Charms for the Easy Life (21 page)

I wrote Tom back that afternoon. I accepted all the invitations, although I did decline his kind offer of discounts and free courier service. When he called that evening, I sat on a tall wooden stool and told him, I felt sure, everything I had ever known. He was leaving early the next morning for Asheville. There was no way I could get to the hospital in time to see him.

Later, when I got there and started my shift, I saw that his bed had been taken by a tow-headed boy whose right leg was packed in sandbags from hip to toe. His right arm was amputated at the elbow. I wasn’t assigned to him, but I asked if I could help with correspondence anyway. I read a letter his sister had sent, and he dictated one to her in return. There was nothing incredible or even mildly interesting about either.

It took just a few minutes with the Mississippi boy to cheer me up. He accomplished this by telling me about the long-distance call his mother had made to him since our last visit. He had asked her about William Faulkner, and he was anxious to tell me her final word on him. He said, “Margaret, I hate to tell you, but Mama says Mr. Faulkner is a big liar and everybody in Mississippi knows it. Maybe you ought to give a little thought to this.” He seemed genuinely concerned about the state of my soul. When I met my grandmother for lunch in the cafeteria, I told her right away that Mr. Faulkner had just been revealed as a big liar. She laughed and said, “Yes, and if he told simpler lies, he’d make a better living.”

When we got home, we saw that my mother had trimmed the tree by herself. She was sitting on the floor putting the tops back on empty ornament boxes. My grandmother asked whether she had left anything for us to do. She said she had not, and if we looked on the desk, we would see that she had finished writing the Christmas cards as well. Although she didn’t say this, it was clear to me that she had used these chores as a way of burning up nervous energy. My grandmother walked straight to the tree and started moving ornaments around, saying how this one had always been closer to the top and this one closer to the bottom. My mother stood watching with her hands on her hips. She looked as if she wished she had the nerve to shout out loud, “You’ve always got to have something to do, don’t you? And if you can’t see it, you’ll invent it, won’t you? Everything from organizing people’s lives to saving them to moving crystal icicles around on a Christmas tree.” After the ornaments were in their new places, my grandmother pronounced the tree finished, and then she sat down with a book. She was caught up for the day. I sat by her and read and waited.

We waited for the mailman, for
Are You a Missing Heir?
and
Dr. I.Q.,
for Edward R. Murrow, Christmas, promised snow, and all the rest of the things I felt were coming in my life. Two weeks before, I hadn’t known what I wanted my life to look like, but now I knew. That’s why there was no fear when I stepped off into the middle of it.

I wrote letters to Asheville daily, sending them special delivery, and received two, sometimes three, from Tom each day. I learned many things about him. He loved having a full tank of gas, having his ears cleaned out, having a good haircut. He loved the way it felt when the barber brushed talcum powder on the back of his neck. It was plain that he wouldn’t be a lifetime, swinging date. He was a lean horse for a long race. He and I went about life at the same tempo.

I always let my grandmother read a draft of my letters before they went out. She made corrections and detailed suggestions in the margins and on the back of the letters. She’d say, “Tell about the blimp we saw yesterday. Tell him how low it passed, how it made all the dogs howl.” Or, “Tell him you’re a fast study and could learn poker if he was willing to teach you.” Or, “Ask if he’s planning to go by the Wolfe boardinghouse. Tell him you thought
Of Time and the River
was long-winded, overwrought, and not to be believed.” I incorporated many of her suggestions and was always pleased with the results, but then I made my own additions, things she never saw. I never let her see how I moved from signing the letters “Your friend” to “Sincerely” to “Yours truly” to simply “Yours.” I let her read all his letters to me except the last two. In these, he said he had looked for me all his life. He said it over and over. Although she had told me this would happen, I couldn’t let her see the direct evidence that it had.

This was the first time in my life I had hidden anything from her. It was the first time I had had an emotion so thoroughly my own that I felt the need to guard it from her view. She did see the evidence of these last letters on my face, indirectly, in the way I couldn’t keep my thoughts straight, in the way I ruined a copper kettle, boiling it dry, and then went to the shed to get firewood in thirty-degree weather, barefooted. I bleached a green blouse and consistently answered calls for other members of our party line. I did something equally mindless each time I finished reading one of Tom’s letters, and as a result I had to walk about the house conscious of every move I made, trying to appear normal. My mother, as concerned as she was about her own self, noticed my behavior. One day she said, “You’re not yourself. What’s distracted you?” “Oh, just this and that,” I told her. “So much seems to be going on these days.” I tried to make my concerns sound too numerous to list. She kept on. “You look like you get no sleep. You whisper to your grandmother incessantly. Is it the schools? Are you two in cahoots again over schools?” I tried to throw her off. I told her, if she had to know, we were. She rushed out of the room and told my grandmother that she was perfectly capable of advising me about when and where to go. She said, “You have her addled.” My grandmother accepted full responsibility for my state, saying, “Sophia, you can blame it all on me. I’m used to it. I’ll listen to anything you have to say.” She gave my mother nothing to push against, and consequently my mother did not push. She put on her coat and went to the movies.

I wasn’t lying when I said so much was going on. That December of 1942 was without parallel. Eddie Ricken-backer told the story of being adrift for twenty-three days, how a sea gull landed on his head and answered his incessant prayers for food. Rommel started his retreat into Tunisia. The Russians crossed the Volga and attacked the Germans. My mother and grandmother and I were watching
White Cargo,
when the projectionist interrupted the film to run the newsreel that showed the Russians’ advance. The theater erupted in an uproar. I will never forget the first scene of the movie that appeared after the newsreel was over. It was Hedy Lamarr in that black strapless jungle dress, begging Walter Pidgeon to beat her. My grandmother was disgusted. She left her seat, after whispering to me that she was going to walk down to City News and Candy to tell her friends about the Russians. A couple of the men there had been encamped in the first American position established on the other side of the Hindenburg Line, in 1918. They were always highly interested in war news, but even though they were surrounded by newspapers, the only news they learned was what people brought to the store and told them. There was no radio, as the owner of the place said he didn’t believe in noise.

When my mother and I picked my grandmother up after the movie, she reeked of cigarette smoke and gin. She fell asleep on the couch before supper.

The next morning we read that Churchill had called Mussolini a hyena, and Mussolini called him one back; their exchange inspired my grandmother to call my mother a hyena for the next three days. We read that the fattest lady in the world, whom my grandmother and I had paid a nickel apiece to see at the October state fair, had died in Florida; she had been as large as the overstuffed mohair chair in our living room. That a local man had been shot by his wife after dealing her a bad bridge hand. That the state legislature had passed a sanitation law prohibiting witnesses in court trials from kissing the Bible; Tom’s mother had a field day with this in her column. That the city of Charlotte had become so distressed by Charles Lindbergh’s America First activities that on December 7 the city council changed the name of Lindbergh Avenue to something else.

Just when December seemed to be so full of news that it was ready to topple over into the new year, a woman of apparent means and sophistication arrived in Raleigh, on the morning of Christmas Eve. Within hours everybody in town knew about her, all her details. She was wearing a red gabardine wool suit of a European cut with a white fox collar, and a red fedora with white satin trim. Her legs were so slender and so long they seemed to proceed right up through her red suit to her throat. And she was blonde. It looked to be her natural color.

Late in the afternoon of Christmas Eve, I answered a call from the desk clerk at the Sir Walter Hotel. She had previously worked at the county courthouse and had supplied my grandmother with birth records and addresses for twenty years. That was as much as she knew us. Her reasons for phoning were of that slightly salacious nature that compels some women to revel in other women’s difficulties with men. She whispered to me—which made no sense at all, as I know she broadcast the news to everybody who walked through the hotel lobby. She told me that a woman calling herself Mrs. Richard Baines had checked in and had booked a room for two weeks. Then she described the woman’s clothing as if she were narrating a fashion show, commenting on the elegance of her gait, her finishing-school voice. The woman was all class, collar to cuff. She asked what my mother would say.

I told her I didn’t know, and then I thanked her for calling. Also, I told her I was sure she’d keep this to herself, which was tantamount to telling the Nile not to rise.

Mr. Baines and his mother were due to arrive in thirty minutes. We were planning to have eggnog and beignets. My mother and grandmother were in the guest bedroom wrapping presents. I walked in without knocking. On the bed were all my Santa Claus presents, boxed and wrapped, ready for my mother to place underneath the tree at daybreak. As blunt an attitude as they both had about the world and its fantasies, they still insisted that I get up on Christmas morning and act surprised to see that Santa Claus had come. I knew what was in the boxes: a chenille robe, the latest Ellen Glasgow and Katherine Anne Porter novels, a copy of
Saturday Review of Literature,
which meant I was being given a year’s subscription, and a small velvet box that I believed contained the mother-of-pearl earrings I had lingered over in the Neiman-Marcus catalogue.

I worried that the thirty minutes before Mr. Baines’s arrival would be chewed up by my inability to get to the point. He would get there before I told my news, and he would announce it himself. He would say, “My ex-wife is in town. We’re planning to see each other while she’s here, and there’s no saying what might happen, and for that I am truly sorry.” My father’s yellow wedding shoes and infidelities would look like practice rounds for that announcement. I wasn’t sure my mother could recover.

They wanted to know what was wrong. Had I seen the afternoon paper? Was somebody from my class on the casualty list? I must’ve looked terrible.

I said, “Well, a lady got to town a little while ago, this morning to be precise, and she has this, well, sort of this
name.
”

My grandmother told me to get myself together and tell them, in simple, direct English, what was going on. I was to tell the story when I could do so without the help of “well,” “and ah,” “um,” and “you know.” I said, “Okay. There’s a lady who’s calling herself Mrs. Richard Baines. She’s staying at the Sir Walter for two weeks. It may not be anything, but I thought you ought to know.”

My mother didn’t deny this could be true. Neither did my grandmother. They didn’t team up against me and say that I had imagined the conversation or that the clerk had imagined the vision or misunderstood the name. Women with less experience in the areas of loneliness, abandonment, betrayal, and other furious pursuits might have thought first: “Oh, that can’t be right.” But not these two. They believed the worst, I suppose, as a means of self-protection. My mother’s face told me this. Within seconds, she looked as if someone’s big hand had started at her forehead and moved down over her face, pulling her features, smearing misery over her as it went. Something inside her seemed to have shut off. She couldn’t speak. If she had tried, I think, she would’ve grunted the way children do when they fall off high swings and get the wind knocked out of them. My grandmother began spitting out questions to which I had no answer, and got irritated when I didn’t know such things as where the woman had come from, why she had come, whether or why Mr. Baines invited her, and why, after two years, she was still flagging his name around. My grandmother believed that last fact to be highly revealing about the nature of the woman’s visit. When it became clear that I was ignorant on each point, she said I was no good, no good at all, if that was the only information I had. She strode toward the kitchen to phone the hotel clerk, saying, “I’m determined to know everything.”

The call was never made. She heard Mr. Baines’s car as she was dialing the hotel number. I was still in the guest room with my mother. The two of us stood very quietly. I had the feeling I was behind a thick, sound wall, waiting for the explosion, like a British woman huddled under a stout table, waiting. Mr. Baines opened the back door, and I started to ask my mother if she wanted me to go out there with her.