I Still Dream About You: A Novel (12 page)

M
AGGIE WAS RIGHT ABOUT BRENDA. SHE DID HAVE ASPIRATIONS
to run for mayor. In her opinion, it was about time Birmingham had a woman mayor; the men had been in long enough. And when the last one had been sent to jail for taking bribes, a lot of people had begun to agree.

Brenda Peoples was already a familiar name in local politics. She had served on a lot of different committees in town, and she had personally started the Youth at Risk program. She was the president of the local alumni chapter of her sorority, Alpha Kappa Alpha. She knew that to be successful at anything, it was important to know as many people as possible. This was something she had learned firsthand from Hazel.

In 1979, Hazel had finished her big speech at the Women in Business luncheon with this statement: “And so, girls, in closing, I’ll leave you with these three words of advice: Network, network, network.” It was a credo Hazel lived by, and Brenda had taken Hazel’s advice about networking to heart. Just last month, when she and Maggie had gone to the symphony, Brenda had gone backstage and introduced herself to the entire orchestra and to all the stagehands as well. “Everybody votes,” she said to Maggie later. And voting was not something Brenda took lightly.

While Maggie had been busy learning to play her harp and dreaming about becoming Miss Alabama, Brenda had been across town, trying to make some sense out of what was beginning to happen. She knew white people lived in one part of town and her family lived in another. Her parents had informed her in a roundabout way that some white people were nice and some weren’t, but it had not affected Brenda much one way or another. Her family had a very full and active social life where they were. Her father was the dean of an all-black college, and her mother was a high school English teacher. They lived in a nice house in a good neighborhood. But when she was about ten, Brenda noticed that the grown people had started talking in troubled whispers about something that was upsetting them.

Then later, when all the upheaval in Birmingham began, her parents, like a lot of their friends and neighbors, had not approved of using children in the protest marches. They were afraid of what might happen. They kept Brenda, Robbie, and their younger brothers home from school the day of the marches. But their oldest sister, Tonya, was thirteen that year, and her best girlfriend told her how much fun the march would be and said to come on and go. She said there would be so many kids downtown, their parents would never find out. Tonya, always up for fun, slipped out of the house and met her friend on the corner of Fourth Avenue North. And it had been fun; the two of them were running around and laughing their heads off, tickled to be out of school, tickled to be downtown without their parents knowing; they were still laughing when they ran around the corner.

To this day, Tonya could still remember how it felt: the sudden shock of the huge round sledgehammer of hard, cold water hitting her in the chest, knocking her down to the ground. She could still remember the sounds of laughter turning into screams of terror; dogs barking, people running, water everywhere. Tonya would always remember the moment when the world stopped being fun.

The next day, when the pictures hit the front pages, the entire city was horrified. How could it have happened? This kind of brutality would never have been condoned if they had known about it in advance. The head of the fire department immediately informed the
city commissioner that his men would “never again” use fire hoses on human beings. But it was too late.

If Tonya had been stunned at the sudden turn of events, Maggie was just as stunned. This was not the Birmingham she lived in. She had never heard her parents or anyone she knew say an unkind word against black people. Up until that time, Maggie had had no idea they were so unhappy. She had never gone to school with a black person. She’d been told that they preferred to be with their own. When the black high school bands marched in the parades downtown, they seemed very happy. They were always laughing and looked like they were having a good time. Maggie knew on some level she was better off being white, but she had never given it much serious thought. When she was growing up, teenagers had not been very political, certainly not the ones she knew. They were too busy obsessing about boys and clothes and worrying about pimples to think beyond the next day, much less about social injustices. Sadly, the blacks lived in one world and they lived in another, and they just didn’t see it, or at least she hadn’t. But unfortunately, history always expects people, young or old, to have known better at the time.

Then later, when four little black girls were killed in a church basement, the city was so shocked, they simply could not believe it. It was such an unspeakable and vile act. A lot of people in Birmingham found it easier to believe it had been radicals from the North who had blown up the church, trying to get more national press, or else it must have been just a horrible accident of some kind. It was too frightening to believe that there was that much cruelty and hatred anywhere, and especially in their own city. But years later, when the white men who had done it were finally arrested and convicted, the city had no choice but to face facts, and it hurt.

A
FTER A FROZEN DINNER, MAGGIE CONTINUED ORGANIZING, AND BY
ten-thirty that night, she had all her paperwork stacked into the throwaway and shred piles. Going through all of those old things and seeing Richard’s photograph had brought back so many memories. What had possessed her to stay with him so many years?

Richard did have curly black hair and a sweet nature, but she now realized (too late) that he had also been weak and a little dumb. His father had been the smart one, though he had been completely ruthless in business, a trait she did not admire. In fact, had she met the family first, she might have had second thoughts about getting involved with Richard at all. She had been modeling at a charity luncheon in Dallas when two women demanded in loud voices that she come to their table so they could feel the material of the suit she was wearing, and as they were complaining about how cheap the material was (it wasn’t), Maggie happened to glance down at the name cards on the table and realized it was Richard’s mother and sister. Oh, dear. Not only were they rude, they were two of the most unattractive women she had ever seen. They looked like frogs with large pop eyes. Through some quirk of genetics gone right, Richard was a prince born into a family of trolls, but you never know when those other family genes might strike again.

Richard never did leave his wife. He dropped dead of a cerebral hemorrhage at age forty-six. If that had not been enough of a shock, three days later, she was handed an eviction notice. Richard’s family (armed with a copy of an old canceled check) claimed that he had bought her condo with company money, and not only did they want the condo, they wanted all the furnishings, dishes, silverware, paintings, television sets—things she had paid for. She could have fought them, but in order to avoid a scandal, she left the next day with nothing but the few clothes she was able to pack.

After Maggie left Dallas, she found a job on a cruise ship teaching classes in scarf tying and napkin folding. It sounded good on paper, but the cruise line she worked for was a far cry from the
Queen Elizabeth
or the
Crystal
cruises. She had hoped to teach people who wanted to learn about how to set a lovely dinner table, but her classes were filled mostly with children whose parents just needed a babysitter for an hour. And so when her parents became ill and she had to move back to Birmingham to take care of them, it was a mixed blessing. During the time she had been living in Dallas and she had come home to visit her parents or to attend the yearly ex–Miss Alabama reunions, it had been so much easier to keep up a good front. All anyone at home really knew was that she was modeling for a major department store in Dallas or, later on, working on cruise ships. Both professions had sounded somewhat glamorous from afar (they didn’t know the details), but now that she was home for good, it was going to be much harder to maintain even a semi-glamorous image. Her parents’ medical bills were piling up, and she had to find a job, and it was not going to be easy. She was getting too old to model, she couldn’t type, she had failed algebra (twice), so bookkeeping was out, and a former Miss Alabama couldn’t very well wait tables at the Waffle House or Hooters.

After a few weeks of looking, she was on the verge of taking a low-paying, somewhat humiliating job as hospitality director for the downtown Sheraton Hotel. Her duties would mostly consist of greeting people, handing out city maps to conventioneers, making hair appointments for their wives, and arranging shopping tours and
visits to the Civil Rights Institute and the statue of Vulcan. But fate stepped in and saved her at the last minute.

T
HE MORNING OF
her job interview at the hotel, Maggie was walking through the lobby on her way out the door when she heard a familiar voice.

“Maggie! Maggie Fortenberry … Hey, Miss Alabama!”

She looked around, but there was no one there. Then, from below, she heard a woman’s voice: “Maggie! It’s Hazel … Hazel Whisenknott.” Maggie looked down and saw Hazel beaming up at her.

“Do you remember me? You used to come to my house for fittings with your mother when you were a little girl.”

Maggie knew who she was immediately (how many three-foot-four people do you meet in a lifetime?) and said, “Of course I remember you. How are you?”

“Great, fantastic, couldn’t be better. How are you?”

“Just fine, thank you,” she lied.

“You look fabulous, as always. I read that you’re living in Dallas now?”

“Well, yes, I was, but I’m home for a while; Mother is not in great health.”

“Oh, I’m sorry to hear that. She was always such a sweet lady. I still have that Easter bunny costume she measured me for—do you remember that? With the big ears that stand up?”

Maggie laughed. “Oh yes, I spent hours helping her insert the pipe cleaners so they would stand up, and I helped her sew the cotton balls together for the tail.”

“You did a good job; I still wear it.”

Hazel cocked her head and looked up at Maggie. “Listen, doll, what are you doing right now? Can I buy you a drink? A cup of coffee? I’d love to catch up with you.”

Maggie looked at her watch; she had plenty of time before she had to be home. “Well sure, I’d be happy to.”

Hazel talked a mile a minute as they rode the elevator up to the restaurant on the top floor, telling her about all the things that were happening and how Birmingham was on its way to a big comeback and that a lot of the old companies that had left in the sixties were now coming back, and new companies were moving in. When they got upstairs, of course the maître d’ knew Hazel and seated them right away.

After they ordered coffee, Hazel said, “I just finished doing a breakfast speech for the Lions Club. What are you doing at the hotel? Are you staying here?”

“Oh, no. I was here for a meeting.”

Hazel looked at her quizzically. “Ahhh … a meeting.”

Even though she was embarrassed, Maggie felt compelled to explain why she’d been in the lobby of the hotel. She didn’t want Hazel to think she was a call girl or something. “Well, they’re looking for a hospitality director and wanted to talk to me about it, so I met with them.”

“I see. So you might be home to stay for good?”

“Well … I’m not sure yet, but I thought while I was here, maybe I’d look around for a little something to do …”

Hazel’s eyes widened in surprise. “You mean a job?”

“Well. Yes. Maybe …”

Hazel slapped her tiny little hands together. “OOOOH booooy, when I found that penny this morning, I just knew this was going to be my lucky day.” She called out to the waiter, “Hey, Billy, forget the coffee—bring us two martinis,” and then she turned to Maggie with a new gleam in her eye.

“Honey,” she said, pointing her tiny little finger at Maggie, “I’ve been searching for someone exactly like you. I need a gal with looks, class, and style to head up my Mountain Brook office, someone who knows the territory, understands the upscale market, and you would be my dream come true. Forget what they offered you here. With me, you can double it. No, triple it. What do you say?”