The Anna Papers

by Ellen Gilchrist

  As they were being seated, a limousine pulled up to the front of the church and Mimmi Farrell staggered out of the back seat and into the church and down the center aisle to the pews reserved for the family. She was wearing black. Black, black, black. Long black veil, wide-brimmed black straw hat. It was a summer hat but Mimmi had been too drunk when she got dressed to know the difference. She had left her tobacco planter–dilettante painter–lawyer husband stretched out on a deck chair by an indoor pool and gone up to her room and dressed herself and called the driver. Somewhere in her drunken consciousness she remembered Helen calling to say that Anna was dead. It behooved her to put in an appearance at the service. If Sykes Farrell was too dissipated to do his duty to Charlotte, then it was a good thing he was married to a lady. She dressed and got into the limousine and snored all the way into town. As they pulled up to the church she took a big drink out of a container of gin and followed it with a breath mint. She moved into the cold perfumed air of the church and down the aisle as if following an ancient neural pathway in her brain. She was wearing dark glasses and she could barely see. She looked out from in between the top of the glasses and the brim of the hat. She spotted Phelan and Crystal and LeLe. She fell into the pew beside them and clutched Phelan’s arm. “It can’t be true. It cannot be true.” Her voice was beautiful and audible. She had once been on the stage, had even starred for one glorious week in a Broadway play. “Oh, I just found out,” she said in her loudest stage voice. “This is the beginning of the end. The universe is playing tricks on us. Oh, my God, the cost. My God, the cost.”

  Phelan cuddled her into his coat. The minister raised his hand. The organ began to play. Bach’s Prelude and Fugue in C Major. The minister stepped into the place between the pulpit and the altar rail. Anna’s friends began to cry. “Pray for the living,” the minister began. “Pray for us all, most holy and loving Lord Jesus Christ. Pardon us and take us into your care in this time of our need.”

  The morning sun poured in the stained-glass windows. The smell of L’Air du Temps and Chanel Number Five and Jessie Hand’s liberal extravagance of Giorgio mixed with the smell of lilies. Lilies and chrysanthemums and orchids, hair spray, cleaning fluid. An orthopedic surgeon from Asheville who had gone to school with Anna and Helen had to be helped from the church. He was extremely allergic to perfume and had once fainted in an operating room from a nurse’s Jungle Gardenia. His wife helped him down the aisle and out into the air. The minister, a young man from Sewanee just beginning his career, thought the doctor had been overcome by grief.

  Mimmi Farrell let out a loud cry. The minister went determinedly on.

  “‘No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were … any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.’

  “So the great writer John Donne taught us and so the great American writer, Ernest Hemingway, quoted him as saying, and now I borrow from both these men to memorialize another writer. Our Anna, who lived among us and helped us to understand ourselves. We are doubly burdened when an artist dies. Still, as Donne said, a clod is as important as a promontory.”

  Mimmi Farrell moaned a great long moan. The minister continued.

  “Anna was also a child and a sister and a friend. She will be missed and mourned at the human level. Her books were translated into many languages. People share our sadness all around the world. It is difficult to accept death in the modern world. We have made such strides in all directions. It seems as if we should be doing better.” He was lost in his scribbled notes. Caught up in the spirit of the dead writers he had conjured.

  Mimmi let out a louder cry. Phelan pressed her head into his chest. Mr. Hand took off his glasses and wiped them on his handkerchief. He was sitting with Jessie on one side and Olivia on the other. Then Mrs. Hand by Olivia, then the rest of their grandchildren spread out in two rows. Their sons- and daughters-in-law flanked the children on the sides. Mr. Hand returned his glasses to his nose, looked up and down the ranks of his progeny, counted his grandchildren and his daughters and his sons. But the first one was gone, the very first one, the one who had resembled his own mother, his very first little baby girl. Had died without progeny or issue. Anna. There was no casket, nowhere to look, no place to rest his eyes. He stared at the rose window above the altar. Olivia turned her face to his. He thought of Anna’s cheeks, Anna’s eyes, his mother’s hair, his mother’s eyes.

  The minister had found his place, was off again. “I absolve Anna Elizabeth from her means of taking off. I am sure God absolves her also. But if he doesn’t I am certain Anna would be satisfied to be absolved by us, by the ones that loved her. I am going to read a few passages from her work, pieces I found as I read over the books last night.”

  James Junior began to squirm. He had met the eye of Jesus in a stained-glass window of the Sermon on the Mount. It reminded him of a time when he and Ray Trimble got stoned with some devil worshippers at a rock concert in the park. I won’t go bad, James Junior promised Jesus. I’m through with all that shit. If you will get me out of there and let me have Shelby I swear I’ll never do dope again, not even grass. You can count on me. From now on you can count on me.

  “Sit still,” his mother whispered. “It can’t last much longer.”

  “I cannot bear it,” Mimmi called out. “If he reads her work I’m going to faint.”

  “Hold on,” Phelan said. “Hold on, Mimmi. We’re going to make it. Hold on to me.”

  Mimmi sobbed. The minister read on.

  The reading ended. The congregation rose and sang “The Church’s One Foundation.” The minister stepped down to the communion rail. No one knew what to do next. It was the first memorial service for a suicide ever held in Grace Episcopal Cathedral and there wasn’t any protocol. There was no choir to march out and nothing for the pallbearers to bear, so everyone just stood around and talked to each other. Finally Mr. Hand took charge and led his coterie of granddaughters up the aisle. Mrs. Hand followed with Helen and Spencer and Louise. Phelan took Mimmi out a side door to her car. Crystal Manning Weiss marched out holding King’s arm. Crystal Anne went in the other direction and climbed up on the organ loft to take off her shoes. King marched back down the aisle and scooped her up and carried her outside. “She’s too young to go to a memorial service,” he said to Jessie. Jessie and Olivia had followed him to a spot on the lawn. “She’s only a little girl,” Olivia said. “She was fine.”

  Crystal joined them and took the child off their hands. Then Jessie and Olivia and King walked off together in the direction of Phelan’s grandmother’s car.

  “Where are they going?” Daniel asked. He was on the sidewalk below the church. Phelan had joined him there.

  “It’s okay,” Phelan said. “There’re three of them.”

  “What difference does that make in this day and age? Goddammit, Phelan, go ask him where they’re going.”

  “The one to worry about is King,” Phelan said. He took a package of unfiltered Camels out of his pocket and held it out to Daniel. “That pair of yours look like they could take care of themselves in a riot in Haiti.”

  Crystal walked their way carrying Crystal Anne. Daniel thought of a night at Hilton Head when he and Crystal had been left alone. She was twenty-six and just divorced from King’s daddy. He was eighteen. There had been a red tide and the water was full of phosphorescence and they had gone out into the surf and thrown their bathing suits away and she had climbed up on his body and put her legs around his waist. I can’t remember if she let me put it in, Daniel was thinking. I think I must have come a hundred times that night but I can’t remember if she ever let me put it in. Did I put it in? he always wanted to ask Crystal but he knew he never would. As old as he was he could barely even talk to Crystal Manning in the daylight.

  “Give me a ride back to
your momma’s,” she said now. “Are you going there?”

  “If we can go by my house first. I have to call Sheila. She’s been calling all week from London. I’m trying to keep her from coming here.” Crystal stood beside him, holding her beautiful little spoiled-rotten half-French, half-Jewish, half-shod child.

  “She’s lost one of her shoes,” Daniel said. “You want me to go back in the church and look for it?”

  In the afternoon people began to leave. Adam went back to Vanderbilt, carrying a card with three different telephone numbers for LeLe. Not that he would need to use them. She would call him nearly every night for the next six months.

  Louise flew back to Scotland. She put on her new dark green Anne Klein original and Niall and James took her to the airport.

  “Am I in the will?” she asked.

  “No, it was all for the kids.”

  “All for your kids? That’s it? She didn’t leave me a thing?”

  “Why would she, Louise? Daddy takes care of you. Remember, I sign the checks.”

  “She was my sister. Well, I want to see the will. Send me a copy and I’ll have my lawyer read it. I don’t believe she didn’t leave me a single thing.”

  “I didn’t write it, Sister. She had it done someplace else. Some friend of hers downtown. Helen is her literary executor.”

  “Helen. My God.”

  “I didn’t write it.”

  “Well, I don’t even care. It’s all so embarrassing anyway. What are people who have the courage to fight cancer supposed to think when they read about something like this? It’s just like Anna to think she’s never supposed to suffer a minute in her life. I know a bunch of people that were cured of cancer.”

  “Not of what she had.” Niall pulled into the airport passenger zone and turned off the motor. “I don’t want to hear any more of that, Louise. James, you take her in.” Niall got out and went around to the trunk and got out Louise’s suitcase and put it on the sidewalk. Then he walked off in the direction of the rental car parking lot. Louise stalked into the airport with James behind her carrying her bag. While she waited for the ticket agent to check her bags she reached her hand up underneath her coat and felt her breasts for the seventh time that day. She thought she felt a lump beside a mole above her rib cage but no, it was only a little muscle or milk gland. Maybe it was a muscle. Maybe it was a milk gland.

  Back at the house Victoria was getting drunk. She had had a drink out of a bottle of bourbon before she went to the service and now she was drinking the rest of it.

  “My niece got throat cancer from smoking,” she was saying to Helen. “And she wouldn’t let them do the biopsy tests. She said, no way, Jose. So the lady doctor that was seeing her came over to her house and said, Eileen, you got cancer. You have got to have these tests. That knot is as big as a fist. This knot in her throat. In her glands of her throat. What you coming over to my house to tell me something like that? Eileen said. Come driving up on my property telling me I got throat cancer. I don’t want to hear it. If I got cancer I’ll get rid of it my own way. You not getting any more of my money down at the so-called free clinic where you have already put me into debt at the drugstore. No one going to give me a three-hundred-dollar test to tell me I got cancer. She ran that lady doctor out of there. Said you tell them at the clinic I got my own chemotherapy if I need any. I got all the painkillers that I need and rat poison if it come to that.”

  “Did she get the tests yet?” Helen asked.

  “No, ma’am, and not going to. So I know what you all are going through with Anna killing herself instead of going to the hospital. It seems to be a run of that this year.”

  Stacy came into the kitchen and began to cut off pieces of the pound cake and eat them with her fingers. Little slivers at first, then larger pieces. Stacy was the baby of Helen’s family. She was nineteen, the same age as James’s Aleece.

  “Get a plate and fork,” Helen said. “Don’t just nibble like that.”

  Stacy didn’t acknowledge that she had heard her mother.

  “Is this when you throw up?” Helen added. “When you finish the cake?”

  Stacy took the piece of cake she was holding and wadded it up and threw it into the sink. “I’m going to our house. I don’t think I’m helping Grandmother. She doesn’t even know I’m here.”

  “Eat the cake if you want it, honey. Only put it on a plate and don’t throw it up afterwards.”

  “Fuck you,” Stacy said, and walked out of the kitchen.

  “She’s a sad girl,” Victoria said. “Don’t let it get to you, Helen.”

  “It does. It does get to me. Get me a glass of wine, will you, Victoria. I’m going in and see about Momma. A glass of white wine will do.”

  “Where you want it? In there?”

  “Yes, bring two glasses. Bring it to Momma’s room.”

  Helen left the kitchen and Victoria went into the pantry and took a drink out of her glass of bourbon, then found two Gibson glasses and rinsed them out and filled them with white wine and put them on a tray.

  This is my life, Helen said to herself as she passed James Senior and Putty and James Junior on their way out the door. This is my portion of the world, my appointed place, and these are the ones I have to spend my life with and there is nothing I can do about James Junior or anything else. I could go and lock up all the toilets in the house and then I guess Stacy would throw up outside on the rosebushes or I could go crazy and have myself locked up or I could see about Momma and then go home and make Winifred and Lynley do their homework but they are twenty-one years old and if juniors in college do not do their homework there is nothing a mother can do. I am going to go and take care of Mother and sometime tonight I am going to get a bath and sit down and read a book. I would like to be in a beautiful clean room with the ocean outside and a good-looking man sitting at my feet reading Cervantes to me. I would like to be young again but not in this world. I would like to know what time it is. What time is it anyway? I feel like I forgot to do something. I know I was supposed to do something about Louise going to the airport but there is too much going on.

  She opened the door to her mother’s room and found her mother lying on her side on the bed holding onto the folded gilt frame that held the photographs of her parents. Her mother was almost asleep and Helen sat down on the bed beside her and held her hand while the birds of North Carolina flew from her mother’s feeders to the trees and back again.

  They want her to turn on the radio, Helen decided. They don’t know where the music is today.

  III

  The Anna Papers

  16

  ANNA’S PAPERS, SORTED BY HER SISTER, HELEN ABADIE, LITERARY EXECUTOR

  Why did she make me the executor? I don’t want this job. I went over there this morning; drove over there in the worst ground fog we’ve had all fall. I couldn’t see out the window of the car but I woke up thinking about those papers and the other executor, the poet from Boston, is coming any day now so I thought I’d better go on and see if there is anything that will embarrass Momma to death. If so, I would just put that away for later. It didn’t take long to find something. Right out on a table on this little filing stand made of red plastic trays stacked up on top of each other. In the second tray there is the true story of something that pertains to Phelan Manning. The Manning family are our closest friends in the world. She hadn’t even bothered to change the names. Just wrote it down, but not in her own voice, it was written in the one that Momma says Anna borrowed from listening to me. I don’t sound like that. I have a degree in elementary education from Hollins and I have never been this chatty and never gossipped in my life. That’s what writers do and why I wouldn’t stoop to be one. They twist the truth around to make it sound like they want it to. Anyway, here is an example of what I have to deal with as her executor. First this preamble:

  Wages of sin, urges to ecstasy, manifestations of grace, some notes on time and space as evidenced in the life of an alpha male during his residenc
e in Jackson, Mississippi, in the later part of the twentieth century. Pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death, amen.

  Then the story:

  ANNA AND PHELAN GO TO THE COAST, A MYSTERY

  Anna called Phelan at his office and suggested they go to the coast for the weekend. She called him because it was one of those perfect spring days that make the whole town start acting sixteen and because she had dreamed of making love to him and woke up with her body soft and warm and filled with tenderness. She had gone by his grandmother’s house the day before to leave off some flowers, and a caribou Phelan had killed was hanging on the wall in his grandmother’s pristine and carefully decorated solarium and it was so big and so goddamn funny and so silly that Anna had dreamed all night of making love to him.

  “I dreamed I was fucking you,” she told him on the phone.

  “Was it good?”

  “It was wonderful. Listen, let’s go down to the coast for the weekend and make love. Let’s see if we still know how to have fun.”

  “Do you mean that?”

  “Of course. I wouldn’t ask you if I didn’t mean it. You want to go?”

  “God, yes. Let me call you back. I’ll have to change some things. When do you want to go?”

  “Whenever you can.”

  “How about this afternoon?”

  “All right.” She was laughing. It was already starting to be fun. “Phelan?”

  “Yes.”

  “I think I’ll fall in love with you. Do you mind?”

  “I’ll call you back in a few minutes. Call and see if we can get reservations.”

  Imagine writing that!

  At four that afternoon he picked her up at her apartment and they stuck a pitcher of martinis in the back seat of his car and started driving to the coast. The Emerald Beach Hotel and Racquet Club. Old headquarters on the Carolina coast. Hardly a bedroom in the huge hotel that had not fostered adultery after adultery, also, plenty of honeymoons and reconciliations between married couples.