Catching Genius

by Kristy Kiernan

  He leaned down to peck me on the lips and then gave a mock salute. “No problem, Sarge. What’s for dinner?”

  On Monday I fairly flew out of the house after Luke left, arriving at my mother’s breathless, a sinking pit of quicksand for a stomach and a large box containing my entire marriage clutched in my hands.

  Estella

  I wait until I hear Paul close his finishing room door and then drop to my knees beside our bed. The box is back there somewhere. My fingers wiggle, stretch, and finally brush against cardboard.

  I have to see her.

  I have to see me.

  The box is heavier than I remember, or, more likely, I am weaker than the last time I pulled these memories out. The last time I had been drunk, and I cry easily when drunk. I am sober now, and I am, thankfully, not prone to sentimentality when I am sober.

  And yet my heart is racing.

  For Whom the Bell Tolls, a gift from my father, reproaches me when I lift the flaps. It has not weathered the years well. I use it merely for its weight, to keep the envelopes from sliding around and damaging the pictures within.

  I wrinkle my nose as the musty smell hits me, and then I put the book aside and open the first manila envelope. These are pictures of Connie’s family that Mother has forwarded, pictures of her beautiful home, her beautiful husband, her beautiful children.

  It used to infuriate me, the thought of Mother writing cheerful descriptions on the back of each photo, sealing them in an envelope, writing out my address, mailing them off. The very effort she made of getting them to me angered me beyond reason. But I kept them, and didn’t tell her to stop sending them.

  I stuff them away; they don’t interest me right now. I don’t bother with the next two envelopes, filled with newspaper clippings, commendations, and awards, the stuff of childhood genius. It is the last envelope I am interested in.

  The pictures tumble out across my thighs and spill facedown to the floorboards. The old, ivory-bordered photos warm against my skin while I replace the other envelopes in the box and smooth the empty one on top of them with its flap open, ready to hide us at a moment’s notice.

  The first photo I turn over is an anomaly: Connie and I are together and we are both smiling. I don’t remember it being taken. I don’t remember smiling with Connie after the genius. I shuffle through the rest quickly.

  Connie, Connie, Connie. Smiling, shining like our mother.

  Me. Not smiling. And nothing like anyone I knew.

  I stuff them back into the envelope. Jam the book down on top. Shove the box beneath the bed.

  It is only when I stand that I realize I am still holding the first picture. It is clutched in my hand like a lottery ticket, full of promise, but doomed to disappointment. I place it on my nightstand and pretend that my hands aren’t shaking.

  I leave it there, crumpled at one side, the side I am in, and my warped smile mocks me out the door.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Mother flipped through the box of documents I brought and nodded before pouring me a cup of coffee. “You’re still determined to go through with this?” she asked, watching me carefully.

  I nodded slowly. “I think so.”

  “That’s not good enough. ‘I think so’ doesn’t deserve a consequence as serious as a divorce.”

  “Mom,” I said, and she winced. She hated Mom as much as I hated Constance, but I needed the closeness of it, the informality. “Tell me why you were prepared to leave Daddy. Please. I need to know.”

  “Well, no, you don’t need to know anything. This is your life you’re talking about changing, not mine.”

  It had always been this way. I knew little to nothing about her childhood, about her parents, who’d both died before we were born. All she had told us about them was that they were God-fearing Christians, good, sturdy people who’d raised her with a firm hand and a steady nature, if without material wealth.

  When I asked for stories of her childhood, she gave me one of two versions. If she was feeling happy she told me fairy tales about swimming in moonlit creeks, talking frogs, and shooting stars zooming so close to Earth that they kissed her sleeping cheek on their way by, leaving the delicate smattering of freckles I’d inherited from her.

  If she was feeling irritable or unhappy she told tales of a tiny, cramped house full of ghosts, beating off a pack of snarling dogs under a stormy sky, and teachers who’d sent her home for the humiliating offense of not having shoes. I had no real image of her as a child, no pictures, no mementos; and for the first time I felt that absence keenly.

  “Mother, I don’t know what to do. You’re right, divorce shouldn’t be an I don’t know. I am thinking about changing my family forever. Daddy’s dead; it can’t hurt him now for me to know.” I closed my eyes against her implacable face. “Help me for once, Mother; just help me.”

  “Open your eyes, Constance. You can’t go through life with your eyes closed. And it’s not your father I’m worried about hurting. Dredging up the past rarely makes people happy.”

  I opened my eyes, feeling chastised. “How bad was it?”

  She took her coffee to the glass doors leading to the patio and slid them open, and I followed her with my cup. She settled herself into a patio chair and gazed out at the Gulf, the morning sun unforgiving on her un-made-up face. I sat in the chair to her left and looked at the water too, giving her time.

  “You know your father wasn’t faithful, don’t you?”

  I thought of Graciela. “I figured,” I said. “Do they all do it?”

  “All men? No, no, I don’t believe they do. I read an article once that linked money and power to affairs, though. Makes sense. Money and power attract women, and men who make a lot of money are more likely to travel for business, more likely to have alibis. And I think women married to men with money, especially if they don’t have money of their own or if they have children, are more willing to look the other way. I did for a long time, and I don’t regret it now. But sometimes it’s time to put a stop to it.”

  “And you did?” I asked with a half-smile. It was hard to imagine my mother forcing my father to do, or not do, anything.

  “Yes,” she said, “I did. You find that hard to believe?”

  Embarrassed, I bit my lip and looked away from her. “Well, I just mean you and Daddy always seemed so happy, like everything was fine. And it wasn’t like he was a serial cheater or anything.”

  The hand holding the coffee cup halted about halfway to her lips and she slowly lowered it back down to her lap. “You think you had it tough, don’t you?” she asked softly.

  I flinched inside. I must have flinched on the outside too, because a bit of coffee spilled on my knee, and I set the cup on the small table in front of us. I’d heard that tone before, but rarely heard it turned on me. Suddenly, I felt expansively sorry for myself because yes, I did think I’d had it tough. My own mother didn’t have any idea what my life had really been like, how I’d struggled.

  She hadn’t had a superior older sister to live up to, or a father whose attention was so easily stolen by the promise of greatness, or the dread of going to school to face the disappointment of teachers, or the struggle to carve her own identity out of thin air.

  “You know, you’re a great one to talk,” I said, standing up and walking to the rail before turning around to face her with my arms crossed beneath my breasts, holding myself in, keeping myself together. “You’ve always had everything you wanted. You didn’t have to compete with a genius, or any sister for that matter. And Daddy might not have always been faithful, but he obviously didn’t flaunt it in front of your friends, and he spoiled you—”

  “Spoiled?” she interrupted. “You have no idea what you’re talking about, Constance. You don’t know what a tough life is.”

  “I don’t remember things being so tough for you. I remember you having nannies, and maids, and a rose garden, and plenty of damn shoes.”

  She shook her head and firmed her lips into a straight, severe lin
e, her too-angry-to-talk look. I turned back toward the Gulf, the railing pressing heat into my belly, my eyes watering at the glare of the sun on the water.

  “I was born with nothing,” Mother said quietly, bitterly, and I froze. These were not words I’d heard before, and I didn’t want to startle the story out of her by turning around. “I was born on Salt Island, off the coast of Georgia. No hospital, no doctor. The men on Salt were good ole boys, and I was lucky enough to be born to one who didn’t think it was his right to start touching me when I turned eight. Most of my friends weren’t so lucky.

  “We had to take a boat to the mainland for school. And I was sent home for not having shoes. I skipped most days, especially after the twins were born.”

  That made me turn around, my eyes wide, my heart beating wildly in my chest. “What? Twins? You had twins?” I whispered.

  She looked startled and then gave a sharp bark of a laugh. “No, Connie, no, I didn’t have twins. I was seven when my mother had twins, my sisters. She named them April and May, if you can believe it. Now, let me talk. If you interrupt me again I won’t be able to get through this, and I won’t repeat myself.”

  My mother had sisters. Two sisters. I stumbled back to my chair and lowered myself into it, and then turned to her, to ask the thousand questions that were forming in my mind, but she started to speak again, and I struggled to remain quiet.

  “My daddy had been a fisherman, but he was a gambler at heart. He lost the boat after the twins were born, and then he took off, but he came back—and he had money. I didn’t know where it was from, and I didn’t ask. Mama asked, though. She’d gotten Jesus after he’d left. And when she found out he’d won it playing cards, she left. With the minister. I took care of the twins. But then she came back too.

  “It went like that for a long time. Daddy would leave and come back, then Mama would leave for a while. After I turned twelve, she didn’t come back. The twins were only five. I took good care of them, but there was never enough money. I fished for food, gigged frogs for their legs. Daddy stayed awhile, but he couldn’t make any money, and so he stocked us up and left. He promised to be back in six weeks.

  “In four weeks a hurricane hit the island. We didn’t have radar, or television, or weathermen. We just had fishermen, and they knew a storm was coming, but not that. They didn’t know about that.”

  She stopped with a shudder and I wondered if I should say something, but I left it too long. When she started again her voice was different, with a tremor in it that I’d never heard before.

  “Anyway, it hit, and I took the twins and hid in our parents’ bedroom, under their bed. The girls were under me; I just tucked them up, shoving a little leg or a little arm under whatever bit of me I could, trying to shield them. The house disintegrated around us; the roof collapsed, hit the bed. It had these wood slats that kept the mattress up and they cracked me on the head, knocked me right out.

  “The girls probably thought I’d died, and when the storm passed I was still out cold. The water started coming, the storm surge. I know what that means now, but then I didn’t know that would happen—that it would just suck all that water away and then throw it right back at us. When I woke up I was choking on water, and the girls were gone. I imagine they were going for help. We found them the next day, caught in the root cavity of a tree taken down by the storm. They’d drowned. Their clothes had been torn right off by the water, and they were naked except for their shoes.”

  Tears were rolling down my face, but I barely noticed them. Mother stared out at the water, dry-eyed, and I reached out and put my hand on her arm. She shook it off and turned her head away.

  “You started this, might as well hear the rest,” she said harshly. I put my hand over my mouth. I wasn’t sure I wanted to hear any more.

  “Daddy came back when he heard the news. And I left with him that time. There was no house left for me to stay in anyway. Seventy-six people lived on Salt. More than half of them died in that hurricane, died or just disappeared. Most of the rest of them left when we did. Nobody said good-bye to each other, we just all hit the mainland and melted away. We rented a room in Atlanta, and Daddy worked out something with the landlady, so she watched me after school and made sure I had dinner, and then he left to find work.”

  She stopped for a moment and took a deep breath, her eyes fixed on the horizon but appearing to look far beyond it. I stayed quiet, afraid to jinx the outpouring of information, and felt triumphant when she gave her head a little shake and began to speak again.

  “He took me on one of his business trips once, for my birthday. We stayed in a fancy hotel in Louisiana, and he gave me money to have my hair done and to buy new clothes, and he had a new suit. We looked good. People stared at us, and one man in particular stared at me. He was a rich man, a man on vacation with a woman who wasn’t his wife, and he was so handsome.

  “I had my seventeenth birthday at the hotel, and the man asked me to dance after dinner. I’d never danced with a man before, but he knew how. My feet just followed him.”

  Her voice had grown dreamy and the angry lines of her mouth had softened. I risked a question. “Was it Daddy?”

  She turned to me with a half-smile. “Oh, yes, that was Sebastian. Anyway, he tried to make friends with my father. Kept trying. He sent the woman he was with away, and my father stayed in the room with me at night to make sure I didn’t sneak out. It was . . . like a dream, just like a dream. Daddy told him that he was in town looking at investment property, but was sticking around for a big poker game he was in on. Sebastian got in on the game too.”

  “Daddy played poker?” I asked incredulously. I couldn’t imagine it.

  “Lots of men did back then,” she said. “You want to hear this or not?”

  “Sorry.”

  “My father was winning, but your dad was giving him a game, and it came down to the two of them. I was watching from a corner, and on the last hand, Sebastian pushed all of his chips in and said, ‘I want to marry June.’ I nearly fainted. Daddy looked at me and laid his cards down. He’d won, and he took Sebastian’s money. And then he said, ‘If you marry her tomorrow, I’ll stand up with you and give you back the pot.’

  “And we were married in the morning. Daddy told me to never tell your father where we came from, and I never did. Daddy left the next day, and I was a wife.”

  I leaned back in my chair. Shock left me speechless for a moment, but the thrill of discovering this whole other life, this life of Southern poverty and motherless traveling, this life of deceit, made the questions come quickly and thoughtlessly to my lips.

  “How could he do that? It’s like you were a horse to be traded or something! A poker chip to be won.”

  “My father?” she asked, shooting me a look of surprise.

  “Yes, your father!”

  “Were you listening to anything I just told you, Connie? He wasn’t trying to get rid of me, he was giving me the gift of a life. What do you think would have happened to me? I was seventeen, with a fifth-grade education and a father who was always on the road. He gave me to him out of love, Connie. Parents do all kinds of things that might seem heartless, to their children. But they are done out of love.”

  “But you were only seventeen, Mother. You could’ve—”

  “What? Gone to college?”

  “I—no, I guess not. But what about Daddy’s family? God, they must have had a fit.”

  She laughed, nodding. “Oh, they did, they did. He wrote long letters to his father, and got little telegrams in return. He was already in trouble, traveling around, spending their money. I think his mother finally pointed out that if he was married he might finally settle down. I don’t know what all went on, but a few months later he got a telegram telling him to come home, and to bring his wife. And they were good to me, in their own way.”

  “Did you ever see your father again?”

  “Oh, yes,” she said. “He was still traveling, but I sent him money out of my allowance whenever
I could, and we met in Atlanta and then later New York.”

  “I wish I’d known him,” I said.

  “He died when you were just two.”

  “Oh. I’m sorry, Mom. Did you ever tell Daddy? About April and May?”

  “I wanted to tell him, but my father wouldn’t let me. He knew the kind of family Sebastian was from. It was bad enough that he’d sprung a seventeen-year-old unknown on them. They would never have accepted me if they’d known about my life on Salt, about my family. He didn’t want to ruin the life he’d given me. It was the right decision, Connie. Your father would never have understood, and I got by. I learned to read better, learned a lot of things just by watching you girls grow up. Did you know I used to sneak in your room and borrow your school-books?”

  I shook my head in amazement. “No, I never knew,” I said. And I really hadn’t. I’d never suspected anything about my own mother’s past. But then children grow up believing what their parents tell them. It simply receded into background that I didn’t care about as I got older.

  And I was as guilty as my mother. I’d never told my own children about my childhood. I never told them about the library full of books, or the music room full of memories, the loss of my sister, or my father. But at least Mother’s father had given her a better life. She still knew he loved her.

  “I wish I’d known sooner,” I said to her, and this time it wasn’t an accusation, but sympathy for the history she’d carried by herself for so long. When I placed my hand upon her arm again she didn’t twitch it off.

  “Go get my hatbox,” she said, still gazing out at the Gulf. “The one with the blue stripes. It’s under my bed.”

  I didn’t question her. The hatbox was large and round; I dragged it from under the bed by its short ribbon handle. It was light, and I contemplated a quick peek, but Mother called me and I hurried out to her, placing the box on her lap. Her hands fluttered over it like butterflies before settling on the edges of the lid and lifting it off. I stood beside her, looking alternately at her drawn face and the box while she peeled back layers of brittle ivory paper.