Babylon Sisters (11 page)

25

Louis left a message on my cell phone. He had talked to Phoebe and she had asked him to open the letter. “Congratulations,” his message said. “You are now the proud mother of a member of the Smith College class of 2009.”

Proud is right,
I thought, driving through downtown and turning toward West End. She worked hard for this. She organized it and focused on it and presented herself to Smith as the amazing, multifaceted jewel that she is, and they recognized her just like I do. As I turned down Abernathy, I imagined how excited she must be. Of course, there was a part of me that was really pissed off and sad that we were still in a weird not-speaking phase, but the part that was happy and proud was stronger. The part that wanted to remove from her mind any possible question of my feelings at this moment so that when she looks back later, she won’t say, “My mother never even congratulated me on getting accepted to Smith.” This was a chance for me to insert myself into the narrative of this moment in her memory as “the good mother,” even in the midst of what Amelia called madness, but which may just be the way of things between mothers and daughters at certain phases of the moon.

I pulled into the florist shop’s reserved space out front and parked. The twenty-four-hour beauty shop was full, as it usually was. I saw Flora waiting and waved through the window. She waved back as I pulled open the florist’s door and stepped inside. The bouquet in the window today was multicolored roses. Phoebe never cared for roses unless somebody she knew grew them. Amelia’s garden had spoiled her for hothouse roses with perfect petals and no scent at all. Phoebe liked flowers she couldn’t grow, and birds-of-paradise topped her list. In this, she shared a passion with the shop’s owners, a married couple who had been running it together for fifty years. The roses in the window were an exception. The rule was unruly bouquets of orange and purple and gold, which Baby Doll and I loved to give each other for our mutual enjoyment. But today I was simply placing an order and sharing the good news.

Sandra Hunter greeted me with a smile when I dinged the bell above the door that alerted her to customers. “Come in, come in!” she said. “Algernon is going to hate that he missed you.”

“Me, too,” I said. “Is this his weekend in Biloxi?”

She laughed and shook her head. “Two old fools. He and Charlie go down there once a month like clockwork, lose a hundred dollars apiece like clockwork, and come on back.”

“Don’t they ever win?”

She shook her head. “Never. The best they ever do is break even, but you know what? It keeps them out of trouble and makes them feel a little dangerous, so I can’t complain.”

“Give him my love when he gets back,” I said, keeping to myself the fact that Miss Iona said Mr. Charles was always lucky and routinely came back from the casino with a handful of money.

“You know I will,” she said. “Now what can I do for you?”

“I need to send some flowers to Baby Doll,” I said. “She got accepted at Smith College.”

“Oh, my goodness,” Miss Sandra said, coming from behind the counter to hug me. “Congratulations! You must be so proud.”

I took the card with Louis’s handwriting on it out of my purse and reached for my credit card. “That’s exactly what I want the card to say. That I am
too
proud!”

She handed me a pen and a small pad and reached for the phone. “Write it down. I’ll make sure they get it right and send her out the prettiest birds in the state of Massachusetts!” She patted my hand, still smiling proudly. She had known Phoebe all of her life.

Congratulations, Baby Doll,
I wrote, then stopped and started again. She was about to go to college. She might not feel like
Baby Doll
anymore. I started again:
Dear Phoebe . . .
That was even worse. All I really wanted to say was,
I love you. I miss you. I’m so proud of you. . . . Love, Mom.

So that’s what I wrote, and I told Miss Sandra to get them to underline
love
twice. Just to make sure she didn’t miss it.

26

Amelia had agreed to loan me an evening dress, since my meager wardrobe offerings do not include a suitable gown for the AABJ dinner, especially since I was accompanying the son of the evening’s honoree. I’m shorter than Amelia by a few inches, and thicker by a few inches, but we’re close enough that she pulled six possibilities from her closet, all of which would do the job with no alterations or major pinning. I rejected out of hand anything that required extreme high heels (for me, that’s anything over three inches), control-top panty hose, or taping of body parts to ensure that they didn’t pop out inappropriately over dinner.

“I can’t believe you have all those dress-up clothes.”

“ ‘Dress-up clothes’?” she mocked me gently.

“You know what I mean,” I said, sitting on her bed amidst the slippery, silken pile. “Where do you go to wear these clothes?”

“Diplomatic functions still tend to be formal,” she said. “I’m getting ready to do some serious international business. These are just some of my costumes.”

“That’s a good way to think of it,” I said. “So are we picking out my costume for the award dinner?”

“Absolutely. Something simple and classy,” she said, pulling out an emerald green sheath that would have been at home in Jackie Kennedy’s White House.

I shook my head. “Too green.”

She nodded and picked up an orange A-line taffeta skirt and a bright pink jacket. It was beautiful, but I didn’t have enough pizzazz to carry off orange and pink at the same time. I shook my head.

She frowned slightly, thinking, and I reconsidered the green number. Maybe I could work a kente-cloth shawl draped over one shoulder.

“Hold it!” Amelia said. “I have the perfect thing for you.”

That sounded promising. Maybe Amelia had held back on one amazing piece that would look great, feel great, and be comfortable. She reached into her closet and pulled out a wine-colored piece of fabric that looked vaguely like a dress with what I think was a scoop neck, extremely long sleeves, and a hemline that seemed to dip lower in the back for some reason I couldn’t determine. On the hanger, it looked a mess.

“This is it?” I said, not even trying to keep the disappointment out of my voice.

“Oh, ye of little faith,” Amelia said. “Go into the bathroom, take everything off, and put it on.”

“Everything?”

“You know that old-time brassiere and big old granny drawers are not going to work with this dress,” she said, pushing me toward the tiny bathroom off her bedroom.

“I don’t wear granny drawers,” I said.

“Yeah, you do, but that’s a topic for another day. Right now, put this on and come out so I can help you drape it.”

I let her push me into the bathroom and close the door behind me. “I can’t even tell which end of this thing is up,” I said, although I had to admit the jumble of fabric felt soft and weightless in my hands. It might not look like much, but it felt terrific.

“Just do it,” Amelia said. “We’ve got to wrap this fashion moment up so you can tell me how you’re going to handle seeing your ex after all this time.”

“He’s not my ex,” I snapped, stepping out of my sweats. “We were never married.”

“I can see you’re handling it beautifully,” she said. “Don’t forget to take off your bra.”

“I’m handling it.”

“You need to just relax and go with the flow,” she said.

I groaned. “That’s exactly what he kept saying on the phone. ‘Go with the flow.’ ”

“I like him already,” Amelia said. “Great minds run in the same channels.”

“Or are caught in the same time warp,” I said, emerging from the bathroom with the wine-colored thing hanging on me with no more grace than it did the hanger. Part of the skirt was dragging the floor, and I shuffled over to the full-length mirror near her dresser and presented myself for our mutual inspection. “Tell me this isn’t the way it’s supposed to look.”

“Of course not,” Amelia said, coming over to loop and tie and button and tuck until the thing began to re-form itself around my body in the most amazing way. The neckline flowed into the bodice, which draped itself over my bare breasts like it had known them all their lives. The strangely cut skirt ended up as a softly wrapped cocoon that clung where it was most flattering to cling and skimmed the rest like a skate bug on the surface of a pond. By the time Amelia completed her ministrations, I looked like I had just stepped out of the pages of
Essence
magazine and was on my way someplace
fabulous.
The best part was, it was comfortable as a pair of flannel pajamas and seemingly weightless.

“It’s perfect,” I said, turning around slowly to admire my artfully covered behind.

“I told you,” Amelia said. “It’s all in the drape.”

I turned away from the mirror. “So who’s going to drape it? You’ll be in Chicago. Does Louis know how to do it?”

She laughed. “Please! Louis can barely tie his own tie, much less drape anything. But it’s not hard. I’ll show you how.”

“Show me now,” I said. “Then if I can’t do it, we still have time to pick something else.”

“Relax,” she said. “I’ll talk you through it.”

She started taking the dress apart carefully while I watched her like a hawk. A half an hour later, I had mastered the technique and learned not only the formal drape that I’d be wearing to the AABJ dinner, but a more casual, just-below-the-knee/a-little-higher-in-the-neckline version that Amelia suggested I wear when I had my first face-to-face with B.J.

“I don’t think so,” I said, once I had changed back into my sweats. “All I need is to pull the wrong thing and who knows what could happen?”

“What do you want to happen?” she said, hanging up my new favorite dress on a padded hanger, where it immediately camouflaged itself by becoming a shapeless mess again.

“I have no idea,” I confessed, reaching for another hanger for the also-ran green dress while Amelia zipped a garment bag over the pink-and-orange two-piece.

She looked surprised. “You have to have an idea. How are you going to control the situation if you don’t even have an outcome in mind?”

“This from the woman who just told me to go with the flow?”

“I’m serious. When you think of seeing him after all these years, what comes to mind?”

“Other than the fact that I hope he’ll be a broken-down old wreck with a scraggly beard and rheumy eyes and his best days behind him?”

She looked at me. “You’re kidding, right?”

“Sort of,” I said, hedging a little, since it sounded awful when I actually said out loud what I’d been thinking.

“How about some tea?” she said, closing the closet door.

“Was that the wrong answer?” I followed her downstairs to the kitchen and took a seat at the counter.

“That’s one way to look at it,” she said, filling the teakettle, “but the thing is, who wants to waste time having dinner with a guy like that?”

“You got that right.” I laughed at the way she came at it. “Sounds like the reunion from hell.”

“Exactly.” She turned on the flame and got down two cups. “So why not consider the best case?”

“And what would that be?”

She put a tea bag in each cup and I could smell the cinnamon. “That would be, he’s as fine as ever, his career’s going great guns, and the only thing he’s ever regretted in his whole charmed life is leaving you without a proper good-bye.”

She said it so simply that its directness almost brought tears to my eyes, a reaction that was not lost on Amelia.

“It’s too late to expect him to explain,” I said.

“Then don’t. Pick a restaurant you like, make sure they give you a good table, put on your beautiful dress, and leave your expectations behind.”

“Along with my granny panties?”

She smiled at me sympathetically. “Did you ever think maybe this is the universe’s way of trying to help you answer Phoebe’s question?”

“I don’t think the universe spends a significant amount of time trying to answer my daughter’s questions.”

“That will be a real surprise to her.”

“One among many,” I said. “Just one among many.”

27

One of the first things I asked Miriam to do was to make me a copy of her sister’s picture from the locket so I could show it around. So far, nobody had seen or heard anything, but I had pinned her photograph to the bulletin board in my office to remind me that this search was about a real person who needed some real help immediately. The sympathetic police detective I spoke to said it was like looking for a needle in a haystack, but he’d do the best he could. That didn’t sound very promising, and the more information I gathered about the ways young women refugees were being exploited, the more frightened I was for Etienne. Children as young as seven and eight, boys and girls, were being snatched or lured away from relatives and forced to live in filthy, overcrowded quarters like the one where Miriam had been stashed, with no way to contact anyone they knew once they disappeared. Every kind of intimidation was being used, but the most effective weapons these modern-day slavers had was the fact that so many illegal immigrants didn’t speak or read English, and they were terrified of being reported to the INS. Nobody wanted to be identified as a troublemaker, so witnesses to any crime were hard to find.

What wasn’t hard to find was the coverage of Busy Boy Baker’s partnership with Mandeville Maids. It led all three nightly newscasts locally and was featured on the front of the Living section of the
Atlanta Journal-Constitution
with a photo of Busy Boy in the middle of the women in white. They were clustered around him, grinning like somebody had just said, “Say money.” He had one arm around his sister and the other around a woman who looked like she was in the midst of a moment that would last a lifetime. That picture also made its way into
Jet
magazine as a photo of the week, and into the
Sentinel
as community news. I clipped it out and pinned it to my bulletin board next to Etienne.

Looking at the women’s excited faces, I wondered how they would feel if they knew how little faith their benefactors really had in them, but they didn’t have a clue and probably didn’t care. They all agreed it was a great opportunity. Whether they chose to take advantage of it was another question altogether.

B.J. called to give me his date and time of arrival. I took Amelia’s advice and told him to meet me at the Pleasant Peasant downtown at six thirty. That would give him enough time to get checked into his hotel and take a breath before dinner. He was staying at the Hyatt Regency, which was only a few blocks from the restaurant, so we wouldn’t have any traffic to deal with. Atlanta’s legendary freeway snarls are always the wrench in the best laid plans, and I avoid them if I can. Life is too short to contend with other people’s bad driving and road rage on the way to catch up with an old friend.

I still had a couple of days before his arrival, which was fine with me. I was busy trying to reprogram myself. Amelia’s decidedly more upbeat projections for the evening had grown on me, and gradually I realized I was looking forward to it. Several successful practice sessions had convinced me I could drape the strange dress appropriately for the occasion, so I gave myself the option to wear it if I was feeling particularly bold at the moment when I had to decide.

B.J. had been my friend for almost two years before we became lovers. He knew Louis because they were both journalism majors and the three of us started hanging around together. They were always arguing about whether we needed more local news or more focus on international affairs. I never understood why the two had to be in conflict. They acted like they had never seen that bumper sticker that says,
Think Globally/Act Locally.
Maybe it’s just the way men communicate.

When I’d get bored with that discussion, I’d make them go to the movies or listen to some music or talk about my chosen career as a diplomat. It was a good three-way friendship, and B.J. fit into my ongoing life with Louis in a way that we all enjoyed, and then . . . what does the song say? I fooled around and fell in love. I didn’t mean to, did not have it in mind, but Louis got an internship in Chicago the summer after our junior year, and B.J. had a project that kept him in Atlanta, where I was working in former ambassador Andrew Young’s office and starting to apply for grad school. Our three became two, and left alone, B.J. and I fell into each other’s arms like we’d just been waiting for Louis to leave the room.

It was heaven. A friend I could talk to who also made me woozy with the pleasure of our lovemaking. A comrade who would travel the world with me and share my bed and my brain with equal pleasure. It was a dream come true, and sometimes when I’d watch him sleeping or we’d slide into the bath he’d run for us to share, I’d know it was just that: a dream. A temporary and highly transitory state that would have to come to an end. I accepted that, I think, but what I had always hoped was that even if this amazing sexual bubble couldn’t last, we could still be friends. It sounds like a classic kiss-off line, I know, but that’s only if you’ve never really had a good friend. B.J. was my friend first, and I missed that part of him as much as anything else.

The doorbell startled me out of my daydream and I glanced at the clock. It was six thirty and the sky was turning pink outside my window. I wasn’t expecting anybody, but I was definitely up for an interesting drop-in. If I was lucky, it might even be a hungry friend with an idea for dinner. Not exactly. I opened the door to find Sam Hall standing there in yet another dark blue suit and tasteful tie, smiling apologetically.

“Catherine,” he crooned my name like a Quiet Storm deejay. “Is this a bad time?”

I’m glad I always dress for work. Doing business in your sweats is a slippery slope that leads to a day spent in your bathrobe and slippers. Plus, it leaves you at a distinct disadvantage when confronted with impeccably dressed drop-ins. I had on a good pair of pants and a blue silk tunic Phoebe gave me last Christmas.

“I’m not sure,” I said. “A bad time for what?”

The smile got a little wider and he held up a bottle of wine. “An apology, an explanation, and a glass of my favorite cabernet.”

That made me smile. I’d been thinking about dinner, but this was an infinitely more interesting proposition.

“Come in,” I said, stepping aside to let him.

He stopped in the small foyer just inside the front door and looked around. This house was one of the original Victorians that once defined Peeples Street, and it still has all the original wood inside. My mother always took pride in this house and used it as evidence that my father’s unconventional and peripatetic lifestyle did not mean he wasn’t a good provider. When the property passed to me, I felt honor bound to hold up that same standard, especially since I also do business here. The place looks good, if I do say so myself, and Sam was clearly impressed.

“This is a lovely place,” he said, following me into the living room.

“Thank you,” I said. “Why don’t you have a seat and I’ll get some glasses?”

He put the wine on the coffee table and sat down on the couch, still taking in his surroundings with the practiced eye of a professional. I brought back an opener and two red-wine glasses with impossibly slender stems and big, round bowls. They had been a set of six, but I had broken them all, except these two. Louis gives me a set of wineglasses every Christmas, and they rarely make it through New Year’s Eve. It’s a running joke between us, but these were survivors.

I picked up the wine and started to open it. I could tell Sam was surprised, but if he brought wine
and
opened it, it was too much like a date and this
ain’t
that. Not by a long shot.

“I used to be in the real estate business,” he said. “This house is in the half-million-dollar range.”

“It’s not for sale,” I said, easing the cork out of the bottle and wondering what he was doing here.

“I’m sorry for dropping in unannounced,” he said while I poured us each a glass of wine. “But I thought it was time for us to get to know each other a little better.”

I put down my glass. “Is that the apology or the explanation?”

“Okay, cards on the table.” He smiled. “Look, Catherine, I’m not a bad guy, but I’m probably not the kind of person you’re used to working with, am I right?”

If our conversation after the ceremony was any indication, he should get an award for understatement.

“Yes, I guess you are.”

“And you know what’s the main difference between me and them? I’m a businessman. Making money is not a crime in my book, and I intend to make as much of it as I can, as fast as I can, before the bottom falls out or somebody blows up the world.”

“Is that why you went to work for Miss Mandeville? To make money?”

He sat back and grinned at me. “See how you said that? ‘To make money,’ like I was doing something sinful because I want to be well paid for what I do.”

I took a sip of my wine. “Maybe we should start there. What do you do?”

“That would be the explanation part, but I hadn’t finished my apology.”

“I’m sorry. Go on.”

“Here’s the thing.” He put his glass down and leaned toward me. “I’m sorry if what I said the other day offended you. I don’t have anything against those girls. . . .”

He must have felt my objection, since the graduates ranged in age from early twenties to mid-forties.

“Those
women,
” he corrected himself smoothly. “I want the best for them, in every possible way, but I’m realistic about what they are to me.”

“Don’t you mean
who
they are?”

“No, because they’re not a
who.
They’re a
what.
Cheap, available labor to do the jobs nobody else wants to do. That’s the only reason I’m interested in immigrants, because they’re more of the same, except they’ll work cheaper, be more grateful to get it, and not make waves. So I’m sorry if that offends you, but that’s where I stand, and the sooner you know it, the more productive our working together is going to be.”

I wondered how Ezola could stand to have him around. “How do you figure that?”

He leaned forward suddenly like he was anxious for me to understand. “Because I’m honest. I’m not trying to pretend to be one of those do-gooders you’re used to working for who are so busy begging for money they don’t know how to make any, but that’s what I do. I’m in the business of amassing capital, gathering resources, and if I can help somebody along the way, or
seem
to, that’s all right with me. But that’s never the goal. It’s only a by-product of the process.”

I couldn’t argue with what he was saying, and as I thought about it, there was no need to. Hiring the women I was helping target for Ezola was going to help somebody along the way. Rewarding a handful of women for earning a GED was helping somebody along the way. And even holding out the carrot of college scholarships would help if anybody took him up on it. What made me mad was his attitude. He seemed so callous toward the women, which is, I guess, the way of the world. Maybe I had just been working around do-gooders too long to admit it.

“That may be the most unrepentant apology I’ve ever heard,” I said. “I can hardly wait for the explanation part.”

He sat back then and took a swallow of his wine, smiled appreciatively, and swirled it delicately around in my doomed goblet like he was sampling the best of the harvest at a Napa Valley wine tasting. “I’m a failed romantic,” he said, and his beautiful lingering over the word shot down my recent irritation with his worldview and replaced it with renewed curiosity about what sort of person he really was. He wasn’t what I’d call likable, but he was very interesting. Plus, we failed romantics are a very exclusive club, despite our tremendous membership numbers, and we usually recognize one of our own. As a failed romantic, Sam was about as convincing as Michael Jackson is pretending to be a guy who really loves kids.

“You don’t strike me as a romantic, failed or otherwise,” I said. “You’re a pragmatist if I ever saw one.”

“Maybe you’re right, Catherine, but I used to be a lot like you. I was still in business, but I believed in
the people.
” His voice put quotation marks around the words to show what he thought of those who still felt that way. “I inherited a real estate company from my father and I embraced the challenge of running it with real passion. My father was old-school, but I had new ideas about how to encourage home ownership in renters. I wanted to use the rehabbing of houses to revitalize poor neighborhoods and energize their residents. I wanted to use home ownership to positively impact everything from health care to public safety.”

Those ideas—the ones I endorse so completely—sounded so right coming out of Sam’s mouth, spoken in that mellifluous voice, that I couldn’t believe he didn’t still believe them. “What happened?”

He shrugged, his well-padded shoulders and his perfectly tailored jacket making the gesture look graceful in a self-deprecating sort of way. “Nothing. Absolutely nothing. My tenants weren’t interested in anything except drugs and watching TV. Their children tore up everything they touched, and you couldn’t fix it up more times than they could tear it back down. Their rent checks bounced, and the crews I hired from the neighborhood sold the tools I gave them and disappeared.”

His story sounded like a nightmare. Trying to change poor people’s lives is never as glamorous or inspirational as they make it when some do-gooders get the central role in a Hollywood movie. In real life, Sam’s experience is probably closer to the truth, a long series of unrewarded sacrifices and thankless tasks that rarely impact the lives of the people you want to rescue. It sounded like Sam had suffered a classic case of burnout. I refilled our glasses, and he took a sip before he continued his story.

“I realized that not only was I not going to be able to make the changes I had dreamed about, but I had invested so much money in the possibility that I was about to lose the business.” He shook his head to clear the bad memory. “I needed to evict the deadbeats, fix the rental places up, and get some tenants in who could pay. The sheriff handled the evictions, but the mess those niggers left behind was just unbelievable. Garbage everywhere, diapers, every kind of drug paraphernalia. It was disgusting.”