Now Let's Talk of Graves (12 page)

“So what was the issue?”

“Well, now, I told you this was silly. When they were little, hardly into long pants, they had a fight over Peggy Patrick, a little girl in their class.”

“And this went on for thirty, thirty-five years?” Sam's tone registered her disbelief.

“I know it sounds ridiculous. And it was. Words were exchanged, a few punches, as I remember, a couple of bloody noses, and then one thing led to another. They were both very bright boys, fierce achievers. Once the battle was joined, they never gave up.”

“It must have been awkward since they traveled in the same circles.”

Kitty hooted. “You're right about that. There
are
only about three hundred people in New Orleans, you know. In our crowd you see the same faces over and over, day after day.”

“But they were very polite about it,” Ma Elise protested. “When Estelle, my daughter, Church and Kitty's mother, was alive, she used to give Church holy hell about it. Said it upset everybody's seating plans at their dinner parties. But it didn't really. Their feud was just a given. You know, like somebody being allergic to tomatoes.”

“We thought,” said Zoe, “that Mr. Dupree might block my being Queen of Comus. Since he's the captain, the one who runs things. But he didn't.”

“I thought the king was in charge.”

“No, no, the king changes every year. Captains are like the president, and they go on forever,” said Zoe.

“Well, I think Maynard knew what a stink that would have caused,” said Ma Elise. “To have broken the succession, you being the fourth generation of Lee queens, well, you just don't let personal feelings get in the way of a thing like that.”

Only in New Orleans, Sam thought, then asked, “Do you remember Maynard ever doing
anything
that would have been harmful to Church?”

“Well,” said Kitty, “men who have known each other for years do join up together in business deals, and every once in a while Church would come storming in, say Maynard had done him out of some investment opportunity. But that sort of thing's so vague—” She waved her hand like a lace handkerchief. “I mean, nobody was really ever going to tell Church directly that something like that was Maynard's doing. It think it was just more a feeling he got.”

“A little paranoia?”

“Well,” said Ma Elise, “you know, if you're looking for Church's enemies, you have no further to go than himself and his drinking. His father drank too—” She glanced at Kitty. “And Estelle, Kitty and Church's mother, was known to have more than one sherry in the afternoon to pass the time. I tried to get Church to stop but—”

“You couldn't do it. You know that, don't you?” said Sam.

“I
know,
dear. But then, I look at people like you, who have found the strength—”

“Not strength. It's having no place to go but up or out—feet first—then finding something that keeps you straight. AA has positively
ruined
drinking for me.”

Ma Elise laughed. “I wish they could have ruined it for Church too. Bless his heart, to have died drunk,
because
of being drunk.”

Sam saw Ma Elise's tears gathering. She
had
been hit hard. Sam was afraid even to look at Zoe. It would be good to put an end to this, to shut the door so the family could pick up the pieces and go on. But what if, for some reason, the inquiry didn't fall out the way they planned? Poking around in a man's past—often it was better not to know.

“I wonder,” Sam said, taking it slow, tiptoeing, “if you all have given any thought to dropping this insurance matter?”

“Well,
I
have,” Zoe said with sudden fierceness. “I think we ought to just let Tench Young keep his damn money. I mean, it's not like I don't already have a whole bunch coming from the first policy, and I've got the house, and the cars, and the camp at Grand Isle and the condo in Florida.”

Sam watched a look pass between the two older women, toting up the cost of school, the clothes, the baubles Zoe had always taken for granted. They would have calculated the upkeep of Church's house, now hers, over on Prytania, the housekeeper, the groundsmen, the gardener. Zoe could
sell it, but no, on second thought, knowing the Lees, that probably wasn't an option.

“No way,” Kitty said, “We'll fight Tench Young to the death on this one. That tightfisted son of a bitch, let him go screw somebody he doesn't know.”

“He doesn't do business with people he doesn't know,” Ma Elise reminded her.

“Well, isn't that more the pity?”

“I didn't mean to upset you all,” said Sam, pushing back from the table. It was time to call it a night; she was a little tired, and there was enough in the pot to let things stew a little. She segued into a story about her old boyfriend, Beau Talbot, whom Kitty had always called the handsomest son of a bitch in the South, now chief medical examiner for the state of Georgia. They laughed at the tale of his recent wedding to a woman half his age, where the minister kept trying to get Beau to give the bride away to his best man, confusing the groom with the bride's father.

“Well, he ought to be ashamed of himself,” said Ma

Elise. “I never could abide these May-December affairs. I think it's disgraceful.”

“You wouldn't say that if one of those cute little things you and Ida hang out with at the poolhall all the time wanted to hook up with you,” said Kitty.

“I would so!” Ma Elise protested.

But Sam could tell from the twinkle in her eye that Ma Elise was lying. All it would take to change her mind was switching the players around.

*

A little while later, tucked into her four-poster in a big square corner guestroom on the second floor, Sam put down the book she wasn't reading and recalled that conversation—specifically the part about older women and younger men.

The women in her AA group in Atlanta joked about it: Get one you can train.
Love
those washboard tummies.

Marie, her old dearheart, her San Francisco sponsor, had married a man nine years her junior and said it was the smartest thing she'd ever done—other than getting sober.

Yeah. Well. But. Sam stared up at the brocade tester; the canopy above the bed was the same soft white as the bed curtains. The whole room was the color of heavy cream. A bride would be at home in here—or Miss Havisham.

Now,
that
was a creepy thought, poor old lady, old as Ma Elise, as Ida, forever pecking around the edges of her moldering wedding cake with her great expectations crumbling.

Yeah. Well. But. Sam had never had great luck with men. She kept losing them, misplacing them. Maybe she'd cure that with a change of vintage.

But wait a minute. She sat up. What was this self-flagellation? A luxury she couldn't afford. If she'd learned one thing in the program, it was that. Right, girl?

Fine. On the other hand, stand back and check the record. Granted, nobody had any luck in love these days, that seemingly having gone out about the days of King Arthur, but good Lord!

Item: Beau Talbot—the first love of her life. He'd jilted her when she was nineteen. Broken-hearted, crazy, she'd run off from Atlanta, from her uncle George, who'd become her father after her parents died. At Stanford, where'd she'd met Kitty, she'd discovered that she could drink, without even trying, in an afternoon, three-quarters of the way down a Jack Daniel's label. She met Jimmy Harris her senior year.

Item: James Covington Harris—tall, cute, bearded, pony-tailed. Big-time draft resister. Scion of a fine Republican family in Rancho Santa Fe, richest community in the state. She and Jimmy burned flags and smoked dope and dropped acid and got arrested. Then they up and got married one wine-soaked afternoon in a public park complete with redwoods and
a spectacular view of the ocean. Their gig, as they called it, lasted four years, only some of which Sam remembered through a scrim of various legal and illegal substances and to the accompaniment of the Grateful Dead, Joe Cocker, and Neil Young. Then Jimmy decided he'd had it with revolution and thought he'd take up law, as had three generations of Harris men before him. He also thought he'd put down his embarrassment of a spouse who, increasingly, was a bit too loud. The last she heard he was practicing law in southern California, living off the fat of the land with his blond, blue-eyed third wife.

Item: Faceless Men—a large number of them who she could not identify when she woke up the next morning, though she had a pretty good idea of what they'd been up to the night before. She ran through a lot of them for about six years.

Item: Sean O'Reilly—her hip-popping, bebopping, tall, lanky Irish setter of a SFPD loverman. Sean had appeared like a gift after the long, tough dry spell during which she regained control of her life. Lost, three years earlier, to a drunk driver.

Item: Beau Talbot—a brief reentrapment due to a moment (okay, a one-night stand) of insanity. Thereafter, they were kind to each other in the manner of old friends, meeting most frequently on business in the Atlanta morgue.

Item: Occasional dates, no one special, i.e., a long dry spell, which, come to think of it, hadn't been all that uncomfortable. Actually, it was rather nice discovering the grown-up Sam all by herself.

Except that
from time to time she could do with a spot of intimacy in her life. Or would you call that sex?

Was
that
why her mind was running around the edges of Harry Zack's collar, fingering open a couple of buttons? And wasn't she the one so flippantly asking Harry if Church had taken a vow of celibacy? What about herself? And if that were true, what was that package of condoms doing rattling around in the bottom of her purse?

Own it, Sam. You're a horny, about-to-be-middle-aged lady who's spotted a luscious mouthful of a young man.

And? The urges weren't exactly her fault. God made people that way.

“Sam?”

She almost jumped out of her skin.

Then the rat-a-tat-tap at her door sounded again. “It's Ma Elise. May I come in and sit down?”

*

“Get back in bed,” Ma Elise ordered. She settled into a slipcovered chair, tucked a quilt around herself. “My grandmother pieced this,” she said, “from hair ribbons, her husband's ties, or maybe they called them cravats then, and scraps of her silk underwear.” Ma Elise's white hair was plaited in a single long braid that reached halfway down the back of her pink flannel dressing gown. “We live with the past piled in with the present here. As if it were only yesterday—which it is in New Orleans time. Is it that way in Atlanta too?”

“Not so much.” Sam was wondering what the old lady had come to tell her but letting her get to it her own way. “Some old families are still there, of course. But so many more of the new people.”

“Yankees.”

Sam smiled. “Yep. Took 'em more than a hundred years, but they've come back, and I'm afraid they've whupped us for good this time. Worse than kudzu. They've torn everything up, covered it in blacktop and shopping centers.”

Ma Elise nodded. “The disappearance, as Kitty says, of grace and gentility. It's happening around the edges here too. There's an area out in Jefferson Parish, around the Lakeside Shopping Center, where there's row after row of discos, bars—New Bourbon Street they say. As if Bourbon Street weren't tacky enough. They call it Fat City. Can you imagine? Saying you live in Fat City?” She shook her head, and her braid flopped. She looked like a little girl dressed for bed. “Well, nobody cares what I think. That's why old people live in the past. Did you know that? Because the present stinks.”

Sam laughed. “I really feel that way about lots of things.”

“Well, you watch that.” Ma Elise shook a knobby forefinger. “You'll be old before your time.
But,
that's not what I came in here for, disturbing your rest. Though it does have to do with the past, Church's past.” She smiled at Sam's reaction. “I thought that would make you sit up straighter.”

Then she went on about Church and his bride, Madeline. Madeline was the prettiest girl at McGehee—the same private girls' school, just around the corner, their daughter Zoe had attended. Sam scanned for what might be important, filing facts in imaginary folders.

Church: young and virile, fighting for the hand of the fair Madeline with his archenemy, Maynard Dupree. Ma Elise sketched out a Count of Monte Cristo duel in Audubon Park beneath a daddy-of-'em-all live oak tree. They'd stolen foils from the fencing salle at Tulane. Each would bear a prize from the field—a scar on the chin, above the brow—to be fondled, stroked, and kissed in the years to come. To the death! or so they said, except old Miz Tilletson walking her dog just past dawn called the cops on them.

In the end, Madeline chose Church.

Madeline: Sam imagined a small woman, not as thin as Zoe, but with that same wildness of black curls, in a gossamer white gown flowing down to the dewy grass, blowing a kiss to the triumphant Church from the tips of her shell-pink hand.