And now, as near as I could tell, she no longer went to church at all. Her back turned on the Word, on God, after my sister’s death.
I couldn’t grasp it, this new glimpse into the past. My head and midsection felt turned inside out. “Does this woman—this Mrs. Grimes—know Mother’s story?” I asked after a long silence.
Daddy shook his head, mopping his face. “I think not. After nearly fifty years? She was just a slip of a child at the time, Ella. But your mother—” He sighed and put away the letters. “She’s got it in her head it was common gossip in the county.”
I took his big hands in mine. “It’s all right,” I told him. “It’s all right.” And I sat with him like that, silent and sickened by the knowledge of how each generation lied to the next. Saddened at the thought of the lives my sister and I had with such care invented for our mother; saddened to breaking at the realization of the life she had invented for us.
26
The woman at the door, when I opened it, looked very East Texas: gentle smile, flowered summer dress, faint floral scent, patent-leather pumps. Black. She put out her firm hand. “Sadie Grimes. Now you would be—?”
“I’m Agatha’s daughter Ella. There were two of us. My sister Terrell died in January.”
“We did hear that unfortunate news, yes. But I thank you, lest I say the wrong thing in speaking with your mother.” She patted at her damp face with a lace handkerchief.
“Please come in. I’m visiting here from Louisiana with my own daughter.”
“How nice for your family.”
I led Mrs. Grimes into the cool living room, where Daddy waited with Birdie. Mother had not yet come out of her bedroom, though surely she had heard the doorbell. I made the introductions, trying to mind my manners. “This is my daughter, Birdie, and my daddy, Judah Hopkins. And this is Sadie Grimes.”
“That’s a fine name, Mr. Hopkins,” she said at once. “Judah, one of the sons of Jacob.”
“My word,” Daddy said, bowing from the waist until his forehead was even with that of the visitor. “That’s a first, someone knowing Bible names in today’s world. Did you hear that, Ella?”
“My brother-in-law is named Issachar. You can imagine how that tormented him in school.”
“My brother Reuben was a judge in Ector County.”
“Certainly, certainly,” Mrs. Grimes declared, nodding her head. “My daddy worked out in Ector in the oil fields, then he moved to Angelina County after, taking a job making oilfield pumps, a step up for a man of his opportunities in the 1940s.”
Daddy helped her get seated in one of the green armchairs, then eased himself into the other. Birdie and I sat facing each other on the small flowered sofas. No sign of Mother. We all looked at one another.
“You don’t find many people interested in those fine old names these days,” Daddy said. He was speaking to our guest, but his eyes were on the living room door.
Breaking the strained silence, Birdie attempted to be sociable. “Did you know I play the cello, Mrs. Grimes?”
“Why, no, dear,” Sadie Grimes said, “I don’t believe I did. My mama was a fine church organist and that talent has passed on down in our family. That’s a priceless gift to have.”
“I and my friend—” Birdie began.
But then we heard Mother come down the hall, and there she was, composed, her hair a deep auburn, freshly done, in an apricot linen dress with white collar, her single strand of pearls. She smiled at everyone as if the curtain had just opened on her show. “Well, now, you must be Sadie Clark,” she said in a rush, giving the rising woman a little squeeze, telling her to please, sit down. “Though I have to say, I wouldn’t have known you, all grown up.” She made a musical laugh. “That’s all so long ago, isn’t it?” She sat beside me on the flowered sofa, reaching out a hand to pat my knee. “I’m sure you’ve met my lovely daughter, Ella. Doesn’t she look nice in taupe? So becoming with her chestnut hair.”
“It’s an honor to see you again,” Sadie said, breaking into a generous smile, “and to meet your fine family. Your husband and I were discussing Old Testament names.”
“Don’t you have something prepared for our guest?” Mother asked Daddy, in the upbeat tone of someone running a children’s birthday party.
“Indeed I do,” he replied, getting to his feet and lumbering off to the kitchen.
I was having a hard time getting my breath. Mother’s hand had stayed on my knee, and after every remark she turned in my direction, beaming on me as if I were a new discovery.
“I have to apologize, Sadie. Ordinarily, I’d have asked you out into the garden, which used to be my pride and joy; although I have never been the gardener my daughter Ella is, still I took pleasure in it. My azaleas did especially well. But not in this devastating weather. Not a drop of rain in a hundred days.”
“Our rivers are wanting water,” her former student said, looking, for the first time, at a bit of a loss.
Daddy brought in a plate of fresh-peach coffee cake squares, still warm, that he’d dusted with powdered sugar (along with the tops of his shoes). “Now, then,” he said. “What would you ladies like to drink?”
“I’d enjoy some iced tea,” Sadie suggested, fanning herself with a church fan though the house was quite cool, “if that isn’t trouble for you.”
“I keep a jar of sun tea in the icebox,” Daddy said, for a moment in his anxiety forgetting to say refrigerator. “I’m sure that’s fine with everyone.”
Then Mother launched into a yard story, just as if this were a common occurrence, someone from her past appearing after forty-eight years. “Did you know that squirrels build nests? I had no earthly idea. Here I was, looking out at the ligustrum that brushes against the side of the house, making us think sometimes, when we’re in bed, that someone is in the yard. At any rate, there I was, standing on a straight chair peering out our bedroom window, trying to see what that pile of twigs and leaves was in the top of the shrub, expecting to see a robin’s egg perhaps, and instead, there was this curled up ball, a common squirrel—”
“I believe I did know that,” Sadie offered gamely.
Daddy brought in a tray of iced tea and placed it on the glass-topped coffee table. He had used the inherited stemware with the slight ruby cast to the rim that Mother saved for company. “I’m going to try walking again,” he announced to our guest. “I’ve done the trick of getting up and down out of a chair, and I’ve got myself the hard-soled shoes. It’s time to get going. The Berkeley Wellness Letter states flat out in no uncertain terms that inactive people are seven times more likely to suffer a stroke.”
I was attempting to swallow a bite of the warm peach cake, all the time about to climb right out of my skin, with Mother turning every other minute to gaze at me, a fixed fond smile on her face.
Sadie took the new subject in stride, dabbing her mouth with the linen napkin before she spoke. “My daddy,” she told him, “had a spell of trouble with his legs, and his doctor advised him, ‘Walk like you was going to school, Elam. See it in your mind’s eye, that walk you used to take from the back porch of your house out there to the front door of the school. Conjure up the houses and stores you used to go past, stop the way you used to stop to wait up on somebody, and your legs will recall it. They’ll be a boy’s legs again and won’t bother you one whit.’ And that’s exactly what my daddy did. It was about five, six months he did this, walked round and round in his house, which wasn’t in any regard as fine and spacious a home as this, after which he never had trouble with his legs again.”
“Elam,” Daddy said. “There’s a name.”
But I thought I’d go nuts if they never let this kindly woman get to the point of her visit. “Mrs. Grimes,” I said, “we are all so pleased with the proposed Agatha Adams Day at your sister’s school.”
Sadie looked as if she might weep with relief. “Bless you,” she said. Then, speaking directly to my mother, she explained, “We are proud to be recognizing you, Mrs. Hopkins, f
or your fine work after all these years. We are a family of teachers, my sister and myself, and our aunts. My own mama, who was doing day work at the time Molly and I were in the county nursery program, used to credit you with setting us all on the upward path. She would quote you to us, my mama, whenever we would get down a bit at some setback, she would quote you to us as saying, ‘You’ve got the King James Bible. You’ve got the language. You can do anything you want.’ ” She clasped her hands in her flowered lap. “The day honoring you is especially meaningful to my sister, Molly, who has just taken over as the principal of the very elementary school she was not allowed to attend when she began her education.”
“I hope we can all be there for the celebration,” I said.
Mother placed a hand back on my knee, giving it a squeeze. “But that’s enough about those old days, don’t you think, Sadie? Today I have riches enough in my lovely family. My daughter, Ella, here, always such a pretty girl, such a marvel, a young widow, raising her Robin alone in Louisiana, making a name for herself among the garden clubs as a cultivator of roses. You should have seen, Sadie, the bouquet of old roses—you know they are quite the thing now, all those bushes and climbers that used to grow alongside the road in our day or trailing up the sides of country churches—that my daughter brought me for my birthday. There were more than a dozen blooms, each the size of your fist, in the most delicate pastel shades. I have to say she’s inherited my green thumb—although my own garden has been quite dried up and wilted this past year. Dear—” She turned to me, face flushed, only the slightest dampness to her eyes. “Tell Sadie about the rose you wrote me about, the special English one—”
My mouth went dry, my hands grew cold. I felt exactly like Terrell must have felt when asked to play the piano for company. Requested to display my ladylike talent: rose growing. How had my sister stood it all those years, having our mother’s bright eyes fixed on her, that smile of pride and anticipation centered on her?
In a quavering voice, I performed as best I could, making a romance of the mingled cuttings of an Alba and a Damask in Hamburg, long ago when that was part of Denmark. A hardy once-flowering rose, cupped, silk-soft, blushing from deep pink to pale, transported to England. Becoming Koenigin von Danemarck, Queen of Denmark.
As the weight of my mother’s expectations descended on my shoulders, there in that egg-yolk-yellow living room, with its apple-green rug and matted birds held behind non-glare glass, I wondered if my mother had invented her present life for her mother back in Angelina County. Writing home, Dear Mother, Dear Mother: letters filled with linen and flowers.
Old Metairie
27
You want a peanut butter sandwich?” Birdie asked Bailey, our new boarder. “I hate peanut butter,” he said.
“You can have banana slices or bean sprouts with it. I fix lunch on the weekend at my house.”
Bailey draped himself over the straight chair at the kitchen table, enough of him left over to twist his legs into a sort of Mobius strip. “Abandoned in Purgatory, Louisiana,” he moaned, “by my so-called guardian, left to fend for myself among the squatters in the middle of a national mosquito-breeding experiment.”
“We don’t have any jelly, though.”
“I HATE PEANUT BUTTER.”
“It’s all right to yell now, because our tenant, Margot, she’s staying with a friend of hers this weekend while Mom gets the plumber to fix her side of the house. But not when she comes back.”
Bailey flung his arms across the table, hugging the far edge. I could see that nothing in our house accommodated tall people. My nephew, naturally, had to sleep on the small blue sofa, which was not as long as he by a foot and a few inches. Plus his week here entailed other humiliations, such as sharing a bathroom with a female cousin who had lots of shampoo bottles and hairbrushes, and, because she liked to soak in the tub, a rather measly shower. My converted-from-a-closet half bath: off limits to him.
Red had come to see us off, carrying a spray of orange blossoms, which filled the car with the smell of orchards, and which he’d had to get from a florist because of the dry weather and the time of year. He still hadn’t quite recovered from the piano business; surprised, as was I, by how deeply those old hurts cut. When he dropped Bailey off, he brought a wooden crate of oranges, and we peeled and ate one in full view of our children. He also left a stack of paperbacks and catalogues, and I sat up half the night reading romances: the first oranges born in the Eden of China, carried by caravan to Italy and Spain; Richard the Lion-Hearted spending the winter of 1191 in the citrus groves of Jaffa; Hawaii getting the orange from seedlings raised on shipboard by a Spanish naturalist; the Romans imagining oranges arriving in the arms of the Hesperides, who crossed the sea in a giant shell.
But now I sat studying my accounts, gnawing my lower lip. I’d abandoned any hope I’d had for jobs to appear after the mass parental return for the start of school—due to the fact that the tropical storm (still known by a female name from hurricane days) had turned us back into a swamp with tree limbs strewn around, power lines down, backyards such as mine standing ankle-deep in water, sections of the freeway closed. Flights on hold. People trying to stay afloat were not worrying themselves about the moisture level of their dozing moonflowers or about the drainage problems of their Chinese blue plumbago.
Bert, the disgruntled but becoming-wealthy plumber, was adamant this time. Which meant he was no longer taking any grief from me about my lack of discretionary funds: I had to call Roto-Rooter. Soonest. They had a waiting list, he claimed, the size of the Old Metairie phone book. Under pressure, he did admit that, yes, he had a buddy who might on a Saturday want to pick up a little extra. “Okay, sure, I’ll call,” he said, which he did, lining me up for late afternoon, double overtime. I didn’t like letting myself into my tenant’s half-house once she’d returned; it felt akin to breaking and entering. Plus she went in for a lot of aromatherapy candles so that the smell of oils and fruit and herbs and roots made for a certain faintness on my part, not all attributable to the forthcoming bills. Especially aggravating was Bert’s way of saying, as he always did, “Nice place here.”
With the plumber gone, I left Karl a message on his machine, thanking him for his welcome-home call and agreeing that things were too much of a mess to try to get together today. Good Karl. I wasn’t ready to face seeing him—I’d had little experience with saying “sorry” to nice guys.
I found Bailey alone, Birdie having gone off to meet Felice at the Pink Mall and hang out with the older girls. Sketching something on the round table under the ceiling fan, in cargo shorts and no T-shirt, sweating front and back, his cowlick spiked in frustration. I showed him how to turn on the frosty, drippy AC unit.
“Look, Aunt Ella,” he pointed, “what you need is a deck out there. See, I measured. If you put in a deck, just eight by six, with a couple of steps, you could walk, maybe you’d need a stepping-stone, from the driveway to the back door. It’s a joke, wading through that pond back there.”
“Look, kiddo, I’m trying to figure out how to fund the Caribbean vacation plans of the Roto-Rooter man right now. Let’s do the lumber thing next time you camp out here during hurricane season.”
He put down his ballpoint. Somewhere in that unhappy face a six-year-old kid sulked. “We gonna do this all the time, then?”
“What?” I decided to fix us something cold. “You can have iced coffee, ice tea, or orangeade.”
“Coffee,” he said, trying to sound about a hundred.
“Do what?”
“Me hanging out here so I can get to know you and the chub, like I can’t see what’s going on.”
“I don’t know. This is a first for me. Having a houseguest who’d rather be in Uzbekistan.”
“Where’s that?” He looked amazed and grateful to spy a slice of pound cake heading his way on a paper napkin.
“You’re the scholar.” We didn’t keep sweets around—but that’s all I knew to do for teenage boys.
“That’s him who’s the brain, Borden. He’s the one knows it all.” He looked down at the cake, and then he was wiping the last crumb from his mouth.
“He’ll be in good company; everybody where he’s going will know it all.”
Bailey let a slight smile cross his face: his brother at Yale suddenly become just run-of-the-mill. “So what were you and Dad fighting about? Back home?”
How to answer? I felt on unsure ground. “That’s hard to talk about.”
He grunted and wadded up the blue paper napkin. “Nobody ever tells kids what’s really going on.”
No argument there. I tried not even to think about my parents in this context. “True,” I admitted. I took my iced coffee and led him out back into the tropics, sitting myself down on the top step, patting the soaked board beside me. The air so muggy we could have watered plants with it. “Okay.” I wanted to get this right. “Okay.” I waited till he got his long limbs settled here and there on the back stoop, his knees halfway to his chest to be in my range of sight. “We were fighting, I guess you could say, about your mom.”
“Mom?”
“Those of us who are younger siblings have this complex about older siblings.”
He adjusted his knees. “That’s news?”
“I guess I thought that your dad would never take up with the likes of me, after he’d lived with her. But what I forgot, Bailey, was that whereas we measure ourselves against them—our sister, our brother—they measure themselves against being perfect. That’s a whole lot harder. I forgot the high price they pay for doing things right.”
Ella in Bloom Page 17