Swan Song

by Kelleigh Greenberg-Jephcott

  He plays hooky twice a week these days, about as often as he can get away with without being sent to a home for wayward boys. He gets himself a stack of books from the library, waits until the grown-up Faulks have left for work, when it’s only him and Cousin Sook left in the big drafty house. Sweet Sook—somewhere between sixteen and sixty, who people think as slow and odd as the boy himself. She brings him cups of hot chocolate as he lies in bed, propped up by pillows, escaping the dull gray town, reading his way through the great stories of the world, sharing his tiny room with the likes of Huck Finn and Oliver Twist, boys who have nobody, like himself, who live large, in primary colors splattered onto vast canvases.

  Sook also brings the boy the morning paper, he being the only soul in the house full of aging cousins who has a lick of interest. He reads the obituaries out loud to her. She likes to hear about the people who have gone, and all the folks who’ll carry on without them.

  As Sook settles into her rocking chair and the boy flips through the newspaper, his eyes flick across the children’s Sunshine Page. He usually skips this—it’s kids’ stuff after all. But his focus is drawn by a photo of a beagle puppy, the word CONTEST printed above. Folding the page carefully to the section in question, the boy reads aloud to Sook’s gentle rocking, the old chair squeaking on her down-tilts. She smiles and nods, mending a pair of long johns, the Sunshine Page pleasing her every bit as much as the Obits. It’s the boy’s high, melodic voice that she loves.

  ‘The Mobile Press Register seeks short stories by children under the age of twelve. Any subject. Five hundred words. First prize, publication and… a beagle PUPPY!’

  He’s just finished reading À la Recherche du Temps Perdu— atten, he later loves to boast—and strangely enough, it felt… familiar. He’s read it’s what’s called a roman-à-clef, which to him just seems to be a fancy French word for spreading rumors. He figures he could try his hand, Southern gothic style. While there isn’t much in Monroeville, there is gossip. It peppers every porch chat from here to Mobile. And who better than the town muckrakers to mine for narrative gold—serving up Mrs. Lee’s and Skin and Bones’ scuttlebutt as fiction, just like old Marcel had done? He’s already written up Mrs. Lee’s slew of lies. It’ll serve her right for talking out of school.

  Within the afternoon the boy has carefully typed a copy of what he now calls ‘Mrs. Busybody’ on clean white paper, has sealed it in a brown Manila envelope and hand-delivered it to Miss Bee McGhee at the post office.

  ‘It’s very important that this not get lost in the shuffle,’ he’s gravely instructed her, paying an extra nickel for first class.

  Each afternoon the boy runs home to check the mailbox. Day after day, he loyally reads the Sunshine Page and fishes through bills and envelopes in the mail, searching for his name. When an official-looking letter arrives, he holds it in his pocket for a day and a half before he can bring himself to tear it open.

  Mr. Truman Streckfus Persons, we are pleased to inform you…

  Pleased?! The boy can hardly contain his joy. He’s never won a cotton-picking thing, has never been told by anyone but Sook that he’s good at anything (she having told him he was excellent at flying homemade kites). He cartwheels across the lawn to Nelle’s house, shouting his triumph loud enough for Mrs. Lee to hear him.

  His joy will be short-lived. As he tells it, his story was to be published in three installments in the Mobile Press Register, under his very own name, which the newspaper men call his byline.

  The boy and Nelle wait on the Sunday for the paper to be tossed over the crumbling fence at the Faulk house. The minute it lands, thrown unceremoniously by a sluggish kid on a red bike pedaling far too slow for their taste, the pair races up to the boy’s room to enjoy his tale, printed there in black and white for all the world to see.

  He feels for the first time a rush of something like power.

  That same moment, Mr. and Mrs. Lee are sitting down to plates of bacon, grits, and eggs, reading their own Sunday Register. Mr. Lee sees it first (the Lees’ cook, Val, will later report), and begins to laugh in his hearty, good-natured way.

  ‘Well, I’ll be damned. Little Truman’s gone and got himself published.’ He folds his newspaper to the Sunshine Page, clears his throat and starts to read out loud:

  ‘“Mrs. Busybody”—by Truman Streckfus Persons. Mrs. Busy-body buzzed like a gadfly on the telephone, hardly pausing to land on one topic before irritatingly buzzing around to the next… “Well, Itty best watch out…” her fly-buzz amped to a buzz-saw wail, “… or she’ll end up like this one next door—knocked up without two pennies to rub together, before she’s old enough to order a cocktail!”’

  Mrs. Lee has, by the third sentence, at least had sense enough to recognize herself, and marches right on over to the Faulk house to tell the boy’s spinster cousins what she thinks of him. She rings up the newspaper editor personally, demanding the next two installments under no circumstances be published. She has all her lady friends write letters threatening to cancel their subscriptions.

  The boy writes his own letters in reply, about the beauty of art and the evils of censorship, but he never sees his byline in the Mobile Press Register again—not, that is, until he has long emerged from the chrysalis of self-conscious prepubescence and made his mark on the world.

  Still ten, the boy also writes the Mobile Press Register about the dog that they had promised, but fails to get a reply. He calls them from the telephone in Mr. Lee’s office in town, which he and Nelle had snuck into for that very purpose. He’s told that his inquiry will be ‘looked into.’ He even saves his pocket change and skips school to take a Greyhound bus to Mobile, where he marches directly to the Press Register’s office, approaching a reception desk he can only just peer over. The receptionist with the horn-rimmed specs pretends not to know what he’s talking about.

  He’s won their contest, fair and square, but he never sees the beagle that they promised. Or the one his Daddy had. Wouldn’t get one until he was all grown up and moved away, to the city where no one cares what you— —

  THE BOY IS eight, but he Remembers being nine. It’s still fall, but closer to Halloween. He vividly recalls planning his costume: Fu Manchu, a long robe with a thin, dangling mustache.

  He often brags about digging a hole from Monroeville to China, has even enlisted the labor of local bruisers to dig up his cousin Jenny’s vegetable patch, promising payments of oriental treasure when they reach the other end.

  This time he recalls concealing the identity of his subject, writing about Mrs. Lee, but putting her words in the mouth of Skin and Bones, the derelict from the railroad tracks:

  ‘… And I just told her ta pack her things and get!’ the boy has the fictional Skin and Bones rant to his hooched-up companion, passed out beside him in the abandoned train depot. He has recast the object of gossip as Skin and Bones’ wayward wife, run off with a traveling salesman, ‘… poking every stuffing from here to Mobile, before the weddin’ cake was in the icebox… runnin’ all the way to N’awlins, without two pennies to rub together… knocked up before she’s old enough to order a whiskey…’

  Skin-and-Bones-on-Paper takes a guzzle of Wild Turkey for emphasis. The boy feels clever coming up with the amalgamation, a disguise that would surely prove crafty enough to elude any grown-up who might suspect his source and put the kibosh on his efforts.

  He even allows himself to plot a sequel, in which Mrs. Lee shocks the ladies of Monroeville at the beauty parlor, spouting Skin and Bones’ diatribe about cock fights and gambling and houses of ill repute, making a case for their various virtues. The thought of offending Mrs. Lee twice over—both by giving her words to a washed-up tramp and by forcing the tramp’s whore-loving words into her pious mouth—pleases the boy enormously.

  Within the afternoon he has carefully typed a copy of the first tale—what he now calls ‘Mr. Busybody’—on clean white paper, sealed it in a brown Manila envelope, and hand-delivered it to Miss Bee McGhee at the
post office, insisting in his gravest squeal that she take special care, paying an extra nickel for first class.

  The prize offered by the Mobile Press Register is a Shetland pony, something the boy wants badly. He thinks he remembers his Daddy promising to bring him one someday.

  He recalls winning first prize, the first installment coming out under his very own byline. But Cousin Jenny comes home early from the dry-goods shop and hears the boy reading his piece to Sook and Nelle in the kitchen of the old drafty house, and recognizes Mrs. Lee’s gossip. She calls the newspaper editor personally and tells him not to print installments two and three, and even makes the boy write a letter of apology for the lies that he has spread. He hopes against hope that he still might get the pony, and gallop into the sunset, or at least ride far away to the city where boys with talent might speak their minds without causing a fuss.

  The pony never — —

  THE BOY IS twelve. He’s not sure if the sun is scorching or if the leaves are falling, but he senses that he’s older. This time he’s added a pejorative ‘Old’ to the ‘Busybody,’ but later forgets whether it was ‘Old Mr.’ or ‘Old Mrs.,’ and vacillates between the two.

  In this version the first installment published under his byline in the Mobile Press Register, as the winner of the Sunshine Club prize.

  The second installment is ready to go to press the next week, but is yanked in the ninth inning when the Mobile Press Register switchboard lights up with calls like a fireworks display.

  The more the boy tells the tale, the madder folks seem to get, until you’d think there’d been an absolute riot in Monroeville over a tiny little story in the children’s Sunshine Page.

  The prize is ‘a beagle dog and a Shetland pony’—sometimes with a bicycle thrown in for good measure. Not that Cousin Jenny will let him ride a bike, claiming his constitution too fragile. Since neither dog nor pony materializes, the boy develops a conspiracy theory and begins to write to other winners of children’s contests across the country, asking if they had been given their prizes, and enlists Nelle to do the same. After fifty letters, their tongues numbed with the cardboard taste of licking stamps, neither is able to find a single case of dog or bike or pony being forked over.

  THE BOY IS a man when he first tells us various versions.

  It was the dead of winter—he’s told Babe—when the skeletal trees rattled against the icy wind. That he’d shivered in a threadbare hand-me-down jacket—even though the average December temperature in Alabama flatlines at fifty degrees Fahrenheit.

  He’s told Lee, C.Z. and Marella it was spring, when the new azaleas had started to bloom atop the previous season’s growth, in that brief lifespan we all know they have, just between Easter and May Day.

  With Slim and Gloria it’s back to that sweltering summer of old. The sizzling lizards. The scorched beagle paws—which he would tenderly have bandaged, had he been given one.

  The summer scene he gives to Gloria because he thinks it might appeal to her hot Latin temperament, to Slim because he couldn’t bear to pitch her any scene but sunny.

  Both of the latter are too savvy to believe a word of it. But Gloria, being a hustler herself, appreciates the detail of the feverish heat, whereas Slim just logs it as another reason not to trust him.

  Nelle alone—never one of us, being armed with too much knowledge and too little beauty—knows the truth. And for that very reason he has kept her separate from our flock, for fear that she’d trumpet a definitive gospel.

  FOUR

  1975/1955

  VARIATION NO. 3

  NATURALLY WE PRETEND that we know nothing of The Sheets, apart from what we’ve read.

  When it becomes the prime topic of conversation around our tables at Vadis or Cirque—or even the eponymous La Côte Basque—we feign suitable horror.

  We pretend not only—as Slim had—that we don’t know that Sidney Dillon is Bill Paley, or the Governor’s Wife Marie Harriman,but that the tale itself is new to us.

  We don our most convincing expressions of offense, looking particularly appalled by details we make a concerted effort not to appear to anticipate. In the end we will offer that the whole thing sounds absurd—so slapstick it must be fiction. Isn’t its author vile to have invented such a thing? However did he think of such graphic smut, the sick little fuck?

  As we play our role in the drama, issue our lines with what we hope reads as naturalness—calibrating our timbre of concern, of shock, with just the right amount of vitriol—we feel her gaze lingering on us across the table as we move on to other topics. When we confer with one another in a series of phone calls afterward, most of us will feel nearly certain that we pulled itoff.

  Of course we’d heard the ludicrous story about The Sheets. Not only that, but we likely knew more about the Paley marriage than Babe herself, the details of which had kept us enthralled over years’ worth of lunch trysts. The intelligence came courtesy of the one who served as a first-hand witness: the favored son who settled in at the foot of their beds each evening trading confidences with wife and husband in turn, who might as well have snuggled in with each of them, so enmeshed was he. And by son we don’t mean Tony Mortimer, Babe’s from her first marriage, or Billy Paley, their shared one both left behind at Kiluna with a retinue of nannies in early days, uninvited in later ones. We mean the chosen son, without whom we’d not seen the Paleys travel in over two decades—be the destination Jamaica or Venice, or Lyford Cay; Paris or London or Timbuktu. He was neatly packed and bundled from tarmac to tailwind, from restaurant to residence. As indispensable and as cozy as a favorite pair of slippers; as reliable and loyal (so we thought…) as the most devoted of pets. Confessor, confidant, consigliere, ever since that fateful day when he’d won Babe Paley’s broken heart in the sky.

  WHEN DAVID HAD asked over the pots de crème if he and Jennifer might bring Truman along, of course they’d accepted. It was hardly a question. One simply couldn’t say no.

  ‘Please do,’ Babe said, with trademark dazzling smile.

  ‘It would be our pleasure,’ Bill assured, scraping the sides ofhis ramekin, licking the last globules of chocolate from his spoon.

  Our pleasure, thought Babe, with a silent laugh, knowing full well that the pains would be hers. What was one more body to Bill? Especially a prominent one.

  Bill loved high-profile guests—the higher the better. What could be a bigger coup than a former head of state?

  Two days and counting to Round Hill. And now a change in protocol.

  Babe began to revise her mental inventory of minute details.

  Would creamed chicken hash on toast be too casual? Would Harry Truman drink a Jamaican Mule? Did Harry Truman drink at all… ?

  For Babe the addition meant nothing more than another meticulous checklist. Another set of carefully orchestrated arrangements to delegate. She planned their Caribbean trips like a general going into battle. She allowed for every contingency. Considered every comfort. She arranged indulgences from New York’s gourmet vendors: cured salmon; rare truffles caked in earth; black cherries soaked in port; five varieties of heirloom tomatoes—six if she could find them; French wine—Pouilly-Fumé, packed on ice and stowed aboard the CBS plane.

  A consummate hostess, Babe could throw a black-tie affair in mid-air if push came to shove, but then Babe could throw an incomparable gathering on the moon. It was her profession: keeping Bill happy.

  The expected luxuries the Round Hill staff would handle. Unpacking luggage, whisking clothes off to be ironed and neatly folded in guests’ dressers before they realized they were missing. The Paley households were known for their pampering, thanks to Babe’s uncanny knack for anticipating guests’ needs before they knew them themselves. Her near-obsessive attention to detail long ago cemented the Paleys as entertainers nonpareil.

  She took care to fill each guest suite with fruit and flowers, wrapped soaps and bath oils, tailoring each aesthetic choice to that room’s particular inhabitant. She hand-selected book
s for every guest; she ensured that three newspapers for each member of the household were neatly stacked outside their door with a pot of fresh-roasted coffee every morning.

  First class all the way, those Paleys. Just as Bill liked it.

  Of course anyone who knows the Cushings (and really who could escape them?) knows that Babe learned the tools of the trade from a shockingly early age. She had been raised to cultivate perfection, in a family where overachievement was an understatement. Who else’s beloved father was a groundbreaking neurosurgeon and Harvard professor, whose leisure time casually produced a Nobel-winning biography? Who else had two permanent rivals in the form of near-identical older sisters? And what a trio of stunners they were, raised by a shrewdly ambitious mother who, like a modern mutation of a dowager empress, bred her girls to marry royalty. It was indeed thrones and dynasties Gogsie Cushing had in mind for her fine-boned daughters… But the courts she looked to conquer were those ruled by the scions of American industry. Vanderbilts. Astors. Whitneys and Roosevelts.

  ‘Marry up’ was the message drummed into their perfectly coiffed heads from their earliest consciousness. And like domestic courtesans they learned to please. From childhood the tools of the trade were imparted. How to prepare an impeccable luncheon: a classic lobster Thermidor with vegetables in miniature, or a cheese soufflé that rose just so. How to lay a flawless table with settings for every occasion, from an informal supper to a debutante ball. To stage a room with just the right mix of New Elegance and Old World shabbiness—preferably French—so that the scent of Old Wealth permeated, its musty chic confirming its inhabitants’ pedigree. To dress one’s lithe frame with effortless grace, wearing the most fashionable attire without letting it wear you. There were lessons in comportment, deportment, and etiquette. How to speak, to sit, to smoke… to please.

  Neatness was the key to dressing well. A girl could stretch the same black dress over ten occasions and fool her critics with a subtle change in accessory. Grooming was everything. Visit the hairdresser at least twice a week. Attend to one’s manicure diligently. Never go to bed without a thick coat of youth-preserving cold cream. And never, absolutely never be seen without your Face on.