Semmes scratched in her ear with a straw, and presently, smoothing out her dress, she got up and walked over to the fish pond. She turned one or two of the lawn chairs straight on the paving around the water, brushing them free of twigs and droppings. Gulls were the worst. Sometimes, when stiff weather came on, rain hanging in dark splotches way out on the gulf, the gulls sailed in to refugee. Once they ate the goldfish. The glass-top table needed polishing. That was Miss Annie’s job. Mister Lawrence could dip trash from the pool. The car would ease in through the gate. Soon they would all be out here, getting drunk and acting crazy about one another, with Dee-dee in a big prissy sash and white socks, passing canapes. A goldfish, biggest in the pool, came above the surface and looked Semmes in the eye.
Semmes had a familiar spirit she often spoke with, something she’d got many years ago, at just about Mary Dee’s age. She’d been to the nuns’ school and nothing she had learned there discouraged her from having this spirit around, though in one way or other, what with so many things happening, wars and elections and everything, times different, she never talked about it. Every now and then she picked up a piece of colored glass, a sort of blue glass, apt to be iridescent, some shells, some little rock, and just going along, whenever she took a notion, she threw these things aside, and maybe the spirit got them. Did it eat them? How would she know what it did?
“Organdy’s scratchy,” said Mary Dee, upstairs and complaining. “It’s a beautiful dress,” said her mother. “Even Daddy noticed.”
“I wore it Sunday.”
“Semmes can press it. Just take it in the kitchen, hang it on the chair. I haven’t got time.”
“Mama, why do we have to have the Meades?”
Her mother, filing her nails, fresh from her bath, sitting in a loose cotton robe and slippers, legs crossed, eyes lowered, flashed her a look and smiled. “Don’t you say that in front of them, monkey.”
“But why do we?”
“They brag on things out here. We went to their open house once, after the Sugar Bowl. They have this lovely old house with original floorboards a yard wide. Then they call up and say Come to Antoine’s, but we never can.” She threw the file aside. “I don’t know. Daddy says that too. I just don’t know. I declare I don’t.”
“So much to do,” said Mary Dee, who did not have to do anything but march into the kitchen with her dress. She sat in the chaise longue and let it comfortably engulf her. She looked out at the sky. From here you could see the water. Two gulls were sailing so far up they looked carefully shaped and thin, like the scalloped edges of a pillow case. They passed across the daytime moon. “First it’s over yonder, now it’s over here,” said Mary Dee.
“What is, precious?”
“The moon.”
“Don’t bite your nails,” said her mother.
“‘A girl is known,’” said Mary Dee, quoting—she had felt guilt for a moment, then she joked it away—“‘by her hands, her skin, her carriage, and her hair. We cannot all be beautiful.’”
“You’re getting too smart,” said her mother. “Who’s going to tell you things if I don’t? Someday you’ll be glad to know all that.”
“Have the Meades got any children?”
“Just that brother that always comes.”
“He caught the hail, I bet,” said Mary Dee.
“That was the silliest thing,” said her mother. “They should have gone straight back. Right into that black cloud.”
“Daddy said Come hell or high water.”
“Daddy said that but you ought not to.”
A wonderful odor, spicy and rich, began to come up from below. They both looked toward the direction of it, as though it could not only be seen but could look back.
“That bisque,” her mother murmured, biting her lip with hunger and pride, a combination not so rare in that household.
Mary Dee jumped up suddenly. She had not gone swimming at the pool that day, but the feeling of swimming came strongly over her, out of habit, so she ran and dived straight into the bed, kicking her brown legs and flailing her arms until exhausted.
“Them old Meades.” Now she was mimicking Semmes. “I wish they’s gone already.”
Her mother shot her a glance, even sharper than before. “Don’t you know better than to carry on like that? What are you trying to grow up to be? That’s what I’d like to know! Stop listening to us! Stop hearing anything we say!”
THE LEGACY
In the stillness, from three blocks over, Dottie Almond could hear a big diesel truck out on the highway, climbing the grade up to the stoplight, stopping, shifting gears and passing on.
She went and brushed her hair that was whiter than pull candy and rubbed a little dime store lipstick on her mouth. In the bathroom window, her cousin Tandy’s big white buckskin shoes all but covered the sill. They were outlined with swirling perforated leather strips, toe and heel and nest for laces, and had been placed there to dry. When he got back from Memphis, he would probably be going out on a date or out on the highway someplace or “just out,” which was what he said when you never knew. He had never asked Dottie anywhere, never told her anything, never talked to her once. She kept notes on him from such things as cleaned up shoes.
She had heard them—Aunt Hazel and Tandy—out in the living room the night she came. They had thought she was asleep, she had been so dead tired when she’d gone to bed.
“One more mouth to feed, huh?” Tandy said. Whatever he said, it was always as if he were telling jokes, the subject of this present joke being what his mother had got into about Dottie.
“You don’t have to look at it that way,” Aunt Hazel said. “She had to be somewhere.”
“Just keep her out of my things. She gets in my things, she’s going to know it.”
“Try and be nice to her.”
“Not paying us a cent.”
“Well, I know, but try your best. Be nice to her.”
“Oh, I’ll be nice to her.” The tone went up; it was an unpromising voice, off center. If it made a promise, the promise might be its opposite because a word had got twisted around. “I’ll be nice to her, all right.”
Dottie’s father worked in Birmingham and did not make much money. She’d had to go somewhere, which was why Aunt Hazel had taken her in. There was also a Great Aunt Maggie Lee Asquith, who (she had said) would have done the same and that she ought to, but she was too old, all alone in a big house in the middle of a Delta “place.” A young girl like that—gul, she called it—a young gul like that ought to have young people around. Aunt Hazel and Tandy lived in a town with young people in it. They were the ones to take her in.
“How long you been with Miss Hazel?” The speaker was a Mr. Avery Donelson, to whose law office Dottie had just been summoned.
“About a year.”
Hanging down from the straight chair one foot couldn’t quite touch the floor. She crossed her legs, in order to resemble any other girl, though the man at the desk gave no sign of noticing. She had heard her father once say that Mr. Avery Donelson was a high class fellow.
“Your family has a high mortality rate,” he remarked, and seemed almost prepared to be amused about it.
Dottie didn’t laugh. Death to her had nothing to do with anybody except her mother (who had held her hand when she hurt from polio and who was right there, everything they did to her. “When you hurt, I hurt, baby. Just think about that. Only I hurt twice as bad.” Nobody else who had died—or lived either—had ever said that.) However, Aunt Hazel’s husband Uncle Jack had died of a stroke uptown one hot day three years ago, and Aunt Maggie Lee had gone quick, from cancer, just last spring. Dorothy hadn’t attended the funeral. Her daddy wouldn’t let her. He had come over from Birmingham to stay with her while Aunt Hazel went. Aunt Maggie Lee was her mother’s side of the family. “You go on, Hazel,” Daddy said. “My little ole sugar’s not going to any more ole funerals.” He had taken her out to eat in a restaurant and then, as they couldn’t find anything to talk
about, he took her to the picture show. The show was sad so she got to cry in it. What she was thinking about was her mother’s funeral. Maybe he had known that because he held her hand. When they got home Aunt Hazel and Tandy had got back from the Delta where Aunt Maggie Lee’s funeral was held that afternoon, and Daddy gave Dottie a lot of wet smacking kisses and called her his little ole honey bun, and went off back to Birmingham, late as it was. She thought that Aunt Hazel made him nervous. “He’s always got business somewhere,” was what Aunt Hazel said….
“I knew your Aunt Miss Maggie Lee pretty well,” Mr. Avery Donelson said. “She was quite a stepper.” He seemed to be enjoying himself.
“What’s a stepper?” Dottie asked. So far she hadn’t smiled; feeling herself observed, she kept her blue eyes steady, thought of her skin which was darker than her taffy-white hair.
“She was a fine lady,” he said. “Knew how to dress, how to talk. Kept a good house, set a good table. Lived in good circumstances. Husband was a planter. Left her well-fixed.”
Dottie had herself known Aunt Maggie Lee. She and her mother had gone once or twice to visit her and stayed overnight, in the Delta, a long way from Birmingham. Mother was a little nervous and hoped Dottie and she were behaving all right, especially at the table. Aunt Maggie Lee sat up straight in graceful antique chairs; yet on the second day she lay down on a sofa for a while. (“Maggie Lee’s tired,” Mother said to someone when they returned. “I think something’s wrong.”) She had a kind of cosmetics Dottie had never seen in stores and her bathrooms were rosy, her house soft with rugs and dim lights because the Delta in the summer was full of glare; air conditioning was essential and curtains had to stay drawn. With her mother out of the room, Aunt Maggie Lee questioned Dottie extensively on a number of subjects. “Do you have a hobby?” she asked. “I collect things,” Dottie said. “What, for instance?” “Bird cards from Arm and Hammer soda boxes, for one thing.” “What else?” “Pencils, all different colors.” When she was sick, for some reason, everybody started giving her boxes of pencils. She had all colors now. If she got one the same color as another she would go out and exchange it for a color she didn’t have. “Birds are of some interest,” said Aunt Maggie Lee. “But pencils….”
“She kept up with you,” Mr. Avery Donelson went on. “She knew about your making good grades in school. She thought you must have a little bit of what it took. I wanted to see you alone because of what she did for you. She made a special bequest for you before she died.”
“Bequest?”
“A settlement … money … all yours. But—a secret.”
Dottie was quaking again now; another one had known of her, thought and spoken of her, made her a secret and formal gift. It sounded like something God might do.
“You’re not interested in how much?” Mr. Avery Donelson finally said.
“Five hundred dollars?” Then she blushed. Greed was what she knew she’d sounded like.
“How about ten thousand?”
“Ten thousand? What? Pennies?” A wise crack was not the right thing. She had just reached the conclusion it was all a big joke.
“Dollars, young lady. And if you don’t want ’em, there’s plenty that will.”
“I didn’t mean that. It seemed like—It was a surprise, that’s all.”
“Don’t you like surprises?”
“It was a big surprise.”
“You sing in school, I hear.”
So he knew that, too. Her contralto voice had a rich thrill in it when she let go with a song. She and everybody else had found out about this by accident, trying out songs. They all liked to hear her, even the teachers, and they got her to sing at school programs sometimes. There would be dances, too, to sing at, but she wouldn’t go to them. If you were crippled it was better not to go. But on rainy days she could hold the student body down in the auditorium at recess, singing almost anything anybody wanted to play for her. Her mother had never known she could sing, not like that.
“What do you want to be?” Mr. Avery Donelson pressed her. “That’s a good sum of money, you know. Set up in trust until you turned eighteen, it could see you some of the way through college. Your Aunt Hazel wouldn’t be able to afford to send you to college.”
“Tandy doesn’t like it because I live there free of charge,” said Dottie. “He thinks I ought to pay. Maybe Aunt Hazel would think it, too, if she knew I could.”
“Then don’t mention it,” he said at once. “You don’t have to. We can say it’s in trust for you, just for college.”
“But it’s not, is it?”
“She wanted you to decide, that’s all. Me to administrate, advise. You to decide.”
Through slats in the venetian blinds Dottie could see the town water tank, painted silver, the tops of the trees, see the still, hot, morning sky. The window air conditioner purred. Mr. Avery Donelson had brown and white horizontally striped curtains, a rug, a desk, some black leather chairs. His secretary was outside and the door was closed. He would never call a daughter “little ole honey bun,” and if he took her to dinner he would know what to talk about. He had known Aunt Maggie Lee who was a stepper like himself and who had picked Dottie out for possible entry into a world different from Aunt Hazel’s.
But did she have to be what they had decided, whatever it was? They had taken her consent for granted. She was dazed.
“I got to think it over, don’t I?”
The carpet took her halting walk. The man at the desk—grey, unmoving, well-suited but casually rumpled—had stopped smiling, sat watching instead, his attention all finally upon her. He rose to open the door. She was a small girl, came hardly to his top vest button.
“It’s in the bank for you. I’m supposed to do anything you say, young lady.” He pressed her hand.
Then she was through the office, down the stairs and on the hot sidewalk that led back to Aunt Hazel’s, hot and chill together in the scald of the sun, a jerky progress through the dazzle.
All that money poured out on me, me, ME! She almost struck herself on the forehead. Transparent as a locust’s wing the frail self within tried to stir, to take up whatever was meant by it; since it was recognized, it ought to emerge and fly. But all it was was Dorothy Almond, plodding back toward her few small treasures and necessities, toward pencils and bird cards no two the same, her four or five cotton dresses, her slacks and blouses, her new white sandals.
When she came in the front door the phone was ringing. “I called you twice,” said Aunt Hazel, on the other end.
“I was in the bathtub.”
“You must have stayed till you shrivelled. I have to work through dinner. Just fix yourself something.”
“Yessum.”
“Did the paper ever come?”
“Yessum.”
“Did Tandy call?”
“No’m. I don’t guess he did.”
“I don’t reckon so. I’ll see you this evening, honey.”
Dottie went and looked to see if the big white male shoes were still on the bathroom window sill. They were. There was nowhere else they could have gone. Men’s shoes, white, heavy, secretive, knowledgeable—they derided her as much after as before Mr. Avery Donelson’s call had smashed into her silence. All else had changed and diminished; they were the same. What did she expect? She had heard of a distant cousin who had stuck his finger up an empty socket to see whether, since the bulb would not work, the lamp was broken. It wasn’t. Was it a shock she had expected when she put her hand out and ran her fingers over those shoes, heel to vamp to toe? Shoes like these, only brown, were now treading pavement in Memphis, Tennessee, with Tandy in them. He was going to know the minute he looked that something had happened to her, and he would find out what it was, right away. Now she was scared. A call to life was one thing, but getting the first breath kicked straight out of you—It would happen if she wasn’t careful. She called up Avery Donelson.
“You said I could have anything, anytime.”
“That’s right.
”
“Can I have five hundred dollars, then?”
“Certainly.”
“Can I get it at two o’clock?”
“That’s possible.”
“Will you put all the rest where nobody can get it, just tell them if they ask you that five hundred dollars was all there was, that was all?”
A hesitance. “If you say so.”
She had climbed his answers like stairsteps, one by one; they had taken her higher and higher, to the very top, and at that top—like saying “Walk!” the way they had in the hospital and she had held her breath and walked, the leg feeling liquid at first and numb, then thin as a toothpick but holding—so at this final moment in what was happening now, she had to jump, which was more than walk; and the jump was trust.
“Do you promise?” She clutched the receiver. Her eyes were squinched up tight.
“I promise.” She was held, so far, unfailing.
The bus to Birmingham had left, as Dottie had known it would from visiting her father, at two-thirty. She was on it. Near a window, bolt upright with five hundred dollars—less the price of the ticket—in her purse, she was drawn forward above the landscape like a pulled-out string. In the Birmingham bus station, she dialed Daddy on the pay telephone, holding her finger on his number in the book. A woman’s voice answered “Hell-o?” too loud. Dottie asked for Mr. Almond, then added, for some reason, “I’m his daughter,” but the woman said she had the wrong number. She tried again, but though she let the phone ring six times, nobody answered it. Maybe he was still at work. She tried Southern Railway, where he had his office, but only got the ticket counter, and when she tried to explain, they couldn’t hear her, there was such a lot of noise at the other end, and then she was out of change. She walked out into the station, which smelled of frying hamburgers, still remembering the woman’s voice on the phone. She attained to an enormous lack of conviction about things involved in finding Daddy, and seeing a bus with Miami on the front, she bought a ticket and climbed into it. On the bus, at intervals, she slept. Miami was not till the next day. When she got there, she didn’t know what to do, so took another bus that said Key West. In Key West there was nothing to do either, but it was the end. Dottie went to a motel of separate cabins in a shady park full of plants, rented one, and fell asleep.
On the Gulf Page 3