Flying Shoes (18 page)

But the injustice and violence of the civil rights era had wounded her and Big William’s humane sensibilities. Liddie had died the most rabid yellow-dog Democrat in the old meaning of the expression; not a Dixiecrat, but a populist, a believer in taking care of all the people, not just the ones who were rich and white. She had taken a beating at the bridge table for voting for McGovern in 1972. A huge Watergate wallower, she had insisted that not one, but
several
photos of Nixon resigning on TV be added to the family album. And she had firmly believed that “America the Beautiful” should be our national anthem, not a jingoistic battle hymn.

Mary Byrd had loved her sense of humor. Liddie had disapproved of the Midwest and the West, referring to
The
Joy of Cooking
as “the Miz Rombauer,” in which the recipes had too much sugar and not enough salt or Tabasco, and to the Rocky Mountains as “tacky.” Her classic London Fog raincoat was her “lesbian coat,” and the droopy skin under her neck that she deeply regretted was her “goozle.” Kind to most, Bilbo and Nixon and his
apeheads
excepted, she had taken zinnias or fresh bread and pimiento cheese to the ill, the bereaved, or the just plain terminally pitiful.

Liddie had never interfered, and Mary Byrd knew that she did not want to hear about your problems, or even that you had any; but she would let you know that in general, she got it. No one knew better than she did how difficult Charles, for instance, could be to live with. Even when he was a baby they’d called him Ti-Mule, Creole for
petite mule
. Liddie had been Mary Byrd’s model in the world; she thought of her as a kind of southern Lady Marjorie from
Upstairs, Downstairs,
and she was sorry that she wasn’t more like her. She felt like the show’s crazy-ass Sarah, the Cockney parlor maid. Mary Byrd wished she could be near Liddie now. They’d talk
around
what was going on in Virginia, but Liddie would give her strength and comfort. “Buck up!” she’d say, and Mary Byrd would.

Ti-Mule was up when Mary Byrd returned from the school and was sitting at the kitchen counter drinking coffee; stiff, chicory-laced, Community brand, black as tar—definitely not Midwestern coffee.

“Hey,” he said, glancing up briefly from the
Commercial Appeal
sports page. “How is everything? How was last night?”

“Horrible. Did you hear about Evagreen?”

“No,” Charles said, reluctantly lowering the paper to look at her. “What?”

Mary Byrd gave him what she knew about Angie’s trouble and the Wiggs debacle with Rod’s family.

“Oh my god. Poor Evagreen and L. Q.” He folded the paper and put it down, conceding to the necessity of conversation. “What can we do? They’ll need money. And a good lawyer.”

“No. Of course I tried to offer. Ken’s here, thank god. He said he’d call us. I don’t know how he got here so fast.”

“He’s an Air Force officer. And whatever else. But that’s so terrible.” He thought for a moment. “What about Ed? Could you make any of that happen?”

“No,” she said. “I hardly got to talk to him at all before the shit hit the fan on the way to the Palace. I’m sorry. He’s probably still at the motel, this early. Maybe you can catch him?”

“Yeah,” said Charles. “Damn. I’ll jump in the shower. Sorry I missed y’all; I just couldn’t get away from Callahan to get back here in time. If I’d been there Ed wouldn’t have pulled that crap. ”

“Oh, it would have been just as screwed up if you’d been here. He was just going to do his thing while I tried to talk to the Bons.”

Charles stretched and started away, shaking his head.

“Chaz, wait. We’ve got to talk about this stuff in Richmond.”

Falling back on his stool, he said, “What’s the deal?” He arranged his features to read patience.

“I really do have to go up there as soon as possible, like tomorrow. This guy—the detective I talked to—said that time was really important. We need to meet with him Monday, he said.” She grasped for more reasons, but why did she have to? “And Will and Eliza have science unfair stuff and games and drama club at the end of next week, and I want to get it over with.”

“Okay. So
go
. Flying?”

“Not if I can help it.” Flying scared the crap out of Mary Byrd, so much she had to take a pill to do it, which would give her a hangover. She knew that it was ignorant and lame to be afraid of flying, almost as stupid as worrying about something like cats sucking the breath out of babies, and of all the things in the world to worry about happening to you, a plane crash statistically wasn’t high on the list. Probably lightning striking, or being eaten by a lion was more likely. Surely riding with Teever had to be way up there on the potential catastrophe scale. And all those hijackings in the seventies weren’t happening anymore. There was the train; she loved trains and had taken the Southern Crescent to Virginia, and she and Charles and the children sometimes took the City of New Orleans. But the Crescent took too long, and someone would have to drive her the three hours to Birmingham just to get on it.

But she was pathologically afraid of planes. Bad things were less likely to occur if you could keep your feet flat on the ground, or at least on the floor boards of a vehicle that was in contact with the ground. When she was absolutely forced to fly, she would implement a complicated protocol that involved all kinds of checks and cross-checks.

First, she developed a fervent love for the airlines and its employees. She needed them all to be her best friends and like her very much so that they would be looking out for her and keep her well-being in mind before all others. There was humor and chitchat with reservation agents so they would give her a good seat. She liked a window seat. Not so she could see out, but so she could yank down the shade and pretend the sky was not out there. An aisle was okay, too, for faster escape and better bathroom access. No middle seats. Never sit way in the back: tails could snap off, and it made you airsick. Don’t sit over the wings because they wiggle flimsily, and you didn’t want to be reminded of the
Twilight Zone
episode where William Shatner sees the abominable snowman thing hanging around out there. Sit near, but never
in
,
the emergency exit aisle in case the door suddenly pops open and you are sucked out. This had happened! Someone had written a great poem about it.

No flammable or synthetic materials were to be worn because they would melt onto your skin if—
when
—the plane became a flaming cartwheel. Shoes must be sturdy with traction for running away from the wreckage—should you happen to survive initial impact. Her special necklace must be worn: a simple chain with mojos given to her by her mother (a little suitcase from the Hôtel de Crillon) and father (a gold heart locket, engraved with “To Mary Byrd from Daddy 1973,” that held William and Eliza’s photos) and a small crucifix from an old friend. A devout nothingist, she was hypocrite enough to keep it on the chain. She looked for coughers—spewers of germs that might bring her down with pneumonia, or worse. Famous passengers were a good sign. What plane would dare crash with Shelby Foote or Isaac Hayes or Eudora Welty on board?

The mechanical crew readying the parked plane also had to be scrutinized: were there slackers on the tarmac stoned out of their minds, playing chicken with their golf cart things, making monster faces at each other with their flashlights and forgetting to make sure no screws had metal fatigue, or that there was plenty of hydraulic fluid? Boarding the plane she examined the door hinges and exterior: were there a lot of dings? Was there rust? She’d crane her neck to get a look inside the cockpit: both pilots needed to be neither too old nor too young, nor too fat, and they should be wearing wedding rings; surely one with a family would work harder to keep the plane aloft. They should not be laughing or fucking around, but running down their own pre-flight lists and protocols. Mary Byrd didn’t know whether it was better or not that flight attendants could now be middle-aged, oversized, and unattractive, but then she decided it was good: they were more businesslike now and there was probably less chance that they’d be horsing around or giving pilots midflight blow jobs. On the plane, you warmly greeted the crew and they became your family. Or maybe it was more like a hospital: pilots were the doctors into whose hands you entrusted your life, and the attendants were the nurses who cared for you; they would be the ones from whom you could glean clues about how the flight was
really
going. Before takeoff, you waved from the window at the stoner mechanics, who you hoped would think, “That’s a nice lady! I better check those bolts one more time.”

It was good to have a seat next to, or near, any deadheading pilots because you could watch them for signs that something might be wrong. Count the rows to the emergency exit in case there might be smoke and always have a little flashlight. Listen for noises that didn’t seem normal, but try not to ask your seatmate if the noises seemed normal to them. Don’t spaz out and grab their knees if there was a bump. Always wear a gauzy scarf to wrap around your face to thwart airborne macro-organisms zipping around the cabin trying to be breathed in.

Mary Byrd had never actually deplaned because of her fear, but she almost had. Back at William and Mary, on a trip to the Soviet Union to see the wooden cathedrals in Kizhi Pogost, she’d been on a domestic Aeroflot flight where a dog was seated in first class. Then in steerage, her seatmate’s armrest had fallen off. If she hadn’t been more terrified of being left behind in the insane disorder of a provincial Soviet airport, she would have bailed.

She was slightly less afraid of flying by herself or with the children; they would be fine with one parent if something happened to her, and it wouldn’t be too bad if they all went down together. Flying alone with Charles when the children were little had made her the most anxious—the idea of William and Eliza as orphans. There was lots of stuff that Mary Byrd feared, most of it things that might happen to the children, or that might damage or warp them. Things that could just happen out of the blue.

She wouldn’t bring up her pointless craziness with Charles. “It would cost a million dollars to fly with no notice, anyway,” she said. “I could drive, I guess, but I can’t make it in one day by myself, especially if the weather’s bad.” She paused. “What if I got Teever to drive up with me?”

Charles looked at her with a look that was his special face of incredulity and disdain. “Are you completely nuts?”

She laughed, slightly embarrassed. “Why not? We could drive straight through.” Of course it was nuts.

“Have you been paying any attention to the news?” he asked angrily. “The weather predictions, for
one
thing. Jesus, M’Byrd.
Teever
?”

“Yeah, I
know.
But if I fly, the airport will probably close anyway, and I’ll get stranded or something and freak out.”

“Do whatever you need to do,” he said, without meaning it. “Teever is just a really, really bad idea, seems to me. Or it would seem to any sane person.”

“I’m going to turn around and come right back. Do you think it’s really so crazy?”

“Yes, I think it’s really crazy! What would you do with Teever when you got up there?”

“Let him stay at Mama’s. It’d just be a couple nights. I
hope.
”

“I’d like to hear what your mother would say about that. Figure it out and do what you have to. The children and I will be fine.” He turned and tried to get away.

“Chaz! I’m
scared
. I don’t want to go.” She hated to resort to melodrama and actually begging to get Charles’s attention. Well, she didn’t hate it; she did it all the time. It wasn’t that he didn’t care about her or sympathize with her fear and sadness, he just wasn’t programmed for discussion; it wasn’t in his genes. Global impoverishment, genocide, social injustice, famine and disaster and sad movies made his heart bleed, and he would write letters and send money, but break it down to one-on-one and you wouldn’t get a whole lot. Mary Byrd had the advantages and resources to figure things out. It wasn’t really his fault. It wasn’t even a fault, it just
was.
The same would have happened if you’d gone to Big William with a minor but disturbing medical problem. He’d smile and say, “I guess we’ll have to amputate below the ears,” and that’d be the end of it. If you were a person of intelligence and privilege, you had no problems that couldn’t be cured by outright surgery, and most things could be taken care of with a cocktail or fresh air, soap and water, and dignity.

Charles went to Mary Byrd and put his arms around her. His sweater, a handsome old green one, one of several knitted by Liddie while she was glued to the tube that Watergate summer, smelled faintly of mothballs, the indoor fragrance of the South.

“I’m sorry, M’Byrd,” he said giving her a hug. “I know you hate it. But you’re tough.”

“I just feel so bad, and scared.”

“I know this stuff is hard for you and your mom and everybody, but think about it—it was a long time ago, and people get through.”

“I
know
that,” she said, a little pissed now.

“Well, it’s your duty to follow through on it. You should try not to brood so much, M’Byrd.”