BLACKWATER:The Mysterious Saga of the Caskey Family (62 page)

"Maybe you should," said Grace firmly. She rose from the table.

In five minutes, Grace and Sister were on their way to Mobile to see Miriam.

Sacred Heart College was a school run by Jesuits, located on the far western side of Mobile on about fifty acres of lawn, oak, azaleas, and cypress. Its buildings Were of stodgy, scrubbed brick. The students themselves were stodgy and scrubbed—girls intensely devoted to the Roman Catholic religion, to their Jesuit teachers, and to one another. They lived three to a room in grim brick dormitories, whose chaste gray interiors were in dispiriting contrast to the intense and manicured vegetation that covered the college's campus.

Grace easily found the Administration Building and, from a nun in the registrar's office, got the location of Miriam's room. Grace and Sister were gently chided for the unannounced midweek visit, which wasn't at all customary, and which would doubtless have a disruptive effect.

"We couldn't help it," said Grace, uncowed. "You see, Miriam's daddy's sister died last night, and we have come to tell Miriam the bad news."

Alarmed and moved, the nun summoned a gardener to show Grace and Sister across the campus to Miriam's dormitory.

At the dormitory, the doleful news had already been received by the house mistress, and Grace and Sister were shown up to Miriam's room directly.

"I cain't believe," whispered Sister fretfully, "that we have just gone and lied to a bunch of nuns. Telling them that I am dead!"

"Hush," hissed Grace.

The house mistress knocked on Miriam's door, and then respectfully retreated.

Grace didn't wait for the knock to be answered. She opened the door.'without being bidden.

In the small gray room were three narrow beds, each covered with a gray blanket; three tiny desks were topped with small green blotters; three chests-of-drawers were stacked one atop the other; and there was a standing wardrobe with double doors. On one of the beds, beneath a window, lay Miriam, weeping convulsively against her pillow. The nun, Grace thought, must already have told her the bad news.

She looked up incredulously and gaped at Sister and Grace in the doorway.

"You poor darling!" cried Grace, holding open her arms wide.

Miriam sat tentatively up on the bed, and then after only a moment's hesitation, rushed across the room and took refuge in Grace's embrace.

"Honey," cried Sister, "I'm not dead! Grace, you shouldn't have told the nun that lie!"

"What?" stammered Miriam.

"Come hug me!" cried Sister, and took Miriam away from Grace. "They came and told you I was dead, didn't they? That's why you were crying, wasn't it?"

"No," said Miriam, mystified and still sniffling.

"Then why were you crying?" said Sister.

Miriam drew back, and looked at Grace. "Because I'm always crying," returned Miriam.

"What!" said Sister. "You never cried before in your life, Miriam! Not even when you were little and Ivey Sapp dropped you on the crown of your head!"

Miriam pulled away and retreated once more to her bed. She dried her eyes on her handkerchief. "Why are you here?" she asked.

"We came to see if you were all right," said Grace, hopping up onto one of the desks and crossing her legs beneath her. "But I can see that you're not, are you?"

"I hate it here!"

"Why!" cried Sister. "Miriam, we didn't have any idea! Why didn't you just call me and tell me you were unhappy?"

" 'Cause you were so glad to get rid of me, that's why!"

"No, I wasn't! I didn't want you to leave me! I wanted to keep you with me forever and ever."

"Nobody else wanted me there in Perdido," said Miriam.

"Everybody misses you a lot," said Sister reassuringly. "Frances talks about you all the time. She is pining away."

"You were homesick, weren't you?" said Grace.

Miriam glanced at Grace sharply, then nodded her head. "Yes, very homesick."

"Then why in the world," said Sister, "didn't you come home?"

"Nobody asked me."

"Nobody had to ask you," cried Sister in exasperation. "Darling, that house is yours, and we're all your family. You could have come home every weekend, and we would always have been glad to see you. Ivey's dying to cook for you again. Your room is always kept ready. In fact, nobody knows what to do without you."

"I hate this old place," repeated Miriam, glancing distastefully about her room.

"You don't like your roommates?" said Grace.

"I hate them, and they hate me."

"I bet they're real sweet," said Sister vaguely. "Hey, Miriam, why didn't you come home for Thanksgiving? We had an empty chair."

"Nobody asked me."

"Lord God!" cried Sister. "What were we supposed to do, send a herald and an engraved invitation? Miriam, we are your family. Don't you know it?"

At last Miriam's eyes were dry. Now she was sullen.

After & few moments of glancing first at Miriam and then at Sister, Grace said energetically, "Miriam, when does your Christmas vacation begin?"

"Friday."

"All right then, Sister and I will be back then to get you. You are coming back to Perdido for the holidays—and not another word on the subject. If you have made other plans, then you break 'em, 'cause you're not getting out of this."

"A girl in my history class had asked me to go home with her to New Orleans," said Miriam hesitantly.

"Don't you do it," said Grace sternly. "You're coming home with us. Sister and I will be here on Friday."

"I don't need you," said Miriam. "I've got my car. I'll be in Perdido by suppertime."

"Sister and I will come down anyway," said Grace. "We've got some Christmas shopping to do down here, and we'll drop by here to help you pack up."

To be thus taken in hand and ordered to come to Perdido seemed exactly what Miriam wanted. She ventured a smile, and said she was glad that Grace and Sister had come to see her. She offered to show them around the campus, and after that brief tour she introduced her relatives to her roommates. There was some awkwardness in maintaining the deception of a dead relative in the light of Miriam's obviously improved temper. When questioned about this by one of the nuns, Grace explained boldly, "False alarm. It was just a stroke, and we hear that she's much better now."

That evening, Grace and Miriam and Sister went out to dinner together at the Government House in downtown Mobile, and there Miriam shamefacedly admitted the harrowing extent of her homesickness. "I cried every night before I went to bed, and I cried every morning when I got up. I never thought I could miss old Perdido so much, and everybody there. I used to daydream about walking along the levee, and buying bobby pins down at the Ben Franklin."

"Honey, I wish you'd called or written and told us how miserable you were," said Sister plaintively.

"She's just like Mary-Love," said Grace abruptly. "And it's always somebody else who has to make the first step. Miriam, you know that's how you are, and Mary-Love taught you some bad lessons. It's about time you got over a little of that."

Sister was certain that this straightforward talk would inflame Miriam, who was very touchy on the subject of her dead grandmother, but Miriam, apparently chastened by her unhappiness, only replied, "I sure will be glad to sleep in my own bed. I am sick to death of having to share everything. And after New Year's, I know I'm gone dread leaving Perdido again."

CHAPTER 47
THE CAUSEWAY

Miriam had learned a hard lesson during her three-month sojourn at Sacred Heart College. She had discovered that she was not as strong and independent as she had thought. From the first night she had been assailed by loneliness, homesickness, insecurity, and unhappiness. She had liked nothing about Sacred Heart: its buildings, its grounds, its teachers, its students. All were strange to her. The nuns were threatening. The girls in the dormitory all seemed privy to a secret about life that Miriam could not figure out. Despite what she told her family, she had decided against converting to Catholicism. The more she saw of that religion, the less it agreed with her. Though she never would have admitted it, even to herself, Miriam wasn't entirely sure why she had chosen Sacred Heart over any other school. Perhaps because it was so close to Perdido—even though she had left home with the intention of returning only infrequently. Perhaps because only women went there—to prevent the family from having any satisfaction in imagining that she even remotely contemplated marriage. Perhaps only because, of all colleges, Sacred Heart had seemed unlikeliest fo» her.

Even in her first days there, she missed Perdido. Often she thought of the house in which she had grown up. She thought about her room and Mary-Love's room and Sister's room. She thought of Ivey in the kitchen, and longed to hear Luvadia's rake scratching patterns in the sandy yard. She wanted to hear the creak of the rotting water oak limbs outside her window. She thought of the Perdido, flowing always swiftly, always turbulently behind its protective wall of red clay. She wanted, from the moment she set foot on the Sacred Heart campus, to be back in Perdido, to live as she had always lived. She was desperate for Sister's company, and she missed Oscar and Elinor and Frances on one side of the house, and James and Danjo on the other. Once, Miriam went downtown to one of the banks in Mobile, and opened her safety-deposit box and examined the diamonds and sapphires that were hidden within it, but the jewels proved of no comfort. She shut the box and returned to the dormitory to cry.

Miriam never even considered returning to Perdido for the weekend, even though Perdido was less than fifty miles away, no more than an hour and a half's drive in the roadster. Though she missed them woefully, and realized for the first time how much she loved them, Miriam still thought of her family as the enemy. This was her grandmother's teaching, and a lesson by which only Miriam suffered. She waited for some sign of capitulation: a telephone call from Sister to say she was desperately missed, a postcard from Frances to ask when she was coming home, a frantic telegram to demand her presence at Thanksgiving dinner, an ostensibly casual visit from James and Queenie at the tag end of one of their Mobile shopping excursions. Hearing nothing, she concluded that her family had won, and that she had lost. Grace's visit seemed heaven-sent and Miriam prayed thanks to the God of her classmates.

In the last few days before Christmas vacation began, however, Miriam grew anxious. She perceived that she would be returning in a state of disgrace—and vulnerability. Grace would have told everyone that she had nearly collapsed beneath the weight of homesickness, that she had been desperate for news of home, that she had missed everyone— even her mother and father. Miriam declined Sister and Grace's offer to return to the college and assist her in packing. With great misgiving she drove back to Perdido through the gathering dusk.

She pulled up before the house, got out, carried her bag inside, and called Sister's name. No one was home.

At Sacred Heart, Miriam had suffered a nightmare. In her dream, she had given up her pride and returned to Perdido, only to find that her family had abandoned the three houses along the river and departed without leaving word of their whereabouts. In the gloom of twilight in the empty house the nightmare seemed to have become reality and Miriam trembled. She ran outside, out the back door, and stood dwarfed and trembling beneath the towering water oaks.

"Miriam!" Sister's voice came from above. Miriam looked up. Sister stood at the screens of Oscar and Elinor's upstairs porch. "Everybody's over here, darling!"

Thinking, They've won, they've won, Miriam entered her parents' house. Zaddie appeared as a dark shadow in the even darker hallway, and said, "Hey, Miss Miriam, how you?"

"Fine, Zaddie. Just fine," she replied, and slowly climbed the stairs to the second floor.

Everyone was there on the screened porch: her parents, Sister, Frances, Danjo and James and Grace, Queenie and Lucille.

"Hey, y'all," said Miriam softly. "I'm back."

No one crowed triumph.

Her mother said quietly, "Miriam, Grace said you had an invitation to go off with one of your friends, but we are truly pleased that you decided to spend Christmas with us..."

"We are all having supper together over here... in your honor," said Oscar tentatively, " 'cause we are all so glad to see you again, darling."

No more was said about her return. No one pressed its ignominy back upon her; no one trod upon her prostrate spirit.

Miriam sat down in the swing beside Frances, who in a quick, apprehensive motion leaned over and hugged her. Miriam tried to gather her thoughts and think this thing out. She looked over at Grace.

Grace said, "Miriam, when I told everybody that you had decided to come back here for Christmas they were so excited, I cain't tell you!"

That was it then;-Grace and Sister had said nothing of her homesickness nor her dire unhappiness at Sacred Heart. She had been defeated by her own emotions and weakness, but no one except Grace and Sister knew it.

Queenie asked her how she liked Sacred Heart.

"It takes some... getting used to," replied Miriam carefully. "I never knew there were so many Catholics before. Some of the mill workers are Catholic— aren't they, Oscar?—but I wasn't used to everybody praying to the Virgin, and people telling rosary beads and tacking up little cards with pictures of the crucifixion on them. All of that makes me a little nervous. I'm still not used to it."

Miriam soon discovered that in her absence considerable changes had been wrought in the family. She found that she was expected to go to her parents' house every day for the midday meal, and that her former recalcitrance in the matter wasn't to be indulged. She bridled the first few days to think that she was to converse with her father and mother, with whom she had had almost nothing to do all of her life. But then she realized that they were treating her differently.

For the first time, suddenly and radically, Miriam was being regarded as an adult. She had an equal place with Sister, and a greater place, it seemed, than either Frances or Lucille.