Tied to the Tracks

by Rosina Lippi

  Except the documentary really was good, better than good; more than he had let himself hope for.

  On the television screen a clip of old film showed a train moving across a winter landscape in grainy black and white. And then the voice, the one he didn’t need to hear again, not just now.

  John got up and went to his desk, where he found a piece of bright pink paper with Patty-Cake’s handwriting: office assignments for the visiting faculty, and the paperwork for the payroll office, and the question she seemed to ask him twice a day: Would Ms. Mangiamele and Ms. Rosenblum be teaching the fall courses they had been offered? If not, they’d have to start looking for somebody else.

  John made himself sit down behind the desk to take care of the housing request, the one he had started to work on three days ago and hadn’t been able to finish past question ten.

  In order to best match available housing with visiting faculty, we would appreciate as much detail as can be provided on the visitor’s family and any special needs to be taken into consideration.

  The things John knew about Angie Mangiamele could hardly be written on a form for a clerk in the housing office to read. Especially as that clerk might well turn out to be Harriet Darling, Caroline’s oldest sister.

  She snores, he could write that, and no doubt she could share a few colorful facts about him, too. But if this was going to work—and it had to work—he would have to find a way to put all those little things out of his head and start fresh.

  From the television came the soft deep lilt of Virginia and in counterpoint a more familiar voice, slightly husky, carefully modulated and still New Jersey. She disliked her accent, or had, back then. Maybe she had learned to appreciate it; maybe they couldn’t afford to hire a professional voice-over actor. In fact, she sounded as if she had a little bit of a cold when she recorded the narration.

  Prone to upper respiratory infections. That was something to write, and: Hates going to the doctor. Hates letting anybody do anything for her. Does her own taxes, paints her own walls. Cuts her own hair.

  He pushed away from the desk and went to look out the window, imagined Angie down there walking under the cherry trees. She was coming, and he couldn’t stop it. She would make friends in the town; in a week everybody would know her name. It was her particular gift, making people open up. He had seen her following an irascible old mailman around for days until she had soaked up everything he had to teach her about a neighborhood she was interested in filming. No doubt he still sent her Christmas cards. No doubt she answered them.

  The truth was, he didn’t want to stop what was coming, and there was the hardest truth at all, one he could hardly admit to himself or even to his brother, who had given him a particular look when he found out who it was that owned Tied to the Tracks.

  At the very least, he had to tell Caroline, and soon.

  He thought of Miss Maddie’s small, kind face, the light in her eyes when she talked about the documentary. Thought of his own silence, when he should have spoken up. The things he meant to say were simple: It’s a brilliant piece of work. She’s come so far, she has the eye. If he could give her nothing else, he must give her that much, respect for the work she did, for the work she would be here to do.

  From the television set came another voice, strong and sure but with an old woman’s gentle wobble.

  “Nobody asked me,” she was saying. “My turn came and I had to climb up into that train. Sometimes I thought about just lying down in front of it, instead.”

  John looked out over the empty campus. Then he turned back to the form on his desk. On it he wrote: Please contact these persons directly for answers to these questions.

  And while you’re at it, he might have written, could you ask Angie what actually happened five years ago this Labor Day?

  Because while John had what seemed like almost perfect recall when it came to that summer before he left Columbia for Princeton, the last few days—the last days he had spent with Angie Mangiamele—were a complete mystery to him.

  From the television came the sound of a train whistle, long and plaintive.

  A month of very good, two months of excellent, and then it all seemed to fall apart in the course of a disaster of a weekend.

  He had come up to her door at a trot, his overnight bag bumping against his leg, calculating traffic and distance in his head and whether or not they would make the train, and what it would mean if they didn’t—his grandfather would hold it against him all weekend if they showed up late—and rapped on the door even as it was swinging open.

  It wasn’t the first time the sight of Angie Mangiamele had robbed him of words. Angie asleep in the first light of day was enough to do it, Angie in a temper or scrubbing the sink or scowling at the pages of a book. He had it bad, no question about it, and so here they were, after weeks of discussion, on their way out to meet what was left of his father’s family, and when was the last time he had done that?

  But the sight of Angie in the doorway made it clear that he had miscalculated, and badly.

  She touched a tentative finger to her hair. The hair that had first caught his attention, lifting in the wind, twirling with a life force of its own, perpetually tangled, wild, enchanted hair. Sometime between this morning and now she had cut it all off into a short shag. And if that didn’t make a clear enough statement—even in his shock, he understood that she was trying to tell him something that he was too dense to have picked up on his own—she had dyed it blue, too.

  If he hadn’t been running late, he told himself later, if he hadn’t been thinking about his grandfather, he would have handled it better. He would have said, Where’s your suitcase, or Let’s move, we’re going to miss the train, or even That’s a particularly stunning shade of cobalt, but none of those things had come to him. He had stood in front of her in the narrow hallway where—this is the way he would always remember it—he had had her up against the wall on more than one occasion, unable to stop long enough even to unlock the door—and opened his mouth to say the wrong thing.

  “Oh, no.”

  The tremble of her jaw gave it all away, though he didn’t realize it at that moment. It would be months before he could think about that afternoon with anything approaching objectivity, when it would finally occur to him that Angie had set him up. And by then it was too late.

  John got up and left his office abruptly. The sound of Angie’s voice came from the TV speakers to follow him down the hall.

  FOUR

  Ogilvie, Georgia. Pop: 3,400. Est: 1820 by General Joshua Ogilvie (born 1780, Savannah), philosopher, historian, slave owner, and hero of the War of 1812. While many small southern towns went bankrupt in the sixties, Ogilvie survived and prospered, thanks primarily to its major employer, Ogilvie College, a private liberal arts university of international standing. Located on the Seaboard Coast-line Railway between Savannah, Georgia, and Jacksonville, Florida, the town is a popular destination for tourists who come to see the beautifully maintained Victorian, Georgian, and Greek Revival homes along University Parkway, the wealth of specialty and antique shops on Main Street, and the many acres of gardens and parks. The town’s Independence Day Jubilee and New Year’s Pageant are counted among the most elaborate, well organized, and worth seeing in the South.

  A New History of the Oldest Coastal Towns

  It’s like a terrarium,” Tony yelled. “Only bigger.” “You mean a jungle,” Rivera yelled back.

  The van’s air-conditioning had whimpered and died as soon as they crossed the Mason-Dixon line, and they had been shouting over road noise and wind ever since.

  “No, I mean a terrarium. The place looks like it’s been manicured.” Tony waved his arms to indicate the entirety of the city of Ogilvie spread out before them, which did look, Angie had to agree, like a lovingly kept garden perched in the oxbow of a river that ran toward the sea. Roofs and steeples poked up here and there but overall it was hard to make out much at all.

  Rivera said, “It’s only an hou
r to Savannah by train.”

  “Hey, winkie,” Angie said. “We aren’t even there yet, hold it with the big city withdrawal, okay?”

  Tony said, “I wouldn’t exactly call Savannah a big city, but it’ll have to do. How far is it to Jacksonville, anyway?”

  Rivera poked him in the shoulder and he yelped.

  “I was just asking.”

  “For Christ’s sake,” Rivera said. “There’s a whole campus of co-eds and professors and staff.”

  “But not until September,” Tony said. Then he sat up a little straighter. “Somebody was telling me that Julia Roberts is from around here.”

  Angie let Rivera handle that, as her concern about the suspicious sounds coming from the van’s transmission was escalating quickly. She consulted the directions she had taped to the visor and turned onto University Parkway.

  Tony wound Rivera up to the point of spontaneous combustion while Angie tried to concentrate on the directions she had downloaded off the Internet. The Parkway was as wide as a four-lane highway with an island of trees and shrubs running down the median strip. Houses stood far back from the street overshadowed by palm trees and oaks draped with moss. A carriage house roof was all but lost in a great mass of vines covered with bright orange-red flowers; Angie saw box hedges sculpted into the shape of urns and dogs; a pale pink stucco house surrounded by rose gardens. The air was different down here: wetter, heavier, hotter, and filled with smells that settled on the tongue. Sugary flowery smells and sharper, herby ones, green things growing and rotting, river water.

  Rivera had been nursing her irritation for the last ten minutes and it erupted quite suddenly. “And if Julia Roberts did come from Ogilvie, what then? A shrine in front of her birthplace?”

  “Maybe she’ll come visiting at Christmas. Southerners are big on family.”

  “Cliché number eighty-seven,” Rivera said. “If you speed it up you might make a hundred before we get where we’re going.”

  “Too late,” Angie said, pulling up to the redbrick security kiosk at the main gates of the university. “We’re here.”

  A wisp of steam rose from the hood, snakelike. “And not a minute too soon.”

  According to the guard, the director of housing was waiting for them in her office rather than at the English department. That piece of news was so welcome that Angie couldn’t even find it in herself to worry about the van, which they left in the kiosk parking lot, twitching like a dog with fleas.

  “Five on a Friday afternoon in the summer,” Angie said aloud, because she liked the sound of it. Unlikely that there would be anybody around.

  “Sure is quiet,” Tony said.

  “As the grave,” Rivera agreed.

  Just visible to the far right between the trees were glimpses of another street, this one lined with stores. “I think that’s Main Street,” Angie said.

  “Let’s go look.” Rivera would have jogged off, but Angie caught her elbow and turned her back toward the building in front of them.

  “One mountain at a time.” She looked at the sheet of paper in her hand. “This particular mountain is called Harriet Darling, and she’s behind that door.”

  It’s the very nicest house we’ve got and it’s so convenient, we thought since y’all will be working together it made sense to have you share? I think you’ll be comfortable . . .”

  Over Harriet Darling’s big head of hair Angie caught Rivera’s look: she was mesmerized by the patter, horrified and fascinated, and completely at a loss.

  Tony, on the other hand, had latched onto Harriet and was doing everything in his power to encourage her.

  “. . . the extra bedroom in case y’all have company coming for the holidays . . .”

  “Do you have a big family yourself, Mrs. Darling?”

  She turned her whole body toward him. “Why, yes I do, Mr. Russo. I’ve got three boys. Tab Junior, Larry, and my baby, Joey? My sisters—there are five of us Rose girls—my maiden name is Rose, did I mention that?—every one of them has three boys, except Caroline. She’s the baby, but she’s getting married—” She stopped so suddenly that Rivera would have run into her if Tony hadn’t put out a restraining hand.

  “I do hope I’ve got the right keys here. Ivy House it should say on the tag, but I’ve left my reading—Mr. Russo, would you be so kind?”

  When Tony assured her that she had the right keys and Harriet had set off again, Rivera hung back. She took Angie’s arm and squeezed it hard enough to make her yelp.

  “He’ll get us tossed out of here before we’ve shot anything,” she said.

  Angie watched Tony, his head inclined toward Harriet’s puffed and sculpted hair. There was a familiar expression on his face: Tony on the scent.

  Angie said, “She’s married.”

  Rivera smirked. “Exactly. May I remind you—”

  “Please don’t.” Angie pushed out a long sigh. “I’ll talk to him.”

  It turned out that Ivy House really was the best Ogilvie had to offer. Ten big rooms, including a kitchen the size of Angie’s apartment in Hoboken, and attached to it was a screened porch that looked over a back lawn that stretched all the way to the river. There were five bedrooms, a basement, two bathrooms with big old-fashioned bathtubs. It had been reserved for a math professor from Vienna with a wife and four children.

  “But the poor man took a heart attack two weeks ago and the doctors don’t want him to travel?” Harriet was leaning against the kitchen counter as she told Tony the story of how Tied to the Tracks had come into possession of Ivy House. “I wish him well, I surely do, but let me tell you we were in a quandary about where to put y’all. If it wasn’t rude I’d have to send him a thank-you note for staying away.”

  “There’s a banana tree,” Rivera called from the screened porch. “In the backyard. A banana tree, and a palm.”

  It was all very southern, which delighted Tony and Rivera both. Lemon and pecan trees, Spanish moss on the oaks that lined the river, ceiling fans.

  “What about scuppernongs?” Tony asked Harriet Darling. “I’ve always wondered. What is a scuppernong, exactly?”

  Angie took the bedroom at the very top of the house. It had two deep window seats that provided a view of the campus. It had ancient wallpaper of young ladies in hoop skirts with pink parasols and bead-board wainscoting. It had an air conditioner the size of a small refrigerator that hummed sweetly and belched a long, cold stream of air.

  For the last week Angie had been too busy to do much thinking; she should have fallen asleep without any trouble at all, and yet she sat wide awake, her feet tucked under her on the window seat. She could hear Rivera and Tony downstairs, arguing while they finished unloading the van, a duty she was exempt from as she had packed it to start with.

  Outside her windows Ogilvie was so still, though she had opened the window to listen. In the distance she heard the sound of a radio tuned to a talk show, the voices indistinct, cajoling, indignant, amused. At two in the morning Hoboken was as alive—more alive, sometimes—than it was at noon; here it was full dark at ten. Somewhere out in that dark John Grant was reading or watching television or talking on the telephone.

  The best thing would be to get right to work. Get set up, start blocking out a shooting schedule, lining up people to interview, places to visit, get acquainted with the facilities on campus, go grocery shopping. After two or three days of running full out, then it would be time to see Miss Zula, and after that was taken care of, John Grant.

  Then she would be able to smile at him and shake his hand and say something just friendly enough to set his mind at rest. She was here for the work, and nothing else. Given a few days, she would figure out a way to tell him that. She might even come to believe it herself.

  FIVE

  Ogilvie Bugle NEWS ABOUT TOWN

  Mr. Harmond Ogilvie, Chairman of the Ogilvie College Board of Regents, tells us that the university has brought a company of three documentary filmmakers to town for an extended stay. Angeline Mangiame
le, Rivera Rosenblum, and Anthony Russo of Tied to the Tracks Films (Hoboken, NJ) are newly arrived to begin production of a film about the life and work of our own Miss Zula Bragg. They will be staying at Ivy House, and working out of offices in the English department on campus. The Regents ask that the good citizens of Ogilvie extend every courtesy to our guests and cooperate with them as they go about their work. If you have a story or memory about Miss Zula you’d like to share, please stop by the public library and write it down in the memory book the filmmakers have made available for that purpose, or contact them at Ivy House.

  By noon on Sunday Angie had ticked off most of the to-do items on the long list she had written Friday night: they had unpacked and stocked the kitchen, found their offices and the film and video editing suite—Tony was still slightly in shock, and Angie had rarely seen Rivera so enthusiastic—and met the neighbors. The van had been resuscitated by a mechanic named Carlos who seemed pretty much unfazable, and they were ready for the first, all-important meeting with Zula Bragg on Monday morning. Sunday afternoon they would spend at a birthday party for Miss Junie Rose, an invitation issued by her eldest daughter, Harriet Rose Darling, and accepted by Tony for all of them. Angie was wondering if she could plead exhaustion when the doorbell rang.