We all clinked glasses and took a sip.
“Honestly, my new job is going to keep me just as busy,” said Mom.
Aunt Eve looked startled. “New job? You’ve already got a new job? I thought you might take a little time off.”
“If only my bills would take a little time off,” Mom said.
“Of course, I’m sorry! I didn’t mean to be insensitive.”
“It’s fine,” said Mom. “And actually, I’m taking a pay cut so it’s almost as if I’m taking time off—ha, ha, ha. I’m going to be working for the Southern Center for Human Rights. I’ll be defending indigent men on death row.”
“Well. I suppose that’s admirable.”
Mom took a seat at the kitchen table. “You ‘suppose’ ”?
Eve walked to the pantry, where she retrieved a tin of cheese straws, which she opened and placed on the kitchen table before sitting down next to Mom. “You don’t get sent to death row for nothing, after all. It’s usually for a pretty grisly crime. My goodness, Daniella, what if they asked you to defend someone like Wayne Williams, someone who . . .”
Aunt Eve glanced nervously at Anna and me. “. . . hurt all those children.”
Just hearing Wayne Williams’s name spoken aloud made my throat tighten, made me feel like I couldn’t breathe, like I was about to have a panic attack. There had been so many young black boys killed in the city over the last few years. Many of them had been strangled to death. They had finally caught Wayne Williams for the murders and sent him to jail for life. Still, it was really scary, even if I didn’t live in the same area where all of the murders were happening, even if it wasn’t white girls like me who were being killed.
“For starters, Williams wasn’t given the death penalty, but a life sentence. So that’s kind of a moot point. Also, he wasn’t actually charged with murdering a child, but rather two adult men—the other murders were just sort of pinned on him so the city could close the case. The point is whether or not a defendant gets the death penalty is almost always based on race and income level. And you know that the state can use the death penalty to intimidate people they view as a threat. Think about Angela Davis back in the day.”
“I’m just thinking about those poor children,” said Aunt Eve. “I’m just thinking about justice for their families.”
“I agree! And I’d say their families haven’t really received proper justice, because while I think it’s likely Wayne Williams is guilty of the murders he was convicted of, it’s highly unlikely he was the child murderer. But that’s just one highly sensationalized, highly publicized case. A lot of the men I’ll be defending are completely anonymous and unknown by the public, and some of them are guilty of nothing more than being black and poor. Seriously, Eve, it’s appalling. Besides, no matter how heinous the crime, the death penalty is barbaric. It just makes no sense for the state to say that murder is illegal, except when they are the ones doing it.”
“But what if it’s a deterrent?”
“Research shows it’s not.”
“I guess all I’m saying is that I feel a lot more sorry for the victims of crime than I do for the people committing them.”
“Jesus, Eve, have you become a Republican, too?”
Mom had told me that Uncle Bob had officially declared himself a Republican back when Ronald Reagan was running against Carter, but Eve and my mom had remained committed Democrats.
“I admit, I had serious concerns about Reagan when he first took office, but don’t you think he’s done a good job? Don’t you think he’s given the American people a much-needed sense of optimism? Honestly, Daniella, just put aside your prejudices long enough to really listen to him. That’s what I did, and I have to say, he makes me feel really hopeful about the state of things.”
“Really? You’ve fallen for his imperialist nostalgia shtick?”
“I haven’t fallen for anything. I just appreciate that he’s returned our country to the moral standards we once had.”
“Are you fucking kidding me?” asked my mom, and Anna and I both looked at each other with wide eyes. Mom sometimes cussed, but never in front of Anna. She and I both knew that Uncle Bob and Aunt Eve were really careful about what sort of language Anna was exposed to.
“Daniella! Please. Little girls! Big ears!”
Aunt Eve probably didn’t even think Anna knew the word “damn.”
“Eve, do you remember what you were doing, oh, a little over eleven years ago?”
“Of course I do. That’s my whole point. Because here’s the truth, Daniella: I never would have become that way if I hadn’t gotten brainwashed by Warren and the whole counterculture movement. I regret it. I really do.”
“The cause was good; you just went off the deep end. But that doesn’t negate the injustice of Jim Crow or the fact that our country had no business being in Vietnam. You just got wrapped up with the wrong people.”
“The whole movement was the wrong people! And we weren’t just protesting our involvement in Vietnam—we wanted the Vietcong to win. We acted like they were these scrappy, virtuous heroes. But they were brutal, monstrous! My manicurist, Linh, was telling me all about how the North Vietnamese imprisoned her father after the war for having had ties with the South. They starved the man! They beat him. They kept him in solitary confinement for years. Years! They were breathtakingly cruel, and we adored them.”
“Eve, sweet friend, the majority of us protesting the war didn’t adore the North Vietnamese,” said my mom. “We just wanted the U.S. out. We didn’t want any more of our American soldiers to die for what was a civil war in a country that had nothing to do with us.”
“You say that now.”
“I am absolutely certain I would have said that then. I did say that then. You just weren’t listening.”
Eve and my mom glared at each other.
“Who’s Warren?” Anna asked, and I watched as Aunt Eve’s expression shifted from mad to worried.
“Just an old beau of your mom’s,” Mom answered quickly. “Your pretty mother always had boys chasing after her. It was hard to keep up with them.”
Chapter 16
BLAST FROM THE PAST
Atlanta, 1984
Driving home after completing her errands, Eve felt enchanted with the world. It was April, and everything was in bloom. The crocuses had been the first to push through the dirt, popping up among the beds in front of their house. Whenever Bob spotted one he would say, “There’s a crocus amoke us.” Nonsense, but it made her smile.
Today the whole world made Eve smile. Ansley Park was beautiful in every season, but spring was its glory: the flowers on the dogwood trees unfurling, the bright pink azaleas ablaze in nearly every yard. She loved how close Ansley Park was to the actual city—she could practically touch the Atlanta skyline from her bedroom window—and how convenient it was to everything: walking distance to the Driving Club and just a short drive to St. Luke’s and Ansley Mall. Easter would be here on Sunday, and she had a woven straw basket all ready to fill for Anna, though of course Anna, at age eleven, no longer believed in the Easter Bunny. Who cared? Her daughter still believed in Cadbury Creme Eggs and jelly beans.
Once upon a time she had turned up her nose at “the straight life.” But now she felt so grateful for it: the order, the rhythm, the pride of being a responsible adult. She liked that her life with Bob gave her structure, boundaries, two straight lanes to drive within. She liked that the gutters were cleaned the moment they became full, the grass mowed whenever it grew a half inch too tall, the furnace filters replaced on schedule. She liked, indulgent though it was, that she had a standing appointment with Jeffrey every six weeks for a haircut and highlights, and another standing appointment with Linh for manicures and pedicures. Bob admired pretty feet and hands, so why not oblige?
Of course, she recognized how privileged her life was. She knew most people did not get to live like this. In response, she and Bob contributed generously to a multitude of charities, from CARE USA, w
hich was close to her heart, to the American Cancer Society, which was close to Bob’s. (His mother had died from ovarian cancer.) They gave to a number of other nonprofits as well, including St. Jude, Big Brothers Big Sisters, and the YMCA of Metro Atlanta. And of course they made and fulfilled their hefty annual pledge both to St. Luke’s and to the Coventry School. She volunteered as much as she could at Coventry, as well. Any time moms were asked to help set up for an event or help spruce up the playground or serve on a planning committee for some auction or another, Eve signed up. She loved stitching herself into the fabric of her daughter’s life in that way. She intuited that she should seize this time, her daughter’s childhood, as the years would quickly pass. Indeed, Anna was starting to grow breast buds.
Eve wished she had had more than one child. Two would be nice; three would be ideal. Three kids made a real family, a brood. But like her mother and her grandmother before her, she had not had an easy time giving birth. When Anna was eventually pulled out with forceps, she was perfect, save for her temporarily misshapen head. But Eve had lost so much blood that she required a transfusion. And despite the fact that the doctor had performed an episiotomy to try to minimize tearing, she had torn so badly that she ended up with fourth-degree lacerations. It was a painful recovery. But by the time Anna was eighteen months old, the memory of the pain had receded and Eve was ready to try for a second. It took nearly a year and a half of trying before she was finally rewarded with the call from her doctor’s office confirming she was pregnant. She was thrilled, but the pregnancy turned out to be ectopic, and she had to have emergency surgery, which resulted in the removal of one of her fallopian tubes. Afterward, she was urged by her doctor not to get pregnant again. Bob agreed. “Sweetheart,” he had said, “another child is not worth your life.”
She wondered, after her fallopian tube was removed, if God was punishing her for past sins. Or maybe she had simply messed up her body with too many drugs, which was a sort of indirect punishment, inflicted by her former, careless self. Or maybe the women in her family simply did not birth children easily. She and Bob considered adopting a second child, but Bob was wary. “You never really know what gene pool you might be tapping into,” he had said.
She did not remind him that he had chosen to tap into a dubious gene pool when he assumed paternity of her daughter, who at the time was only the size of a grape in her uterus. Bob knew, of course, that Warren was Anna’s biological father, but everyone else—save for Daniella—believed that she and Bob had gotten pregnant during their whirlwind courtship, Anna included. Anna had been upset enough earlier that year when she and Sarah did the math and realized that unless Anna was born really premature, she had been conceived before her parents were actually married. Eve had spent a long time assuring her daughter that, while after the wedding was of course best, it really was okay if a baby got a little head start during the engagement.
There was absolutely no reason for Anna to know the sordid details of her conception. Warren was dead, obliterated, and Bob loved her as much as any father could possibly love a child, especially when Anna did something particularly delightful: brought home straight As once again, or won the poetry contest held by the elementary school at Coventry, or just looked pretty and innocent dressed for church on Sunday, wearing a Laura Ashley floral dress with a square neckline.
Despite the disappointment of only having one child, life was good. So good, in fact, that it sometimes stopped her breath. She was so grateful to have this second chance. She was amazed that not only did she survive the madness of her years with Warren, but that she had somehow been allowed to reenter society, to become a central figure in the Atlanta world she had once so arrogantly disparaged.
She turned into the driveway of their house, which had once been Bob’s house and before that his parents’. She loved that it was stately, that it was architecturally significant, but she had insisted on softening its facade with thoughtful landscaping. Her landscape designer, who had legally changed her name to Honey Butterfly—also the name of her company—made certain there was something in bloom every season but winter, and even then she greened up the windows on the front of the house with boxwood wreaths.
Eve parked at the foot of the driveway to retrieve the mail, then drove up the gentle hill where a riot of tulips—reds, yellows, purples—bloomed in intentionally haphazard arrangements in the front yard. Pulling the Mercedes wagon into the two-car garage behind the house, she contemplated its second-floor space, which Bob referred to as a “bonus room” and which, for the past several years, the girls had used as a playroom. Soon she would convert it into a guest suite, as the girls didn’t really play anymore, now preferring to talk on the phone with their friends, paint their nails, and read endlessly.
Letting herself in through the back door, she found Anna and Sarah at the table drinking Sprites (Anna was allowed two a week) and eating toasted bagels topped with cream cheese and pineapple chunks.
“Hey, sweet girls!” she called, dumping the mail on the counter and walking over to give them each a kiss. She loved her daughter most of all, of course, but she loved Sarah, too, loved her the way she might love a particularly close niece. (She had no nieces and nephews. After Fig left Charlie, he had devolved into a perennial bachelor, dating increasingly younger women as the years went by.)
“Where’s Miss Ada?” Eve asked, hearing the pitch of her voice go up when she said Ada’s name. Things had not been the same ever since she and Bob had told Ada they couldn’t help her get a loan for a house. The warmth that Eve had always felt radiating from Ada had simply been turned off, which honestly seemed a little unfair given that Eve paid Ada significantly more than any of her friends paid their maids. Did that not count for anything?
“Upstairs, I think,” answered Anna, glancing up from the book of Mad Libs she and Sarah were filling out.
“Okay, now I need a noun,” Anna said.
“ ‘Fart,’ ” said Sarah. “As in ‘a fart,’ not ‘to fart.’ ”
Anna looked at her friend with delight but swatted her on the arm. “That’s rude, crude, and socially unacceptable!” she proclaimed, a phrase she had picked up from her teacher, Mrs. McDonald.
“The whole point of the game is to be rude, crude, and socially unacceptable!” cried Sarah. “Right, Aunt Eve?”
“Perhaps you could land on ‘rude’ without crossing all the way over to ‘crude,’ ” Eve bargained.
“Okay, fine. A burp,” conceded Sarah, and then burped loudly to make sure everyone got the point.
“You two,” said Eve, laughing along with them as she pulled a Tab from the refrigerator and gathered up her mail, including the new Southern Living, to take with her to the sunroom. The bills she left for Bob.
She sat in her armchair in the sunroom (there were two matching armchairs, upholstered in Pierre Deux’s Fontenay Linen, one strictly hers and the other strictly Bob’s) and flipped through her magazine while sipping her diet soda. There was a recipe for an Italian cream cake with cream cheese frosting that looked divine—maybe she would fix it for Easter dinner, along with a spiral-sliced ham, macaroni and cheese for the girls, slow-cooked green beans for Bob, and a big, fresh salad with avocados and mandarin oranges for her and Daniella. Eve always invited Daniella and Sarah to Easter dinner. She considered asking Bob to bring along one of the single men from his golf group—several were recently divorced—in an attempt to set Daniella up, but she knew that was a fool’s errand. Bob’s golf friends were his age or older, and Daniella often made disparaging comments about men who dated younger women, either forgetting about the fact that Bob was twelve years her senior or not forgetting about it at all. (Would she rather Eve have raised Anna as a single mother and not provided her with a loving, stable, two-parent family?)
Of course, the real deal breaker for Daniella, when it came to any of Bob’s golf friends, would be their politics. Eve had plenty of friends who still considered themselves Democrats even though their husbands had
started voting Republican, but Daniella was such a purist, there was no way she could live with such a compromise. A month ago the New York Times had run an article about the white southern migration from the Democrat to the Republican Party, as a surge of former Democrats had cast their ballots for Reagan in 1980 and continued to offer the president their full-throated support. Bob, who was the newly elected national committeeman of the Republican Party of Georgia, was prominently featured in the piece. His great-grandfather had been a Democratic senator from Georgia, and Bob had voted Democrat in every election until 1972, at which point he wrote in “Mickey Mouse” instead of either Nixon or McGovern. He had voted for fellow Georgian Jimmy Carter in 1976, of course, but in 1980 he had finally said to hell with it and switched parties, casting his vote for “someone who was actually proud of our country.” It was a trend piece, not a deep investigation, but it was of added interest that she, Bob’s wife, had been active in the antiwar movement during the 1960s and had voted for Carter in 1980 but was planning to support Reagan in his upcoming bid for reelection.
Eve was uncomfortable with the article, wary of it shining a light on what she had come to think of as her “lost years.” But Bob was thrilled with how the piece turned out, saying that the brief mention of Eve’s ideological turnaround only drove home the point that Reagan was a “big tent” leader. The evening after the Times piece ran, Eve had attended a gathering of Atlanta-area Fleur alums (it turned out Grandmommy had been wise to stop the mailing of her official resignation), and she was practically greeted with a standing ovation.
“And your family looks so darling in the photo!” exclaimed Ginny Simmons, whose son, George, was a grade above Anna at Coventry.
Daniella’s reaction had not been to applaud. She had telephoned Eve that same night, after Eve returned from the alumnae event, and when Eve answered, the first words out of Daniella’s mouth were, “Please tell me this is some sort of elaborate prank you’re playing on me.”
We Are All Good People Here Page 20