Cementville (19 page)

“I should think they'd be looking at Levon Ferguson before anybody else,” Wanda ventured.

June stood suddenly and stamped out her cigarette, too close to Charlene's zinnias.

“What?” Wanda said with fake innocence, thinking: So it's true. June's been sleeping with that bucket of scum.

“People need to lay off Levon,” June said.

“All right!” Wanda whispered. “Christ on a bike. Somebody would think you were in love with him or something.”

“He's not the way everybody thinks he is. He's had a life you wouldn't wish on Satan himself.” June sat down and lit another cigarette. She puffed furiously and the swing pitched back and forth with vehemence. “Angus Ferguson, he's the one that ought to be locked up. I can't even repeat the things that pus-bag did to those kids growing up.”

“June, you know I don't butt into other people's beeswax, but I wish you'd stay away from Levon. You know he's been two-timing and beating tar out of Ginny since the day they got married, if not before. Besides, I've already got Mother to worry about, I don't need to add you to my list.”

“He's getting divorced, for your information.” June at thirty was still given to pouts. “Arlene was a fool, letting a man like Angus Ferguson around her children, when she knew good and well—first-hand,
in fact!—what he was capable of.” June pushed the swing harder and grabbed a fistful of zinnias. As the swing moved forward, she tore off every blossom within reach. She put out a foot and the swing lurched to a stop. “Sorry. Just remembered—they're your relatives. Sorry, Wanda.”

“Don't worry about it. Hey, speaking of badly behaved kinfolk, you won't believe where I'm going when I leave here, much less why.” Wanda was trying both to change the subject and to recapture the conspiratorial urgency with which she and June used to tell each other things when they were twelve and thirteen, letting it out in a single long breath.

“Go on.”

“I'm going to visit old Mrs. Slidell.”

“Get out.”

“Dead serious!” As soon as she said it, Wanda knew she could not tell June why she was going to visit the grandmother to whom she had not spoken in her entire life.
Oh, Death came by last night and invited me over to my rich evil granny's house for a quick tea party
. June had been her best friend—admittedly, her only friend. There was a time when Wanda could tell June just about anything. Just about. But sharing hallucinatory dreams with another human being is shaky ground, even if you were not already an agoraphobic train wreck.

Of course, Wanda didn't believe it herself. She had waited all morning for the uncanny pull of the dream to leave her, the urgent sense that she was supposed to go and see her estranged grandmother. Estranged would have been putting it mildly. What she felt was a kind of second-hand hatred. The last time they'd laid eyes on each other, Evelyn Slidell had spotted Wanda in the parking lot of the A&P. The old lady turned straight around and hobbled back to her car on Martha Goins's arm, forgoing groceries altogether rather than speak to her granddaughter.

“Why, pray tell?” June sank into her more customary cool indifference.

“Well, I heard she's really sick. She's probably dying, and I'm her only blood relative. I feel bad for her, all alone up there in that big moldy house.”

“And there may be some money involved . . .” June rubbed her fingers together and squinted hungrily out of the corner of her eye.

“Don't be absurd. I heard she was sick, that she might want to see me. I am not going to begrudge a simple kindness, June.”

“And this juicy lowdown came from . . .?”

“Talk around town. You know, the kind of thing you overhear in the checkout line.”

“You overheard people at the A&P saying that Mrs. Slidell needs her granddaughter—whose existence she has not acknowledged for thirty years—to come hold her hand while she trundles on home to Jesus?”

“Oh, shoot—look at the time! Give my love to Valine.” Wanda tossed the little red cap into June's lap and left her in her mother's porch swing, pushing herself with one foot, shaking her head.

T
HE
S
LIDELL MANSION WOULD BE
imposing in a city of any size. In Cementville, it was a castle. Wanda puttered up the boxwood-lined driveway in Loretta's '61 Fury. The peal of the doorbell echoed from deep in the center of the house. Martha Goins, the nurse from Holy Ghost School, opened the door.

“Wanda! I didn't know Mrs. Slidell was expecting anybody today. Well, isn't this nice. I was just getting her tea tray ready. Come on in, sugar.” Mrs. Goins huffed and panted the way big people do with the effort of a string of words.

Wanda stepped into the foyer. A breeze rushed through the front door as though snatching a rare opportunity, setting the crystals in the chandelier tinkling. The familiar smell of old people roused itself, then settled into the corners like a cat declining to be disturbed. She thought of Poose and Mem, the way their clothes, the furniture, the house, came to smell of stale saltines and tea left sitting too long.

“You must think I'm awful, Mrs. Goins. Here it is July, and I never told you how sorry I was to hear about Donnie Ray.”

“So horrible, what happened to the little Vietnamese girl, wasn't it?” Martha Goins clasped her hands in front of her and gave the barest hint of a nod to acknowledge Wanda's condolences. She seemed to be staring at the air over Wanda's shoulder as she burst forth with, “And how is that mother of yours?” She turned to the tea tray sitting on a table near the front door, rearranged the cup, the teapot, the budvase, letting Wanda know that grief was a thing one ought not tempt into getting the upper hand.

“Mother is, well, Mother—you know her. Maybe I could pick your brain sometime about how to get her to behave. She won't move to the downstairs bedroom no matter how clearly I outline all the reasons she should. We'd love it if you came by for lunch some afternoon.”

“Name the date! I'm always looking for something to do.” An unspeakable sadness flitted across Martha Goins's broad face before she pushed on. “Oh, say! Rate's been talking to Carl Juell about coming on with him in the shop. Weren't you two an item for a while when you were youngsters? I always said it was a shame the way that boy got shipped off to that awful place.”

Wanda brushed her finger along the petals of some daisies on the tea tray. “Pretty!” she said, taking her own turn at being cagey.

“Lunch with you and your mother would be nice. Speaking of which, I better not let this tea get cold. Mrs. Slidell hates that. Let me put a second cup and plate on for you. Why don't you go on up. Visitors are not a regular occurrence, as you might imagine. Judge Hume calls every now and again, but even that has dropped off. Poor thing has only me to talk to!”

“I'll wait for you.” Wanda followed Mrs. Goins's broad backside out to the kitchen where she fetched an extra teacup, a chipped Limoges, probably once exquisite.

The staircase was one of those broad, carved, mahogany extravagances. Wanda's carefully chosen outfit of khaki skirt and pink
blouse was suddenly Eliza Doolittle–shabby. They were halfway along the wide upstairs hall when she heard the furious tinkle of a bell. The rabbit in Wanda's chest thumped a frantic alarm.

“She always seems to know when somebody else is in the house,” Mrs. Goins whispered as she swung open the door of Evelyn Slidell's bedroom.

A tiny figure sat in the middle of a four-poster, her gray skin blending with the faded bed clothing, her nearly colorless eyes alert to the intruder. Loretta's stories of the woman's cruelty and arrogance flashed through Wanda's head.

“Look who's here! Somebody has come to see you, just in time for tea!” Martha Goins seemed too cheery, a little too singsong. From everything Wanda had heard, Evelyn Slidell was not the kind of woman who handled condescension well.

“Hello,” Wanda croaked, and cleared her throat and hollered, “I don't know if you remember me! I am Wanda Slidell! I am your granddaughter!” She suddenly felt every single one of her seventy inches, a giant freckle-faced tree towering over this dainty bedridden lump of humanity.

The old lady didn't respond; she had eyes only for the tea tray being rested across her lap. She brushed her nurse away as if the two-hundred-pound woman were a bothersome fly. Martha placed the second cup and a plate of biscuits and jam on a Chippendale table that appeared all set to skitter away on its spindly legs. She indicated a brocade chair next to it where Wanda should sit.

Martha Goins mouthed a silent “Good luck,” and Wanda was suddenly alone with Evelyn Slidell, who immediately assaulted the tea tray like a ravenous vulture.

“You probably find it odd, me showing up here this way—” Wanda began.

“Stop yelling,” she snapped. “
He
sent you, didn't he?”

“He—who?” Wanda tugged at the sleeves of her sweater where her naked wrists kept jutting out.

“Old Man Time,” Mrs. Slidell mumbled around a mouthful
of biscuit, “The King of Terrors. Hell's Grim Tyrant. The Reaper. Whatever they call him these days.”

Wanda rubbed tight circles around her temples and tried to breathe deeply. She looked at the desiccated human being in the middle of the bed, remembering a superstition that cautioned against speaking the name of Death out loud. This was a mistake, pure folly. The woman was batty.

The crone shoveled jam through her thin slit of a mouth and plunked four or five cubes of sugar into her teacup, gave it a perfunctory stir, and swallowed the whole thing at once. “I've been thinking about it,” she said.

Wanda watched a couple of the sugar cubes travel the length of the old woman's craw as she crunched her tea. She cleared her throat to keep her voice from quavering. “I'm sorry—‘it'?”

“It. You. You're all that's left, Wanda, sad as that is to admit. You're not much to look at. I was stunning when I was your age. Your parents were handsome people, too. What happened?” She stopped and seemed to be pondering the mystery of Wanda's plainness. “There probably isn't a lot of time left, and some things are best cleaned up for whatever's to come. Now, I understand you're something of a shut-in—”

“I get out. I'm here now, aren't I? I just came from the grocery and the library and—”

“You're a shut-in, Wanda.” Evelyn Slidell lifted the cracked teapot. “There's not a lot left, but it's enough to make a difference to someone in your position. The house, of course. Some stocks—a few unfortunately in that worthless junk heap, Slidell Cement. The distillery went public a long time ago—some fellow in Japan probably owns controlling interest now, for all the difference it makes to me. There's some cash. Saint Brigid College is taken care of, of course—although for the life of me, I never did understand why they saw fit to name it after the patroness of milkmaids and bastard children. Prescient, I guess, hmmm?” She stopped and squinted at Wanda. “I suppose I could leave more to charity, but it's been so
long since I participated in any of the local causes, much less cared. You can't tell who's crooked these days. I might as well leave it all to you.”

“I don't know what to say.”

“You don't have to say anything. And besides, it doesn't come without a catch.”

“Of course.” Wanda forked open a biscuit and slathered it with butter and jam.

“You were an innocent baby, and your poor mother was unfortunate enough to lose her head over my son, bless his drunken soul. I probably shouldn't have taken my grief and disappointment out on the two of you.” She waved a limp hand. “Bygones. We're all entitled to a few bygones, wouldn't you agree? And that was a long time ago.”

“Excuse me—disappointment?”

“Your mother was a Ferguson. Johnny Ferguson wasn't ever going to amount to anything. Old crooner. The man sang in
lounges
.”

“My grandfather was the finest tenor in the county. And he couldn't just sing, he was a fine man, too. He and Mem saved up and bought that farm. With their own sweat. They weren't handed things.” Wanda felt the perspiration beginning to prick around the ginger fuzz of her hairline and tried to catch her breath. “He gave the Ferguson name any polish it now has.”

“Exactly,” said Evelyn Slidell. “You can't polish a turd. But you're missing the point here, girl. You are to be my heir.”

“Is this supposed to be some kind of warped apology, Mrs. Slidell? Because my life has been good. Please don't get the idea that your severing all ties with my mother and me has affected my happiness—” A thin trickle of sweat rolled in front of Wanda's ear.

“I make no apologies. This is an amends. Big difference. Didn't they teach you anything at that pathetic excuse for a college? Is that tuition money another total loss?”

“I beg your pardon, ma'am, but I attended college on a full scholarship.”

The older woman looked at her with the fake patience people display while waiting for something to sink into the head of a dunce. Wanda shifted on the stiff cushion where she perched like an overgrown bird.