Gaston lived down there, and I up here, and we hardly saw one another at all during the next few years. We passed one another on the street from time to time, and we’d nod, or speak very briefly; and I sent a basket over to his wife when she had Donny. We fell into a habit of distance, as though we had never been friends; and I gave up all thought of reconciliation, so that even when the news reached me that Annie had died with their second child, not even then could I rouse myself to overcome my pride. It was not just pride; it had been years at that point, you see, years and years; and I didn’t know how to change things. And the Wednesday teas were long finished; I hadn’t the heart for them anymore.
And then I had my stroke, and Gaston came back. Of course I had a nurse, but he guessed that I would prefer his company. He knew that I’d find helplessness humiliating, and that it would be easier to bear in the context of friendship. He got me through the worst of it, and he stopped working so much down at the store, and we fell back into being together. Nostalgia, I suppose; no one else that we’d grown up with had survived so long. He comes here nearly every day, and we keep each other company.
At first, we expended an awful lot of energy trying to behave as though nothing had ever happened between us. We were remarkably awkward with one another, considering that ours had been a lifelong friendship, and the argument we’d had had lasted only a few minutes. But we couldn’t seem to fall back into that old comfortable manner; there was always that little distance between us that wasn’t there before. And finally we gave up trying to recover what we had lost, and accepted the new way; we learned to live around it, in that way people do when a new baby has come to disrupt the household, and after a while it’s like it’s always been there.
Amazing, that we could be divided, after so much time and trust, by a little piece of silver. Bent past its original curvature by a child’s ill-use, changed forever by its short flight out of this house.
But it wasn’t about a little piece of silver, twisted and covered with earth when Julia brought it back, as though she had wanted to bring proof with her. It wasn’t about anything you can hold in your hand or drop on the pavement or forget. It was about larger things, about the friendship of years discarded in a few moments of temper; it was about a man who had been reared to a higher station than servitude, and about a woman pushing him right down there again, the one woman he might have trusted never to do such a thing. It was about becoming conscious all over again of his blackness, my whiteness, and about being afraid and ashamed. He couldn’t forgive me. One afternoon, to change us forever.
I’m tired. I didn’t know your mother all that well; there’s nothing more that I can tell you. Gaston will see you out.
CHAPTER FOUR
Buddy Downtown
WHAT AM I doing here? he thought. Listening to an old woman’s life story. Sure, it makes for great footage, all that corn-pone stuff, but it’s not what I came for.
Maybe he should have asked questions, directed her a little, instead of just letting her talk. But the assignment was pure documentary. And Mr. Szilardi always said, The best documentary comes out of unexpected places. Still. All he’d learned from Tess was that his mother went to a couple of tea parties in the fifties and got divorced. And something about a child, Amanda.
Of course, that wasn’t all he knew about his mother. He knew where she’d been born (Episcopal Hospital, Naples, Virginia), and where she died (her own living room, Darien, Connecticut), and the real color of her hair, which was a medium honey blonde. She lightened it with a package bleach to the hair color she’d had as a child. She called it “doing my roots,” and the two of them had played backgammon while the stuff was on, thirty-five minutes by the kitchen timer, her head wrapped in an old towel, ammonia fumes escaping, her eyes squinting up while she watched the board.
He’d known she was from the South; her voice gave that away. “All of them back home would say I sound like a Yankee now,” she told him, when he imitated her. But she didn’t say much more about her home, apart from the occasional stories about childhood birthday parties and teenage beauty contests. “I won them all,” she’d said, simply, and he’d believed her.
Hard to understand now, why he’d never asked her about herself, why she’d left Virginia, or anything about her first husband, whom she referred to as Old Beerbelly. She’d never volunteered anything about their marriage or divorce. Like most children, Buddy had been self-involved, dimly convinced that his mother had had no other life before his arrival. He’d never thought to press her for information: when he’d asked about grandparents, his mother had said, merely, “They’re dead, honey,” and he’d accepted it, childish, trusting.
But I’m not a child anymore.
He had been walking, muttering to himself, down the long path which led away from Tess’s house, carrying the last load of equipment. He dumped it rather recklessly into the trunk of the car and sat for a minute in the driver’s seat, his fingers on the ignition.
He had a theory about secrets: they could do no good. Concealment permitted things to fester, things that would be neutral and sterilized by the open air. Something in his mother had festered, enough to make her insides bubble and churn, enough to make her shoot herself through the forehead, one afternoon not long after Christmas.
She’d left a note. I love you. He assumed it was written to him, since his father had been out of town. But he couldn’t be sure.
There had been the questions, then, from the female police detective, and Buddy’s creeping sense of shame when he knew none of the answers.
“Was she depressed?”
Shrug. Who wasn’t, sometimes?
“Did she have—excuse me for this—a boyfriend?”
Not that he knew about. But he was away at college, and his father away a lot on business. She could have filled this house with admirers, and neither of them the wiser.
“I ask these questions,” the policewoman had said, putting a gentle hand on Buddy’s shoulder, “because we need to be very clear about what happened.”
“She shot herself,” said Buddy, his first words, strangled sounding.
“How old are you?” the woman had asked then.
“Old enough,” Buddy had said, surly.
“I’d guess seventeen,” she’d said.
“Eighteen,” he corrected.
“Well then,” she’d said, and made a place for herself on the step next to him. “We have to be very sure how this happened,” she said.
“She pulled the trigger,” said Buddy. The detective threw him a sharp look.
“You say yourself that she didn’t seem overly depressed,” she said in a soft voice. “And—well, it just isn’t usual for a woman to do it this way.”
“I don’t understand.” His voice was flat.
The detective sighed. “The gun,” she said. “Women usually … use … pills or poison. Softer methods, which don’t always succeed. Your mother’s death was … unusually violent.”
“You’re saying she must have really wanted to be dead,” he said, raising his eyes to the detective’s.
“Son,” she said, looking back at him, dead on. “That’s exactly what I’m saying.”
Violence. What did Buddy know of it, apart from television and the newspapers? When he was eight, the tabby cat had had kittens, six of them in a miracle afternoon, on a pile of old coats in his bedroom closet. He and his mother had counted aloud: three tabbies, two orange, one pure black. “That clinches it,” his mother had said, when the first orange one appeared. “Marmalade must have paid us a visit.” When the last tabby emerged wetly, his mother looked at it closely. “Honey,” she’d said. “This one’s sick.” He’d looked, and had seen the intestines hanging out like little worms, gathered behind a tough cloudy membrane. “It’s going to die,” said his mother, softly. “It’s crying,” said Buddy, horrified. “It’s hurting,” said his mother. “We can help.” He’d looked at her, not sure he understood. “You don’t have to watch,” she’d s
aid, and waited. “Stop it crying,” said Buddy, finally. He’d watched the little jaw opening and closing, the chest heaving, while his mother went away and came back with a bucket of water. “It’s warm,” she said. “Like a bath.”
At the last minute, Buddy had looked away, but then he made himself look back again, in time to see his mother’s strong hand in the dimpled water. The kitten was tinier in death.
“I know you’re sad,” his mother had said, hugging him. “But it’s better this way.”
“It’s not crying anymore,” said Buddy.
They buried the kitten in the backyard of that house, and ten years later and many miles away, they buried Buddy’s mother. The ceremonies were remarkably similar—simple and sad, only a few mourners, his father and he standing close together, his father weeping as Buddy had done that time before, Buddy propping him up as his mother had done for him when he was eight.
The two of them stayed in the house, rotten now with mourning, while the police crawled over everything and reluctantly pronounced the death a suicide. Buddy hadn’t gone back to school for the spring term; he got a job and hung around with his father, until the fall. Then his father had decided to sell the house. “There’s a good job in California,” he’d said. “I need to get away from here. I’d like you to come with me—you can transfer your credits to a school there, if you like.”
California was too far away; Buddy decided to return to college in New York, although he really didn’t want to go to school at all. In September, he was in classrooms hating everything. All those heads looking forward at the lecturer, all those hands taking notes, nobody seeming to think about anything. He bumped dismally along in his courses, putting off choosing a major; the only class that interested him at all was the introduction to film, which he’d taken largely because it fit into his schedule. It was different from his other classes: most of the homework was watching movies, and most of the class meetings took place in the screening room, with the chairs in a long row in front of a large blank wall.
After the first screening, Professor Szilardi had snapped on the lights and put a question to his blinking students.
“What did you think of the filmmaker?” he asked.
No response. The students huddled down into their chairs, shy and confused. They were afraid to speak, afraid to be wrong. Buddy huddled down with them, made as blank-minded as they by the most fearsome kind of question—the one with no clear-cut answer.
“I’ll tell you what I think,” said the professor. “I think he’s an asshole.”
Asshole. Magic, magic word, spoken by a professor in a college classroom. Buddy, along with some of the other students, sat up a little straighter and looked more closely at Mr. Szilardi, who stood smiling before them. The word had demystified him, and at the same time contributed to his deification. Buddy was entranced, and took out his notebook as the professor began his lecture.
After that, Buddy never skipped Szilardi’s class, as he did so many others. He liked everything about it—the moteridden darkness, and the way Mr. Szilardi’s hands cut through the beams from the projector. He liked the vocabulary of film—wild sound, focus, candela. But most of all, he liked its magical property of arranging things, the power it gave to intervene, to splice and resplice until a scene was flawless. Film was about control.
But that’s not where you started. According to Szilardi, you started with documentaries, editing scriptless potluck footage into a meaningful whole. “Reality first,” he said. “You have to earn your fantasy.”
So here he was, filming reality. He had followed Jack up here to Tess’s this morning, and now it was past noon, and he had nowhere in mind to go. Still unsure, but feeling restless, he started up the car and pulled away from the curb.
It was a lucky break, wandering into that bar that first night; he’d hit upon a nest of good old boys, drowsing over their beers. They had warmed up to him after a few minutes, and had seemed friendly enough and willing to talk. At first. When he’d tried to pin any of them down to interviews, they’d melted away like spring snow. Shy, he thought. Or maybe stubborn. They didn’t hold with all this newfangled equipment. Weird, that one guy with the stutter, how they all acted like they didn’t hear it. And he was Jack’s brother!
Buddy by now was developing a slight hero-worship of Jack; he found it impossible to believe that Jack and that skinny, stuttering man were brothers. They hardly even looked alike. Well, maybe half brothers, or maybe one adopted.
He had turned from the shady quiet of Tess’s street onto another winding avenue; at a stoplight, he turned right, and found himself downtown. The ground was level here, and the streets were white, dazzling; everything looked old but terribly clean. He spotted a sign affixed to the side of a building. NAPLES HISTORIC PRESERVATION SOCIETY. Buddy had seen the same kind of sign before, during summer vacations in various “rustic” locations in New England. It was a cinch that the committee was nothing more than a dozen serious old ladies and a handful of draggled husbands. They’d come in here and scrubbed and repaired and painted everything, and slapped these signs up so that no one might threaten their hard work with a neon sign or parking lot. Of course, the ladies had done the planning, and the men had gotten up on the ladders and done the work.
He crawled up and down the streets of downtown, which turned out to be four parallel roads, all equally pristine. Buddy, seeing a Village Barbershop and a Village Florist, guessed that this must be what was called “the old village.” These folks should see the real Village, he thought to himself, meaning New York. They’d rush back here and call it something else.
He drove in widening circles. As one left the old village, there was an abrupt degeneration, a sudden neglected quality to the buildings. Not historic enough for their troubles, thought Buddy. He had noticed a smallish house with a plaque on its edifice proclaiming it the headquarters of the Historic Committee. He turned back in that direction, and parked.
I like this, he thought, slamming the car door. Park anywhere. What a town.
Inside, the building was cool and institutional. A row of pamphlets poked out from a wooden rack on the wall, just inside the door.
“May I help you?”
He turned. One of the old ladies.
“Yes, please, I want to know more about Naples.”
“Well, now, that’s what we’re here for. Or at least part of why we’re here.” She wasn’t that old, maybe sixty; she had white hair but a curiously unlined face. A giant brooch pinned under her chin bobbed as she talked. “Where are you from?” she asked.
“New York,” said Buddy, uncomfortably, feeling like he was lying. Well, he wasn’t lying; that was where he lived now; but there was no easy answer to that most common of questions; there never had been.
“If you’d just sign our register here,” said the woman, pushing a book toward him. He bent over it, taking up a pen from the desk. “We like to keep track of our visitors,” she said, cheerily. She peered at his handwriting. “New York City, well,” she said. “I guess that’s New York, all right.”
Buddy smiled, not sure how to respond.
“I’m Millicent Grass,” said the woman, flipping up a small brass name tag attached to the front of her dress. “We have a brand-new pamphlet here,” she said, proudly, indicating a glossy stack to the right of the visitors’ book. She lowered her voice. “The old one wasn’t as good, it left out all kinds of things. I was on the committee that designed this one.” She pulled one of the pamphlets toward her, and flipped it open upside down, so that Buddy could read it. “The other one had all the important facts, you know, but not all of the interesting ones.” She set a pink fingernail against a column of text. “For instance, did you know that Naples was completely spared during the War?” She nodded, as though he had expressed disbelief. “It was next in line to be burned,” she said, “when the Yankee general was suddenly called to Washington. So a lot of the houses around here are original. You won’t see anything like them anywhere el
se in this part of Virginia. See here, for instance,” she said, tapping her nail against a photograph in the pamphlet.
“Uh-huh,” said Buddy politely. All houses looked much the same to him. True, he’d been impressed with Tess’s old house; he hadn’t seen anything like it before except in movies. Now, while Mrs. Grass talked on, he compared the mansion of the morning to the brick house in Connecticut, and both of those to his father’s ranch-style house in California. He had a glimmer of understanding; but still, he wasn’t much interested in the subject.
Mrs. Grass finished her little speech about local architecture, giving a light laugh.
“I will go on about Naples,” she said. “I haven’t even asked you if there’s anything specific you need to know.” She put her head on one side.
“Well,” said Buddy, not sure how to explain. “My mother was born here.”
“How nice,” she said. “You wouldn’t be that young man staying with Jack Corbin, would you?”
Buddy nodded.
“Well, how convenient,” she said, beaming. “I’m vice president of the Historic Committee. We were going to send you a letter, but seeing as you’re here …” Her face dissolved alarmingly from smiling welcome into severity. “We have some pretty strict rules about movie-making in Naples.”
“But I’m just—” began Buddy. She ignored him, ticking off on her fingers as she spoke.
“One,” she said. “The committee must screen and approve all footage. Two. The committee reserves the right to confiscate and destroy all footage which it deems offensive or inappropriate. Three. The committee may, at any time, withdraw its previous approval. Four. Any revenues—”
“There won’t be any revenues,” said Buddy.
Mrs. Grass frowned slightly.
Near Canaan Page 6