Behind the queen and her court came a pipe band. The squealing lilt of the bagpipes touched something in Peyton’s heart that she had not known was there, something fierce and wild, like a young raptor trapped there.
“Oh,” she breathed.
Her father looked down at her and smiled.
“So you’ve got the pipes in your blood, too,” he said. “I thought it was just your grandmother.”
Behind the band a surging straggle of green-clad, beer-carrying people lurched along, waving banners and shillelaghs and singing whatever Irish song they happened to know. It was not a big parade, but it was a loud one, and when they got back into the Thunderbird to drive out Peachtree Street to Buckhead, Peyton’s ears still rang with it.
They had dinner in the same Italian restaurant where Peyton and Nora had eaten before.
“I promise it’s the last time,” Nora said. “We should sample a few of the other ethnic restaurants-if there are any. But you wanted clam linguine, Frazier, and Peyton, this time you’re going to let me order for you. You can’t eat pasta and cheese forever.”
In the twilight the dim restaurant had an undersea look, and with its curling vines and impossibly purple grapes and Etna soaring on the walls, it had the aspect of a chamber in Atlantis, a room in Shangrila. The Muzak was pouring out “Finiculi, Finicula,” and Peyton had the sudden flash of elation and comfort that a traveler in a strange land might have, coming upon a familiar landscape.
“I hope it’s as good tonight as it was last time,” she said languidly. “Restaurants often aren’t, you know. They can be inconsistent.”
They turned and looked at her. Her father lifted an eyebrow, and her cousin grinned.
“They can indeed. Has that been your experience here?” Nora said.
Peyton blushed, knowing she had sounded ridiculous. The fact was that Ernie had said the same thing a couple of weeks before and had sounded wonderfully worldly and discriminating.
“No,” she said sheepishly. “It’s just something I heard.”
Nora and her father split a bottle of Chianti, and Peyton had a splash of it in a small glass. It was sour and dry, and she really did not like it, but it made a warm track down to her stomach, so she finished it. Her father ordered clam linguine for two, and Nora studied the menu and then said, “Peyton, I think the scungilli for you. It’s light and not so highly seasoned, and it has a nice lemony taste to it.”
“What is it?” Peyton said doubtfully.
“Fish cooked with some wine. Really special. I think it’s southern Italian, but it’s not as heavy as most of that.”
“OK,” Peyton said. “I’ll try it.”
“Do,” Nora said. “If you don’t like it you can fill up on popcorn later.”
They talked lightly and lazily in the flickering light of the candle set in an empty Chianti bottle, and the white-aproned waiter hovered over Nora and brought another full bottle of Chianti, “on the house,” he said. Nora smiled.
“What movie are we seeing?” Frazier said. He was rolling the wine around in his glass and sniffing it appreciatively. Peyton tried the same thing and coughed as the acid fumes curled up her nose.
“On the Beach,” Nora said. “It’s a couple of years old, and certainly not great art, but I’ve always loved it. It always makes me cry.”
“Oh, well, then by all means, let’s see it twice,” her father said, smiling. “What’s it about?”
“The end of the world,” Nora said.
“How uplifting.”
“As a matter of fact, it is. It’s pretty heavy going, but it says everything there is to say about the human spirit. About how to live your life when it’s ending.”
He looked at her quizzically. “Do you think Peyton…?”
“Absolutely. Besides having a message she needs to know, it’s just a fine movie, with wonderful acting. I take full responsibility,” Nora said.
Their dinner came then. Peyton’s plate was steaming, and a wonderful smell curled up from the delicately browned medallions on it.
“Mmmm,” she said, taking a bite. It was not like any fish she had ever tasted, certainly not the ubiquitous fried catfish with hush puppies offered by a half-dozen “family-style” restaurants along Highway 29. But there was about it an ineffable taste of sun and sea salt. The swirls of lemon butter and wine it was bathed in were exotic and rich. She finished most of the fish and mopped up the sauce with a piece of bread, as Nora and her father did with their linguine.
“That was good,” she said. “What kind of fish did you say it was?”
Nora leaned back and lit a cigarette and smiled at her.
“Squid,” she said. “Some people call it octopus.”
The tender white medallions rose in Peyton’s throat and sat there struggling for expulsion. Her stomach muscles contracted. And then they subsided, and the scungilli slid back down where it belonged.
“Not bad at all,” she said boredly, thinking that the squid was going to earn her a place of honor in the pantheon of awfulness at the Losers Club. Let’s see Ernie top that, she thought.
“Next time we’ll go to Emile’s and you can try escargot,” Nora said. “Snails.”
Peyton looked at her sickly, and her father laughed. “There’s a limit,” he said. “Don’t push your luck.”
From the minute the theater lights lowered, Peyton was transfixed by the movie. The reality of the great cloud drifting slowly toward the last survivors of an atomic blast, the sweet banality of the last lives being lived under that reality, the images—paper blowing down an empty street, a Coca-Cola bottle caught in a venetian-blind cord in an empty San Francisco, randomly tapping out a last lost message to Australia—all lodged in her chest and swelled until there was a great ball of darkness there, and abyss of nothingness as real as the nothingness waiting on the celluloid beach. She closed her eyes as the tears began to come: tears of fear and hopelessness and a kind of fierce exultation born of the courage and grace of the doomed people flickering in black and white on the screen. She tried hard to hide them. Mostly she succeeded, but when Gregory Peck kissed Ava Gardner for the last time and took his submarine out to sea to meet death, a strangled sob escaped her. She felt rather than saw Nora’s hand come over to touch hers, and her father silently passed her his handkerchief.
Coming out of the theater, they were silent. So were the other moviegoers. Nobody was saying anything at all, and there were empty faces and wide-staring eyes all around. As the crowed moved into the lights of Peachtree Road, and the sounds and smells of the city in early spring eclipsed the great silence they had left behind, they began to talk among themselves in low voices, but there was no laughter.
“Anybody want ice cream?” Nora said, and they walked down the sidewalk to a drugstore that Frazier said must surely have the last old-time soda fountain left in Atlanta. They sat in curly iron chairs at a small marble-topped table. Nora ordered vanilla ice cream, Frazier had coffee, and Peyton, suddenly ravenous for sweetness and substance, ordered a banana split and then could eat only a couple of bites. She put down her spoon and looked guiltily at Nora and her father.
“I guess my eyes were bigger than my stomach,” she said.
Nora studied her.
“How you doin’, kid?” she said. “I’d forgotten how tough that movie is. Maybe we should have waited a couple of years….”
Her father said nothing but studied her curiously. Peyton felt her face color under his eyes, and dropped her own.
“It was OK,” she said. “I liked it.”
“What do you think it meant? What was the movie trying to say?” Nora tossed out for whoever might answer.
Presently her father said, “I think it meant that we might be extinguished but we don’t die out. That, and that Ava Gardner has a nice shape.”
Nora laughed. “Pretty good. I think it’s a comment on the futility of modern life and our attempts to make sense of it. What do you think, Peyton?”
Peyton did not li
ft her eyes. She felt tears, thick and briny, gathering behind her eyelids. They stung in her nose.
“I think it meant that everybody always loses everybody they love,” she murmured. “But they need to love them anyway because…”
“Because?”
“Because there isn’t anything else,” Peyton said, and she burst into tears.
Her father gave her a brief hug and produced the handkerchief again. When she had mopped the tears, Peyton looked up at them. Both were staring at her.
“But that’s probably not right at all,” she mumbled.
“It’s exactly right. Exactly,” Nora said. “Nobody but you really got it.”
On the way home Nora put the top up on the Thunderbird and they skimmed through the dark like a small craft planning over the surface of a black river. The inside of the car was small and dark and warm, and the radio played softly. Nora sang along with Dean Martin: “Return to Me.” Her voice was soft and gritty, like improperly mixed fudge. Wedged between them, Peyton closed her eyes and let the roaring of the road beneath them swell in her ears until she slipped off on its tide. Once she lifted her head and saw black, star-pricked sky and knew they were sailing through the fields near home, and heard laughter, and put her head back on her father’s shoulder and slept again.
When she came in from the Losers Club the next Monday, Chloe was uncovering a great platter of fried chicken. Its warm crustiness wafted up from the waxed paper that covered it. Peyton’s mouth watered: it was one of the archetypal smells of her childhood. It meant comfort, safety, love. She knew the instant she smelled it that her grandmother had made it.
“Your grandma was here,” Clothilde said. “She say she made too much chicken and thought she’d bring us some. It was real good to see her. She don’t come so often anymore. I told her if she’d wait awhile you’d be home, and then your daddy, and he’d drive her home, but she said no, it was a pretty day and she wanted to walk. She right mad at you, Peyton. You ain’t been down to see her in a while. You need to call her and thank her, and you really need to go see her.”
“I’ll go tomorrow afternoon,” Peyton said, guilt flooding her. It was true. It had been at least a week since she had visited her grandmother. She couldn’t have said why. All of a sudden she felt a fierce longing for the old woman, for her radiant madness and her hawklike beauty, and for the absolute acceptance and focus that made Peyton feel, for the moment, totally alive.
She called her grandmother after dinner.
“I wish you’d stayed, Nana,” she said. “I’ve missed you. I know, it’s my fault. I’m coming tomorrow. And the chicken was just fabulous. Nobody does it like you. There isn’t a scrap left. Nora ate three pieces.”
There was a long silence in which Peyton could hear her grandmother breathing. It sounded as if she were gasping for breath, a fish drowning in air. Then she said, coldly and as if from a great distance, “Is that red witch still there, then?”
“Well, you know she’s teaching at the high school—”
“She’s come for your soul,” Agnes McKenzie said, and Peyton flinched at the madness. It wasn’t fey and flickering now, it was dark, a thick, escalating coil.
“Nana…”
“She’s come for Franzier, too, but it’s mainly you she wants. Listen, Peyton, listen to me. Get the bones. Get the bones! Bring them to me, all of them. Don’t leave even one. Did she take them? Ask her. Ask her now!”
Her grandmother’s voice slid up into a kind of weak shriek. Peyton dropped the phone and ran to the living room, where Nora was shuffling through the mail on the secretary. She got a lot of mail, most of it from Miami or Key West, but some from Cuba, too.
“Nana says to ask you what you did with the chicken bones from dinner,” she said, hearing the absolute idiocy of her own words.
Nora looked at her. “I put them in the kitchen garbage and took it out to the backyard. Tomorrow’s pickup day. Why on earth does she want to know?”
“I don’t know. She just does,” Peyton said, and she ran back to the phone. “They’re in the garbage in the backyard, Nana,” she said. “Nora took them out after supper. They’ll get picked up in the morning.”
“Go get them!” her grandmother screamed. It was a thin, high, falcon’s sound. “Go get them right now! Get them all! Don’t let her bury them! Has she buried any of them?”
“Nana—”
“She’ll ill-wish me! She probably already has…. If you bury the bones from somebody’s meal so they can’t find them and get them back, that person will die! I thought she was gone; I couldn’t see her anymore…. GET THOSE BONES! BRING THEM NOW!”
“I’ll get them, Nana,” Peyton said, beginning to tremble. “I’ll get them first thing in the morning, before the garbagemen come. I don’t think I could find them in the dark.”
Her grandmother began to scream something Peyton could not make out. The tumble of words was wild and swift, roiling water from an interior river. They sounded almost foreign, not English at all. Then the torrent faded, and Peyton heard the phone drop.
“Nana,” she called. “Nana…”
But her grandmother did not answer. Peyton ran for her father’s study over the garage.
When the car squealed into the farmhouse yard, he was out of it and running before the engine died. Peyton sat still, frozen with terror. There was a great sense of wrongness hovering over the house, beating in the air like enormous wings. Finally she got out and followed her father into the house.
Her grandmother lay on the kitchen floor, the wounded telephone lying beside her, dial tone buzzing. She lay on her back. Her arms were drawn up to her chest, hands balled into fists. Her eyes were closed, and when she breathed a bubble of spittle formed on her drawn-back lips and in her nostrils. Her face was a doll’s broken face, twisted, mouth drawn down. She did not move or speak; there was only the terrible, bubbling breathing.
It was not until they heard the sirens of the ambulance wailing into the driveway that she spoke. Frazier knelt beside her, holding her knotted hands, head bent so that Peyton could not see his face. Peyton had been hovering about the kitchen, first at the sink, then at the stove, unable to settle, unable to find any place in the awful, bright-lit kitchen to be.
When they heard the sirens, her grandmother opened her eyes. They were dilated to black, and utterly mad. She made a garbled sound in her throat, a spittle-choked grunt that rapidly rose and rose until it became a wordless shout. Her throat knotted with the effort of it; her chest heaved, her twisted face flushed. Her black eyes passed over her son’s face and found Peyton’s.
The animal scream strengthened. It seemed to Peyton that there were words hidden in it, words for her alone. She leaned forward, forgetting to flinch.
“What is she saying? My God, what is she saying?” her father said. His voice sounded, incredibly, thick with tears.
“‘Go tell the Devil,’” Peyton said, knowing it suddenly. “She’s saying, ‘Go tell the Devil.’”
The stroke was severe. Agnes stayed in the hospital in Atlanta for weeks. She did not speak again, and all efforts to make her accept therapy failed. She simply set her teeth and closed her eyes and went away inside to wherever it was that she spent most of her days. Once in a while she gabbled something at Peyton, but it was not intelligible, and Peyton’s efforts to understand seemed only to infuriate her. When she was able to leave the hospital, Frazier told her that she was coming home with him, to live where people she knew and loved could take care of her.
There would be Chloe and Peyton, he said, and Nora would help out. He would be there every evening. It was what everyone wanted. Agnes became so agitated that her doctor was called and he cleared the room, fearing another stroke. The agitation flooded in whenever Frazier mentioned her coming to their house. Finally he gave up and found a nearby nursing home that seemed acceptable. It was clean, cheerful, and well staffed, and it cost the very earth. Agnes seemed if not happy, then at least content there, dreaming and dozing
away the days. Peyton visited often at first, but she could not be sure her grandmother even knew her. Sometimes she slept; sometimes she seemed to focus on Peyton for a moment and gargled in frustration and fury when Peyton could not understand what she was saying. Nora visited once, with Frazier, and her grandmother became violent, trying to rip out her tubes—trying, it seemed, to get at Nora. That night she had another small stroke, and after that she was gone from them, only her elegant slight body remaining.
Peyton did not visit anymore after that, nor did Nora. Only Frazier went, night after night, to hold his mother’s hands and say words to her that would never be answered, perhaps not even heard. When he came home from these visits he usually spent an hour or so in his office before he came in to watch television with them.
After her last visit to her grandmother, Peyton wrote in her diary, I hate her and I love her too; I love the way she was. Why does everything have to change? Why do people have to be wrecked like that? Who will there be in my life like her now?
In her heart she knew the answer to that, but she could not bear the weight of it, and buried it deep.
12
All through the early days of that spring, Nora incised herself deeply and vividly into the small life of Lytton. It was as if, now content that she had safe harbor in the house on Green Street, she felt emboldened to flash out into the town and the school like a comet, trailing delight and outrage in equal parts in her wake. Everyone had an opinion about Nora Findlay. Almost everyone expressed it at the drop of a hat.
Peyton came to think of the two factions as the Aunt Augusta Camp and the School Camp. Aunt Augusta’s tongue, and the tongues of her cronies, chronicled Nora’s excesses like a Greek chorus. The talk that careened around Lytton Grammar and High Schools was more in the nature of legend: Miss Findlay was teaching from a book where people did it in the farmyard and said “fuck,” “shit,” and “piss,”; Miss Findlay had them writing essays on their own sexual feelings and never once laughed at any of them; Miss Findlay brought in a small set of drums to class and showed them, graphically and energetically, how to honor and invite the pagan saints of santeráa with dance and percussion.
Nora, Nora Page 18