I do want that cranberry glass globe,” she adds then, noticing the hanging fixture in the stairwell as if for the first time. Arthur and Don are laughing. A strange kind of giddiness seems to be taking over. It’s the strain, Myrtle thinks, distracted, we’ve all been under such a strain—what with Mother dying, and then Sybill’s accusations . . . Myrtle refuses to think about Sybill’s accusations at all, or about this bulldozer which has just started up down there at the bottom of the hill. She will put the bulldozer right out of her head and not mention it once. Nobody will mention it, and then they can gently say to Sybill, “Okay, look, honey. There’s nothing there,” and Sybill can seek appropriate treatment, as Don said. Oh, he’s right, he’s right. He’s always right. It’s best to resolve it once and for all, to leave no stone unturned, no questions unanswered, while the family is still together. Besides, it really will be nice to have a pool. Don says pools are easy now, all you do is dig a hole and then the people come and pour something in it. Don says we’ll be swimming in two weeks. The phone starts to ring. “Oooh!” Myrtle says, pulling a stepladder over so she can reach the dangling rose globe to affix a sticker to it. “Can you get the phone, honey?” she calls up to Don, who picks it up at the top of the stairs.

  It’s Jack, again.

  “Lacy,” Don calls.

  * * *

  Lacy gets up from the dresser in the bedroom where she’s going through Miss Elizabeth’s jewelry, which turns out to be all fake anyway, lots of it probably from the dimestore although you couldn’t tell it, she looked so elegant always—Lacy comes to stand in the bedroom door, eyebrows raised in a question.

  “Yes,” Don says to her.

  Lacy shakes her head, moving toward the telephone. Don and Arthur are grinning at her.

  “Jack, we’re all real busy over here,” she says into the receiver. “I told you not to call anymore.”

  Jack has been at the Ramada Inn since Tuesday, the day after the funeral, having left Bill with his girlfriend Susan. He says he’d just like to talk things over with Lacy, who would not like to do this at all.

  “It must be exhausting,” Jack says to her brightly, over the wire. “How about dinner later? You call me when you’re through there—and then maybe a movie? Flashdance is on in Buncoe.”

  “Oh honestly, Jack! Go home!” Lacy slams down the receiver.

  “What’d he say this time?” Dr. Don is amused. He never liked Jack particularly anyway, finding him supercilious, so far above the concerns of the skin.

  “He wants me to go see Flashdance.” Lacy makes a face, and Arthur begins to laugh.

  “I hear it’s not bad,” Don says.

  Behind Lacy, in the bedroom, Kate and Theresa start singing “What a Feeling,” and Lacy swats at Kate. “That’s your father you’re making fun of,” Lacy says, and Kate says, “So?” Kate and Theresa hold on to each other’s shoulders and try out some cancan kicks, still giggling, but Lacy turns from her daughter and goes to stand for a moment at the window, staring out at the patches of phlox like brilliant blue scatter-rugs drying in the long grass which stops at the treeline.

  Now Sybill and Candy are flipping for the spool bedroom suite, which Sybill wants very badly although she’ll have to store it, and which Candy does not want at all but thinks might be nice for Tammy Lee to have, or Tony if he ever marries. “Heads,” Candy says. “It’s tails!” shrieks Sybill. “I get it!” Sybill thinks this is a lot like “The Price Is Right.”

  “Then you take the pineapple bed,” Myrtle says to Candy.

  Candy nods, biting her lip. Tammy Lee, who is artistic, would like the pineapple bed.

  “Well, I want the cedar chest,” Sybill says, consulting, again, her list.

  “What cedar chest?” Candy asks.

  “The one in the guest bedroom, it’s mine anyway. Mother said to me one time, I distinctly remember, she said, ‘Sybill, you can have that for your hope chest.’ ”

  “I find that ironic,” Theresa says pointedly, to nobody in particular, as she goes to answer the phone.

  Which is for Lacy again. It’s Jack, asking if she’d like to go see Trading Places. “Eddie Murphy’s in it, playing a stockbroker,” he says. “It’s like an update of The Prince and the Pauper. Come on, it might relax you.”

  “I know Eddie Murphy is in it,” Lacy says. “Dan Ackroyd’s in it, too, and I don’t need to relax. Now leave me alone, Jack.”

  Kate and Theresa link arms, singing “Every breath you take, every step you make, I’ll be watching you.”

  “You really ought to be more serious about all of this,” Lacy says to them severely. “You’ll probably want some of these things in years to come, when you have children and houses of your own.”

  “Not me,” Theresa says. “I’m never going to get married or keep house. I’m going to raise all my own vegetables and have lots and lots of lovers.” Theresa’s pale blond hair swings back and forth as she and Kate continue to kick, one-two-three! like chorus girls.

  “Whoa now,” says Arthur. He and Dr. Don stand in the hall laughing.

  “Every breath you take, every step you make, I’ll be watching you!” the girls sing, kicking. They’ve changed the tune. Everything’s changing, Arthur thinks. Boy George wears makeup and Mother is dead.

  “Go on now, all of you,” Lacy says. Lacy looks harassed.

  “I’ll be watching you! I’ll be watching you!” The girls kick and sing, out on the landing. Down below, Myrtle descends from her stepladder to deal with Sybill.

  “I don’t think we should break up the set.” Sybill refers to the dining-room chairs.

  The phone rings, and rings again, but nobody answers. Everyone knows who it is.

  “Have you seen Star Wars?” asks Kate. This cracks them up.

  “I wish you all would just hush!” Myrtle throws this up the stairwell to the girls.

  “Have you seen Gone With the Wind?” giggles Kate.

  Lacy shoos them down the steps and shuts the door. Through the wall she can hear, or almost hear, Don and Arthur, going through the men’s clothes in the closet where her mother put them—Jewell Rife’s from long ago, her daddy’s from ten years back. If any clothes are left there now—Lacy remembers her mother trying to press them on Jack, and then of course there’s the PTA thrift box—somehow, the thought of poor people all over town wearing her father’s clothes makes Lacy infinitely sad. As does the thought of her husband Jack, who is behaving so badly—or strangely, at least. As does her mother’s jewelry—only the rings were real. The thing of it is, Mother never appeared in public without being thoroughly turned out: the blue curls in place, the stockings, heels, the earrings and matching necklace. These ensembles were so impressive that everyone assumed the jewels were real, or at the very least, good costume jewelry. Lacy locks the door. Then she seats hersel
f at the dressing table. She affixes large pearl earrings to her ears, a pearl brooch at the center of her T-shirt. She picks up vial after vial of perfume, sniffing. There was a particular way her mother smelled in later years, first it was lilacs, but later, it was something else, something—she can’t quite get it, but that’s close: Estée Lauder and loose powder, old age. Lacy narrows her eyes and looks at herself in the pier glass mirror. Who’s getting the pier glass mirror? Lacy can see her mother in herself already, the way the flesh droops a bit at the sides of the mouth, the mouth itself, a perfectly symmetrical bow, the wide forehead with the vertical frown mark, just there, between the eyebrows, from reading. Reading too much will age you and make you crazy, just see what it’s done to Jack. Lacy will look exactly like her mother, in thirty years. And then will she be able to remember the way she feels right now, or how she felt at the funeral or at the Piggly Wiggly, or how she felt the first time her lover took her to bed in his basement apartment on Stinson Street in Chapel Hill? Will she remember Kate doing a cancan on the day they split up her mother’s things, Kate wearing a slouch hat? What will she recall?

  Lacy removes her mother’s earrings and the brooch, and stands up. She walks to the dresser and pulls out a drawer at random and finds to her surprise a lavender beaded purse, lovely, which Kate will want. She sighs. It’s like a puzzle, all this going through the house. It’s like those search-and-find pictures they gave you in school, the forest with the animals hidden in the trees. Can you find (1) the elephant, (2) the boa constrictor, (3) the monkey? Can you go through this house and find the family that lived here once? Can you ever know how it worked, or what it was really like? Lacy concentrates, remembering, listening to the voices below, on the first floor, Candy and Sybill and Myrtle, the kids, Dr. Don and Arthur in the guest room, and this new sound, the racket of the bulldozer out on the hill where Dr. Don is going to put in the swimming pool. Can you find the secret here, at the heart of the house?

  Lacy concentrates, remembering Sunday dinner and her mother in flowered voile at the head of the table, wearing these pearl earrings, this brooch: it seems to be summer then, too, it’s so hot, but not one of the men has removed his coat and tie. There’s molded Jell-O salad, a ham, fried chicken. Arthur does something bad and is sent from the room, he pulls Lacy’s hair on the way out. Lacy has long curly hair. “Arthur!” she cries. “Hush, dear,” her mother says. Everyone listens to the Episcopal rector who’s come for Sunday lunch, who talks about visiting England. Lacy thinks she’ll die, and imagines her death in great detail, exactly what will happen, who will cry. For dessert they eat ambrosia and angel food cake. As soon as he can, Daddy escapes out the back where he smokes Camels—she won’t let him smoke in the house—and takes a nip or two of bourbon. This is the time when the children come to him, one by one, with problems, while Mother sleeps, fully dressed and perfectly rigid, flat on her back on the lacy white spread on this very bed.

  But you took your problems to Verner Hess, who dealt with them one by one and often by saying nothing, just listening until you were finished talking. Sometimes he gave you money, or talked to a man on the phone. Often he said, “If I were you, I wouldn’t bother your mother with that,” or, “Don’t tell your mother, it’s no sense bothering her,” and they didn’t, either, so that eventually they all had isolated, or insulated, Miss Elizabeth from whole sides of their lives. Daddy’s aim seemed to be to keep her completely pure, unsullied by any consideration of reality. He worshiped her. Even now, Lacy can’t quite understand it, although she knows there doesn’t really have to be a reason, you worship what you worship, you love what you love, and can’t help it . . . but it seems to Lacy that this is the secret, the hidden beast in the forest, around which that household revolved: Verner Hess’s total, obsessive worship of his wife. How odd that such a small red-headed man should be the possessor of such a love! How different from Lacy’s own marriage to Jack, all that good will and the mutual interests and ideals that seemed to be so important, and seem to her now to be inconsequential. Better a blind obsession, better a fascination with the nape of somebody’s neck.

  Lacy takes out all the dresser drawers and arranges them one by one on the bed, so that everybody can get at their contents. As she does this, she glances out the window at the yellow bulldozer, backing up and pushing dirt into a huge, pointless pile which Sean keeps riding up and down on his bike. Don says they’re going to extend the driveway all the way around the house, and put in a pool, a patio, and a gazebo. In some way, Lacy realizes, her mother knew what she was doing when she left Myrtle and Don the house, assuming—as Lacy assumes—that she wanted the house to stay in the family. Despite Miss Elizabeth’s dreamy distance from the world, despite her regal austerity, she knew what she was doing, she always knew what she was doing; and for this reason, Lacy believes, she could never have killed Jewell Rife. Sybill’s having a nervous breakdown, that’s all. It’s not uncommon. In fact, Lacy may choose to have one, too. She places all the drawers neatly on the white lace spread and rifles through the fragrant sacheted contents idly with her hand, surprised to feel, at the bottom of the last drawer, something hard—a book? She pulls it out. It’s a composition book in the old style, with a mottled black-and-white cover, the little white space for the title, which reads, in her mother’s elegant, spidery handwriting: Days of Light and Darkness:—Memoirs by Elizabeth Bird, 1928. Heart thumping wildly, a strange lightness in her head, Lacy clutches the composition book to her and opens the door and starts rapidly down the stairs.

  “Look!” she cries. “Look what I’ve found,” but her voice is nearly drowned out by the bulldozer’s drone, louder here, and by the ringing doorbell. Sybill and Myrtle are arguing in the kitchen. Arthur, Kate, Theresa, and Mr. Constantine are watching something on TV in the parlor. Who’ll get the color TV? “Look!” Lacy cries, waving the journal. Dr. Don goes to answer the door. At first it crosses Lacy’s mind that this must be Jack, again, but it’s not, it’s somebody wearing something like white pajamas, and a kind of helmet. Who is it? Nobody knows. Dr. Don talks to this personage briefly, shaking his head, gesturing. There must be some mistake. You can’t hear a thing because of the bulldozer. Dr. Don cups his hands around his mouth, finally, and calls to his wife, “Myrtle! You didn’t call for an exterminator, did you?” and Myrtle looks up from the kitchen table where she’s counting silver teaspoons with Sybill, and cries, “No!” Her mouth remains wide open, a perfect O. The front door shuts, the noise diminishes, and Lacy says, “Just look . . . ”

  Days of Light and Darkness:

  —Memoirs

  by Elizabeth Bird

  1928

  I approach the Past as a young maiden, bearing a candle, might approach a deserted mansion deep within the Enchanted woods. The path I take is overgrown with briars. The dangling limbs of blackened trees, the thriving thistly tangle of underbrush, the slick, wet, slimy stones conspire to thwart me. Above, the Moon herself is but dimly visible, and that at intermittent intervals through the limbs of the Trees which reach like ancient fingers toward the gray, low-racing clouds. The wind, surprisingly, is warm. It carries the sickly sweet scent of decaying flowers, it whips my frail Skirt to and fro, wrapping it about my legs as if to impede my Quest. This wind is my anxiety manifest. I shield the candle with my trembling hand, and if I reach the mansion, will its paltry light be sufficient to illuminate That which lies therein?

  After what seems an eternity I approach the gate, which gives inward easily with a sorrowful, groaning sound. Heartsick, I proceed. The huge old door is overgrown with hoary Lichens, crisscrossed by vines, and yet:—I see by my flickering Light—it, too, stands ajar. “Deliver me,” I pray, and setting my shoulder to it, and gathering whatever Courage the Almighty has to give, I push with all my might. An odor of must, as of the grave, assails me. The pool of Light cast by this ridiculous candle falls about my feet:—the light too weak to reach the recesses of this hall; the high imagined ceiling; the other door
s to other, further rooms. And an antic wind from the open door is playing tricks:—casting monstrous shadows at the edges of this light, creating flitting shadows in the deeper dark above, shadows like wings:—

  But I am here. Hand on Heart, I rest awhile. This mansion is no place for the faint of heart, no place for the unprepared. And so I have come armed with what I have:—with Honesty, with Courage, and with Love. Though the wind do its best, my candle shall not be extinguished. Though I walk these wide Halls with fear and trembling, I shall enter every room.

  * * *

  My Father seemed always on horseback, I know this was not So. And yet, how many evenings did we wait at the lower gate, in our pinafores, little hearts thumping wildly, to see him coming in the distance, up the long hill? First a speck we saw, and then the rising dust, and then at length, his gallant Form. When he saw us there, his girls, he would set spur to flank and gallop wildly that last stretch between the glowering pines; “Hi, Jennie!” he’d cry to his spotted horse; he knew we loved it So. Winter and Summer, he wore a wide black Hat. And oh, then how we’d squeal, and tumble from the gate, and race up that long walk to our happy home, skirting the side front porch, and running around to the side where Johnny would be waiting to take the horse, and Mama, fresh from the kitchen, all ruddy-faced, was wiping her hands on her apron and pushing back the escaping tendrils of her curly auburn hair.

  Jennie was reined to a stomping halt, and dust flew in all directions. “Ladies, good evening!” my Father bellowed. Dismounting with a Flourish then, he’d sweep up my Mother in his strong arms and spin her about the yard. Faster and faster they would go, her petticoats billowing. “Lem, Lem, let me go! Stop it this instant!” she shrieked. “Put me down!”

  My Father roared with laughter. “Not until you give me a Kiss,” he’d vow, and she said, “Oh not now, why here are the girls, I tell you, put me down!”