We Are All Good People Here

by Susan Rebecca White

“Oh, baby. I can’t believe that bastard is still alive.”

  Chapter 22

  BELMONT GIRLS

  Roanoke, Virginia, 1993

  I begin the drive feeling melancholy about Dean. Though we broke up after our first year of college, made miserable because we tried to maintain a long-distance relationship, whenever we’re back in Atlanta we hang out, ostensibly as friends. Last night we had “good-bye sex.” I regretted it the moment we finished, regretted that I still can’t quite let go of him, even though our lives—at least right now—no longer intersect.

  But the farther Mom’s Toyota carries us from Atlanta, the less I think about Dean and the more excited I become about returning to Brown. I love who I’m going to be living with, three fun friends, all of whom were in my freshman dorm. We lucked out with the housing lottery and got a suite in Young Orchard, where we will each have our own bedroom, with a kitchen and a living room to share. Best of all, Lizzie, after two years kicking ass academically at the University of Colorado, is transferring to Brown. Lizzie joined a sorority her freshman year at Boulder in order to please her mom but got kicked out or, rather, “encouraged to deactivate” after another member walked in on Lizzie and her “Big Sis” Natalie naked in Natalie’s bed. Lizzie’s rendition of the story is funny—after they got busted, there was a formal meeting held by the officers of the house, during which everyone but Lizzie and Natalie painstakingly avoided any actual discussion of lesbian sex—still, the censure from her sorority stung. But now she will be at a place where the LGBT Alliance annually hosts the hugely popular “Prom You Never Had.” I’m happy for her; also, I’m just really happy that she will be in my daily life again.

  Mom recently installed a CD player in the Camry. After listening to my selection of R.E.M.’s Out of Time, followed by the Indigo Girls’ Rites of Passage, Mom insists on choosing the next CD. I groan when she slides Jesus Christ Superstar into the player, but I secretly love the music, and even start singing along to “What’s the Buzz” / “Strange Thing Mystifying.”

  Our plan is to stop in Roanoke, where we will visit Anna at Belmont College, then spend the night at a historic hotel downtown, which is a splurge, but one that Mom says she can handle, adding, “I get a Triple A discount.” Anna is only in her second year at Belmont, having taken a year off after graduating from Coventry. During that time she embarked on a ten-month NOLS course in Patagonia, where she hiked all over Argentina and Chile, putting as much distance as possible between herself, her parents (well, her mother and her nonbiological father), and the media buzz around Warren’s trial.

  Aunt Eve and Bob dutifully paid for her exile, hoping, I imagine, that she might be ready to forgive them when she returned. She wasn’t. Two years later, Anna still rarely visits Atlanta, and when she does she stays with Mom, having moved in with us during our final semester at Coventry, unable, she said, to bear being in the same space as her mother. Anna will meet Bob for dinner when she is in town (she no longer calls him Dad), but she won’t see Aunt Eve. Mom says that Eve gets teary speaking of Anna but reacts to her daughter’s rejection with resignation, as if it is something she must simply endure, a painful but necessary punishment, which will one day, she hopes, end.

  Warren St. Clair truly is serving his punishment, twenty to life at a state penitentiary in eastern Kentucky, a bleak fortress that Anna visits every few months, making the five-hour drive. Belmont’s relative proximity to the prison was one of the reasons she decided to go to college there, that and she got a newly established merit scholarship intended to lure girls who otherwise might go to UVA or Washington and Lee now that those universities admit women, causing Belmont’s enrollment to decline each year. The scholarship helped free her, at least temporarily, from her parents’ purse strings, and for Anna, the fact that Belmont only admitted women was a plus: there were no men around to molest you, for instance, if you happened to pass out after drinking too much. Still, her decision to attend the same college as did her mother, grandmother, and even great-grandmother surprised Mom and me. We thought she wanted as much distance as possible from her family, after all that had happened. “If he hadn’t shown up, I never would have known,” she would say, of Warren. “I would have lived my whole life as a lie.”

  I suppose she’s at Belmont to try and piece together her story. She lives in Hanker House, informally called “Write House” because it’s filled with creative-writing majors, which Anna plans to be. The women in her dorm tend to be more fringy than other Belmont students. They are not the ones who go through sorority rush, as our mothers did so many years ago. When I asked Anna if she was planning to join a sorority, she barked an emphatic, “Fuck no!”

  Anna has changed.

  • • •

  During the drive Mom and I talk mostly of her upcoming wedding to Bruce, which will be held at North Oak Presbyterian, the church Bruce joined shortly after accepting the position of in-house counsel at the ACLU of Georgia so that he could move to Atlanta to be near Mom. Before Bruce relocated from D.C., he told Mom that he really needed to be part of a faith community in Atlanta and he needed it to be a bit more Jesus-y than Unitarian. North Oak was one of the few churches he visited where the congregation is pretty much an equal mix of black and white. Mom goes with him most Sundays but can’t go so far as to join. She doesn’t want to abandon her Jewish half. The one time I went with them, the sermon was all about liberation theology—essentially that Jesus aligns with the oppressed and that any ideology that asserts the supremacy of one group over another stands in direct conflict with the will of God.

  Bruce is black, a fact that seems to matter to Mom both a great deal and not much at all. Born to a poor family in Jackson, Mississippi, and educated at Jackson State on an ROTC scholarship (followed by a tour in Vietnam), Bruce shares none of my dad’s patrician background but is very similar to him in terms of kindness and steadiness. The word “solid” popped into my brain the first time we met. He and Mom are planning on selling our house in Morningside and moving to College Park, a majority-black city just south of Atlanta that includes a designated historic district, where old bungalows, some in better shape than others, dot the leafy streets. The one Mom has her eye on has a huge front porch and a gorgeous stained-glass window that is original to the house. College Park is right by the airport, which is good considering how much they both travel for their jobs. But more important, Bruce will no longer stand out as one of the few black men in a mostly white neighborhood. “I don’t want a neighbor calling the police every time I come home late,” he said. At first I thought he was making a joke, but then Mom explained that, no, someone really had called the police once when Bruce had arrived home from work after dark and sat in the car listening to the end of an interview on Fresh Air.

  Aunt Eve and Bob separated after Warren’s trial and recently finalized their divorce. Eve moved out of the Ansley Park house and into what she refers to as a “cottage” in Buckhead near the Duck Pond, which she and Mom walk around once a month or so, catching up while getting a little exercise. I imagine they won’t get together as often once Mom and Bruce move. College Park is really far from Buckhead.

  I was surprised when I learned of the divorce, having always thought of Aunt Eve and Bob as a paragon of blue-blood stability. But Mom says that the national media attention surrounding Warren’s trial, and all it dredged up about Eve’s past, was just too much for Bob to handle. “He could no longer cast her as his helpless little debutante, led astray,” said Mom. Plus, Eve had lied to Bob for years, keeping secret the fact that Warren had written her when Anna was eleven, saying he wanted to get to know Anna, asking for her photo. Eve ignored his letter, hoping he would simply disappear, the way he had disappeared all those years ago after he blew up the house at Linwood Avenue, killing J. T. Higgins and an unidentified man around whose neck Warren surely placed the dog tags that read: Minh, Ho Chi.

  Mom says that if Warren had been charged with those two murders, she is certain he would have been fou
nd guilty. But it turned out the state of Georgia didn’t have to build a case against him, for he was already wanted in the state of Kentucky for the murder of Leroy Butts McGee. Mr. McGee, whose head Warren had smashed with a pistol during an armed robbery in 1972, was the owner of a restaurant/filling station just south of Lexington. He did not die instantly but later, at the hospital. His only son, who had walked in on the robbery, testified for the prosecution. Warren did not deny the charges but pled insanity, claiming the depravity of the Vietnam War had driven him literally crazy, that he never would have committed such a heinous act if our country hadn’t been concurrently scorching the bodies of Vietnamese villagers with napalm.

  “Your moral relativism disgusts me,” the judge decreed before handing down the sentence.

  • • •

  As we approach Roanoke, Mom launches into her latest tirade against Eve, that she has become an absolute zealot, having switched her membership from St. Luke’s to a newly established evangelical church near Coventry, led by a celebrity preacher who published a book about himself called The Prophet Among Us. In the book, he claims that he is indeed a modern-day prophet and that God routinely speaks to him, with great urgency, about the heresy of the modern Episcopal Church, particularly its decision to ordain first women, then homosexuals as priests. Mom says that though Eve was granted membership at her new church, there are certain things she can’t do there as a divorced woman, such as teach Sunday school. But regardless of her second-class status, she remains committed to her newfound orthodoxy and is forever talking of her “innate depravity” and the fact that she had to hit “rock bottom” in order to have a chance at salvation.

  “Have you ever considered the possibility that she might be right?” I ask. I am goading, but it seems wrong of Mom to dismiss Aunt Eve’s beliefs so out of hand when they are clearly coming from a place of need.

  “If she’s right, then you and I and everyone else we know are going to hell,” Mom says.

  “I know, and that’s really disturbing, but isn’t that kind of the heart of the Christian faith? I mean, at its core, doesn’t Bruce’s church teach the same thing, that you have to accept Jesus in order to be saved?”

  “It depends on what your definition of salvation is. Bruce would argue that a Christianity focused exclusively on individual salvation and the afterlife, available only to those who claim a certain creed, is missing the point entirely.”

  “So what’s the point?”

  “Ugh. You know Unitarians don’t like to talk about this stuff!”

  “You love to talk about this stuff,” I say. “Besides, aren’t you, like, half-Presbyterian now?”

  “Okay, fine. Anything for my darling child.” She glances at me, smiles. “Bruce takes Jesus at face value when he says to welcome the stranger, feed the hungry, visit the prisoner, et cetera. He sees that as the point. He sees building a beloved community as the point. He thinks that if the concerns of this world didn’t matter, the Bible never would have said anything about God loving it. He thinks the end game will be the reconciliation of all people, rather than the divvying up of the saved and the damned.”

  “Does he believe in heaven?”

  “I think so. He has his moments of doubt like most of us, but ultimately he believes in an immortal soul and an eternal love. And because of that he trusts that this life is not the full story.”

  “What about hell?”

  “Nope. He finds it anathema to the spirit of a loving creator that anyone would be condemned to an eternity of suffering.”

  “Even Hitler?” I ask. “Even child pornographers? Even corrupt prosecutors?”

  “You just pinpointed exactly where it gets tricky for me.”

  “Huh,” I say.

  We ride in silence for a minute. I’m thinking about Aunt Eve, and how she once assured me that heaven was real and that my father was in it, and how much I needed her certainty at that particular time in my life.

  “You know,” I finally say. “St. Luke’s was all about Aunt Eve’s family, where Anna was baptized and confirmed, where the three of them sat in the same pew every single Sunday. But now she doesn’t really have her family anymore. So it makes sense that she would need a new church where she could start over. She’s probably just looking to replace what she lost, to find some stability.”

  “Yes, but why that particular church, led by such an arrogant, self-satisfied man? It drives me crazy how easily Eve is taken in!”

  “You could invite her to services with you and Bruce. Give her another option.”

  “I did, actually. A few months ago. And she came. Afterward, she mailed me a copy of The Prophet Among Us.”

  • • •

  We exit the freeway at the signs for Belmont College. We have a Triple A book of maps outlining our entire trip, but Mom says she doesn’t need me to navigate, she remembers the way. Ten minutes later, we arrive, Mom turning the car into the long driveway that winds through green hills dotted with trees and eventually leads to a quadrangle of pretty old redbrick buildings. Gentle mountains surround the campus, and I remember, as I do every time I visit Anna, why she loves this place and why Mom loved it, too, during her one year here. We park in the visitors’ lot and walk along a path to University Hall, where the Blue Room is located, the formal parlor where the creative writing department is hosting a reading as part of a convocation for new students to give them a glimpse into what the writing program is all about. Anna is one of the presenting poets.

  It’s dusk. The sky is beginning to turn pink against the mountains and the air takes on just the slightest chill. I feel hope rise in my chest like helium. It is uplifting to be somewhere so beautiful.

  “God, does this place bring back memories,” says Mom as we walk up the short flight of stairs that lead to University Hall.

  I think of the story she often told about how her dorm mother and Rush Counselor arrived at her room early one morning to inform her that she had been cut from Fleur and Pansy. Eve defended her and fought hard for her to be included in her sorority, and then dropped out when she realized Mom wasn’t offered a bid because she was half-Jewish. I think of all of the meals Aunt Eve brought to Mom and me during the year after Dad died, how she nourished us during that dry, desert time, how she took me to the pool nearly every day that summer, knowing that the more exhausted my body was by nightfall, the more likely I might actually sleep. I think of her buying me a three-hundred-dollar prom dress when I was sixteen; I think of the delight she always took in making Anna and me happy. And now she is alone—divorced by her husband of twenty years, her only child no longer speaking to her.

  “I feel so sorry for Aunt Eve,” I say as we make our way through the stately old building.

  “I’d take Eve’s fate any day over Warren’s,” Mom snaps.

  “They’re not equivalent cases. Warren killed people. Aunt Eve didn’t.”

  “God only knows what all Eve did.”

  “Jesus, Mom. Do you realize that you’re harder on her than you are on anyone else? You spend your whole life trying to find mitigating factors for why convicts did what they did. But you won’t do that for your oldest friend.”

  “It’s just that she frustrates me endlessly. Her life has offered her so many opportunities, so many second chances—second chances no person of color would ever get, by the way. Yet she continues to bury herself again and again in the dogma of whoever has captured her attention at the moment.”

  “That doesn’t mean I can’t feel sorry for her.”

  • • •

  There is a large crowd gathered in the Blue Room, and the prep factor is high—lots of headbands and pink-and-green plaid. A few minutes after we arrive, Anna enters with a posse from Hanker House, diluting the clean-cut vibe. With her is a black woman with short hair and dark liner inked around her eyes wearing Doc Marten boots and a flannel shirt over baggy shorts, a wispy white girl so pale and thin she looks to me as if she spent her youth trapped inside a dark, damp basement, a
nd a freckled redhead who looks more or less like a standard-issue prep, save for the oversized pin she wears on her button-up shirt proclaiming, “Well-Behaved Women Seldom Make History.”

  And then there is Anna, in sweats, flip-flops, and a T-shirt that reads: “This Is Your Brain on Drugs with a Side Order of Bacon” over a fried egg with a strip of bacon beside it. Anna is a good twenty pounds heavier than the last time I saw her. She became skeletal during her year in Patagonia, but she has been making up for it ever since. It occurs to me that George might not have assaulted her had she been overweight. Or maybe he would have. Maybe he would have felt even more entitled to violate her, figuring she was less valuable than a pretty, popular girl.

  “You’re here!” Anna says to Mom and me, walking over to give us a hug. She smells a little sweaty, earthy.

  “Is Belmont the same as you remember it?” she asks Mom.

  “Better,” says Mom. “They don’t have maids living in the basement anymore, do they?”

  “No, but all of the cafeteria ladies are black and they get paid crap.”

  “Oh,” says Mom. “Different station, same song.”

  • • •

  There are rows of fold-up chairs facing the podium. We grab three seats up front, Anna sitting with us. At the beginning of the reading the head of the creative writing department, a no-nonsense woman with short dark hair, gives a brief overview of the program and then introduces Anna to kick things off, calling her “a bold Belmont woman finding her voice.” Anna walks solemnly to the podium, looks straight at Mom and me, and smiles briefly in acknowledgment.

  “This one is called ‘Raised Right,’ ” she says, her voice loud and clear and steady.

  “No white shoes after Labor Day!

  Say, ‘Yes, ma’am,’ and ‘No, sir’!

  I was raised right in the shadow of lies

  I believed I was saved; I thought I was

  blessed; I cleaned up the mess you made

  My life an illusion—proof you were okay