Savannah Blues

by Mary Kay Andrews

  For the rest of America, 1970 was a year of revolution. For the Foleys of Savannah, it was the year my forty-year-old mother produced a living miracle—me.

  Up until my mother realized a really rotten case of heartburn was actually a pregnancy that was six months along, nobody had ever really expected any big surprises from Marian Foley. Having a baby at forty was the last thing my mother expected out of middle age. I know, because whenever I’ve crossed her over the years, she’s told me so.

  “Forty,” she always says, crossing her arms over her bosom in the classic martyred-matron pose. “To think I waited all those years for you. A miracle. That’s what it was. Father Keane said you were a gift from Our Lady. Because of all the novenas I made.”

  Once, at a family party, when my father got into the Jim Beam with the bad uncles, he heard my mother tell that story once too often.

  “Bullshit,” he bellowed. “It wasn’t the damned novenas. It was a busted Trojan!”

  Mama didn’t speak to him for six months.

  And so, more than thirty years after that precipative prophylactic incident, on the hottest day of July, I set out for Beaulieu to pay my respects to the late Anna Ruby Mullinax. And, of course, to see the treasures of Beaulieu.

  Ever since I can remember, the place has fascinated me. We used to pass it on our Sunday-afternoon drives, and Daddy would slow the car down so we could get a good look down that long, live-oak-lined driveway. You couldn’t see the house from the road, just the trees dripping Spanish moss and the rusted wrought-iron gateway with Beaulieu written in arching cursive letters.

  Once, when I was a teenager, a boyfriend took me for a boat ride on the Skidaway River and pointed out the ruins of the plantation’s old slave quarters, barely visible through the green-and-gold swath of marsh grass that separated Beaulieu from the river. There had been a long dock once, stretching out over the marsh to a landing on the river, but all that was left by the late eighties were rotted pilings populated by giant brown pelicans who sat in the sun and blinked and yawned in the relentless heat.

  It was high tide, so we ran the boat up on the gray mud riverbank and snuck onto the property. The boyfriend’s name was Danny Stipanek. We only lasted three months as an item, mostly because Danny, who was nineteen and getting ready to enlist in the Marines, was perpetually horny, whereas I was afraid of getting pregnant, or worse, in Savannah, getting a bad reputation. That day, though, something came over me. Not the terminally tumescent Danny Stipanek, but the cool, velvet beauty of Beaulieu.

  I didn’t get pregnant, just sunburned and chigger-bit in the worst possible places. Danny Stipanek drifted out of my life and into the Marine Corps just as it was time to start my senior year of high school in the fall. I always think of him now when I see those television recruiting commercials for the Marines. The few. The proud. The horny.

  My father always calls the obituaries “the Irish sports page.” The day after BeBe’s phone call, I saw the funeral notice for Anna Ruby Mullinax. Just as BeBe had promised, there were no survivors. And as she’d promised, there’d be a memorial service at Beaulieu. A chance for an advance showing.

  That Friday, I slipped my best dress into a plastic dry-cleaner’s bag and hung it carefully over the passenger seat of the truck. I thought of the dress as my homage to Zelda Fitzgerald—buttercup yellow ankle-length silk voile, with a matching silk underslip. I’d found it in a plastic garbage bag full of old clothes a year earlier when workers were tearing down an old Victorian house on East Thirty-eighth Street.

  Dressed in my favorite baggy khaki shorts, faded T-shirt, and sneakers, I made my usual Friday-morning rounds. I’d circled four estate sales in the classifieds of the Savannah Morning News but only one turned up anything worth buying. After the sales, I hit the Goodwill store on Victory Drive, the St. Vincent DePaul Thrift Shop, and finally, the This N’ That.

  Mr. Meshach Greenaway runs the TNT. It’s a homely little concrete block box that used to be a lawn mower repair shop, until Mr. Greenaway discovered he could make more money hauling away white people’s junk than he could fixing black people’s busted Snappers.

  The TNT is over in what my mama calls “the quarters”—one of her typical euphemisms for Roosevelt Park, a modest, mostly black neighborhood a few miles from my parents’ own all-white suburban ranch-style neighborhood.

  Mr. Greenaway saw me coming. He opened the door and cracked a smile, his blue-black face dripping with perspiration. He pointed toward a towering pile of boxes that blocked the entire front of the shop.

  “Been waitin’ for you, Weezie,” he said, taking a sip from his ever-present plastic foam cup of ice water. “Take a look over there, girl. That there’s all the attic and garage of Mr. Arnold Lowenstein of East Forty-sixth Street.” He lowered his voice, in case of spies.

  “Mr. Lowenstein, he the one owns Low-Low Liquors. Used to anyway. He dead now. Got that big old redbrick house with the hedge around it, over on the corner of Atlantic Avenue.”

  The address he’d mentioned was prime territory, a wealthy settled neighborhood, big houses, and old money.

  Mr. Greenaway nudged me. “Take a look.”

  Oh, the junk!

  The Low-Low Liquor Lowensteins were prominent in all the right circles in Savannah, and they’d had four kids. They were big wheels at Temple Mickve Israel. Cissy Lowenstein had been a grade ahead of me at St. Vincent’s Academy, Walter a year behind me over at Benedictine. In case you’re wondering, the way it works in Savannah, rich WASP kids go to Country Day School and working-class Catholics and rich Jews go to the parochial schools.

  Anyway, the kids would have taken all the “good” stuff, I knew. So there was no sterling silver, cut glass, or bone china, nothing with an English pedigree or a French accent. It was just a good old bonanza of baby-boomer Americana.

  The Lowensteins had been savers, bless their hearts. Practically nothing had been thrown away since Mr. Arnold had gotten back from World War II. Of course, none of it was stuff my local dealers would touch.

  There was a whole carton of Fire-King jadeite dishes, with sectioned luncheon plates, matching coffee mugs, cereal bowls and chop plates, enough to stock a small 1950s diner.

  Another box yielded mint-condition magazines from the thirties and forties; Field and Stream, Boys’ Life, Argosy, Collier’s and Vanity Fair. The covers were original color illustrations by the biggest names of the era. The Field and Streams alone would bring fifteen dollars a pop from my antiquarian book guy in Charleston.

  I pawed through the boxes like a woman possessed, rejecting thirty years worth of National Geographic s and all Mr. Lowenstein’s banking records from the 1950s, but separating out a stack of hemstitched Irish linen bedsheets and pillowcases, yellowing lace curtains, and a pile of women’s satin and silk slips, nighties, and peignoirs. When I opened a metal foot-locker containing Mr. Lowenstein’s World War II army uniforms, I knew I’d found something good. Stashed under the uniform was a fabulous cache of forties and fifties pinup girl calendars, playing cards, and magazines. As soon as I spotted the first Vargas girl calendar, I began to appreciate the fact that Arnold Lowenstein had been a true connoisseur of nudie art. I loved him more when I found the first issue of Playboy, dated 1951, and the subsequent issue that featured the famous Marilyn Monroe pictorial.

  After an hour, I was filthy, smudged with dust and mildew, my clothes littered with dead silverfish. I reeked of mothballs, but I was happy.

  I sat back on my heels and looked up at Mr. Greenaway, who’d been pretending to read the newspaper.

  “How much?” I asked, gesturing toward the pile I’d accumulated.

  He sucked his teeth, closed his eyes, took a pencil stub, and scribbled numbers on the margin of the newspaper page.

  “Look like a hundred seventy-five to me,” he said. “And that’s ’cause you a regular.”

  I felt a stab of Catholic guilt coming on. The stuff was worth at least four hundred dollars, even buying wholesale, which I w
as doing. I was fairly sure I could make at least three times that, if my usual dealers were in a buying mode and if I hadn’t made any stupid mistakes. But I had exactly two hundred dollars in cash on me, and I was trying to budget my buying to free up enough cash for the upcoming Beaulieu sale.

  “It’s worth more than that, Mr. Greenaway,” I said. “Those green dishes are jadeite. Really trendy. The plates alone go for thirty-five dollars apiece in Atlanta.”

  Mr. Greenaway pushed his sweat-stained baseball cap to the back of his head. “That right?” he said, picking up one of the diner dishes, looking at it with new respect.

  I took the roll of twenty-dollar bills out of the black leather fanny pack I wear strapped around my waist, peeled off seven bills, and handed them to him. “I’m kind of strapped this week,” I said. “How about I take everything but the dishes for one hundred forty dollars. If you don’t sell them, maybe I can come back next week, after I turn this stuff around.”

  Mr. Greenaway took the money and tucked it into the bib pocket of his overalls. “Go on ahead and take the dishes, Weezie,” he said. “You good for it. Think I don’t know that?”

  By the time we got everything loaded in my truck, it was already eleven-thirty. I’d have to rush to my parents’ to get showered, dressed, and over to Beaulieu.

  I whizzed in the kitchen door, past Mama, who was at the sink peeling tomatoes for my father’s lunch. Daddy always has the same lunch during the summer; a tomato sandwich on white bread with Blue Plate mayonnaise, Lay’s potato chips, and a Diet Pepsi.

  My father was taking his midmorning nap, I knew. Since he retired from the post office, he has a regular routine; breakfast, newspaper, coupon clipping, nap, lunch. Then, yardwork, nap, television game shows, dinner.

  “OK if I take a shower?” I asked, not waiting for an answer.

  “Weezie?” Mama said, looking up. “What are you up to?”

  “In a hurry,” I said, grabbing a handful of potato chips as I passed.

  My hair was still damp from the shower when I came back into the kitchen, wearing my yellow Zelda dress.

  Mama put the plate of sandwiches on the kitchen table and eyed me with suspicion.

  “You goin’ to a dress-up party in July?”

  “No, ma’am,” I said. “I’m going out to Beaulieu. To Miss Anna Ruby Mullinax’s memorial service.”

  As soon as I’d said it, I knew it was a mistake.

  “Jean Eloise Foley, don’t you dare,” Mama said, setting her iced tea glass down on the table with a thud. Her thin, blue-veined nostrils flared from the outrage of it all. “That’s the most sacrilegious thing I have ever heard. I won’t have it, you hear?”

  When she’s drinking Four Roses watered down to look like iced tea, something she usually does 1 to 4 P.M. year-round, Mama thinks everything is either outrageous or sacrilegious.

  “The paper said family and friends would be received for the memorial service at Beaulieu starting at one P.M. today,” I pointed out. “She doesn’t have any family left. Who’s to say I’m not a friend?”

  “You’re not,” Mama said. “We don’t know any of those people. People like the Mullinaxes don’t know people like the Foleys.” She leaned in closer to me, sniffed my dress, and made a face. “People like the Mullinaxes don’t know people who pick through other people’s garbage for their clothes.”

  I ran my hand down the front of the dress, which I’d spent hours hand-washing, mending, and pressing. Suddenly, I didn’t feel like a Zelda. I felt like a zero. Mama has a talent for that.

  “This dress has the original Hattie Carnegie label,” I said quietly. “If I decided to sell it, I could get at least two hundred dollars from one of my vintage dealers in New York. Maybe more if I auctioned it on eBay.”

  “You can’t go out to that woman’s house,” Mama insisted.

  “She’s dead,” I said. “She won’t mind a bit.”

  Mama sipped her bourbon/tea. “It’s disgraceful,” she said. “What if one of the Evanses is there? Tal’s mother and daddy run around in that crowd. What if one of them sees you there?”

  I forced a smile and dipped a phony little curtsy. “I’ll say ‘Hello, Genevieve. Hello, Big Tal. So nice to see you again. I’m just here to see how the other half lives, now that your son left me and ripped me off for most everything I own. Please give my regards to Little Tal, and tell him I hope he and his darling Caroline rot in hell.”

  Mama got up abruptly, went to the refrigerator, pulled out an aluminum tray of ice cubes, and clinked more cubes into the tall glass already standing on the kitchen counter.

  “I still can’t believe you’ve ended up like this,” she said accusingly. “Tal was perfect for you. You had the perfect life.” Her nearly nonexistent upper lip quivered, the fine downy hairs rippling like a miniature crop of wheat. “Now look at you. You live in a garage. No job, no husband, no prospects. What kind of life is that?”

  Daddy walked into the kitchen as Mama was launching into her “no prospects” spiel. He had the television listings folded into a neat square, his afternoon viewing plans all mapped out. He stared down at Mama’s drink on the countertop, frowned, then looked over at me.

  “If you’d just get a job and then quit, I could tell people what kind of work it is that you’re out of,” Daddy said, chuckling as he always did when he pulled this line on me.

  He reached around to his back pocket, took out his black leather billfold and extracted two ten-dollar bills. “Here,” he said, giving me a wink. “To tide you over.”

  I pushed the money away. “I’m fine, Daddy. Really.”

  He looked at my dress, grabbed my hand, folded my fingers over the bills. “Buy yourself something nice. A new dress.”

  Like twenty bucks could buy a new dress. Daddy still thought Cokes cost a dime. I tucked the bills in the breast pocket of his short-sleeved dress shirt. “Keep your money,” I said. Be sweet, Weezie, I thought. Even if it kills you. “Tell you what, Daddy. Play my numbers in the lottery. It’s up to eleven million this week. If you win, you can give me half.”

  He was getting annoyed now. He did that when I showed signs of having outgrown my training bra and my pink princess telephone—both of which were still ensconced in my old bedroom at the back of the house.

  “Just keep it ’til you get a job and move out of that garage,” he said, shoving the money back into my hand.

  “I’m self-employed, not unemployed. And it’s a carriage house, not a garage,” I said, my voice tight. “My carriage house is a historically significant structure on the most beautiful street in the historic district.”

  “For Christ’s sake! It’s a garage behind the house your husband lives in with his girlfriend,” Daddy said.

  “Ex-husband,” Mama said, always helpful. “I guess we should be grateful she’s got a roof over her head, Joe. If it weren’t for your brother James, she’d be out on the streets. Or back here, living with us.”

  Be sweet, Weezie, I thought, biting my lip. But I knew I’d live in a Dumpster in hell’s back alley before I moved back into that princess pink shrine at my parents’ house.

  From their point of view, I was a mess, I knew. I was over thirty, newly divorced, with no money or direction or marketable skills. Dropping out of the local community college to marry Talmadge Evans III had seemed like a good idea when I’d done it ten years ago. The ink on his Georgia Tech architecture degree was barely dry, and we were tired of having sex in the back seat of his mother’s big white Lincoln Continental.

  Genevieve Evans has always driven Lincolns, and his father, Big Tal, has always driven Cadillacs. Tal’s family are what Mama likes to call “well-fixed.”

  In Savannah, that’s a euphemism for old, Episcopalian money. “Filthy rich” on the other hand, is new, Yankee money. “Stinking rich” is Jew money. If a woman is “popular,” it means she puts out. If a man is “artistic,” he’s gay. If a rich kid is “troubled,” he’s a sociopath. It’s easy if you’ve lived here long
enough. And the Foleys have always lived in Savannah. Well, always since Aloysious Francis Foley came here from county Kerry, Ireland, in the 1850s to help lay track for the Southern Railroad.

  Daddy turned on the television on the kitchen counter, sat down at the chrome-and-Formica dinette table, and unfolded his television viewing chart. He frowned. Jeopardy would not be on for another half hour. He would have to settle for Wheel of Fortune.

  “Selling junk!” Daddy muttered. “What the hell kind of work is that?”

  “I’m a picker,” I told my father for the bazillionth time. “I buy antiques at the source and fix them up and sell them to antique dealers. It’s a real job and I make real money.”

  “Garbage picker,” Mama said, lapping up her bourbon/tea.

  “Look at the time,” I said, edging toward the door. “Bye-ee.”

  “What’s your hurry?” Daddy asked. “Have lunch. You look like you could use a free meal.”

  I snatched another handful of potato chips and dashed for the door. “Thanks!” I called over my shoulder.

  Chapter 3

  James Aloysious Foley leaned back in his chair and studied the wooden fan blades doing slow circular laps around the high pressed-tin ceiling over his head. He sighed, then looked back at the woman sitting in the wing chair opposite his desk, who was waiting for him to say something profound.

  “You see, Father James,” she began, dabbing nervously at her forehead with a crumpled tissue, “I don’t want a divorce. Divorce is a sin. I just want you to fix it so that Inky brings his paycheck home like he’s supposed to.”

  “Mrs. Cahoon, please,” James said. “I’m not Father James anymore, remember? I’m out of the priesthood. I’m a lawyer. Now, from what you’ve told my secretary, you haven’t had much of a marriage for a long time. It’s time you ended it. Start a new life for yourself and let Inky get on with his.”