Life Estates

by Shelby Hearon

  The next day, I got to my daughter’s door at the start of visitors’ hours. “Fannin?” I called, stepping into her room.

  “Mom?”

  “I’m so sorry,” I said.

  “You are not, don’t say you are.” My daughter wept.

  Drying her eyes with a Kleenex, I studied her. Such a thin stalk of a girl, long legs, thick dark hair around her thin face, blue eyes freshly wet. Peaked—if that word was still in use—she looked like a runner who had used up her last wind and was still making slow laps around the field, her muscles moving in reflex. Tensile—that was another word. She had the shoulders, the carriage of her North Carolina daddy, the softer features of her aunt and my own daddy.

  “I did worry,” I said, pulling up a chair by her bed, “that you were not strong enough to have another. I didn’t wish this.…”

  Fannin squeezed her eyes shut and then opened them. “You know what Matthew did, Mom? He told his Sunday School teacher that our baby Rankin had died in his mommy’s tummy and she sent him home with a sympathy note and an extra lamb on his shepherd’s poster. Poor Matt. He has to tell everybody everything he knows.”

  “She sounds like a good teacher. Better than the one he had in second grade.”

  “Don’t be mad, Mom. I guess I mean, don’t be glad.” She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. She was in a loose blue nightie, one that looked familiar. Maybe she’d worn it after she delivered Jonathan.

  “How could I possibly be either?”

  But a nurse came before she could answer; it was time for a shot.

  I thought about my grandsons, whom I loved far more than I got credit for. Stalwart Matthew; jolly Mack, now nearly a first grader; kindly Lucas, who liked to push his youngest brother around in his yellow dump truck; baby Jon, who wasn’t a baby anymore, a big boy now, in training pants and black baseball cap, talking at the top of his voice, wearing a whistle around his neck so he could get everyone’s attention. My daughter was good with them, her boys. Easy. Come on, scouts. Let’s go, fellows. Hey, gang. Yo, guys.

  I did not know how to do that. I had treated my two as separately as possible from the start, just as Bess and I had been treated. Had that seemed lonely to my children? So much so that George had elected to have none, and Fannin, a team? Neither replicating the sharp focus of parent on child, one on one. I tried to imagine Edith calling out, Hey, girls, get a move on. Come on, kidlets, hop to. Not possible. I had to laugh at the idea.

  “Daddy’s doctor came all the way to Atlanta,” Fannin said, a spot of color on her cheeks, when the nurse had gone. “Can you believe it? Dr. Perry. I didn’t really talk to him much while Daddy was—I mean, he was just the old doctor who came in and out with that stethoscope hanging down, the kind that makes you wonder why doctors are always heavy yet they fuss at their patients about gaining weight. He was really neat to do that. He sat right down here and talked to us about the baby. He’d talked to Eiko—you know, my doctor—and she’d told him she’d said for me to wait, not to get pregnant again so soon. And I admitted that she had and that I’d promised, but that I’d wanted, we’d wanted—” Fannin looked at me, tears welling up.

  I nodded for her to go on.

  “—that Johnny wanted six, that we’d said all along we wanted six. I told Dr. Perry that I guess I was missing Daddy. I said I guess I’d got pregnant knowing he was dying, and wanting to have another baby and name it after him.”

  “What did Will say?”

  “He said the nicest thing.” Fannin looked up, rosy. “I asked him were you doing all right about Daddy’s death, and he said, Well, he didn’t know, but that if you’d produced such a sensible and pretty daughter, maybe he ought to look into it. Wasn’t that neat? I don’t think anything has ever been as flattering. Me, sensible? Not hardly. Not exactly what I’m used to hearing.” She looked at me, flushed with the compliment.

  I smiled. “I trust his judgment, so it must be accurate.”

  “Anyway,” she said, sitting up and swinging her legs off the side of the bed, looking much the way she had when she’d got her tonsils out, shaky but ready to go, “I promised Dr. Perry and Johnny, too. He sort of put Johnny on the spot, a little bit, saying that four should be enough for any man, that he’d made his point and what was my health worth? Johnny looked offended, but then he got embarrassed. I mean, coming from who was saying it, what else could he do but say that, sure, maybe we should take a few years off.”

  God bless Will. How good he was with them. No one else could have collared Johnny that way, no one. My son-in-law and Nolan had got into a grudge match from day one. Nolan thought he was uppity, a smart aleck, not a real man. No doubt Johnny thought his wife’s daddy a redneck in disguise, a cracker in a banker’s suit.

  “I don’t know, Mom,” Fannin said, lying back down. “I want a houseful of kids, that’s the thing. For their sake. I want them to have each other no matter what happens to us, Johnny and me. I want them to have a big close family even if one of us—you know. I just think that you and Aunt Bess had such a lonesome miserable life growing up, with your daddy dying and your mother abandoning you to that old woman who didn’t know a thing about kids. It must’ve been awful. I don’t want to do that to my kids; I want them to have a gang of siblings. Half a dozen—” She wiped her eyes, which had filled again, even the lids wet. “I wanted six, I did, no use putting it off on Johnny.”

  Oh, Bess, I thought, with some vexation, what a sad story you’ve handed my daughter. What a picture of our growing up, poor little match girls, the Coopers. I could see Bess with her dark curly hair, fat cheeks, and big grin that could crumple into sobs in thirty seconds. I tried the light approach. “Your aunt likes to dramatize,” I said. “Edith Huntt Cooper is a hard act to follow.” I scooted my chair closer as if for a confidence. “Did you ever hear how Bess used to joke about her marriage?”

  “She never talks about him. Randy?” Fannin sat up, at once interested.

  “Randy, Randy. He was a glamorous polo player from Camden, a fable, better than good-looking. She went to all his matches, just out of school she was then. She saw him get all his silver championship cups. When they married, all his teammates were in attendance. Then, she used to say, it dawned on her on her wedding day that she’d ended up with the rider instead of the horse.”

  Fannin looked shocked but joined me in a laugh. “Really?”

  “She used to tell them when she was at the Redfield Academy that she was an orphan. That she’d been raised in an orphanage.”

  “Aunt Bess?”

  I felt my irritation at my younger sister ebb away. I liked recalling Bess’s stories, her good nature, her funny way of dealing with growing up with horse posters instead of parents.

  “I have to go home today,” I told my daughter. “Will you be all right?”

  “Sure. I’m going to stay another night; Johnny said it was okay.” She looked as if she could use the rest. “Mom, guess who came to see me while I was here yesterday, did he tell you? My brother.”

  George, being a help to all of us. “I’m glad.”

  “He came in here and then went out to the house to see the boys. I don’t think they even remembered they had an Uncle George. I haven’t, honestly, I don’t think, Mom, seen him since Daddy’s funeral. We all went to Aunt Bess’s for Mother’s Day—I hope you didn’t get mad—and then—it seems like forever. He was great about my losing the baby, really upset. Imagine, my brother.”

  “I haven’t seen you two in the same location since your father died either.”

  “Yeah,” Fannin said. “Gosh. What if I have all these boys and then they grow up and live in different places? In Timbuktu and the Klondike and the Andes and Borneo, and never even write to each other.” Fannin looked at me, her mother, appalled. “I guess you don’t think about how it’s going to be from a parent’s point of view.”

  “Or from your child’s.…” And with that I enveloped her in a serious South Carolina hug, my daughter, whose slim
arms wound around me fiercely.

  I HEAVED HARRIET’S HEAVY garment bag into the trunk and maneuvered us along the tree-lined airport streets, turning right, west, at the clay embankment. I’d got to the airport with thirty minutes to spare, but it had taken time to park my generic Toyota among the Hondas and Hyundais. Soon, when the BMW plant opened in Greenville, we were going to think we were seeing a foreign car when we saw a Dodge or Chevrolet.

  Harriet leaned back in her seat. “I’m going to savor the scenery,” she said. “When you come from the swamps, this already seems like being in the Alps.” She was taking short breaths but her color was grand, as if she’d just come back from a stay at the shore.

  She was complaining about her flights. “Every seat on the plane was taken from Houston to Atlanta. I got stuck next to two women who were carrying on one of those reinforcement conversations that drive you up the wall. ‘I know, I know, I know,’ ‘You’re right, you’re right, you’re right.’ If echolalia is repeating everything twice, what is three times? ‘Sure, sure, sure.’ ‘I get it, I get it, I get it.’ And if that wasn’t enough, on the quickie from Atlanta to here, we hit some turbulence, and a woman near the front begins to see her life—her death actually—flash before her eyes. She starts screaming and hollering—I’ve never heard that before in my life—to be let off the plane. The flight attendant—we could hear her—called in ‘distressed passenger’ as we were landing. That applied to all of us by that time. It was one of those little DH-7s.”

  “You look wonderful,” I told her. I’d been so relieved when she came out of the gate, jaunty in a short skirt inches above her knee, her prize legs in sheer hose with a sheen to them, green high heels. Her face had that honey tan that blonds get, and was less drawn than the last time I saw her. What if Will was wrong? What if it really had shrunk away, the small-cell tumor, the currents radiating it to a tiny dried prune of no consequence?

  Harriet said, “I’ve got an amazing story, Sarah. That’s one reason I couldn’t stand it when you postponed my visit. My big news is, I found out whose blouse that was supposed to be.”

  Blouse? I had to think. The bow-tied gift Knox had so foolishly left behind on his closet shelf. “You did?”

  “I did. At Birthday Club, of awful places to find her. Let me start at the beginning. It was the Midsummer Night’s Party for husbands. I’ve known all that time, but I guess I wanted to tell you in person. Some things you just can’t say on the phone.”

  Besides, I thought, she’d been on radiation since that time. Perhaps this story was what she’d held on to, something saved back, something that was left to tell in her old style of arriving with a surprise.

  “It took forever to decide what to wear. I was scared to look in my closet, afraid I’d find turtlenecks cloning on the hangers. I ended up getting out everything I owned, and finally decided on the boat-neck amethyst-and-white Albert Nipon that’s as old as the Thicket, and I knew it was a smidge too bare and short, but the main thing was, it wasn’t new. I didn’t want to look like I’d bought a brand-new dress to try to vamp their flabby, bald, tiresome red-faced husbands.”

  “You got that dress for your fiftieth-birthday party.”

  “I did. And I decided, what the hell, I was going to add my pearl choker; I was sick of vandals deciding what I could and couldn’t wear. Besides, I had my .22 tucked in my evening bag already.”

  I listened as she re-created the evening of more than a month ago, her own jewel, mounted in its elaborate setting. I knew the Stagecoach Inn, so I could picture the event. Wagon wheels on the wall, heavy gilt chandeliers and Victorian flocked ruby wallpaper. And the requisite game dinner—rabbit terrine, venison medallions moutarde, duck breast suprême with walnuts, quail with watercress puree. Dishes no real hunter ever ate—much as the Depot here served homestyle meals never cooked at home.

  “Then—the most amazing thing, Sarah—when I got in the special party room, I saw that every single woman in Birthday Club had worn jewelry, too. As if we were all sick and tired of being scared out of our wits every time we left the house. They had dinner rings—how long since you’ve seen a dinner ring?—in aquamarines, tourmalines, moonstones, citrines, those big beautiful stones we used to wear. And pieces that had belonged to their grandmothers, old heirlooms: an opal brooch, a rose cameo, a topaz butterfly, a heart made of rubies that looked like red-hots, a bow of diamond baguettes. And, just for one minute, I wished that Knox had figured out that an emerald was my dearest wish. We could have posted a Brink’s guard at the door. I mean it.”

  I conjured up a military ball from boarding school days, Harriet and the other girls looking the same except their faces were forty years older, and their long formals had gems instead of corsages at the shoulder. The boys, in their military haircuts and glossy patent shoes, now with grandfather jowls and bellies. And myself, upstairs in the practice room on a pile of overcoats, getting out of my dog-walking trousers, my hair graying in a plait. Ned still pale and tubercular but having grown bald and looking strangely like Will. I had to smile.

  “Everything was going wonderfully,” Harriet was saying, “and I was actually having a terrific time. A redheaded dentist had given me the high sign that we were going to dance later, and I forgot that I’d ever been worried about coming alone. The Turtlenecks were off in some corner, talking to each other in their high-necked gray taffetas, and I was sitting with this realtor, Madge, and her stump-dumb spouse, who I’ve never been able to stand. And I was thinking, He’s the test case: is any man better than no man at all?”

  “And the answer?”

  “You bet. At a dance anyway.”

  I laughed.

  “They’d just put out the chocolate mousse with whipped cream when I found myself studying Madge’s outfit. She and her plank-brained mate had always sat with Knox and me at Midsummer’s, it was a sort of tradition. And she used to be so pretty, in a top-heavy kind of way, until she fell apart this fall. But I hadn’t put all that together.”

  It took me a few miles to register that Harriet wasn’t smoking. It took a few minutes to notice the absence of motion, the cigarette pack appearing from her handbag, the automatic flick of her lighter. It must be hard, I thought, listening to her, to lose such a long-time habit when she most needed it.

  “Anyway, Sarah, she was wearing this dress that had a white bib and faux man’s tie—with a red-dotted background and tiny black-dotted bow ties on it. And something just clicked. The bow ties, how much Knox and I used to see of her, the way she’d had the collapse this fall. And I remembered Knox saying to her last year at the table, ‘You look fit to be tied,’ making a joke, and how she’d looked back at him. I guess I didn’t want to see it, so I hadn’t. The same way I wanted to believe that Knox had bought that stupid thing for me in the wrong size.

  “Before I knew what I was doing, I leaned over and said to her, ‘I think I have a present that was intended for you. The tie that binds.’ I don’t even know where the words came from. And she looked at me funny, burst into tears and ran out of the room. When I went after her, all the rest of Birthday Club came, too, thinking it was time to duck into the powder room before the dancing started.

  “And, Sarah, I followed her into the bathroom and I reached into my purse, ready to point my gun at her stall. I actually did that. I was actually about to pull a gun on this woman.” She turned and looked at me, stricken. “I’m ashamed to tell it. I could die remembering. But I guess you don’t know what you’ll do.…”

  Or how scared you can get, I thought.

  “I stood there, looking down at the damn .22, too shocked to move, and then it turned comic, in a way. One of the Turtlenecks, named Jo, spied the gun in my bag and she said in her timid voice, ‘Me, too,’ and pulled out a big .38 from her satin purse. And then every single member of Birthday Club opened her bag and all of us had guns! We had ourselves an arsenal—five .38s, six .22s and one Tec-9. And when Madge came out someone shouted, making a joke, ‘Present arms,’ and we a
ll raised ours in the air. And I looked around at them, these women that I see every day, and I thought, What difference does it make if Knox bought one of them a blouse? We’re all of us in the same boat, fighting for our lives.”

  “We are,” I agreed.

  “Well, that’s all water under the dam now,” Harriet said, quoting Doll’s old line for ending a story.

  “You had a fright,” I told her, thinking of several things, the gun, her health.

  “The only thing is—how could Knox have picked someone with such short legs?”

  I laughed as I was meant to. She never stayed down long. Then I slowed the car and turned in a horseshoe off the highway—a blue line of hills, a glimpse of Georgia to the west, and fruit trees close at hand on either side of the narrow state road.

  “Madge moved to Houston, and I figure what the hell. One of these days I’m either going to hang that blouse out on the line and shoot every single bitty bow tie out, or I’m going to rewrap it and mail it to her, and she can cry her eyes out over that tacky size ten. Anyway, who knows? I may need her to sell my house for me one of these days. If I should become Mrs. Young Man’s Wife and decide to move.”

  I could hear a squeak in Harriet’s voice. I told myself to stop. Be with your friend. Leave the medicine to Will. I reminded myself that even he left it behind him off duty. That he walked the dogs, read his mysteries, towelled me dry. He didn’t try to diagnose everybody he ran into at the dairy counter at BiLo or having supper at the Depot.

  I felt a lurch in my midsection when the road curved past the cemetery, through it really, the old part sloping up a low hill on one side of the road, the new part stretching out flat on the other. On previous visits, I had mentioned that there were more people underground in Mineral Springs than aboveground. On previous visits, Harriet and I had sometimes stopped to walk around the sprawling burial grounds so different from the family plot in East Texas with its all-day grave-cleaning and sociable covered-dish dinners. Here each family was fenced off from the next by ornate ironwork or low stone walls overgrown with kudzu, honeysuckle, Virginia creeper, until there was so much vegetation you could hardly see the monuments until you were right on them.