Nancy Culpepper (22 page)

I found that I was talking to myself on the street. A teapot was a grenade. A briefcase could be a car bomb. There
were
guns. I remembered the time Jack and I went with our little boy to see the crown jewels. It was 1975, at the Tower of London. We were waiting in a long line—Louise would say queue—to see the royal baubles, and an alarm went off. A group of baby-faced young men in military uniforms materialized, their M-16s trained on the tourists. Any one of us might be an IRA terrorist.

The cacophony on the major streets was earsplitting. On the Pall Mall, the traffic was hurtling pell-mell. The boxy cabs maneuvered like bumper cars, their back wheels holding tight while the front wheels spun in an arc. A blue cab duded up with ads screeched to a halt right in front of me and let me trot the crosswalk. Still angry, I marched to Westminster Abbey, aiming for the Poets’ Corner. I had a bone to pick with the poets. Where were these guys when you needed them? I had to elbow through a crowd of tourists earnestly working on brass-rubbings. A sign warned that pickpockets operated in the area. I never followed directions and now I refused to ask where the Poets’ Corner was. I was sure I’d find them, lurking in their guarded grotto. I walked through a maze of corridors, stepping on the gravestone lids of the dead. A great idea, I thought, walking over the dead. I stomped on their stones, hoping to disturb them. Then I saw an arrow pointing toward the Poets’ Corner. But a velvet rope and a man in a big red costume blocked my way.

“Why can’t I see the poets?” I demanded.

“Because it’s past four o’clock,” he said.

I didn’t know the poets shut up shop at teatime. Slugabeds and layabouts. Pick a poet’s pocket—pocketful of rye? Would prisoners have more self-esteem if their bars had a velvet veneer? I wended my way past a woman in a battery-powered chair that resembled a motor scooter. I skirted the suggested-donation box and plowed around a crash of schoolchildren.

I left the poets to their tea.

At the Virgin Megastore on Oxford Street I searched for music. Everything was there, rows and racks of CDs and singles of folk and gospel and classical and ragga and reggae and rock and pop and world. The new Rolling Stones blared out over the P.A. No moss on Mick! Then a group I couldn’t identify caught me up in an old-style rock-and-roll rhythm. I had to find out what it was. It was a clue to the new music, all the music I had been reading about but couldn’t hear in the soundless turkey décor of Louise’s flat.

“What group is playing?” I asked a nose-ringed clerk.

“Bob Geldof and the Boomtown Rats, from their greatest-hits CD,” he said, smiling so that his nose ring wiggled. “Circa ’seventyeight, that song.”

Where had I been all these years? Why didn’t I know this? Did this mean I was old? The song ended. The Virgin Megastore was so huge and so stimulating I felt my blood sugar dropping. There was too much to take in. Whole walls of Elvis.

At the British Museum, I stared at ancient manuscripts. I saw something called a chronological scourge. It was a handwritten manuscript in the form of a “flagellation,” an instrument used in ritual self-discipline for religious purposes. The chronicle was a history of the world, written on strips of paper streaming from the end of a stick. There was a large cluster of the shreds, exactly like a pompon. I wondered if Andy was flagellating himself at the monastery. A paper scourge wouldn’t hurt. It would only tickle and annoy, like gnats. Birch-bark twigs would give pleasure. Rattan would smart and dig. Barbed wire would maim.

For two days, I kept telephoning Louise, getting no answer at the villa in Italy where she was supposed to be. Then I got an answering machine, Louise in Italian. I guessed at the message, heard the beep, and blurted out the story. “Don’t worry,” I said. “There wasn’t any damage. Just the telly and the radio and nothing broken. I had to change the locks.” I asked her to let me know about the insurance. I didn’t tell her about the gagged letter slot and how I found her mail littering the mews because I kept missing the postman. I knew she would say “telly” and not “TV.” Louise had gotten so English she would probably have tea during an air raid.

I sat in a cheap Italian trattoria and drank a bottle of sparkle-water. The waitress brought some vegetable antipasto. Then she brought bread. I ate slowly, trying to get my bearings. I knew what Andy would do: Purify, simplify, and retreat. He’d listen to his Enya records, those hollow whispers. I felt a deep hole inside. The family at a table nearby was having a jovial evening, although I could not make out most of their conversation. A young man, perhaps in his thirties, had apparently met his parents for dinner. The father ordered Scrumpy Jack and the son ordered a bottle of red wine. The mother pulled out a package from a bag. It was gift-wrapped in sturdy, plain paper. The young man opened it—underwear!—and discreetly repackaged it. He seemed grateful.

Another young man arrived, carrying a briefcase. The two young men kissed on the lips. Then the new arrival kissed the mother and shook hands with the father. He sat down at the end of the table— diagonally across from the birthday boy—and removed a package from his briefcase. It traveled across the table. Some kind of book, I thought. No, it was a leather case filled with what looked like apothecary jars. The birthday boy seemed elated. He lit a cigarette just as a young woman swept in, wearing a long purple knit tank dress with a white undershirt and white high-heeled basketball shoes. Her hair was short, as if Sinead O’Connor hadn’t shaved in a week or two. She handed the boy of the hour a present. I decided she was his sister. But maybe they weren’t even a family, I thought. Maybe I was just jumping to conclusions, the way the locksmith did.

My main course arrived. Something with aubergines and courgettes. I couldn’t remember what courgettes were and couldn’t identify them in the dish. I didn’t know why the Italian menu used French words. I wondered if Louise had learned Italian because Italy was where she learned of her mother’s death. Maybe she had wanted to translate her memories of those foreign sounds we heard that unforgettable day at the American Express office, near the Spanish Steps, when she got the news from America.

Finally, I spoke to Louise on the telephone. “Don’t worry about this little episode, Nancy,” she assured me. She had no hidden valuables that might be missing. We discussed the insurance details. I’d get my hundred dollars, she’d get her telly.

“The police said it might be Gypsies that live nearby,” I offered.

“Oh, but those are proper Gypsies,” she said. “They don’t live in the council estates.”

Council estates meant something like public housing. “Proper Gypsies?” I said, but she was already into a story about how a cultural attaché’s estranged wife showed up in Rome. The Gypsies must live in regular flats like Louise’s, I thought. In America, no one would ever use a phrase like “proper Gypsies.” Yes, they would, I realized. It was like saying “a good nigger.”

“Louise,” I said firmly. “I’m very disturbed. Listen.” I wanted to ask her about the Indians and Pakistanis, but I couldn’t phrase it. Instead, I said, “Remember when we went to Europe on five dollars a day?”

“More like six,” she said with a quick little ha-ha.

“You know how I didn’t know what to say to you when your mother died? I was useless, not a comfort at all.”

“Why are you upset about that now?”

“I just wanted to tell you I’m really sorry.”

“Look, Nancy,” Louise said, in mingled kindness and exasperation. “I know you’re unnerved about being burgled. But you got the locks changed, so you’ll be O.K. This is not like you. I believe you’re just not adjusted to your separation from Jack.”

“It’s not that,” I said quickly. “It’s the world. And the meaning of justice. Major stuff.”

“Oh,
please.
”

“
Ciao,
Louise.”

At a little shop, I bought detergent and a packet of “flapjacks,” just to find out what the Brits meant by the term. I went to a laundrette. How did Louise do her wash? The laundrette had a few plastic chairs baking in a sunny window. Two Indian women cleverly bandaged in filmy cotton were washing piles of similar cotton wrappings. They were laughing. One said, “She was doing this thing that thing.” She had beautiful hands, which she used like a musical accompaniment to her speech. It dawned on me that Louise’s maid did her wash, probably taking it home with her to her own neighborhood laundrette. I wondered if the proper Gypsies had maids. Technically, wouldn’t a proper Gypsy be one that fit all the images? Gold tooth, earrings, the works? I sat on one of the hot plastic chairs. In my pocket I had a fax from Andy—a fax from a monastery! I didn’t think I would answer his simple-Simon missive. I couldn’t imagine a monk faxing. I waited in the laundrette, eating the “flapjacks.” They were a kind of Scottish oat cake mortared with treacle. The Scottish called crumpets “pancakes.” They had tea very late, giving the impression they couldn’t afford dinner. But the English had afternoon tea just early enough to make it seem they didn’t have to work during the day. The English said “starters” for appetizers, preferring a crude word to a French word. Their language was proper yet at times strangely without euphemism. They ate things they called toad-in-the-hole, bubble-and-squeak, spotted dick, dead baby. They ate jacket potatoes and drank hand-pulled beers. I couldn’t decide whether this was terribly strange or very familiar.

I threw my jeans and T-shirts and socks into a spin dryer called The Extractor. It was a huge barrel encrusted with ancient grime and thick cables of electricity. It looked like a relic of a brutal technology. Dark satanic mills.

At Trafalgar Square, trying to get from Nelson’s Column to Charing Cross, I got caught up in a demo of some kind. With my plastic bag of laundry, I squeezed among a bunch of punks with electric-blue and orange Mohawks. Spiritless teenagers in ragged, sloppy outfits propelled me through a flock of pigeons. I kept one hand on my belly-bag; the pickpockets from Westminster Abbey were probably here. Maybe poets, too. I couldn’t tell what the protest was, something about an employment bill. I saw turbans and saris, and I heard hot, rapid Cockney and the lilt of Caribbean speech and the startled accents of tourists. I could hardly move. My plastic bag of laundry followed me like a hump. Although it was scary, there was something thrilling about being carried along by the crowd. I felt all of us swirling together to a hard, new rhythm. My hair was blowing. I could feel a tickle of English rain. A man next to me said “Four, four, four,” and the woman with him beat time in the air with her fists. Her earrings jangled and glinted. The scene blurred and then grew intensely clear by gradations. It was like the Magic Eye, in which a senseless picture turns into a 3-D scene when you diverge your eyes in an unfocused stare. As you relax into a deeper vision, the Magic Eye takes you inside the picture and you can move around in it and then a hidden image floats forward. Inside the phantasmagoria of the crowd, everything became clear: the stripes and plaids and royal blue and pink, the dreadlocks and Union Jacks. I saw T-shirts with large, red tie-dyed hearts, silver jewelry, gauzy skirts, a large hat with a feather, a yellow T-shirt that said STAFF. I saw a coat with many colors of packaged condoms glued all over it. The surprise image that jumped into the foreground was myself, transcendent. All my life I had had the sense that any special, intense experience—a sunset, the gorgeousness of flowers, a bird soaring—was incomplete and insufficient, because I was always so aware it would end that I would look at my watch and wait. This was like that, in reverse. I knew the crush of the crowd had to cease. It was like an illusion of safety, this myth of one’s own invincibility.

Finally, I reached a crosswalk where a policeman had halted traffic and was rushing people across the street. I landed in front of the National Gallery. I joined a smaller throng inside and found myself staring at some sixteenth-century Italian crowd scenes and round Madonnas. The thumping piano of “Lady Madonna” surged through my head.

I thought about the first time I visited England. It was in the summer of 1966, and I was alone in London for a few days because Louise had gone on ahead to deal with her mother’s effects. It had been five weeks since her mother died. I was left alone, emptied of Louise and her grief. I was going home soon. The Beatles were going to America, too, to begin what turned out to be their last tour there. Their records were being burned in the States because John Lennon had commented offhandedly that the Beatles were more popular than Jesus. I figured he was right. The morning newspaper gave their flight number and departure time. It was a summons to their fans to wish them well on a dangerous, heroic journey. The Beatles’ vibrant rebellion had taken a somber turn. I decided to go to the airport and try to get a glimpse of them because I was young and alone and I loved them fiercely, more than I’d ever loved Jesus. I took the tube to the Heathrow station, then had to catch a shuttle bus. While I was waiting, a motorcade turned a corner right in front of me. It was a couple of police vehicles, with one of those black cabs sandwiched between them. I realized it was the Beatles being escorted to their flight. I could see vague shapes in the back of the cab. I waved frantically. Through the dim glass I couldn’t tell which was which. But I believed they saw me, and I knew they were thinking about America, cringing with dread at the grilling they faced. They were looking at me, I was sure, and I was looking at my own reflection in the dark glass.

The rest is history.

The Heirs

1

In February 2002, in the attic of her grandmother’s house, Nancy found a packet of letters and a small stick of dynamite in a shoe box.

Nancy was born here at the Culpepper homeplace in 1943, and she had grown up on the farm, but she had not lived there for many years. Now all the older generations of her family were gone, and the family farm had come to her, to be split with her younger brother and sister. The land was now rented out to soybean farmers, and the house, unoccupied for a year, had deteriorated. Whenever she returned to the farm, she always felt intimate with it, filled with an overpowering love for the familiar contours of the fields and the thick fencerows and the meandering creeks. The farm had shaped the family for generations, as if each individual had been carved by the wash of the creek and the breeze of the heavy oaks. It was the place she had always called her real home, and it had endured. Yet it had changed over time, just as she had herself, and now the farm would pass from her life. She wanted to approach the impending sale to a development consortium with some detachment. She could not live here. Her parents were dead. And the greatest old oak trees had fallen, split by lightning. The barn had burned. The other house, the small wood-frame where she had grown up, had been razed. The smokehouse, the corncrib, and the henhouse disappeared years ago.

In a motel room on the bypass around the small town, Nancy filled the ice bucket with water and set the stick of dynamite in it. The stick, about eight inches long, was rust red, crumbling slightly on the rim. Perhaps it was only a Roman candle, she thought. She remembered fireworks at Christmas when she was a child—never on the Fourth of July, when the family always stayed home because of holiday death tolls.

Nancy placed the shoe box on the bed, with her laptop and book satchel. She felt comfortable in the anonymity of motels, where she could be alone, uninvolved with her surroundings. She unlaced her hiking boots and slid them off. Settling herself on the bed, with the pillows behind her, she began to examine the contents of the box. She forced herself to contain her eagerness; she wanted to savor the details. She was hoping for family secrets, for clues that would illuminate her own life. Along with the letters was a newspaper clipping, an ad for Detroit Special overalls: “They wear like a pig’s nose.” In the bottom of the box were a pink self-covered button, several large hairpins, and a small booklet about a corn drill. She flipped through the booklet, recalling how as a teenager she rode on such a drill behind her father’s tractor, helping him plant corn one spring. She could almost feel the metal seat—hard, punctured with holes arranged in a daisy design. Holes to aerate one’s bottom. She remembered sitting there for hours, operating the seed hoppers. A day of labor seemed like a year, and her sunburn got infected.

The letters were tied with a selvedge, which was frayed and yellowing. Tucked beneath the string was a note handwritten on lined tablet paper: “Take care of these as we are saving every scratch of the pen.”

Nancy cut the selvedge and the letters fanned out. They were addressed to Mrs. Nova Renfroe and Miss Artemisia Smith, Nancy’s great-aunts. She had heard her grandmother speak of her two sisters many times—in a tone of both melancholy and mystery. Nancy’s father, who was fond of his aunts, had once told her that Aunt Mezhie had epilepsy, but Nancy’s grandmother would never confirm that. Nancy hadn’t realized until now that Mezhie’s name was actually Artemisia. She had hoped to find personal letters in the box, but most of them were from the Syndicate of Edwards Heirs, with various return addresses. The first envelope yielded two receipts for donations of a dollar each, with a note of acknowledgment. As she read through more of the letters—mostly pleas for donations—she grew both reflective and excited. She recalled that her grandmother used to say, “We were supposed to heir a fortune, but we got cheated out of it.”

She found another loose item in the box, a family history published in a booklet on thin paper. She began reading.

My name is Alonzo Green. I will chronicle what is known of
the family history to the best of my ability. It all commenced
in 1642 when an Englishman called Thomas Hael, or Hall,
purchased a large tract of wilderness in Nieuw Netherland.
This is the land in question, which came down to our great-great-great grandfather Robert Edwards. We have the deed
from the Dutch Colonial Government: “a certaine parcell of
land in ye Island of Manhattan, stretching on the North
River, betwixt Old John’s Land on the south and Jan Rotterdam’s Road north and about 1 thousand rodds wide from
the river.” Thomas Hael explored his boundaries with a
heavy heart, wondering at the wisdom of the acquisition. A
year earlier, he had married loquacious, dumpling-shaped
Anna Mitford of Bristol, England, and the pair sailed to the
New World to seek connubial joy and religious adventure.
Poor Anna! She contracted a virulent sea sickness and did
not survive the journey. Not much is known about the status
or pecuniary expectations that Hael may have brought with
him to Nieuw Netherland or about how he provided for
himself after his arrival. But by wintertime, the grieving widower paid a thousand Carolus Guilders for this unpromising
stretch of dark forest and sand dunes below Old John’s
Land and married a robust young Knickerbocker. Her name
is not remembered. She gave him five daughters, who
showed little appreciation for the lonely, fearsome landscape
surrounding them. The nubile maidens hovered indoors in
the fledgling village of Nieuw Amsterdam until one of our
more jejune kinsmen, Thomas Edwards, an asthmatic seafarer, arrived, with a shine in his eye. He was captain of a
broad-bottomed, wide-beamed three-master called the
Society.
After a brief but vigorous courtship filled with Morris
dancing and demonstrations of nautical knots, he was forthwith betrothed to the oldest Hael daughter. Thomas Hael, or
Hall, lacking a son, bequeathed to his oceangoing son-in-law
his “wearing clothes” and a paper entitling Edwards and his
heirs to Hael’s patch of ground—surveyed as seventy-seven
acres, three rods and thirty-two perches. This is rightfully
ours.

Thomas Edwards, out on the high seas raiding Spanish
galleons for Queen Anne, was too busy to settle down, and
he left this land to his grandson Robert Edwards. But
Robert, who was also a seafarer, had no use for the New
York property, which was burdened by rising taxes and gargantuan boulders, so he leased it for ninety-nine years to the
notorious Cruger brothers for a thousand pounds and one
peppercorn per year. In the agreement, his descendants were
to take possession of the estate when the lease expired, in
1877. But Robert Edwards, without issue, was killed in a
freak shipwreck off the coast of New Zealand, and the
ninety-nine-year lease tied up the property until it was almost forgotten. Robert’s heirs were some brothers—William,
Joshua, Jacob, John, Leonard, and Thomas—and a sister,
Martha (called “Mackie”), but by the time the lease expired
they were all dead and their offspring flung along the Great
Wagon Road and out to the Territories. It is true that the
ninety-nine-year lease itself was so severely damaged in the
1860 basement leak at the Bouwerie Hall of Records that
not a legible cipher remains, but an affidavit from one Mr.
Murphy, a lugubrious liveryman, attests to his memory of
the wording of the lease. Although the actual facts may be
hard to pluck from the folds and twists of time, descendants
far and wide have over the years painstakingly assembled
the evidence of our inheritance. Anyone descended from the
brothers of Robert or the obscure sister, “Mackie,” is in line
to be an heir. Some years ago in New York, Edwards descendants were especially aroused by the famous troubadour
Valentine Edwards, who mumbled an obscure-sounding
shipwreck ballad, ending with the refrain “Ninety-nine years
and the land is ours, / Ninety-nine years is all . . .” The song,
“The Wreck of the Mangel-Wurtzel,” became a national sensation after Valentine Edwards performed it before
Theodore Roosevelt at the Music Box on Twenty-third
Street in 1908. The Edwards family lore—the stories handed
down about the privateer and the Dutch deed and the
lease—was stirred afresh by kinsman Valentine Edwards’
shipwreck ballad into a surfacing, as if memory itself were a
form of wreckage strewn along the floor of a distant sea.

The Edwards claim is a tribute to memory, to continuity,
to the supremacy of kinship!

And so, from the end of the last century, and through the
Roosevelt years, and on up to the present Harding years, the
Edwards claim has gained ground and amassed authority.
Edwards families have held conventions, reunions, and
church picnics celebrating the illustrious history of our clan.
There were some doubting Thomases until 1919, when a
document discovered in an old hair trunk in a colonial-era
attic in Orange County, North Carolina, verified the buccaneer’s ninety-nine-year lease to the Cruger brothers, who
had sublet to the Trinity Church. Therein lies our proof.

As an earnest petitioner and family historian, on behalf
of the Edwards family of America I submit claim of ownership of the land described. The estimate of wealth has enlarged beyond our capacity to account. Old John’s Land
bordered Greenwich Village. Jan Rotterdam’s Road is now
arrayed with mighty structures climbing skyward. The vast
Edwards holdings, a lopsided rectangle on the bottom of the
island, includes the Woolworth Building, the Federal Building, the New York Stock Exchange, and the whole of Broad-way. Respectfully submitted,

—Alonzo S. Green, Kokomo, Indiana, Sept. 10, 1921

Nancy leafed through a printed document from the Board of the Syndicate of Edwards Heirs, describing the Supreme Court’s rejection of the Edwards petition. The property delineated in the document seemed to be most of lower Manhattan, from Christopher Street, Greenwich Village, on down to the tip of the island. Nancy was eager to tell Jack about this. How amazed he would be to learn of the expectations of her modest family! When they first met, Jack had pictured her rural Southern upbringing as a scene from the distant past—like the Depression world of her great-aunts. She laughed aloud. She could have told him her family owned the World Trade Center.

Nancy knew with certainty that in 1932 she would have sent her money in, too. If she had been a farm wife in the Depression—or perhaps her spinster sister, in a diaphanous dress on a summer Sunday, awaiting a gentleman caller (a crude youth with no prospects except setting out some tobacco in a corner of his father’s land)—she would have built up the dream of the inheritance to such a frenzy she would have had to be locked in her room. She knew she would have answered ads in the back of magazines, entered contests, conspired with cousins on ways to escape a country woman’s lot. Her yearnings frothing over, Nancy would have waited impatiently for the mail to bring some deliverance. With the promise of the Edwards fortune, she would have hitchhiked to New York to claim the city. But she recognized her tendency to exaggerate, to blow up some detail the way Jack used to enlarge a segment of a photograph in his darkroom before he went digital.

An envelope spilled out two receipts for membership in the syndicate—twenty-five dollars each. Nancy was astounded. She knew that farm people didn’t have cash during the Depression. She wasn’t sure, but twenty-five dollars might have been like two hundred and fifty dollars now. How could they have made such sacrifices? She pictured her great-aunts, worn into submission by the steady routine of farm work, their thin cotton dresses clinging to their heavy, biscuit-fed bodies. She thought of the tyranny of men—their expectations of meat and pie on the table and clean, starched shirts.

She could imagine the remade dresses, the wool coats of a generation’s wear cut into strips and woven into rugs, the fresh beans simmered with hog jaws for an entire day. She remembered such images from her grandmother. How tantalizing the letters about the inheritance would have been! The aunts’ imagination would have stirred the kings, queens, and jacks on the playing cards to life. The aunts would have dreamed of the bustle of the city, with the opera and fine millinery shops. But Nancy thought perhaps they did not even know what to dream of. Did they have sexual fantasies? She tried to imagine their sex lives—dutiful, simple gropings in the dark.

There was one more letter—an envelope from the U.S. Postal Service addressed to Bealus Renfroe. Nancy thought he was Nova’s husband, but she wasn’t certain. And to her surprise, Nancy discovered three photographs in an envelope in the bottom of the box. She held one up to the light—a large group of men and women and children fashionably dressed, the women in dresses with hems rising toward the knees. The twenties? She had sought details of her family history for years, but they were not a family of storytellers, and the Culpeppers had few old photographs. She held the second picture close to the dim lamp. A man in overalls was standing on a stump. What was pleasing about this picture was how good-looking the man was. He stood erect, his thumbs in his pockets, and faced the camera with confidence. He had a farmer’s hands, but his face was smooth, with strong features and dark, straight hair spilling from under a striped cap. He stood like a prized specimen on display, an excellent, prized ram at the fair.