After the War (15 page)

Partly, she had an idea that Russ was still around here in some way.

“I think I’ll go upstairs and just have a little lie-down,” Dolly told Odessa, once Odessa had come in with her awful news: “He dead, down in Georgia. At the Warm Springs, someplace like that.” Not wanting Odessa to see that she cried, Dolly hurried, almost running up the narrow stairs, the back stairs that led up from the kitchen.

As she and Russ had run, all those years ago, the both of them so drunk—after the first big party that Esther and Jimmy Hightower gave in their big new house, which was out there near SallyJane and Russ’s house. It happened about a week after Willard’s mother died, Dolly’s awful mother-in-law, and that was where Willard was, up in Virginia still seeing to his mother’s things. Old Mrs. Bigelow, dead at last, in Lynchburg. And SallyJane had stayed home with a headache that night. So there they were, Dolly Bigelow and Russell Byrd, both young, in their early thirties still, drinking too much the way everybody did back then—and just flirting up a storm.

The funny part was, and what ended up making that night just so amazing, she and Russ had never anywhere near flirted before, not just the least little bit. And so it was like the both of them were some brand-new person to the other, some strange new kid in school from somewhere else, sort of interesting and attractive.

There they both were, alone, not like married people, but
like kids. And they both got into the mood of this, this strange kid mood. Almost pretending they’d never seen each other before. And in a way that was true, although it might be more true to say they’d never looked. Certainly there were a whole bunch of things about Russ that Dolly had never noticed one bit, like how wide his shoulders were, and the tiny little lines at the corners of his eyes, and how small and dainty his earlobes were, not fat and hanging down like—well, like some people’s earlobes. And who knows what he saw in her that night? She was wearing (she can see it clearly, just like yesterday) a new red silk dress, with one of those sweetheart necks that she had worried about a little, it seemed sort of low.

She and Russ giggled and whispered these silly questions to each other, like kids on a date—What’s your favorite flavor of ice cream? Favorite flower? Best movie you ever saw?—as the party went on, and they drank and drank more bourbon, until everybody was going home, and then Russ said to her, another whisper, “How about I take you home, young lady?”

They didn’t touch at all in the car. He just drove along, and when they got to her house she told him to park in the back, like everybody did, and when they got there she saw that the student child-help person had already gone home, like Dolly had told her to; the boys never, never woke up in the night. And so she and Russ went into the house by the kitchen, and in there they started up whispering again, like it was her parents asleep upstairs and she was this very young girl instead of a mother, with her own children asleep.

And then he started in to kissing her, then touching her breasts, reaching down into her dress, the both of them still
like kids who’d never done such a thing before (although kids these days are up to the Lord knows what all).

They ran upstairs, first taking off their shoes, and they tiptoed into Dolly’s (Dolly and Willard’s, really) bedroom, and then Russ whispered, “I don’t want to hurt you,” just like she was some young virgin, and probably him too. But by this time Dolly was too excited for any more pretending, and she reached for him in a way that no young girl (no proper young girl) ever would. So that ever after that night, Dolly felt this terrible embarrassment (with Russ) and shame. And love, and hate.

And then all these other things happened to Russ, these other women. Like Deirdre. And the wife of that so-called psychiatrist, supposed to be treating SallyJane and killed her off with the shock treatment, finally. And Cynthia Baird. Cynthia thinks to this day that Dolly didn’t know about their carrying-on, but of course she did. And God knows who all out in Hollywood. Or in New York. Even Esther Hightower, maybe.

Later, Dolly even started up all that flirting and finally going off for some kissing in cars with Clifton Lee; all that was just to make Russ jealous, which for one thing it simply did not do, he could not have cared one bit less if he even noticed—and for another she got sort of caught up and involved herself, she got to really liking poor old Clifton—and then he died. It was like her mama said to her, a long time back, “Honey, don’t you ever try to make a man jealous, they only get jealous when they’ve a mind to, and it’s liable to be when you don’t even want them to notice. Besides, if you try it’s going to backfire on you someway you won’t like.” Well, her mama didn’t even know the half of it.

• • •

Lying there on her pretty pink ruffled bed, all chintz, with a matching skirt on the tables and curtains the same material, Dolly then thought that what she was doing was dangerous, really, lying there with all her bad thoughts, of Roosevelt and Russ and even poor Clifton; next thing she knew she’d be thinking about her daddy, dead now for fifteen years. She must not think about his terrible death—she had to get out someway, even if it was such a terrible day outside, and looked like a thunderstorm, and she was mortally afraid of storms.

In her little Ford car, though, letting it coast real slowly down the hill to save on gas (this terrible rationing!) as Dolly passed the poor little tacky tarpaper shacks where the poorest poor whites lived, she had this really bad thought about the war: she thought, without him things are not going to get any better at all, all the New Deal things that Mr. Roosevelt started will not go on, and we’re not going to get along with those Russian Communists, like he tried to do, and the darkies will just go wild and kill everyone so they can take over the country.

She had got all the way down to Graham Creek before she had to start up the car again, but she left it real slow, and then stopped just before the bridge. The creek was high and brown and swirly. Somebody once said—it could have been Russ who said this, be just like him—that in a good canoe you could make it all the way down to Florida on this creek, but Dolly for one would not like to give it a try. On the other side was a dirty little sand beach, nothing like the fine white sand at Wrightsville Beach, or Nags Head, or out on Ocracoke
Island. And the poplars were a dirty white, their bark all peeling off, trailing down, like some bad skin ailment. Some little colored boys were usually out fishing there, but today Dolly didn’t see a soul. Of course all colored folks are scared and superstitious over storms—though she should talk.

So peculiar for Russ and Deirdre to name that little boy, little Graham, the name of this dirty old creek, Graham Creek. Enough to make a child strange right from the start. But then Russ was strange as strange about names, always had been. I mean, thought Dolly vehemently, who on God’s green earth that was in his right mind would name a baby for a colored girl in a book by that big fat Gertrude Stein?
Melanctha
. Lucky for Russ she wasn’t fat and ugly too, but just strange, like her name, and those great big bosoms the size of watermelon, almost, passed down from SallyJane, her mama. Or for that matter, who would name a new little baby for an old dead wife? That poor little SallyJane, although so far she looked to be just a real normal happy little baby girl. But poor little thing now, to grow up without any daddy. No Russ.

Graham, that was one very odd little boy—or not so little now; he must be getting on to thirteen or fourteen, and real tall for his age. And just plain different from anybody else. You could say that Russ was different too, but different in a very different way. This boy was quiet, very—like Russ was quiet sometimes too, but then other times he’d talk up a storm, and laugh and make his jokes. But not one bit athletic, Graham wasn’t, except for track; turned out he could run like a bird. A good-looking boy, you might say, and how could he not be, with Deirdre for his mama, and his daddy old handsome Russell Byrd?

Sometimes Dolly just clean forgot that Russ was dead.
For one thing, she was so used to his being around, and alive—and then his dying in Texas, on a train like he did, with that colored soldier; that made it all like some story, not something that happened to a person everyone knew. And maybe it wasn’t true? maybe one day Russ would just walk back in and he’d say, Just what’s all this I hear about me being dead?

Dolly began against her will to imagine Russ alive, but just as he walked into the room—into any empty room within her mind—the rain began, a terrible squall into which Russ had vanished. And there she was, alone in her car, down by Graham Creek, in the pounding, terrifying rain.

She had stopped the car right there on the cleared space before the bridge, which is probably where she would die that very day. She and Mr. Roosevelt dead the same day (at least now everyone would remember her death day). And maybe there was a Heaven, after all, and she would see Russ there, and Franklin. She put her head down on the steering wheel and sat there, hearing the distant thunder off in the hills, getting louder as it came toward her, and the rain now beating down against the windows of the car.

In Dolly’s often told version of what happened next, it went like this:

“There was all this rain, heavy beating on the car, and along with that some other beating, like a person with a stick or some big fist. So I pulled all my nerves together and I opened my eyes and there at my window, right next to where I was sitting, just the glass between our two faces, was Russell Byrd. Not the old Russ we all knew but Russ dead and gone to Heaven and turned into some young angel.” At this point Dolly always paused, her bright eyes brighter yet and opened
wide. “I tell you I like to died, or at the very least fainted dead away.”

It was of course neither Russ nor a transformed-angel-Russ, but Graham Byrd, son of Russ and Deirdre, once known as Deirdre’s brother.

Recognizing him but still unable to speak in a rational way, Dolly opened the door a crack, and the boy, this Graham, said, “Oh, Miz Bigelow, I hope I didn’t scare you none, I saw who you were and I wondered could you give me a ride home? I mean whenever you’re heading back up that way?”

Dolly opened the door so that Graham could get in—of course she did, noticing that he considerably hurried, so as not to let in more rain. His face was all streaked, wet with rain, but then it came to Dolly that he was red around the eyes; the boy had been crying, he was not just wet from rain.

Her first thought was: This little old boy is still too old to cry, tall as he is—but then she softened some, and she thought, Grown men can cry too, sometimes. Willard did when his mama died. But who would have expected a boy to take on so about the President, about Mr. Roosevelt? She was taking for granted that that was what he was crying over. She asked him, as gently as if he was a whole lot younger than he was, “Graham, honey, you all right?” And she added, “I know it’s terrible about Mr. Roosevelt, I feel real bad too. I feel awful.”

Graham stared at her with those dark blue eyes of Russ’s, and in a wondering way he asked her, “Mr. Roosevelt?”

It came to Dolly just then (“dumb old me” she used to add at this point) that Graham could have been crying about his daddy.

But what he said was, “No’m. I, I went for this walk with
Mr. Mountjoy, that’s our, our Scout leader, and he—” Then Graham’s whole face twisted up, and he shoved his fists (very dirty, Dolly noticed) against his eyes. Meaninglessly he told her, “He’s gone now. Left me there.”

This is something I don’t want to hear about, I just know I don’t, Dolly thought as she resolutely put the car in gear, backed up, and turned around. And started back up the hill.

The rain had stopped but the sky was still this ugly color, a greenish gray, like water that has got something poison growing in it. Heavy, scary-looking. Beside her on the front seat Graham sniffed. Dolly could feel him trying hard to stop.

Without quite knowing what she was saying, Dolly began to lecture. “Now, Graham,” she began, “sometimes a grownup will do something that a child will not understand, even a specially smart boy like you. I’m sure Mr. Mountjoy had his reason for going off and leaving you there like you say, but if I were in your place I wouldn’t even try to understand. After all, he is the Scout leader, and he’s got to know what he’s about. I’m sure you’d best not even give it any more thought, and not mention it to anyone.”

She went on for some time in that vein. When she looked over at Graham, he had stopped crying—of course he had; he looked serious, and much older than his years. And more like Russ.

“What you must always remember about this day”—and now Dolly herself began to sniffle—“is Mr. Roosevelt. This is the day that he died.”

13

A
PRIL 13, the day after Roosevelt died, was one of the freshest and entirely loveliest days ever seen in Pinehill. Each tiny pale green leaf, the delicate petals of each pale pink or peach-colored rose, the white of the dogwood blossoms, barely trembling in the slightest new spring breeze—all perfect, and almost unnoticed, in the general aura of heavy trouble and confusion.

Cynthia woke early—early and appalled as she became all at once aware of several things, unrelated, but on the other hand—Oh God! she had dreamed of sex, of sex with Derek, and yes (Jesus!) she had actually come, and now she squirmed in humiliation at that memory. (Surely women weren’t supposed to dream like that?) She realized too that she had been crying, and she remembered: Roosevelt. Dead.

Sitting up in bed, she shook her head and shoulders as though she could thus dispose of bad thoughts, but still more came. She thought of her father’s death ten years ago, but so terrible, the months of pain, and even then the end of it, his actual dying had seemed sudden.

Then she thought of a recent article in the
Atlantic
or somewhere, by some refugee psychoanalyst, some follower of
Dr. Freud, who said that Roosevelt was a sort of “father figure” for the whole country—and, like her own father, strong and handsome, with a beautiful voice, and sexy, rumored to have a lady friend, or friends. As her father did, and Derek, probably.