We Are All Good People Here

by Susan Rebecca White

  He did not ask how she knew. Men did not ask such questions of their wives. Instead, he asked if she was well enough to finish the trip, if she would like to fly home early. She had laughed off his concern, told him she felt perfectly fine, was experiencing only mild nausea, usually in the middle of the afternoon, which she found she could fend off if she drank a little soda. Bob hung up the phone feeling that the pieces of his life were locking into place. He and Marian had recently purchased a two-thousand-square-foot bungalow in Ansley Park, just two blocks from the imposing brick fortress in which he had been raised and where his mother still lived. It was in this pleasing craftsman-style bungalow where they would raise their first child, with more surely to follow.

  • • •

  He had met Stella a few months before Marian’s trip to Europe, at the bakery counter at Rich’s Magnolia Room. He had stopped by on his way home from work to pick up the coconut cake he had ordered for Marian’s birthday. They were having his mother and her parents over to supper to celebrate—Maggie was fixing Marian’s favorite, beef tenderloin—and they would drink Champagne with the cake because Marian had spent a semester in Paris her junior year at Emory and henceforth adored all things French.

  Bob had no intention of flirting with the pretty clerk who rang up his order. But she was just so bright and cheerful, a confection as pretty as the cake inside the box she was handing to him. He asked if she had baked it herself. She laughed and batted her eyes. And so it began. Just before Marian was to return from Europe, he brought Stella a parting gift, a Whitman’s Sampler and a hundred-dollar bill. When she realized he was breaking things off, she chased him out of her apartment, pelting chocolates at him as he scrambled to exit. Later that night, the whole thing struck him as so comical that he wished he could share the story with his wife. Marian was such a practical girl that he could almost imagine her understanding what had happened, shaking her head at his naughtiness, forgiving him by bedtime.

  She was to return on a Sunday, the day after he ended things with Stella. It was not until weeks later that the remains of her body were flown home for her closed-casket funeral.

  Of course, Bob blamed himself for his wife’s death. If he hadn’t started things with Stella, he surely would not have encouraged Marian to go away for a month on her own. If he hadn’t started things with Stella, he might have concluded that he could take the time away from work, at least for that final week of the tour. If that were the case, he would have died along with her, holding her hand as the flames consumed the plane. The three of them would have died together, though no one but he and Marian would have known of the child growing inside her. But surely she had told Betty Miller, whose hand she had probably held at the end instead of his.

  Some evenings, after a second glass of Scotch, he sat alone in his leather chair in the living room and wondered if it were possible that he had made it all up—the wedding, the pregnancy, the fact of Marian herself.

  • • •

  When his mother died a few years later, he sold the bungalow and moved into her stately home, designed by renowned architect Neel Reid, in the Georgian Italianate style. It was comforting to return to the house he grew up in, the much-loved only child of a nervous mother and a courtly father. As the 1960s dragged on, his once-lovely neighborhood deteriorated. Some of the beautiful old Ansley Park homes were divided up and rented out as boardinghouses, while Piedmont Park became overrun with hippies and bikers. As a child he had played in Piedmont Park, had spent many weekends on its golf course with his father. Now he avoided the place, saw it only from the vantage point of the Driving Club, which overlooked the public park.

  He supposed that if he dwelled on his life for too long he would come to the conclusion that he was lonely. But he had been raised not to dwell. He had been raised to get on with things, to make his bed in the morning, to finish everything on his plate without complaint or excessive praise, to say “yes, ma’am” and “no, sir.”

  Bob would work late on Friday nights, have a Scotch at the club, have another drink at home while reading—he preferred dense histories, particularly if they were about Churchill. On Saturday mornings he played squash, and then he typically spent his afternoons doing personal bookkeeping: going through bills, balancing his checkbook, studying his investments. Sometimes he would meet his old fraternity brother Fox McGee for a burger and beer at George’s or a seafood supper at Bill McKinnon’s place. Often he just stayed home and read. Sunday mornings he went to services at St. Philip’s. Maggie would be back on Mondays and she would grocery shop for him and make sure he had something to eat each night.

  Years passed. Life went on. His personal life was predictable, contained. Gone were the flirtations that he used to engage in, his monasticism atonement for past sin. World events did not cause much of a disruption for him, though he was disheartened by the assassinations of the Kennedy brothers, one at the beginning of the sixties, one at the end, and irritated by those fools protesting the Vietnam War. It wasn’t that he had a strong opinion about the war; it was more that he felt that if the commander in chief thought the United States should be over there, then we damn well should be. When he saw protesters on the nightly news he just shook his head. Children. They seemed like children. As if you could change the human condition by offering a flower to a soldier. As if war were something new.

  He liked his work. He liked drawing up airtight contracts. He liked building model airplanes and working on crossword puzzles. He liked the lady lawyer they hired in 1970, though the only reason they hired her was because nervous old Samuel Sneed thought they needed to get in front of any risk of a discrimination suit. Still, he recognized that she was diligent and smart, if a bit formal.

  So it had surprised him when one day, rather out of nowhere, she had asked if she could speak with him alone. She had never initiated contact, and he wondered if she was going to tell him that she was pregnant, something the managing partners all assumed would eventually happen and would signal her imminent departure. (He had come to accept that a smart young woman such as Daniella Strum might want a career right out of law school; he could not accept a mother choosing to spend her days in an office with men instead of at home with her child.)

  But Daniella wasn’t meeting with him to tell of a pregnancy. Instead, she wanted to tell him about a new client of hers, Eve Whalen, who had somehow gotten herself brainwashed by one of the more radical antiwar groups and now had rightfully come to her senses and wanted to return home. Daniella explained that she had met with Eve that morning and that Eve was now waiting at Daniella’s house while she sought his counsel. She knew this was all terribly last minute, but was there any chance he could meet with Eve at her home in Morningside, now?

  He didn’t have much scheduled for the afternoon, save for a deposition, and he could get an associate to handle that. He asked Daniella for her address and told her to give him an hour while he tied up loose ends at the office.

  He was happy to help. He knew her parents, for goodness’ sake, had gone to their annual Christmas party for years now, could even remember a party some time ago when Eve was home from college and making her debut. She had been a very pretty girl. He remembered that.

  • • •

  The interior décor of Daniella’s house was rather ethnic, what with the African masks hanging in the living room and the abundance of textiles that seemed to be from the Far East, but Bob admired the craftsmanship of the house itself—a well-maintained mock Tudor cottage with half-timbering, an arched front doorway, and casement windows with diamond panes.

  Eve was already seated in the living room, wearing a faded Barnard T-shirt and a pair of jeans, her legs tucked beneath her, her dark hair cut short. She looked up and smiled at him, and suddenly he felt so dizzy that he almost had to catch himself on the doorframe.

  She looked like Marian, dark-haired Marian, still in her twenties, still beautiful, still very much alive.

  If Daniella had noticed how startled Bob was,
she didn’t let on. “Eve, this is Bob Powers, one of the managing partners at the firm.”

  Eve locked eyes with him. “Thank you for coming, Mr. Powers. I think you know my parents?”

  “Call me Bob, please. And yes, your parents are wonderful people.”

  She was not Marian. Of course she was not Marian. But she looked so much like Marian that he was having trouble keeping his thoughts organized. Had her hair always been so dark? He had a memory of her as a blonde. Perhaps she had dyed it. She was, after all, a fugitive.

  “I’ve got coffee,” said Daniella, heading toward the kitchen.

  Eve didn’t say anything, just remained looking at him, tentative, like a shy kitten.

  “Coffee?” he asked her.

  “I wonder if she has any tea,” she said in a soft voice.

  “I’ll check,” he said, and walked to the kitchen where Daniella was arranging grapes, cubes of cheddar cheese, and Triscuits on a platter.

  “Perhaps tea would be more calming?” he suggested.

  “I’ve only got herbal. Sleepytime or Red Zinger.”

  “A cup of coffee for me and an herbal tea for Eve, whichever one you think is best. This house is an architectural gem, Daniella, beautifully restored.”

  “That’s all Pete’s doing, my husband. Normally he’d be here for you to compliment him—he doesn’t teach on Fridays, and he usually works at home. But he decided to go into the office today, just to assure he doesn’t overhear anything that’s confidential.”

  “Prudent,” Bob said.

  • • •

  They sat in the living room and nibbled on grapes and cheese, sipping their coffee and tea. Eve didn’t say much, but Daniella shared her game plan with Bob, and he agreed that the best course of action was for Eve to turn herself in for any outstanding warrants and to offer any information she had on Warren and Smash, including his talk of bombing Calley’s apartment, the talk that had triggered her to make plans for her own surrender, aware that Warren really had gone off the deep end. After being questioned by the police, she would, they hoped, be released to the custody of her parents, whom they planned to call later that day.

  Throughout their discussion, Daniella kept pushing Eve to tell her more details about her time with the Smash Collective, as if she was certain there was something Eve was not admitting, as if she could trip the poor girl up by asking the same questions again and again. It was good legal strategy, frankly, and it was probably good practice for when Eve would surely be interrogated by the authorities. Still, Bob hated for Daniella to make Eve so uncomfortable.

  Eve told them that she had moved to Atlanta from Manhattan a few years ago, living in a dilapidated ranch on Euclid Avenue, near Little Five Points. But in 1971 she had returned to New York, back to the apartment in Morningside Heights where members of Smash often crashed. There she had lived with Warren and Abby for more than a year, taking temporary jobs to earn money while plotting a revolution that she was now certain would never come. “I don’t even think I want it to come,” she added.

  Good girl, Bob thought.

  “But why did you return?” demanded Daniella, still playing the devil’s advocate. “Why were you in Atlanta on the night that Warren, the man you have been involved with for nearly a decade, blew himself up in the house the two of you were renting?”

  Bob worried that Daniella was coming on too strong.

  Eve looked down at the Oriental rug that covered the floor of Daniella’s living room. “Smash was ending. It was obvious we didn’t know what we were doing anymore, if we ever did. But Warren couldn’t let it go. A few months ago he asked me to move back to Atlanta with him. He had this theory that the revolution was going to start in the South. I agreed to come because . . . because my world had gotten really small and Warren was pretty much the only person remaining in it. But a part of me was also thinking that maybe if I got to Atlanta I could reconnect with my parents. I could reconnect with everyone important—with you.”

  She looked straight at Daniella when she said this, and the two women held each other’s gaze for a long moment.

  “But once I got here,” Eve finally continued, “I didn’t know how to do that. What was I supposed to do, just ring the doorbell after how many years? Just say, ‘Mom, Dad, here I am! Your prodigal daughter returned at last!’ ”

  “Well, yes,” said Bob. “Your parents would delight in your return. You allude to the prodigal son jokingly, but they would have reacted exactly as the father did in the parable. They would have thrown open their arms and called for a celebration. They would have been so grateful their daughter had come home to them.”

  She looked at him with tears in her eyes.

  “You told me that just a few weeks ago Warren talked of bombing Fort Benning in order to kill Lieutenant Calley. Are you sure you two didn’t come to Atlanta for the express purpose of doing just that?” interrogated Daniella.

  “The Calley talk was new. And it terrified me. When he started talking about that—that’s when I decided to leave.”

  “You had no idea he was planning on setting off a bomb on the very night you wandered around Buckhead, on the very night I saw you at Oxford Books, during which time Warren was presumably at the house the two of you shared, counting out sticks of dynamite?”

  “Daniella, please,” Bob interjected. “I understand that you’re trying to prep her for questioning, but how many times does she have to tell you she had no knowledge of Warren being in possession of a bomb? Mercy. Eve is our client, not a hostile witness. We’re all good people here, all trying to muddle through this the best we can. You don’t have to keep badgering the poor girl.”

  • • •

  Just as Bob predicted, Eve’s parents rushed to Daniella’s house as soon as she phoned to tell them that she was in Atlanta. After a teary reunion, Eve followed them back to The Compound in her little American Motors Gremlin, her only remaining belonging, as everything else she owned had burned in the fire. The following day, Bob drove Daniella to the Whalens’, where they would pick up Eve and accompany her to the police station so that she could turn herself in. Both Mr. Whalen and Bob had spoken privately with the police chief and were assured that Eve’s surrender would be kept under wraps, that no reporters would be on hand to scream questions and snap pictures.

  The Whalens’ home wasn’t visible from the street, but after driving through a veritable forest they arrived at the stone house on the hill, which looked smaller than it actually was, probably because it was surrounded by so much undeveloped land.

  “I’ve always thought this was one of the best pieces of property in Buckhead,” said Bob.

  They parked in the front drive. Bob started to walk to the door, but Daniella stopped him. “Let’s go around back. I still remember Patricia Whalen telling me years ago that the front door is just for ‘party guests and solicitors.’ ”

  They walked around back to the kitchen door. Bob knocked on one of its glass panes. Through the glass he could see Eve sitting at the kitchen table, sipping a cup of coffee with her parents. She raised her hand at the sound of his knock as her mother rushed to the door.

  “Bob Powers!” she cried, her eyes springing with tears as she grabbed both of his hands. “Words cannot express my gratitude. Thank you for bringing us back our daughter!”

  Patricia Whalen wore a navy St. John knit suit. Her hairstyle looked the same as always, a sort of short, fluffy helmet around her head, locked into place with Aqua Net, the smell of which made Bob think of his mother.

  Dr. Whalen had stood when Bob and Daniella entered and was still standing now, wearing a blue blazer with gold buttons over khaki pants.

  “Bob!” he called. “So good of you to come. And Daniella, too. Can Ada get either of you a cup of coffee?”

  Dr. Whalen motioned to a small, trim Negro woman standing by the counter. She had perfect posture and wore a pale blue maid’s uniform with a white apron, very proper, though her hair was worn in a short Afro, a beco
ming style for her angular features, but which Bob found vaguely unsettling.

  “No, thanks,” said Daniella. “It’s good to see you again, Miss Ada.”

  “It’s good to see you,” she answered. “Thank you for bringing our baby back.”

  “Coffee, Bob?” Dr. Whalen asked again.

  “I’m good, thank you.”

  Bob watched Daniella walk to the kitchen table where Eve was sitting. “How are you feeling?” she asked.

  “Nervous. Terribly nervous.”

  Eve looked beautiful in a pale pink baby-doll dress, her short hair fluffed and shellacked into a style not dissimilar from her mother’s. The dress was youthful looking, a smart choice, Bob thought, before he realized that it was probably not a choice exactly, but an item of clothing that happened to be left over from her college days.

  “Baby,” said Dr. Whalen, striding to the table where he stood behind Eve, placing his hands protectively on her shoulders. “Nothing bad is going to happen to my little girl. Believe me when I say that I know everyone worth knowing in this town: judges, lawyers, everyone. Now that you’ve come home, we can protect you. Now that you’ve come back home, everything is going to be okay.”

  Chapter 12

  MRS. POWERS

  Atlanta, 1972

  Eve and Bob married within six weeks of their first meeting. In the wedding photo, taken in Judge Chambliss’s chambers at the downtown courthouse, it was impossible to tell that Eve was pregnant under the silk Missoni caftan she wore, pale blue and decorated with pink and orange birds, the sleeves fringed.

  “I won’t wear white,” she had told Bob. “I just can’t.”

  Bob understood the shame she felt and did not argue. He hoped that as the years passed Eve would be able to forgive herself for embracing such unsavory people and positions during her youth, that she might come to understand that her sweetness and innocence had been used against her, that she had been taken advantage of.