Tied to the Tracks

by Rosina Lippi

  It occurred to him just then that maybe Miss Zula was trying to tell him something else.

  He said, “You make it sound like she’s not coming back.”

  At that she did turn to look at him. “She’s coming back,” said Miss Zula. “Sad to say, but she will most certainly come back as she promised.”

  The rest of the way home John had tried to think of ways to ask Miss Zula to explain that sad to say. He was good with words, and always had been. Students and colleagues both gave him high marks for his lectures, for the way he led seminars, for his ability to make the complex clear, to argue his point. He had made a career out of the careful weighing and arrangement of words until they sang on the page. Words were tools that could be used to uncover the truth, but this time they would not work for him.

  Because, he must admit to himself, he was afraid of what Miss Zula might say if he could think of a way to ask her.

  Now John half listened to Rob and Kai as they moved boxes. They were talking about curtains and telephone calls that needed to be made, address-change cards and utilities. They needed an answering machine and long-distance service, which made John think of his own telephone, because, he realized, it had been ringing for a while.

  “John,” said Kai, passing him with her arms full of books. “Aren’t you going to answer that?”

  By the time had had crossed the room, the machine had picked up.

  “John? This is Eunice. What is this silliness about Caroline going on retreat five days before her wedding? Mama’s no help, she says it’ll do Caroline good. Except Mama’s up there at the lake and we’re down here with a list a mile long of things to get done before Saturday.”

  The machine clicked off. John looked at Kai, who blinked at him with the same look she got when she was working out the next ten or twenty chess moves: intrigued.

  He got up and started filling an empty moving box with books from the pile on the floor.

  For the next hour he and Kai packed books and carried the boxes out to the porch, listening to one message being recorded after another. John would have turned the machine off, but he had the idea that if he did people would start showing up at his door.

  “Dr. Grant? John? This is Patty-Cake, in case you don’t recognize my voice. I’m worried about you, John, and I’m worried about Caroline. Is everything all right? I can’t get ahold of Junie, and there are rumors going ’round. Folks are saying Caroline’s run off and the wedding’s canceled, and I’m calling you direct, out of respect, you understand, because you should know what people are saying. I’m not one to spread rumors, but my daddy always said speak the truth and shame the devil, and so I’m speaking some truth here. The question is, who exactly is the devil in this situation? A few weeks ago everything was fine, and then . . . I just don’t know what to think, Tab in the hospital and Caroline run away to those nuns. I do wish you’d pick up.”

  John stood there for a long moment after the machine had clicked off, sweat running down his face and body, feeling a little faint for the second time this summer, though this time a trip to the emergency room and a few stitches wouldn’t fix the problem. Kai was watching him, her small heart-shaped face tilted to one side.

  She said, “I wonder that Caroline didn’t tell her family about her plans.”

  “She made up her mind all of a sudden,” John said.

  Kai nodded thoughtfully. She said, “Patty-Cake is thinking of Angie and her friends, that they have something to do with . . . whatever is going on between you and Caroline.”

  “I got that, yes.” John managed a smile.

  “It would be best if Angie stayed out of her way, I think,” Kai said.

  “Probably.”

  The phone began to ring again.

  “Dr. Grant? Professor Grant? This is Jean Marie Stillwater? I’m Caroline’s second cousin once removed on her daddy’s side? I do the book-keeping for Abby Shaw, the florist? I’m calling because the balance is due on the bill for the flowers, the corsages, and arrangements for the church and all that? And I can’t get hold of Caroline. Her sister Eunice said I should call you direct? I surely would appreciate it if you’d come by the shop tomorrow and take care of business. Bye now.”

  In the silence John could hear Rob singing to himself while he lugged boxes to the car, lots of volume and enthusiasm, but what song it might have been was known only to him.

  “Mama always said Rob couldn’t carry a tune in a bucket,” John said. It wasn’t often he thought of his mother, but she seemed very close at the moment. Lucy Ogilvie Grant Bradshaw Butler Chatham Black would know how to handle this situation. She would look Patty-Cake Walker in the eye and say just the right thing, words as pretty as oleander and twice as deadly. If John were to ask her for advice, she would cluck sympathetically and offer anecdotes from her many ventures into matrimony. Who else of his acquaintance had as much experience with weddings, and the multitude of ways that the whole thing could go wrong?

  “You must be very distressed if you are thinking of asking your mother for advice.” Kai was watching him, her arms filled with books.

  John was getting used to the way Kai sometimes picked up his thoughts, but this made him jump. He said, “The one person I need to talk to is the one I can’t call. No phones at the retreat.”

  He wanted to talk to Angie, too, but he couldn’t say that aloud, not even to Kai. And he had made a promise to himself: he would stay away from Angie until he had something concrete to say.

  She shook her head at him as if he were a lazy student. Then she put down the books and went into the kitchen. She came out again with a pad of paper and a pen, which she thrust into his hands.

  “Write,” she said. “They have no phones, but surely she can read a letter. If you have things you must say, then say them. Get it into the mail tomorrow morning and she will have it on Wednesday.”

  “Tomorrow is a holiday,” John said.

  “Then she will have it on Thursday, unless you want to drive up there and leave it for her. Is it that important?”

  “Yeah,” John said. “It is.”

  “Then write,” Kai said. “And Rob and I will drive with you, to keep you company.”

  When Angie and Rivera got back to Ivy House the phone was ringing. They bumped into each other in their race to get to it when Tony’s arm snaked out from the couch and snagged the receiver.

  He sat up and waggled his eyebrows at them.

  “He’s feeling better,” Rivera said.

  “Good,” Angie said. “Then I can kill him with an easy conscience.”

  On the phone Tony said, “Your lovely daughter is right here, planning my murder. Here you go.” He held out the receiver and gave Angie a beatific smile. “Your father.”

  “Angie!”

  “Dad.”

  “Tell me, they got a different calendar down there in Georgia? A different number of days, or maybe in a different order? I only ask because my calendar here, the one cousin Benny sent me from Florida, that calendar says today is Monday, July third. Which means—up here in Jersey, anyway—that yesterday was Sunday. And I got this idea, call it crazy, but I got the idea that yesterday was Sunday where you are, too, because this beauty-ful Florida calendar says so, and Florida is south of where you find yourself at this point in time. And the last I checked, time zones run east to west, not north to south. Am I right?”

  Angie grimaced at Tony, who shrugged dramatically. “Sorry, Dad. Things got busy yesterday.”

  “Angie, this is your mother on the other line. You’ve got my permission to ignore your father. He misses you, but that’s no excuse for bad manners, Tommy. Now, tell me, how is work going? How’s Rivera?”

  “Good, we’re all good, everything’s good.” Angie shot a look across the room to Rivera, who was scowling at the screen of her cell phone. She might have said, Rivera seems to be in love with a woman who just ran off to a nunnery. Her mother took an academic interest in Rivera’s love life and would certainly be intrigued by th
is newest chapter, but now was not the time for a lesson in modern-day lesbian mating rituals.

  “Tony got himself in trouble yet?” Angie’s father yelled.

  “Oh, yeah,” Angie said. “I’ll let him tell you about it.” And she handed the phone back to Tony, who performed, as he always did when pressed. While he related the story of the rumble in the park, Angie went into the kitchen and got herself a glass of water. Rivera followed her in, and they stood there together in the dim cool listening to Tony, who paced up and down with the phone under one arm, the unlit cigarette in the corner of his mouth jerking as he talked.

  “We’ve got a busy day ahead of us tomorrow. We should get some sleep.” Rivera said this flatly.

  From the other room Tony called, “Your father wants to know what you two put in your picnic baskets.”

  “Lasagna in mine, cannelloni in Rivera’s,” Angie called back.

  Rivera snorted a laugh.

  “Oh, like I can tell Tommy Apples what southerners eat. He’d be on the next plane.”

  “Your mother says it sounds like a slave auction,” Tony shouted.

  “Tell her enough with the old Roots tapes, they’ve made some good movies in the last twenty years.”

  Rivera produced a giggle like a burp and then they were both laughing in near hysterics, covering their mouths and bent over double. Finally Angie caught her breath. She said, “Did you have any idea Caroline was going to do this?”

  “Run off?” Rivera flung herself down on the couch, looked up at the ceiling, and frowned. “I knew she was feeling trapped, but this? No. Do you think the Mother Superior looks like Rosalind Russell in The Trouble with Angels? Caroline reminded me of Hayley Mills the minute I saw her. I had such a crush on her in that movie.”

  Angie leaned forward and pressed her forehead against Rivera’s shoulder. “What a mess we’ve got ourselves into.”

  Rivera said, “It’s a record, even for us.”

  In the other room Tony was talking to Tommy Apples about the odd habits of southerners, and they listened to him for a while. Finally Angie said, “There are questions I’d like to ask you.”

  “No,” said Rivera. “Please don’t, because I’ve got nothing useful to tell you.”

  Less than a half hour after Kai handed him paper and pen, John folded three closely written sheets into an envelope and sealed it quickly before the urge to edit got the better of him. This morning he would have told anyone who asked that he was so used to composing on the computer he couldn’t write longhand anymore, and yet this particular letter had poured itself across the page without hesitation or pause.

  Rob and Kai were waiting for him on the porch, Rob tossing the car keys from hand to hand.

  “You don’t have to do this,” John said. “But I’m glad you offered.”

  “Can’t have you driving into a ditch,” Rob said. “Not just when things are getting exciting around here.”

  “I owe you.”

  “Yes,” Rob said, clapping him on the back. “You do.”

  For the next hour and a half John drifted in and out of a twilight sleep, vaguely aware of the darkening sky, of Kai’s profile when she turned her head to talk, of the weight of the letter in his shirt pocket. He thought of Caroline reading it, her head bent over the paper, and he was overcome by sadness and affection and fear. He didn’t want to hurt her and he couldn’t marry her; he couldn’t even remember how he had imagined he could make her happy.

  He had loved her—he loved her still—for her intelligence and quick mind and shy smile, for her quiet thoughtfulness and her empathy, her kindness, but he had no idea what touched her most deeply. She never lost her temper, though there were times he had been angry for her, at her sisters, for the way they passed her back and forth like a doll; at her mother, for letting that happen. He had asked her, more than once, how she managed and she had given him her enigmatic smile.

  Anything for a quiet life. It was her mantra, and a joke in the family. Eunice had given her an elaborate purple velvet-and-silk pillow with those words embroidered on it. Caroline kept it on her bed, the one spot of color in her cool white bedroom.

  No matter how Caroline felt about this letter, about him, about the trouble he was bringing down on her head, she would never allow it to come to the surface, just as she kept everything else just out of touch. The evening he asked her to marry him she had smiled so sweetly and turned her face to his shoulder and trembled. Because she was happy, he had thought then, because—he remembered resorting to cliché without hesitation—still waters run deep.

  Once he set himself the task of examining the things he had so studiously ignored for the past year, John found he couldn’t stop. Caroline’s solemn nature, her shyness, her inability to stand up to her family when it came to something as basic as her own wedding, all these things he pulled forth from his memory like rabbits out of a hat, and taken together they spelled out an indictment, not of her but of himself. He had treated her no better than her sisters; he had used her as a mirror, and she had done that job well, reflecting back to him what he wanted to see. Now John promised himself that sometime, somehow, he would confess this failing to her and ask her forgiveness.

  Rob said, “We’re just about there. You’re sure you want to do this?”

  His first impulse was to brush the question off, but John caught his brother’s glance in the rearview mirror, wary, concerned.

  Step by step he reviewed what must come. He would hand this letter over to whichever nun came to the door. Caroline would read it, tonight or tomorrow morning, and with that, their engagement would be ended. Sometime in the next few days Caroline would make the announcement that the wedding was off, because he had left it up to her to decide how best to do that. She might come home to Ogilvie, or find a phone and call one of her sisters or, more likely, her mother. At that point, the wedding guests would be contacted and the rumor mill would go into overdrive. When he showed his face in town, he would be accosted on the street by third and fourth cousins, Caroline’s and his own, who believed it their right to hear the whole story of what went wrong, and who was at fault. No matter what story Caroline told, no matter how kind she was to him in the telling of it, blame would be parceled out, the largest portion would fall to him. Because he deserved it, first of all, for getting into this situation.

  He would deal with all that and more, because it was necessary, and because it was the price he had to pay to claim Angie. Or to try to claim her; there was always the possibility that she didn’t want him.

  Except that she had kissed him back, and meant it.

  He said, “Yes, I’m sure.” And he was overwhelmed, just that simply, with relief.

  Kai turned to look at him. “What happened to change your mind?”

  He could have told her the whole story. Most probably he would tell her, one day, but as the redbrick wall of the retreat house came into view, a simpler answer came to mind.

  “Something a man on a plane said to me,” John said. “And Angie. Angie happened.”

  THIRTEEN

  If you can get Miss Zula to open up and tell you about how she bases her characters on people here in Ogilvie, you can be sure we would all love to hear about that. To tell you the truth, I think most folks in this town only read her work because they are looking for themselves. For example, I am sure she based Daddy Sam in her second novel on Emmet Preston, but I have never got up the nerve to ask her.

  Your name: Please don’t be offended if I don’t sign my name. This is a small town.

  I took organ lessons from Miss Zula’s daddy from the time I was five years old until the day Brother Bragg died. I was ten years old when our Lord sent down His band of angels to pick up Martin Bragg to be the leader of His choir in Heaven. There must have been two hundred people at his funeral, come from as far as Atlanta and Tallahassee. Sister Bragg looked like a marble statue sitting there in the front pew, but the three children wept so. Brother Bragg was much loved by all the congregation, fo
r his kindness and generosity and for his music. I know that he will spend eternity playing and singing His holy praise. I look forward to shaking his hand on the other side, someday soon.

  Your name: Alvin Lee Downs. My mama played the organ at Mount Olive AME after Brother Bragg passed on, and I took her place when Mama was called to Heaven thirty-seven years ago this March.

  On the long drive back from the retreat house John slept like a man suddenly and unexpectedly relieved of a burden, deeply and without dreams. When they pulled up in front of the Lee Street house, he woke disoriented but not unhappy. He couldn’t even claim to feel guilty, though he figured he should; he was about to cause considerable pain and discomfort to people he cared about. Had probably already caused such pain. His general lightheartedness, he told himself, had less to do with Angie than it did with the fact that marrying Caroline would have been a mistake.