The Ada Decades

by Paula Martinac

  So Ada stared out the passenger window, her mind filled with the Davidson house, the perfect log fire, the pristine tree, the French doors, and then the drops of bourbon glistening on the oak floor, Cam’s father wiping them up. She would ask Cam at another, safer time what exactly had happened in the parlor, but now she knew it was best to keep still. When they had both been quiet for a few long minutes and Cam’s hands seemed to relax, Ada reached over and flicked on the radio, where a local station was playing Christmas carols that filled up the void.

  As the lights of Charlotte flickered and drew closer, she wondered what they would do the next day for Christmas. The last thing she wanted was to be deposited at her parents’ house on Christmas Eve. “I told you it was wrong to leave family on Christmas,” her mama would say. Ada would sulk alone in her room, then go to church with her parents the next day, pick at Christmas supper. It was hard to imagine anything lonelier.

  And what about all the Christmases to come? A sense of panic welled up in Ada’s throat. Family was what you did on holidays—gathered with your folks or the folks of someone close to you. Unless like Auggie—and now, it seemed, Cam—you were unwelcome even among the people who raised you from a child.

  They were just a few blocks from her parents’ house when she glanced toward Cam and said, as gently as she could, “Honey, I don’t want to see my folks just now. Let’s go to Auggie’s.”

  Cam opened her mouth like she might protest, come up with some reason for being alone. But she closed it again, and without even a slight acknowledgment of Ada’s suggestion, she made a right turn where she shouldn’t and they headed in a new direction.

  The Plan

  1962

  Auggie shot himself on a balmy day in May. Ada had stayed late at school to assist two girls researching their American literature projects. They sat with Encyclopedia Britannica volumes splayed open on a scarred oak library table. Their teacher had assigned Herman Melville and Edgar Allan Poe, claiming only male authors were worth studying.

  “Now I would have picked different writers,” Ada said. “You ever read The Member of the Wedding?”

  “No, Miss Shook.”

  “To Kill a Mockingbird? That just got itself a Pulitzer Prize, a very fancy award.”

  Two sets of blank eyes stared back at her, so she returned to her desk. She was drawing up a list of books to include in a new bulletin board display when she noticed Cam in the library doorway, waving through the window for her to step into the hall.

  “Shouldn’t you be at practice? Or did you miss me that much?” Ada said, looking up and down the hallway to make sure they were alone. If the library had been empty, she might have ventured a kiss on the lips, too, just to feel the forbidden spark of it electrify her body. They were at long last moving in together at the end of the term. Cam’s apartment had two bedrooms, conveniently located at opposite ends of a hall so it would look like they were just roommates.

  Cam, who was usually full of saucy comebacks when Ada flirted with her, seemed more than a tad distracted.

  “Darlin’,” she said, her eyes round as hula hoops, “I’ve got to get back to the girls, so I’m just going to come straight out with it. Something bad’s happened to Auggie.”

  The words that tumbled out didn’t make sense to Ada. She stared at Cam’s mouth like someone trying to lip-read.

  “. . . shot himself,” Cam seemed to be saying. “This afternoon. Right in Twig’s living room. The police are there. Twig’s gonna need a place to stay for a few days, so I offered him my couch. I hope that’s okay.”

  “I don’t understand. Where’s Auggie?”

  “Oh lord, darlin’. He shot himself in the head with that revolver Twig kept—the one belonged to his daddy? Blew his damn fool brains out.”

  § § §

  In April, the Observer had run the story, below the fold on page one. Accompanying it was a grainy photo of young men being escorted into the police station, their hands in cuffs, heads turned away from the camera to conceal their faces. “10 Arrested in Homosexual Round-Up.” Auggie’s name and address topped the alphabetical list—Augustus F. Barkley, 30, 820 Catawba Ave., Charlotte, N.C.

  Before school in the library, Cam had read the story aloud in a hushed voice, and Ada’s stomach flip-flopped. “Seems like some kind of crackdown going on. Remember they raided Neptune a couple of months back?”

  “But why do they print the names?” Ada asked. “Isn’t being arrested bad enough?”

  “Not by half,” Cam said. “It’s the humiliation, darlin’.”

  Twig had posted bail, even though they were just friends now and not lovers, so Auggie was home by lunch. The following Monday, the manager at his bank called Auggie in and handed him his slip. No two weeks’ notice, no pay for unused vacation days, not even a “thank you” for eight years of service—just a curt goodbye and dismissal. “You see the position we’re in,” the manager said.

  “Missionary, obviously.”

  Ada gasped when Auggie related the story to her later. “You did not say that!” She wasn’t sure if she should be proud or mortified.

  He admitted he hadn’t, that he only thought of it later when he was already through the revolving door. Ironically, Auggie said he hadn’t planned on cruising that night. The city was having a rainy spell, and “Who wants to get down on your knees in the mud? I mean, what a mess.” At the last minute, though, the sky cleared, and the stars flickered like lightning bugs. “I wish to God it had stormed,” Auggie said with a sigh.

  The snappy retorts Auggie was famous for—Cam dubbed him Oscar, for his one-liners—became fewer and further between as the weeks went on. His eyes took on a glassiness that reminded Ada of her Uncle Rad, who had returned from the war in Europe with what everybody called “battle fatigue.”

  On an evening when Ada knew Auggie was at home, he didn’t even pick up his phone. She imagined him passed out on his sofa, butts and empties strewn around him. “He’ll burn his place down if he’s not careful,” she said to Cam as she replaced the receiver in its cradle. “Should I go over there?”

  “He’s a grown man, darlin’,” was all Cam said. It was hard to see him that way. Although he was a few years older than Ada, she felt like his big sister, offering comfort and company when he needed it. Even his carrot-top hair stuck up in a cowlick, the way her brother Foster’s did when he was a kid. Auggie had no family to speak of; his daddy had tossed him out right after his high school graduation. But it wasn’t something he dwelled on. Ada only found out when she innocently asked if his parents were proud of his promotion to chief teller at the bank. “Couldn’t say,” he said, sniffing. “They disowned me years ago. You’re my only real family, you and Cam . . . and Twig, even though he broke my heart.”

  She had heard about other fellows like Auggie who had given up, “accidentally” plowing their cars into trees or fashioning nooses out of belts, at the very time they should have been launching their lives. But though Auggie had seemed down, he hadn’t registered as despairing. He still got up every day, took a shower, talked to his defense lawyer, checked the Help Wanteds in the Observer. Who bothers to look for a new job if he’s going to kill himself?

  In fact, Twig said later, Auggie had been so relaxed when he arrived at his house that day, Twig thought he might have actually turned the corner on dejection. “I opened the door and he just said ‘hey’ in his usual way. He acted so calm, said he’d come up with a plan—no, he called it The Plan. I asked if he wanted to go to Shoney’s and tell me all about it, ’cause my shift didn’t start till four. I went to change into my scrubs, so I could go to work right from supper . . . I wasn’t gone more’n ten minutes, I swear to y’all . . . and that’s when I heard it. I seen a lot in my days, but nothing like that. His . . . well, it was all over the walls.” Twig’s hands covered his face, like he was trying to erase the picture from his mind. “My neighbor heard the shot, so she called the cops. She said I screamed, but I don’t remember.”

&n
bsp; That night, Ada slept over at Cam’s, making up an excuse for her mother about a friend “in crisis.” From the sofa where he slept, Twig let out a piercing wail in the pitch dark that jolted her and Cam awake.

  “Shouldn’t we go out there?”

  “He’s going to have nightmares for a while,” Cam said.

  Cam’s matter-of-fact way about the ordeals of life struck Ada as cavalier. What happened to you just happened, Cam seemed to think, and you were better off moving on as fast as you could. Ada, on the other hand, was accustomed to accompanying her mother when she brought casseroles to grieving neighbors, praying along with widows whose hearts were shattering right in front of her.

  “Well, I can’t sleep now,” Ada said. She slipped Cam’s bathrobe over her chemise, and swept her hair back with a rubber band. In the dark, it was hard to distinguish Twig’s willowy frame from the shadows. When she sat down beside him, Ada could see beads of sweat glistening on his face in the moonlight.

  “I can’t get it out of my head,” Twig said, his mountain twang more pronounced when his guard was down. Then out of nowhere, “I wish I could take it all back.”

  “What do you mean?” She thought she should stroke his arm or back, but she had never been one to touch or hug. Even with Cam, she sometimes went stiff if the embrace went on too long. She wished Cam would come and hug him for her. But one thing she was good at was listening.

  “I cheated on him, Ada.”

  “Oh, he told me that, honey. That’s not why he did it.”

  “I know,” Twig said, the tears rolling freely down his cheeks. His voice got more high-pitched as he continued. “But I still wish I could take it back! The other fellas—they were nothing! If we were still together, he wouldn’t have gone to that park—he wouldn’t have, I know it! I know it for a fact!”

  Her hand went out tentatively and skimmed the layer of black hair on his forearm. She had no experience with men, and the silky feel surprised her. She imagined hair that thick would be coarse and nasty, and cause her to recoil. Instead, she settled into a rhythm of petting him like her neighbor’s retriever.

  “You can’t do this to yourself,” Ada said. “People don’t just . . . do something like that unless they’re troubled in their minds. I kept asking Auggie to come to church with me, but he wouldn’t.”

  “What good would church have done?” Cam said from the bedroom doorway. “It’s not like God is stepping in to help the homosexuals.” She pronounced it in the way she did when she was being sarcastic, stringing it out into its full five syllables.

  Cam’s blasphemy never failed to prickle Ada, and faith was a roadblock they still hadn’t made it past in their four years together. Like her folks, Ada was a lifelong Methodist, while Cam was a proud agnostic.

  “Hush,” Ada hissed. “We all know how you feel about God. Now please go get Twig a glass of water.”

  Cam lit a cigarette first, and the tip glowed orange in the darkness. She inhaled deeply, as if making some sort of point, before heading to the kitchen. Ada turned away, her attention focused again on Twig, whose chest was heaving in and out with great effort. She leaned in and whispered, “Would you like to pray with me?”

  Twig’s head bobbed like a puppet’s, and she took his hands in hers. “Dear Lord,” she said, bowing her head, “we pray for our sweet brother Augustus. Please forgive him his sins and welcome him into your kingdom, so he may find rest in your loving arms. We pray for this in the name of Jesus Christ your son, who gave his life that we might live.”

  A glass made a distinct “clunk” on the coffee table in front of them, and Ada pressed her eyelids down more firmly, blocking out Cam’s disapproval. “We thank you, Lord, for each other, and for the precious gift of life you have given us. Please help us keep Auggie in our hearts and prayers. For this God is our God forever and ever; he will be our guide even to the end.” She heard Cam take another long drag. “Amen.”

  “Amen,” Twig repeated after her. He opened his eyes a second after she did and downed the glass of water in front of him in a single gulp.

  “Being who you are is never a sin,” Cam noted, crushing her cigarette into an ashtray.

  “You know I don’t think that,” Ada said.

  § § §

  Auggie’s death notice read, “Suddenly, on May 14.” There was no visitation listed, no funeral, no way to show respect for their friend. Twig contacted the funeral parlor to find out if there had been an omission in the paper, but was told “the deceased’s family” had decided on a brief, private service.

  “Probably just tossed him in the ground,” Twig said through bursts of tears.

  Twig decided to stage his own late-afternoon service, when the cemetery would be quiet and there would be few to notice. Auggie deserved a real party, he said, so he placed phone calls to “a few dozen of the finest homosexuals.” He even bought balloons, but only Ada and Cam showed up.

  “The fellas are scared,” Cam said. “You can’t blame them.”

  Twig wore his charcoal go-to-church suit, with matching orchid shirt and socks and a white carnation in his lapel. It was hard to find Auggie at first, but then the Barkley plot appeared, replete with marble tombstones elaborately carved with Biblical verses. One grave had freshly turned dirt, with a wooden cross at its head that obscured its owner’s identity: A.F.B., 1932–1962. Twig wailed at the sight of it.

  “At least they did the right thing and included him with the family,” Ada said, patting his back. “You sure you want these balloons, Twig? It might not be . . . respectful of the others.”

  “The others can go eff themselves,” Twig said, wiping his nose on his sleeve as he draped balloons from several trees. “Pardon my French.”

  In the end, Twig’s service was a serene affair and not much of a party. Ada read Psalm 130 and found her voice surprisingly strong: “Out of the depths I cry to you, O Lord, Lord, hear my voice! O let your ears be attentive to the voice of my pleading. If you, O Lord, should mark our guilt, Lord, who would survive? But with you is found forgiveness: For this we revere you.”

  Twig invited them each to say a few words about Auggie, and Cam was the first to think of something to say. After remembering happier times—meeting him when she opened a bank account, sharing a cottage at Folly Beach—she ended with, “I’m sorry you’re gone, my friend, I’m sorry you were in so much pain. But this . . . this really ticks me off!” Ada grabbed her arm, urging her to stop, but Twig chimed in, “How could you do this to me?” Their reactions made Ada’s left eye twitch, and she declined to speak.

  Finally, on a portable record player, Twig played “Stand By Me” and sang along with Ben E. King in a slightly off-key baritone.

  Ada had one white rose for Auggie’s coffin, and she placed it on the mounded dirt before leaving. At the shop, the florist had given her a sly grin and said, “One perfect rose for your sweetheart?” Ada didn’t know what to say, so she just agreed: “Yes, ma’am,” and hurried out, forgetting to take her change.

  “Rest, Auggie,” she whispered now. “I hope for your sake it’s in peace.” In her mind, Ada added, “I love you,” something she was too shy to say to him when he was alive.

  Twig suggested supper at Shoney’s, but when their order arrived, he picked at his fries and ate the pickle off his burger, and Cam had a few bites of her club sandwich. All Ada could tolerate were some sips of a ginger ale. Even that roiled in her stomach until she thought she might toss it back up.

  Later, Twig went home. “You been good to me,” he said, hugging Cam, “letting me stay so long. I just couldn’t face that room, but . . . well, it’s time.”

  As they approached the intersection for Ada’s house, Cam asked if she wanted to spend the night. Stopped at the traffic signal, Ada watched it turn from green to red through the windshield. She wanted to ask Cam what she thought happened after death, but was afraid of her answer.

  “I best go home,” was all she said, the desire to be alone sitting like a river rock on
her chest. They didn’t speak again, except to say goodnight, and Cam brushed her cheek with dry lips.

  “Saved you some chicken and greens,” her mother called out to her, as if it were just another day. Ada went to her room and closed the door with a gentle click. She fell asleep on top of her grandmother’s quilt, even though it was just past six.

  § § §

  At breakfast, there was a note on the kitchen table: “Camellia Lively phoned,” in her mother’s crisp, schoolgirl penmanship. Ada could read the parental disapproval in just those three words.

  “I don’t know why you spend so much time with her,” was her mother’s continuing complaint. “Unless she’s working on finding you a husband. You know, your window of opportunity won’t be open much longer, Ada Jane!” Ada was almost twenty-seven and knew her mother actually feared the window was closed for good.

  That morning at work, Ada found herself avoiding the teachers’ lounge and the cafeteria—any place she might run into Cam. They usually tried to find ways to bump into each other during the school day. But since Auggie’s death, they’d been snapping at each other more than talking, and the only thing that registered now when she looked at Cam was disappointment.

  When Cam stopped by the library after classes to ask if she’d be coming over that evening, Ada begged off, saying she’d gotten her period and felt poorly. “I’m not good company.”

  “Since when do we only see each other when we feel good?” Cam asked. “I thought we were way past that.”

  “I guess I just don’t want to.” When hurt filled Cam’s eyes, she added, “Be with anyone, I mean.”

  “Even me.”

  Especially you—but Ada couldn’t say it. The truth was, she wondered now if she could be with someone who had so little faith, who didn’t believe in the grace of God. Ada went to church every Sunday, even when she’d been out the night before, and attended Wednesday evening services when she could fit them in. For a while, she’d been in the church choir, until the rehearsal schedule became too onerous.