Bound South

by Susan Rebecca White

  I had always been uncomfortable in black neighborhoods—sorry, darling—but with Ben I wasn’t. It wasn’t that he was some hulking man or anything; it was that nothing ever quite felt real with him. It just didn’t make any sense that I would be spending my time with this Jewish Yankee who wasn’t in a fraternity and hadn’t been a Boy Scout and in fact seemed to dislike most athletics besides baseball. He was unlike any male I’d ever known, and around him I was a different person than I knew myself to be. Ben was always laughing at things I said, not patronizingly, but laughing in real amusement. You and your father like to tease me for having no wit, but my wit was one of the things Ben liked best about me.

  But there was another reason why things never felt quite real with Ben and that was because I knew, from the very beginning, that he and I could never get married. There just wasn’t much mixing and matching between Jews and Protestants back then, at least not in North Carolina, not for a girl in Chi O. We were just so ignorant. There was this girl, Margaret Bath, who was also from Atlanta. She had gone to Lovett. She was Protestant, Episcopalian I think, or maybe Presbyterian. One or the other. Sophomore year her daddy put her on a strict allowance after she spent $500 at Saks during a trip to New York, and because of her new budget and consequent stinginess, we all started calling her Margaret Bathberg. As if that was funny.

  It cut both ways too. Ben told me that when he left for Chapel Hill his mother made him promise her two things: that he would go to Hillel, and that he would not bring home a shiksa for her to meet. (Of course Ben had to explain to me what a shiksa was. “A Jewish mother’s worst nightmare,” he said.)

  Maybe he would have defied her. He certainly had the gumption to do so, but I didn’t want to have a mother-in-law who didn’t want me. It would have all been so complicated. Daddy would have refused—refused—to pay for the wedding. He wouldn’t have even attended it. Daddy was a segregationist through and through, and that didn’t just apply to whites and blacks.

  DURING THE TIME that Ben and I dated, I felt as if I were split into two selves. When I was with him—even though I knew there was no future between us—I was buoyant and hopeful, but as soon as he dropped me off and I was alone, away from him, I lost all my energy and I would mope around the apartment and sometimes cry. What a pitiful girl I was. Tiny tried to remind me that I had only dated Ben to make John Henry jealous in the first place. And there was some truth in that. After your father and I broke up but before I met Ben, I took any date Tiny could find for me, hoping to run into John Henry while I was in the middle of a good laugh with one of his fraternity brothers. Hoping to make him jealous enough to want me.

  I never slept with Ben. I knew that if I did I wouldn’t be able to say good-bye to him. But we would kiss for hours and hours on the front porch of the house he rented with his bandmates on McCauley Street. I still remember that. But even more so, I remember our talks. I remember how, talking to him, I felt such a sense of connection that for the first time in years, since I was a girl, I wondered if there might really be a God. Ben and Tiny were the only two people who I ever felt actually listened to me. If I ever tried to have an opinion around Daddy he dismissed it as naïve, and John Henry just seemed distracted when I talked.

  Ben saw the world as wide open and was shocked to learn that I had no plans for after graduation. “But you’re so smart,” he would say. We made a list of things I might do: get a PhD in English, join the Peace Corps (his idea), move to New York City (mine). Because he was a Morehead scholar he had all sorts of connections. And even though I wasn’t sure I wanted to do any of the things he suggested, the fact that there were options made me start thinking, for the first time, about what I might like to do besides care for a husband and children.

  (Don’t get me wrong, Caroline. I don’t mean to imply that nurturing a family is in any way a secondary or inferior thing to do, but perhaps doing so should have felt more like a choice and less like a mandate for me. I mean, my God. I was twenty-one years old and ready to pledge allegiance to one man for the rest of my life. And what did I know about commitment and compromise? All I knew of married life was a cliché from television: my husband would return home at the end of the day and I would be waiting at the front door, eager to kiss him on the lips. And why I thought that, given the state of my parents’ own marriage, I will never know.)

  IT TOOK ME by surprise when John Henry finally called. I always said it was shortly after we broke up, but really, it had been months. He called right before Chapel Hill let out for Christmas break. It was two in the morning. I assumed he was drunk. He had been every time I’d run into him at a party after we broke up. Drunk and with his arm wrapped around a different girl each night. I started to tell him to call me back once he sobered up, but he cried out, “Wait. Just wait. I’m stone-cold sober. I just…”

  In that moment while he choked back a sob, I felt my skin prickle and I knew that my life was about to change.

  And then your father told me that Wallace, his twin, had shot himself in the head.

  I won’t go into the details. You know them already.

  JOHN HENRY WANTED to drive home to Atlanta that night (morning, really) but I convinced him to come to our apartment instead. He was a mess at my front door, broken, hunching his shoulders like a boy in trouble. Tiny was out, sleeping at Anders’s. I was wearing a white cotton nightgown and when he stepped inside the apartment he backed me against the wall and wrapped his arms around my middle, got down on his knees, and wept until my nightgown stuck to my skin.

  Later, in bed, it was as if our months apart were a fantasy, some other life that I had accidentally stepped into, before finding my way back into the real. He smelled the same, like Ivory soap and bourbon.

  WE TRIED TO sleep in anticipation of the long drive to Atlanta the next day, but neither of us did. We didn’t talk either, just held each other and cried. It was impossible that Wallace was dead. Impossible that John Henry’s twin would put a bullet in his brain. Impossible, except for all the signs. Wallace’s expulsion from two boarding schools, the coma he went into his freshman year at Georgia after downing two bottles of bourbon, the money he would borrow from John Henry, with no explanation as to what it was for. I wondered who would clean up his apartment. I wondered if we would need to go to Athens and do it ourselves. We left the next morning at 6 a.m., exhausted and unwashed. There was no discussion of whether or not I would go with him. Of course I would.

  BEN AND I had plans to go to a movie the night after John Henry and I left for Atlanta. He showed up at my apartment and Tiny told him what had happened. He sent flowers, roses, but they had turned brown and limp by the time I returned to Chapel Hill a week later to take my final exams. He came by our apartment the first night I got back. He was always so happy to see me; he would run up the porch stairs to get to the front door. I always made him ring the bell. I liked the excitement of opening the door and seeing him, allowing him inside.

  That night I waited for him on the front porch after he called to say he was coming by. He walked up the steps and when he saw me, on the swing, he smiled. I couldn’t talk. I started to cry. He thought I was crying out of grief, grief for Wallace. He tried to comfort me, but I could not be comforted. Not by him. Your father and I were already engaged. That was why I was crying. Your father proposed to me the night of Wallace’s funeral. He needed me to stand beside him, to hold his hand, to hold it together for him, to make things nice. He was the last Parker, now that Wallace was gone. He needed me fiercely, and I loved feeling needed, feeling as if he couldn’t get through the months after Wallace’s death without me. Also I worried that maybe he had inherited some of Wallace’s bad genes. They were, after all, identical twins, the same egg split in half. If I refused to marry him, might he put a bullet through his own brain? It didn’t seem possible, not John Henry, who was nothing if not rational and calm. But in the days following Wallace’s funeral, I saw your father break.

  The next year, on the day of our wedding,
I cried down the aisle, thinking of Ben. And the minister, the man who married John Henry and me, looked at me, and said, “It’s wonderful these days to see a young person taking her wedding vows seriously….”

  November 16, 2004

  Dear Caroline,

  I am so sorry it has taken me so long to respond to your sweet letter. Ever since I received it I have been meaning to sit down and write out the story you asked for, but there has just been so much going on around here I have not had a spare minute! Most distracting has been the home improvement project that we are in the middle of—replacing all of the toilets. We should have done it years ago, but we knew how expensive it would be and how much of a mess it would cause. Last week we reached our tipping point when the toilet in Charles’s bathroom overflowed five times in one day! I felt as if the plagues were upon us.

  It will be a relief to have the new plumbing, but as for now, there is a team of workmen at the house from morning until night. I don’t mind their company of course but the crew manager, Rodriguez, loves to talk. Not that I’m complaining—he’s as sweet as he can be and has such fascinating stories about growing up in Guatemala—but it has gotten so that I spend so much time talking with him that the day goes by without me getting around to any of my work.

  Not that writing to you feels like work! I’m thrilled to have the chance to record your daddy’s and my engagement story. It’s something I should have done a long time ago so that when I’m an old senile woman I’ll be able to look up my memories. Your daddy and I are also just thrilled that you and Davis have definitely decided to have the wedding in Atlanta. And I think it is going to be just perfect to have the ceremony at our house and then have everyone walk over to the Driving Club for the reception. Of course we might want to hire a shuttle or two just to transport any old or feeble guests.

  Did you ever meet Tiny’s darling little gardener, Nancy? Well, I managed to book her after Tiny moved to Sea Island, which is no small feat. Nancy has a waitlist a mile long, and there I was, jumping to the top of it. But you know how Tiny is. When she puts her mind to something, it gets done, and Tiny wanted me to have Nancy for your wedding.

  Nancy and I have been thick as thieves plotting the design of the back garden for the wedding. She is going to dig up all the bulbs from last fall and plant a new collection of only white flowers, all timed to bloom for the big event! Can you imagine how stunning it will look? And we are going to start a vine of jasmine over the stone archway that leads into the garden. It will work perfectly for the wedding party to make its entrance underneath the arch. Gives me goose bumps just thinking about it!

  I could go on and on about how lovely your ceremony is going to be. But I guess I should get down to business and give you that story you’ve been asking for! Of course, by now you’ve probably heard it so many times you could write it yourself, but here goes: It was the fall of my senior year at Chapel Hill. Your daddy was also a senior and was in the middle of filling out his law school applications. Tiny, whom I was sharing an apartment with (our first apartment ever, we had lived before in the dorms and then in the Chi O house), had gotten engaged to Anders just a few weeks back. He had given her a beautiful ring that had belonged to his grandmother. Though it was as simple as could be and only had a teeny little stone (he later upgraded the diamond), it looked so beautiful on Tiny’s hand that I noticed it always.

  I thought that your daddy and I were headed in the same direction as Tiny and Anders. We had been dating for over two years, we were in love, and we were about to graduate. Back then, those things spelled e-n-g-a-g-e-m-e-n-t, so much so that anytime John Henry took me to a halfway decent restaurant I became convinced that he was going to pull a ring box out of his pocket. I mean, over half the girls from my pledge class were already engaged! Honey, I was behind.

  Unfortunately, your daddy had other plans. Plans of independence.

  One night your daddy and I were listening to records at his fraternity house when he said that he had something serious to discuss with me. My heart started beating faster and my hands started to sweat. This is it, I told myself. But instead of asking me if I would be his wife, your daddy asked me—or rather, informed me—that he thought we might ought to date other people, seeing as how it was our senior year and the last time we would be able “to play the field.”

  I wanted to die. I was so embarrassed that I thought he was going to propose and instead he was breaking up with me! But instead of crying or getting all upset about it, I channeled Tiny. I squared my shoulders, tossed back my hair, and said, “Sounds like a plan.” I knew that was just what she would do.

  Your daddy looked a little stunned, but then he coughed and said, “Okay then.” I went home and told Tiny all about it. She reminded me of how Anders had put her through the exact same thing.

  “You,” she said, brushing my hair out of my eyes with her hand, “are going to do exactly what I did and go on a date every night until John Henry becomes so jealous he comes to his senses and proposes.”

  IN THE BEGINNING Tiny and my sorority sisters had to set me up with dates. But once the word got out that I was free and available, well, boys just kept calling me up on their own! I went on so many dates that my sorority sisters nicknamed me “date girl.” Your poor daddy. I don’t know how many times he ran into me out with another fellow. Once I was even out with one of his fraternity brothers! Well, this went on for a little while, up until the time I ran into your daddy at an afternoon football game. I was on a date (of course!) and he was there with his roommates. As luck would have it, our seats were right next to his. Oh Caroline, you should have seen his face when I made my way down the aisle he was sitting in with my Saturday date.

  Poor John Henry. He had brought a little flask of bourbon with him to the game and he kept mixing himself bourbon and ginger ales. That was his all-time favorite drink back then. Honey, by the time halftime rolled around, your daddy was drunker than I had ever seen him. He was three sheets to the wind, totally and absolutely schnookered.

  And it was during halftime that he came stumbling up to where I was sitting with date #551 and plopped right down next to me. When he put his head on my shoulder I had to use every ounce of strength I had not to put my arm around him. But I resisted. I had decided that I was not going to go back to him until he could offer me a firm commitment.

  Finally he turned his head so that he was looking at me, his breath soaked with alcohol.

  “Louise,” he said, “I don’t think this dating other people thing is such a good idea.”

  Oh how I wanted to jump up and do a victory dance, to run in circles and holler like a madwoman! Instead, I kept my cool. I even found it within me to flick back my hair before answering, “Fine by me. Sounds like a plan.”

  A week later he officially proposed. Which really was good timing considering what would soon happen to Wallace. He needed me to help him get through all that.

  I HOPE THAT if they hear this story Davis’s parents won’t be too shocked by what a trickster I was! But maybe they should be warned early of the ways of southern women—after all, they’re going to have one for a daughter-in-law!

  Just teasing. Don’t read that last part aloud if you are planning to read this at the bridesmaids’ luncheon or the rehearsal dinner. And do call me when you get this. I want to talk to you about menus for the reception. You would not believe how sophisticated the food has become at the Driving Club. I’m afraid Nanny Rose might not recognize half of what she’s served!

  Love you,

  Mom

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  The Inevitable Occurs

  (Louise, Winter 2005)

  Good Lord. What that poor child is going to do with a baby, I don’t know. If she hadn’t been raised in such a narrow, narrow church the fact that she is pregnant would not necessarily mean that her life is ruined. And even her mother, a member of that church, agrees that abortion is the best solution. When I called Faye to see if Missy had accepted my offer to pay for
one, Faye said that when she suggested terminating the pregnancy Missy looked at her like she had suggested she abort Christ Jesus himself.

  It seems that the man who got Missy pregnant did not ejaculate inside her, and so Missy has convinced herself that because they did not technically have sex, but instead his semen seeped through her underwear and up into her while they were, well, humping without penetration, that God has destined this child to be born. Faye said she wanted to slap her child’s face when Missy told her that this was God’s baby.

  “You think God’s going to pay for its diapers?” she asked me (as if I needed convincing). “You think God’s going to be the one who has to drop out of school and take care of it?”

  John Henry and I will help out, of course, though frankly, Missy’s pregnancy is coming at a bad time for us financially. We’ve got Caroline’s wedding this spring and we’ll have Charles’s college tuition next fall, which depending on where he is accepted might be even more expensive than tuition at Coventry, if you can believe it. Not to mention the fact that we had to redo all of the ancient plumbing in our house, which cost a fortune.

  But obviously I feel somewhat responsible for Missy having gotten herself involved with that horrible man considering it was Charles, my son, who literally drove Missy to him. What was he thinking taking her to North Carolina like he did, not stopping for one minute to consider how Faye would feel when she discovered Missy was gone, let alone how Missy would feel upon encountering her father after so many years of absence? And how about how John Henry and I would feel—did feel!—when we were told, by our housekeeper, months after the fact, that all this had happened while we were away on vacation?