I Cannot Get You Close Enough (35 page)

Five hours later we still hadn't found her. When the sun went down she was still nowhere to be seen. We had combed the beach and torn the house apart. King was running everywhere and Jessie and Mr. Manny would not leave the water's edge. Olivia and myself and Lydia and Miss Crystal and Andria were going up and down the road asking at houses and seeking her in town. My heart was in my throat and my blood pressure was cooking about two hundred. I knew she was not dead or harmed. I knew she was not drowned or kidnapped or taken by Gypsies. She had run away. But where had she gone and how long would she stay? Was there any other way to raise a bunch of children? Is there something we have lost sight of, some secret of being happy, or has it always been this way? So it was in the oldest times told of in the Bible, brother against brother, men wanting many wives, prodigal sons and so forth. But you never read of little girls running away because their fathers yelled at their mothers for having an IUD. Still, I guess that would come under the heading of spilling your seed on a woman's stomach.

When the sun went down and still no sign of her, Mr. Manny called the cops. A Sergeant Mossbacher and Lieutenant Madison appeared at our door. Lieutenant Madison was a woman with short brown hair cut in a modern style. She was very quiet and kept pursing up her lips and looking like she thought there was more to this than we were telling. Sergeant Mossbacher was more the old-fashioned type and kept shaking his head. “They go off that way,” he said. “There's a spate of it each summer.”

“You want it on the radio and TV?” Lieutenant Madison asked. “If so we'll need a picture.” The phone was ringing behind us. We were on the front steps. “There's your phone,” she added. “They usually call in when it gets dark.”

It was Crystal Anne. I was the first one to the phone and there was her lovely little voice, sounding very old and far away. “Where's Dad?” she said. “Tell him to come here.”

“You tell me where you are before I say another word,” I answered. “I have combed the town for you. Oh, honey, how could you do us all this way?”

“I'm at Dana's,” she said. “We went out on her dad's boat. We went out to the island.”

Then Mr. Manny grabbed the phone and started listening very hard and talking in small sentences and saying, yes, no, yes. Miss Crystal grabbed his arm. Her hands were all around the sleeves of his thick white shirt. It is just like Mr. Manny that he hadn't bothered to change out of his suit pants to spend the afternoon searching for his daughter on the beach. He has the least vanity of any man I have ever known and should have had a different career, been a scientist or rocket engineer or inventor. His whole part of the house is filled with models of inventions or telescopes or binoculars or things like that. Once he set up a hydroponic garden on the back porch and grew experimental vegetables until King discovered it and put in marijuana plants.

Back to Crystal Anne. Mr. Manny was still talking to her. “Don't leave there. Stay right there,” he kept saying. “Let me speak to Dana's father.”

“I'd like to paint a woman in uniform sometime,” Miss Lydia was saying to Lieutenant Madison. “I'm painting a series of heroes from everyday life. If you get time before I leave, would you spend an hour posing for some sketches?”

Then Mr. Manny hung up the phone and he and King drove over to Dana's house and picked up Crystal Anne and brought her back. The police stayed until she got there to see that she was all right and make her promise not to do it anymore. I went in and got our supper started. We had fried chicken Andria picked up at the Quik Stop place and salad and mint jelly I had meant to put on the lamb and French bread. We all went into the dining room and gathered around the table. We lit candles Olivia found somewhere and sat down like normal people in a normal life and began to eat. Mr. Manny began to tell jokes and then told us all about what was going on in New Orleans since we left. They have had another scandal about the Superdome and the teachers are threatening to strike in the fall.

“I want you to come on home,” he said at last. “How long are you all planning to stay up here?”

“I thought we'd stay till the middle of August,” Miss Crystal said. “Does that suit all of you?”

“I don't want the summer to ever end,” Jessie said. She and King were being very quiet lately. She looked at Crystal now. “This is the best summer of my life.”

“Well, I have to get ready for school,” Olivia put in. She has had disappointing news from both Harvard and Duke and has decided to stay home and go to the University of North Carolina in Charlotte with her sister. “I have to go to Oklahoma and see my aunt before school starts. And my grandparents. I guess they think I've deserted them.”

“I have to get home too,” Andria put in. “I got to make sure all my loans came through. I don't trust Momma to take care of my mail.” She looked my way. I felt sorry for her at that moment. She is the only one who has to borrow money. Then I thought better of it. Adversity is the fire that makes us strong. So my auntee always said. Later that night, before they went to bed, I saw Mr. Manny take Andria aside and have a talk with her. It turned out he told her to take all her loan letters to his secretary at his law firm when she got home. He told her not to worry, he would see to it she had plenty of money to go to college as long as she was keeping up her grades. He is such a good man. Such a truly fine man. I understood some things after I heard that fight that afternoon. It had been about babies after all. He had wanted Miss Crystal to have more babies and she had refused. That is why their bedrooms were apart and they had turned their marriage into a war. (After everyone blaming it on King cutting off the tops of the Japanese magnolias all these years.)

They went up together that night and the moon was full and they had almost lost their precious child, so I was hopeful something might happen. Not the thing I have with Mark, I guess, where anytime he gets me alone he begins to get that look on his face but whatever it is rich white people do when they stop thinking long enough to smell the roses.

The next morning Mr. Manny announced he had decided to stay two weeks. He called his office and told them to put his calls on hold. Then he put on some casual clothes and went into town and bought a camera and several rolls of film and began to photograph all of us around the house and beside the sea. He had no more than used up his film than things began to happen that required a man's hand.

LYDIA Manny is here and Crystal has made up with him. I'm glad. I keep telling myself I'm glad. Still, I keep remembering that letter I got from her in 1985, after he threw her down the stairs at that wedding in Memphis. I have it at home in a jewelry box. I don't have it up here or I would give it to her. What if I said, Crystal, do you remember that letter you sent me from the hospital after your fall?

What letter? she might say. What are you talking about? On the outside of the envelope it said, “Lydia, save this and give it to me if Manny tells me how much he loves me.” He had thrown her down the stairs for flirting with a college boy.

The letter was written on small white hospital stationery and mailed in a homemade envelope made of lined graph paper and held together with Scotch tape. By the time I received it she was out of the hospital and Manny had taken her sailing in the B.V.I. Here's the letter.

Dearest Lydia,

I woke up dreaming a recurrent dream I have of you. I decided it was time to tell you about it.

I have suffered a bad fall and a brain concussion. Come see me and I'll tell you the dream. In which you paint a perfect timeless masterpiece. A wonderful dream. I just want you to know about it. So much creativity occurs while our eyes are closed in sleep.

I love you,
Crystal

Manny threw me down the stairs. Give this to me if he tries to tell me how much he loves me.

11

TRACELEEN Next we got the flu. Influenza B, a terrible epidemic that usually only strikes people in the winter but had gotten a head start up here by flying in on a plane from the north.

A Mr. Arletti from California brought it to us. He stopped by on his way from Nova Scotia to Los Angeles to see the house. He used to visit here when it was full of theater people and he was only a struggling director. Now that he has won two Oscars and can name his own price, he wanted to make a sentimental journey to see where he began his climb. “Noel introduced me to the people who gave me my big chance,” he said. “It was the summer of nineteen fifty-nine. It seems a million years ago. Martin Manulis sat right there in that chair and said for me to come and see him in the fall. The rest is history. I made a
Playhouse Ninety
special and the studios started calling.” Cough, cough. Cough, cough, cough.

“You need to go to bed, Paulie,” Miss Crystal said.

“No, I'm fine. Someone was coughing on the plane from London. What good does it do to fly first class if sick people insist on flying. No, just get me some water.” Cough, cough, cough. “My immune system can deal with it. I never get sick.” Cough, cough.

An hour later he was upstairs in bed in the room with the gray-and-white wallpaper. The only time he woke up for two days was to have coughing attacks. Then he began to run a fever.

That was Thursday morning. By Saturday Olivia was down, then Jessie, then King, then Crystal Anne, then Miss Crystal, then Lydia, Mr. Manny went to bed on Monday morning, last of all me. The only person in the whole house who was not sick was Andria.

Mr. Arletti began to recover after four days. He recovered from the coughing spells and his fever was dropping, then the disease spread to his head. He was on the phone every time he woke up talking to doctors in California. They had the drugstore in Rockland delivering supplies and pills five times a day. That is how Andria met her love.

Every time the delivery boy would come Mr. Arletti would hand Andria a twenty-dollar bill to give him for a tip. “I can't take this,” the boy said, after the third delivery. “That's sixty dollars today. This man must be out of his mind.”

“He's a Hollywood producer,” Andria said. “He sat by Princess Anne at a benefit last week. He got the flu on an airplane. Well, how much do we owe you for the vaporizer?”

“I can't take any more tips today.”

“Then how much is the bill?” Andria had been running around nursing all of us, her hair tied back with a crimson scarf. She had on those little cutoff blue jeans I hate to see her wear and a tank top. She had been arranging flowers when the doorbell rang. Her arms were full of lilies when she went to the door. No wonder Kale Vito fell in love.

He was not a boy after all. He was twenty-one years old and was a sophomore at Harvard University. Part African and part Italian. Darker than Andria but not as dark as me. The minute I met him I was convinced he was the one for Andria. He has the loveliest manners you can imagine and is on a scholarship to Harvard to learn to be a medical doctor or a physicist, he hasn't made up his mind.

He made up his mind about Andria fast enough. He had never met a black girl from New Orleans and he was captivated by her charm and the legends of our city.

He was also very interested in our flu epidemic, being the son of the pharmacist and going to pre-medical school. He advised Andria to wash her hands every ten minutes as she nursed us. It's the hands that spread it, he told her. Not the air.

“Did he ask you to go anywhere?” I asked. Cough, cough, cough. Andria had come to sit on the side of my bed and tell me about meeting him.

“He asked me to go sailing with him Saturday.”

“Oh, no, not out on a sailboat.” Cough, cough, cough.

“Aunt Traceleen, take your Robitussin. I can take care of my own private life.” She held out the spoon and I tried to swallow it. I cannot think of August in Maine without thinking of the terrible taste of Robitussin mixed with orange juice and crackers and the Whitman's Samplers Mr. Arletti had delivered to make up for giving us the flu.

In the middle of the night, the fifth night of the flu, King began to have terrible stomach pains. Mr. Manny dragged himself out of bed and took him to the hospital. They called back and said it might be his appendix. The next time the phone rang King's appendix was out and Mr. Manny was in an isolation room being treated for pneumonia.

For twenty-four hours it was touch and go. Miss Crystal dragged around in her pajamas putting in calls to the doctors. Finally, after two days, Mr. Manny began to respond to his treatment. On the third day Miss Crystal went into Rockland and brought him home.

“How about King?” I asked. “How is he? Is he doing okay?”

“He's fine,” she said. “Only they have had him doped up on shots for pain. After all we went through to get him off of drugs. What if he relapses? What if this gets him back on drugs?”

“He'll never go back on drugs,” Jessie said. She was standing in the doorway in her pink pajamas. Her face streaked with the tears she had shed all night. “How could he go back on drugs? He's going to be a father. I'm going to have a baby.”

Here is how they knew. They had gone to the drugstore and gotten this kit and taken it to The Hangout and Jessie had tested herself while King played the jukebox. Every now and then I think I have the modern world figured out. I am very interested in inventions and improvements of things and try to keep up. Miss Crystal and Mr. Manny take every magazine known to man and I read them in my spare time. So I always think I have kept up but even I had not known you could find out you were pregnant in a matter of minutes. “Are you sure it worked?” I asked, when she had explained their findings. “Oh, yes,” she said. “I did it two days in a row.” So there we were no more than coming out of the flu epidemic and an emergency appendectomy and here we were with an unwed mother situation. Life is not a tree that stands out in the yard making nice dependable changes with the seasons. No, it is more like a storm that blows in from the sea, full of rain and sudden surprises. Then the next day as calm as it can be and beautiful and sunlit and blue.