“No. Fergus just told me he was ill.”
“It’s a little complicated, Marianne. George insists on total immersion … says he promised Miss Kate if he ever joined a church he’d get dunked … be immersed,” he corrected himself.
“Is he joining Miss Kate’s church?”
“No. That’s the complication. He’s joining Jean’s, the Methodist. You know they just sprinkle. There’s the Baptist chapel out on the road to Columbia. The Baptist minister will loan it to the Methodist minister, Brother Graver. He’s a nice young man, went to a seminary in New York.”
I had no great wish to see Uncle George baptized. However Lucius was so earnest and had gone to so much trouble to make arrangements, I wanted to do my part. First I had to check on George.
I discovered him propped up in his bed drinking bourbon and water at ten in the morning.
“Bottle’s in the nightstand, honey. Pour yourself a drink.”
He still had an arrogantly handsome face with high cheekbones, more prominent in age, a long straight nose, clear blue eyes though red around the edges, thick wavy white hair. He’d combed it though he hadn’t shaved that morning. Dave, waiting in the hall until I left, would be in to do that. George was seventy-two. How old was Dave? He had a young-old face with a heavily creased brow, the face of a person trying to remember every day exactly what he was supposed to be doing.
“I sold my farm, honey.” Tears rolled to the corners of his eyes.
I nodded. His and Jean’s farm had been sold for over a year. Time, for Uncle George, was no longer linear. His mind seemed to circle and glide.
“Broke it up into lots and sold them every one. Notes are paying good interest. How are those little girls? Bet they’re pretty.”
That’s all he ever said about Sally and Kate. They must be pretty or sweet. It was all he knew to say. Both of them were struggling through adolescence; Marshall and I were struggling along with them. They were both smart and would be pretty enough. Neither would ever be the luscious flirtatious sort of woman Uncle George had in mind, the sort that wanted to please a man more than anything else in the world. There was no use telling him this. Instead I talked to him about other women.
“Your first wife … Aunt Lula, was she pretty?”
“She was … had dark hair, dark eyes….”
“What happened to youall?”
“We got divorced … ’37 or ’38, I guess. We couldn’t get along. We could have if I’d tried. I didn’t. She wasn’t a bad woman,” he said equitably. “She just had a mind of her own, and so did I.”
“And Marguerite?”
“Well, you know Marguerite drank….” A grin spread across his face. “You never knew whose bed you’d find her in next. I found her in my own once. Marguerite was generous. Her daddy left her rich. She was generous on her own. The summer after the war ended, we went to Hot Springs together. She told me, ‘George, you’ve always wanted to meet a rich widow.’ She was an old friend of Jean’s. They were roommates in college.”
I remembered a picture of Marguerite I’d seen on the stairway at the farm. Much younger than I’d ever known her, dressed in a gypsy costume, a strip of bandanna across her forehead, bright metal discs fringing her skirt. One hand was on her hip, the other was outstretched and she was smiling. It was a smile of a woman enjoying herself, an incongruous gesture among the stiff photographs of female Moores wearing too much lace and male Moores looking as though their ties choked and their collars scratched.
“That picture of Marguerite dressed as a gypsy….”
“She gave it to Jean before she took off. Said she didn’t want to be en-cum-bered.” He rolled the syllables out. “I had an auction for Marguerite after she left. Sold every damn thing and sent her the money.”
“Didn’t she go to California?”
“I warned her, ‘Marguerite, you’re hurting the property value of this place.’ She’d let it go so it looked like a Goddamn horror house. That’s when she said she was going to California. Told me she’d sell me the house and I could worry about property value.”
“What happened to Ada and her husband and all that family?”
“I don’t know. Maybe they went with Marguerite. She was always leaving and coming back and leaving again. A wandering woman. She didn’t come back from California. Killed herself with a bottle. Got that liver disease.” He sighed. “That was Marguerite. Set on doing everything her way.”
For a moment he looked at me as if to say he had no choices left. But I was only reading ideas in his facial expression. Uncle George’s choices were to go on living as long as he could, to count his interest—he loaned much of his money—to remember the women he’d had, and, I suspected, to hope to find another.
His hand shook as he put his cup of bourbon and water down on the bed. A little sloshed out. I got up to get a towel.
“I spill my whisky. At nights sometimes I wet my bed. Goddamn it! And I cry a lot. Nearly anything gets me to crying. I’m a wet old man.”
I pressed the towel down on the bed beside him.
“Leave it, Marianne. Just leave it. Smells better than pee. The nurse will get it anyway. They got some sweet little old girls here.”
He grinned at me. In his eyes though, I could see tears.
“I kept that gypsy picture. It’s over there somewhere in the apartment Lucy and Phillip moved me into. It’s in a drawer somewhere. You go look if you want it.”
“No. Thank you.” There had been too many deaths in my family. I had already sifted through hundreds of pictures of people whose names I didn’t know and too many of those I knew well.
“I had an auction out there. I sold my mules.” His mind circled from Marguerite’s sale to his own final days at the farm.
I left him to his whisky. As I started down the hall, I could hear him shouting, “God-a-mighty! Dave, you dumb ass s.o.b! You shave a man with hot water!”
“Sorry, Mr. Moore. Sorry.”
George was howling at everyone around him just as Fergus had warned me. “He’s mad at Mother, Daddy, me, Dave. He accuses everybody of stealing, of lying, of making him miserable!”
As I was leaving the hospital, Dr. Walters walked in. Tall, well tanned, he had on cowboy boots as usual. His color, the boots, and his expansive nature reminded me of Marshall a little. I was thankful he was there, thankful he and Lucius were the ones in charge of Uncle George. I asked him if George was well enough to be baptized that afternoon.
“I don’t think it will hurt him. Sometimes after a conversion people are more peaceable. It seems to ease their minds.”
“His is pretty uneasy.”
Walters smiled. “George has called all the old ladies in town and asked them to come live with him. Some are shocked. Some are flattered. Some are just after his money.”
“He probably wouldn’t mind a gold-digger if—”
The doctor gave me a long look. “Tell your family not to worry. George’s interest in women is mostly appetite.” He shook my hand and waved me on.
The chapel, a small white wooden building with a square bell tower instead of a steeple, stood in a low place by the side of a creek. Light green leaves were beginning to curtain the opposite bank. The ground around the chapel had been cleared. There was no attempt at landscaping, none of the familiar bridal wreath or roses. Nor was there a name above the door. Bare and functional, the chapel seemed a statement of southern fundamentalism. Here religion was stripped to its core. Here the large necessities—baptisms, weddings, funerals—were attended to. As for the rest, you were on your own with your faith.
On the slope of the hill I saw a small Confederate graveyard. There were only three or four soldiers from that old war, buried after a skirmish maybe. The anonymous back pew Lucius had offered when I met him at the front door seemed wrong. If I was going to be there as a witness, Uncle George needed to know it.
He didn’t seem surprised when Brother Graver showed me into the room adjoining the baptismal tank. I found h
im sitting on top of a small stepladder. He wore a white robe that looked like a hospital gown except it tied in front. Dave and Lucius were on either side.
“Marianne, I’m glad you’re here. This is the closest it looks like I’m going to get to joining a church with this idiot Dave helping. I can still get around some, but these damn steps—”
He’d climbed or been boosted up three. Three matching steps on the other side led to the tank, a zinc-lined rectangle sunken behind the altar, a place as unadorned as the chapel’s exterior. One light bulb, stuck under an old fashioned circular metal shade, glowed on the water.
“Here,” said Lucius. “Let’s get on with this. Dave, you stay on that side.”
George must have been heavier than I supposed. It took them several minutes to lead him down the first step, then with a lurch, he fell forward in the water.
From the front Brother Graver’s voice rose, “George Moore,” he spoke in obvious haste, “I baptize thee—”
Floundering and splashing George rose, his white gown billowing around him. “This is the coldest God-damned water in the world! Get me out of this God-damned thing!” His voice rang in the cool spring air. “Dave! Lucius!”
Brother Graver, his eyes closed, continued praying.
Ignoring George’s shouts, Lucius pushed through the door to the church.
I looked out to see him patting the minister on one shoulder. “You forgot to temper the water, I think. And you forgot to push his head under.”
“To what?” Graver turned to face him.
“You didn’t run any hot water in there, did you?”
“Well, no. I didn’t think—To tell the truth, I’ve never baptized anyone this way.”
“Never mind! Run some hot water in, and don’t forget to dunk him. Total immersion means total. Hold his nose and put your hand over his mouth like this.” Lucius demonstrated the method used in his church.
“Lucius!” George wailed, both hands on the ladder.
“We’ll pull you out, George. But you’ve got to do it again without the curses. Not a single one. You asked to be baptized. I won’t let you make a mockery out of it!” He had always been a deliberate man. I had never seen him so hurried. Without waiting for consent, he and Dave heaved George to the second step above the water.
“Marianne, this is going to kill me.” Uncle George shivered.
Before I could answer, Lucius interrupted, “No, it won’t George.”
Hot water poured in. This time he slid easily into the tank. Brother Graver pushed his head down firmly while Lucius, Dave, and I watched from the front pew. This time only the ritual words were repeated while clouds of steam swirled upward.
“He’s going to be good now,” Dave whispered.
“I doubt it,” Lucius said. “But he will be baptized.”
I stayed long enough to help Aunt Lucy and Uncle Phillip return George to the apartment he’d moved to after his farm was sold. Pleased to be home, he crawled in his mahogany four-poster that had been my grandfather’s and grandmother’s.
“I feel pretty good,” he told me. Then he leafed through his mail which was largely circulars and catalogues. Checks were mailed directly to his bank. Now and then he stared out the window at some fields and knobby hills, all beginning to turn green. He didn’t want to read anything, nor did he want to look at TV. I turned it off when I saw him giving it no attention. Perhaps he had the same reaction to television as my grandmother had when she was in the nursing home. Perhaps, to him, it was only a black chattering box full of shadows and sounds. Whatever he saw there had nothing to do with the realities of his life, with the value of land, the taste of whisky, or the pleasure of women.
Shortly after everyone left and I was saying my goodbyes, George said, “Hand me that phone book, honey. I don’t know why Lucy has to act such a fool, putting it clear across the room.”
I did as he asked. We were blood kin and had lived in the same house. Standing there beside him, I was in that strange small country where, for a flickering instant, childhood and the present were spliced together. Probably because I had come from afar and would leave again, George didn’t turn against me as he did everyone else. Fergus said he didn’t rage at me because I was his niece, and old men naturally favored younger women just as our grandmother had favored her only son. Whatever the reason, I knew that George and I had no time now to pile up resentments.
“I have to find somebody besides Dave to help me out. He’s the most aggravating s.o.b. I’ve ever had around. There’s this friend of Jean’s…. Her husband’s gone, and she might…. ” Reverie seemed to overtake him. When I left, he had one hand on the phone book and his face turned toward the window. Dave waited in the kitchen. Lucias would drop by that afternoon.
In late May I returned for George’s funeral. The woman who looked after him in his last days at her nursing home told me, “He used to ask me, ‘When are you going to get in bed with me?’ And I’d say to him, ‘In a minute,’ then he’d groan and say, ‘Your minutes are so long.’ He died holding onto my hand.”
A kind country woman, she spoke of George with strong affection. Plump, energetic, sentimental, George’s last woman. He never had her but he had expectations.
A few days after the funeral Lucias Atkinson arranged for us to meet in his conference room. Uncle Phillip, Fergus, Marshall and I sat around an empty gleaming table. Aunt Lucy was still too shattered to come. Once again there was the blue paper wrapped around the white. We all had copies. Why, I wondered, had Lucias summoned us? He could have mailed us those copies. Actually, I thought, he preferred the ceremonial aspects of life. He was, after all, the one who had insisted on baptism by the rules. Now we were to have a proper sort of will reading within this dimly lit stage-set looking room where portraits of Lucias’s father and grandfather peered at each other from opposite walls. Lucias had never married; no one was left to hang his picture with theirs. He stood up at one end of the table and cleared his throat.
“As you will see, George has left the bulk of his estate to Fergus and Marianne. Fergus is to be the executor since he lives in Tennessee.”
There was also a large cash bequest to Aunt Lucy, a small one to Dave, and another small one—two thousand—to a woman none of us had ever heard of.
“Who is this … this Gladys?” Fergus asked.
Marshall smiled. “I bet she was one of his women.”
Lucias cleared his throat. “I think she … she, um, used to work here … at a cafe on the square. She … well, she lived above the cafe. You know George…. ”
We all nodded.
“When was he carrying on with her?” Fergus’s curiosity could be as bad as mine sometimes.
“Oh, I don’t know exactly.” Lucias said, “I guess it was sometime after he and Lula parted.”
There was nothing more to be gotten out of him.
“What I don’t understand,” said Fergus once we were outside “was why, when he wouldn’t loan me a cent, he left me nearly half of what he had.” He stopped and looked over at Uncle Phillip standing in the sunshine talking to Marshall, making sure he had company, looking after him as he’d helped look after everybody.
“It was Daddy he held a grudge against, wasn’t it?”
“The funerals? Because he was drunk at Miss Kate’s? What about Jean’s?”
Fergus nodded. “Hers too. I tried to get him not to go, but he loved her. Finally I decided, all right. Why not? If my daddy wants to drink his way through funerals, it’s all right with me.” He looked at me and grinned.
I smiled. We were both thinking about how sober Uncle Phillip had been at George’s funeral.
Fergus, Aunt Lucy, and I divided Uncle George’s belongings. Fergus wanted his bed. Aunt Lucy chose a music box she and Uncle Phillip had always admired. I left the owl for Fergus but asked for the rest of his office furniture, those ornate Victorian pieces he’d acquired at auctions; the mahogany table made from a piano, its legs bulging with oak leaves and acorns, a se
ttee and its matching rocking chair with women’s heads holding its arms, the one I’d sat in the first time I went to see George downtown.
He never remembered where he bought any of those things. By the time I thought to ask him, he couldn’t name a single location.
“Why did you choose these?” I pointed to the curly women’s heads on the rocking chair’s arms.
“Oh, the ladies,” he said, “You know how I love them!”
I had forgotten about the picture of the woman in the mirror in Uncle George’s room until several summers after he died when Marshall and I were staying in a hotel on the Isle of Mull, one of the Western Isles off the coast of Scotland. Rising above a cliff overlooking the bay, outlined in cupolas and carved stone, it was a marvelous Victorian pile, which had endured many owners and much history. There above the hotel’s small bar was the same picture.
First one saw the woman with her hair heaped on top of her head, some of it falling round her neck, young and beautiful, as she gazed into the mirror. As I stared, the metamorphosis took place; a skull loomed above the bar. Now it was no longer magic; it provoked only a realization of an optical illusion, a remembrance of the old trick time played on all of us. Perhaps Uncle George viewed it daily as an ironic reflection on mortality, but more than that: for him, I believe, his picture was also a reminder to hurry.
MARTIN MOORE McNEIL
Marshall and I both knew we wanted our son too much. We already had two daughters, Kate, five, and Sally, three, good ages to welcome a new brother. For a while we didn’t tell them he was on the way; we told no one. Perhaps we both feared something might go wrong if we admitted our secret. I don’t know. We didn’t talk about it. He was the gift we kept closely hugged to ourselves, the invisible life hiding behind Marshall’s back every night, circled by our bodies while we slept. I didn’t even tell my Grandmother Moore who was always hungry for news of the next generation, nor did Marshall tell Carter and Sarah, the uncle and aunt who’d raised him. They lived out in the country south of Austin.
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