The Tree of Forgetfulness

by Pam Durban

  THE TREE OF

  FORGETFULNESS

  YELLOW SHOE FICTION

  Michael Griffith, Series Editor

  THE TREE OF

  FORGETFULNESS

  A Novel

  PAM DURBAN

  Published by Louisiana State University Press

  Copyright © 2012 by Louisiana State University Press

  All rights reserved

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  LSU Press Paperback Original

  FIRST PRINTING

  DESIGNER: Mandy McDonald Scallan

  TYPEFACE: Adobe Garamond Pro

  PRINTER AND BINDER: McNaughton & Gunn, Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Durban, Pam.

  The tree of forgetfulness : a novel / Pam Durban.

  p. cm. — (Yellow shoe fiction)

  ISBN 978-0-8071-4972-0 (pbk. : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-8071-4973-7 (pdf)—ISBN 978-0-8071-4974-4 (epub) — ISBN 978-0-8071-4975-1 (mobi)

  I. Title.

  PS3554.U668T84 2012

  813′.54—dc23

  2012017588

  Though this novel was inspired by actual events, all characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources.

  For Peter, always

  Where blood has been spilled, the tree

  of forgetfulness will not flourish.

  —BRAZILIAN PROVERB

  Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good

  and evil passes not through states, nor between classes,

  nor between political parties—but right through every

  human heart—and through all human hearts.

  —ALEKSANDR SOLZHENITSYN

  THE TREE OF

  FORGETFULNESS

  1

  Howard Aimar

  June 1943

  YOU DON’T MEAN IT, people will say. Fifty is too young to die. He was such a good father, they will say. Such a good man. Remember Howard at the piano at Christmastime, singing “Joy to the World” with Libba and the children? What a beautiful tenor voice he had, it fit so well with Libba’s sweet soprano. Did you ever see him dressed for an evening out? In that white silk scarf and the long, ivory cigarette holder tipped up at a dramatic angle, didn’t he look like FDR himself? Remember how, when anyone stopped him on the street to ask, he could talk for ten minutes about how Lewis was getting along over there in the Pacific, fighting the Japanese? You’d think God in His mercy would have spared a father’s life until his son came home from war, but as we have been taught so long and so well: God’s ways are not our own.

  Howard and Libba owned a movie camera, of course, a Bell and Howell, the newest thing, and no matter how he moaned and groaned about that camera, you could tell he was proud that it cost so much; they both were. In a home movie shot in April in the backyard of their big, fine house, he followed his daughter Cecile along a winding path through the azaleas, holding up the long train of that white gown she wore when she was crowned May Queen at St. Angela Academy. Bent like an old man, one hand on his aching back, he mimed the faithful servant hobbling along behind the young monarch; you could tell he was joking by the way he mugged for the camera. Howard was a cutup, a practical joker. And dance. That man could do it all—foxtrot, jitterbug, even the Charleston.

  In early June the Aiken Standard carried an item on the social page: “Mr. and Mrs. Howard Aimar attended the graduation from St. Angela Academy of their daughter, the delightful and charming Miss Cecile Aimar.” A week later he was rushed to the hospital in agony, his appendix about to burst. After the hurry-up operation, blood poisoning set in, and three days later, in spite of all the love, the singing, the dancing and clowning, in spite of his son’s absence and all the other objections raised against his dying, Howard Aimar was gone.

  In the story handed down through the family like an heirloom, negligence, possibly malfeasance, caused the fatal infection, because the sudden death of such a good, generous, fun-loving family man, a man with everything to live for, cannot happen for the simple reason that people are struck down sometimes; there must be a villain, a mistake. They didn’t have to look far to find both.

  A few months after his death, a nurse who’d been in the operating room that day hinted to Cecile that the doctor might have wiped the scalpel on a not-quite-clean towel. A sponge might have gone into Howard Aimar’s body and not come out, though she wouldn’t put her hand on the Bible and swear to either fact. They had to get that appendix out, and abdominal surgery was always fraught with the danger of infection, especially in 1943, when penicillin was needed overseas and there was a shortage at home. But over time the dirty scalpel and the lost sponge would become enshrined as the cause of his death and of the mistrust and resentment that still lead Howard Aimar’s kin to give the doctor’s kin the cold shoulder if they run into them at Sunday brunch at the country club or in the crowd lining Laurens Street to watch the Christmas parade.

  But now it is the first of his last three days, and as he lies dying, Howard Aimar goes on making plans, as though planning for the future will save his place there. Doesn’t everyone feel too necessary and unfinished to die? Faced with catastrophe, how often do we say, Wait, stop, there’s been a mistake, and trust that we will be heard and allowed to finish the work we’ve started or to start the work we’re always about to begin?

  A cedar grows outside the open window of his hospital room (open because his wife, Dr. Hastings’s daughter, insists on fresh air in a sickroom), and early that morning a mockingbird lights in this tree and scribbles a long complicated song in the air. It sings as though singing his plans back to him, the way his secretary, Miss Laura Sudlow, reads the letters he dictates from his desk at Howard Aimar Insurance and Real Estate. Reads them with such spirit that she makes his ideas sound fresh and full of possibility, even in that dim, narrow slot of an office with windows set so high in the walls they frame only sky. His place of business, where no matter how fresh and clear the weather, the air always smells of fuel oil and carbon paper and the ink of typewriter ribbons.

  The place would be completely drab if it weren’t for the pictures on the walls, like the painting behind Howard’s desk that depicts the moment at Waterloo when the British repulsed Napoleon’s cavalry and the battle was lost, splashed with the blood of dying men and dying horses, a swarm of red and blue uniforms. That painting had hung above his father’s desk in the pharmacy in Augusta where he’d toiled his life away, and he’d felt a special kinship with one dying French soldier. Howard finds the picture appropriate to his situation too, though he sees himself as a British soldier, not a French cavalryman, and he believes that this way of thinking makes him the victor in the battle against despair that his father lost.

  Waterloo is framed in gold, more gold surrounds the prints that advertise the insurance companies whose products Howard Aimar sells. From Lincoln Life there is the haggard Lincoln of the war’s middle years, and the Fireman’s Fund is represented by a scene of a sooty fireman carrying a small blonde angel of a girl out of a burning house. Every morning as he walks past that picture on the way to his desk, his own wife looks back at him out of the child’s untroubled blue eyes. Life is good, she whispers. And you, my love, are provider and protector of that goodness.

  Not that Libba’s childhood home had ever been threatened by fire. She grew up in a house with four chimneys, surrounded by a yard full of azaleas and sweet-smelling shrubs, the town’s first automobile parked under the port
e cochere. She grew up with a brother and a father who petted and spoiled her and a mother who hosted ice cream socials and sang in the First Presbyterian Church choir. A woman who kept the home and served as president of the Choral Club, the Civic Club, and the Little Garden Club, whose yearly flower show she had founded and nurtured into statewide fame.

  A woman who contributed her opinions to a column in the State newspaper called “As a Woman Thinketh.” “For years I have been using a face lotion that my grandmother used before me. She paid fifty cents for it, and it is made by an old chemical concern in New York. I have never been able to find it in a South Carolina drugstore, though she used to buy it anywhere in the state. They will order it for me but charge me a dollar and a quarter for it. I can order it from a retail drugstore in Georgia for seventy-five cents. Shall I pay a druggist fifty cents to write my letter for me? Not while I’ve got a perfectly good typewriter and don’t suffer from rheumatism!”

  Her more serious reflections appeared in the Keystone magazine published by the Federation of Women’s Clubs: “The heart must be developed as well as the head. This necessarily reverts to the home, where the youth must be taught control of the instincts and the obligations to society stressed.”

  “Spirited,” people called Libba’s mother, but not so spirited as to be thought hysterical or difficult.

  Libba grew up believing she would marry a boy who came from one of the two or three families that Dr. and Mrs. Henderson Hastings judged to be on a par with their own. She hadn’t known she needed rescuing until Howard came along. One cool morning in late September the year she’d turned eighteen, she’d been enjoying a walk among the sweetly flowering tea olive bushes in the front yard of her father’s house, when she’d heard footsteps on the brick sidewalk outside their fence. A man walked up to the fence and stopped. “What is that heavenly smell?” he said, and she broke off a sprig of tea olive and gave it to him, and in that moment she saw that compared to the man who had stopped at her fence, the boys who walked with her to church and came to her ice cream socials wore the soft, unformed faces of children, and she felt as though she’d stepped into a bright maze where every path led to the same radiant place. Her mother tapped on the front window, but she didn’t turn. If the ground had opened at their feet, she would have gladly tumbled with him into the crack.

  When I get well, Howard Aimar sings along with the mockingbird, I will go down to my office and burn those files. He should have done it long ago, and as he imagines it now, his hands rehearse the tearing and wadding of paper. From somewhere nearby Libba whispers, “What is he doing? Howard, stop.” Her hands capture his, but the planning continues. He will collect all the long yellow sheets covered with numbers and sums and dump them into the burning barrel in the alley. He will light a fire and stir it with the scorched rake he keeps beside the barrel, catch each drifting cinder and return it to the flames until he is sure the pages are burnt up and not just charred. He will burn all the pale blue pages of Laura Sudlow’s personal stationery as well, the ones with her address embossed at the top, and then the trail will disappear that leads from his office to her small white house behind the camellias, and no one will ever know or be tempted to make up a story about the net they’ve woven to hold the money that is always tearing, or threatening to tear, in a dozen places or the hours he’s spent at her dining room table with his head in his hands, looking for a way to balance the money trickling in with the money gushing out. When I get well, the mockingbird sings, I will pay my just debts and clear my name so that years from now, when I am an old man and dying in my proper time, no one will be ashamed of anything I’ve done.

  One of Laura Sudlow’s letters pleads with him to pay some of the premiums owed to the Fireman’s Fund; another reports that Lincoln Life has called for an accounting of delinquent payments. She is the perfect secretary, the ideal confidante. She knows everything and does not judge, except for Libba’s spending, and then only in the mildest way. “Maybe Libba could do without a new coat this year?” That is one of the suggestions written in her small, flowing script. “Perhaps you could shorten your trip to the beach this summer, or stay home in good old Aiken for a change?” But the idea of not taking Libba to Waveland, the house on Sullivan’s Island that they rent for a month every summer, fills him with clawing panic. If they stay home, Libba will suspect that something is wrong, and Libba must not be suspicious; her faith in life’s goodness rests on her faith in him, and he will not betray that faith. Besides, if they don’t go to the beach, her mother and father might call out to her from their adjoining graves in Bethany Cemetery. Castles in the clouds, they’d say. We warned you, Libba. And this time she might listen.

  Libba is forty-five the year Howard dies. Every morning before she leaves for the hospital, she dresses in a snug skirt and a freshly pressed blouse and fastens on the pearl necklace he gave her for their first anniversary. “To my pearl of great price,” he wrote on the tag in his elegant, beveled script. Three days earlier, coming up from under the anesthesia, he’d grabbed the pearls and held on so tightly she’d thought he would break them. It is one of the stories she will tell the grandchildren, who will know him only through stories: how she had to pry his fingers loose that day, else he would have broken her necklace, and that would have broken her heart.

  Today, as every day, she tips a few drops of Chanel No. 5 onto her fingers from one of the bottles he tucks in her Christmas stocking every year and dabs the perfume behind her ears. She pins up her dark hair and spreads bright lipstick on her mouth and stops in the hall outside his room to pinch color into her cheeks before she sashays in and kisses him on the forehead. “Hello, my love,” she says, then pulls a chair up close to his bed, pats his arm and laughs her high sweet laugh that ripples in the air like a bright flag on the ramparts of happiness. She touches her pearls and chats about this and that—the back door hinges oiled and the driveway raked, their little flock of Barred Plymouth Rock hens laying eggs all over the yard, the branches of the hundred peach trees in her aunt’s orchard so laden they have to be held up with forked sticks. She talks as if this sickness and the deepening gray shadow it throws over his face, the way he lies like a stone king on a tomb, is a passing inconvenience. She will give him, as she has given him ever since the night she climbed out of her bedroom window and ran away with him in a borrowed car across the Savannah River and married him in front of a justice of the peace in Augusta, the gift of her complete confidence.

  This morning he manages a word. “Lewis,” he says, and she’s ready. No new letter has come from their son, so she opens the most recent letter again, unfolding the thin V-mail page and reading around the blacked-out lines. “Dear Folks, All is well and I am healthy and eating well. Yesterday, I ate my first coconut, which is surprisingly tasty once you figure a way to crack that doggone shell. I used the butt of my rifle, which is, I figure, about the most work it’s going to get! The army is keeping me pretty busy, but I manage to get in a swim most days in this tropical paradise where they’ve sent me. Ha-ha.”

  Hearing Lewis’s letter, he remembers more reasons to live. To see Cecile married, to welcome Lewis home, to know his grandchildren, to love his wife through all her days, to make amends for his failures and lacks, to become, finally and completely, the man he meant to be.

  As she does every day, Libba sits beside his bed and ticks off on her fingers the food that friends and kin have brought to the house. Ham and chicken and potato salad and succotash and custard, pickled peaches and deviled eggs. When he opens his eyes and sees her hands, he smiles. He loves her hands. Unlike the rest of her—her long slender neck and waist and legs—her hands are small and compact, with short blunt fingers and thick palms, hands made for work, not leisure. “My Lord, Howard, I’m going to turn into a butterball if you don’t hurry up and come home to help me eat that food,” she says, running her hands over her hips to show him the danger. The sight of her hips makes him smile too. The smell of her perfume brings pictures: curtai
ns stirring at their bedroom window, himself turning the lock on their door.

  At noon Cecile looks at her father’s hands that lie where they’ve fallen. “Please stop, Mother. He can’t hear you,” she says.

  “Of course he can, Cecile, don’t be foolish.” Libba leans over and kisses his forehead. “Look at him smile when I tell him about the food.” As long as they both shall live, she will comfort him, and if Cecile doesn’t approve, she can go about her business and leave them in peace.

  When his appetite comes back, she tells him, he can eat himself to sleep, and when he wakes up, she’ll pop another tidbit in his mouth; she’ll fatten him up until he fits into his old cheerful self again. They’ll start with pecans, good old Gloria Grandes from their backyard trees, roasted in butter and salt, the way he likes them. Her aunt’s peaches will ripen, and every Sunday evening he will churn peach ice cream on the back porch. “Look at him smile about that ice cream, Miss Doubting Thomas,” she says to Cecile, raising her voice so that he can hear. This is her last gift to him: trusting as she’s always trusted that what seems to be happening is not.

  “You won’t believe it, Howard,” she says. “But Minnie’s back. Just for the time being, of course, but never mind.” She has come out of the goodness of her heart, Libba says, to answer the door and keep track of the food in a notebook that Libba keeps on the table in the foyer. “Minnie’s coming to see you, Howard. She promised,” Libba says.

  Minnie. Hearing her name, he hears another—Zeke. Fear comes up in him like thick black smoke, and he runs through it, flailing and thrashing. “Help me up,” he shouts, but no one hears. He needs to get back to his office and start another fire and burn the papers he saved during the terrible autumn of 1926, when three colored people were killed and a New York reporter came down to accuse them all of murder.