One More River (3 page)

Opposites attract must have been among her more conventional wisdoms. Mickey Moe’s daddy had been a short, stocky man, round and hard as a stew pot, with a peddler’s rough hands and plodding feet. If taken one by one, his features were handsome enough, but they settled in a bundle at the center of a globular head and were framed by a pair of jug ears. His large button eyes were capped by thick red eyebrows of a northward slant, and between them emerged a thin, straight nose that flared at the nostrils as unexpectedly as a trumpet vine in an arctic plain. Beneath that was a dainty but impeccably shaped mouth. All of it together made his adult face a tableau of something so innocent, so childlike that whomever he met in the course of a day could not help but look at him and smile. This was not the worst luck. Given a lifetime of genial regard from strangers and intimates alike, the man developed a radiant good humor that the Sassaports decided must be the source of his wife’s attraction to him.

When questioned on the matter, Beadie would demur. I believe he’s a good man, she’d say, and he’s entertainin’ and he’s kind, very kind, to me. One of the things she liked best about him was that he was respectful from the first, unlike other men who’d come to call. Even after his death, when all the world discovered Bernard Levy was a bounder, she revered his memory on that score.

Unfortunately, their daughters had not turned out like their celebrated mother, being more on the pleasant-looking side if you were kind about it. When they complained about their flaws, she’d tell them not to fret about themselves so. Be grateful, she’d say. Beauty is a curse. Men everywhere bother you, even the ones who seem so nice before they get you alone. They’re all hands and their eyes violate you a thousand times an hour. Now your daddy kept his hands to himself while we courted and his eyes where they belonged—on mine. That went a long way with me.

What she didn’t say, perhaps because it never really penetrated her consciousness, was that beautiful women are often the most self-critical, far worse than their pleasant-looking daughters. In secret, great beauties demonize every blemish. When such a woman appreciates a funny-looking man or an ugly man, the unworthy one is so astounded his affections can veer toward worship. That’s a heady tonic for an insecure beauty. Bernard’s respect, his near knightly devotion, most likely won her.

Or it could have been his money.

Bernard Levy, grandson of the founder of Levy Agricultural Supplies headquartered in Memphis, Tennessee, looked to have heaps of money when he first came to town, bags and bags of gold coin in weights sufficient to seduce every Israelite girl in Hinds County, including a half-educated belle socially crippled by her innumerable requirements and borderline skin tone. Bernard’s money worked its seductive magic for his son’s generation as well. Despite his family connections, Mickey Moe might never have been invited to the garden party where he met Laura Anne Needleman if his family had not been from the swell part of town. No matter that Daddy and his money were long gone or that his six-columned house peeled paint from every slat and sagged on its foundations into mud that had never dried out entirely since the flood, their address was old, important. The very best people lived on Mickey Moe’s street. It was a street so fine that when his daddy first moved in, everyone in the town whispered Bernard Levy must have made a deal with the devil to wind up there. At the very least, he must have bribed or blackmailed someone. Imagine that. A Jew on Orchard Street, they’d said, what do you all think he’s got on whom? No one could accept there was that much honest money in pitchforks, feed bags, and plow blades in 1931. In those days, farmers around sold their produce and cotton at bargain basement rates or saw them rot. They bartered what was left over for essentials they couldn’t grow or raise. They didn’t buy equipment. They repaired what they had or went without and tilled the soil the way their grandfathers did, with their own two hands and the hands of all their women and children, using the sharpest implements they could scavenge, or jerry rig, or steal. They furnished their own seed and their animals, if they could keep any, ate what nature left around for them to find. Yet Bernard Levy made money hand over fist at the family trade. Imagine that, they’d said the day he moved in, inventing unsavory explanations for how a Levy might accomplish such wealth off the souls of the poor.

Of course, the public solution Bernard Levy put forth to the puzzle of his resources lacked the colorful drama of pirated land and dispossessed widows the good Christian men of Guilford made up. When Beadie decided to ferret out the source of his wealth on their second date at the Rialto Cinema all the way over to Jackson, she chose phrases she thought would flatter him into candor.

You’re such a young man, Mr. Levy, she said, to have accomplished so much in the material sense. Everyone in Guilford is impressed by your industry. I suppose you worked after school as a child and all the summers from dawn to dusk, spending more time learning the art of commerce than your ABCs.

Bernard laughed and leaned back so hard in his fourth-row orchestra seat it cracked, startling their chaperone, Beadie’s brother Ben, into spilling soda pop all over the aisle. He commenced to lie as easily as a rougher man might cough or belch. I’m very sorry to disabuse you of that charming notion, Miss Sassaport, but the source of my riches is more mundane. I had nothing my whole life, and then one day my granddaddy died.

Beadie did not respond with the amusement his riposte encouraged. That’s terribly sad, she said, then favored him with a studied look of empathy, peeping up through her eyelashes and rounding her luminous almond eyes. She’d practiced the pose in the mirror ever since she’d seen Norma Shearer perform the same trick in
The Devil’s Circus
five years earlier. Beadie did it better.

It took all the self-control the man possessed not to gasp. No, Miss Sassaport, he managed, elaborating the falsehood that would steer his family for two generations, it is not. Granddaddy was ninety-seven year old and hadn’t known his given from his surname for six years. It was a blessing.

Four months later, Beadie and Bernard were united in matrimony. Between that happy day and the bombing of Pearl Harbor, Beadie refused to investigate the source of her husband’s wealth any further. Her reason was rooted in conviction. Beadie believed a woman’s job was to feather the nest, a man’s to provide the feathers. As long as Bernard allowed her to acquire dazzling plumage for the neighbors and relations to see, she asked no questions.

Bernard Levy may have been a liar and a scoundrel, but he was a family man, devoted and true. He loved his wife to distraction and for all the worst reasons. He loved her not because she was kind or accomplished, although she had at least a half-portion of each, but because she was beautiful. He loved her not for the quality of her spirit but for her bloodlines, which were as blue as a Southern Jew could possess. He loved her for her ardent application of rules for living, which from his perspective amounted to the same thing as the highest level of refinement. He was ignorant of society. His upbringing had been entirely rude. In short, he loved her because she was everything he was not.

For whatever reasons she chose him, shortly after the honeymoon in New Orleans, Beatrice Diane Sassaport Levy came to love her husband for the best reasons, although ultimately, each was exposed as a sham. She loved him because he appeared industrious, trustworthy, and educated. She loved him because he was of a family nearly as old as her own, one arrived in Charleston a mere two generations after the Sassaport ancestors disembarked at the port of Savannah. Those were brief generations, too. People often lived lives fleet as a June bug’s in that time, there was so much malaria, yellow fever, and pneumonia going around. Bernard’s pedigree was particularly significant to her. She was enchanted by the notion that the two of them, she and Bernard, were a pairing of eagles. Their children, when they came along, would be ranked among the oldest families in society, a democratic America’s equivalent of royalty. Accordingly, Ladies Sophie, Eudora Jean, and Rachel Marie, not to mention Lord Mickey Moe, were the joys of her young life, representative of an achievement not even her illustrious ancestors had achieved. Their offspring made her better than her betters, you might say, better than those Old World peddlers and shopkeepers, those family icons of everything admirable in life for the way in which they’d triumphed over the meanness of history, putting down roots in a hard New World, and blossoming. Great as they were, Beadie thought, those peasants never approached the elegance of the Levys of Guilford, Mississippi. The old ones never imagined this! she sighed to herself as she wandered the cool, vast halls of the big house on Orchard Street just before solid, satisfied sleep. None foresaw these linens, these fruit trees, these porticos and piazzas, these nods from the gentile neighbors, hats tipped and heads bowed!

Bernard and Beadie were happy in their sumptuous nest. They were passionate. They were always laughing in the beginning. There were ripples of discontent, but these were minor, the breath of angels against still water. For instance, Beadie found it necessary to train Bernard in various aspects of social discourse. On one occasion in which she found him deficient, she straightened her back and spoke as sternly as she dared. Didn’t your mama teach you anything at all, sugar? She sighed, shook her head just enough to disturb her marcelled curls, a gesture she knew made his palms sweat. I’ve been told that you left only one calling card at the Parkers’ house when you know there are three adult women there. How could you insult them so? It’s one per female, darlin’, one per female! Bernard’s round face blanched as white as the moon in full. Beadie’s heart soared, thinking, how he regrets my displeasure! Her sweet chin, already aloft with pride, rose a little higher.

How could she know his discomfort was not from remorse at annoying his wife or riling the sensibilities of the Parkers but from fear of being found out? He was not one of those liars convinced of his own falsehoods. He knew what he was: a thief of hearts, a poseur, common as dirt. He knew his bliss was founded on an accident of bravery committed years before he knew Guilford, Mississippi, or Beadie Sassaport existed, an act committed amid enormous tragedy. He felt he could never repeat that act even if—God forbid—a similar occasion arose. What he had done had been a product of the moment, of the dark clouds, the thick air, the screams of the river that terrible day. His deeds that day were an act of nature much like an earthquake or a tornado, both of which occur violently without warning. His actions happened outside himself. He was as much a stunned observer of his own behavior that day as those who’d stared down the levee to gape at him. A wildness had swept through his blood, and it propelled his hands, his legs, the words out of his throat into an utterly alien place, exotic with terror. When he pondered that surge of ferocity, and he pondered it often, he determined that this was the way prophets of old felt. And since he never quite stopped feeling the awful rush of that moment, he absolved himself of his sins. A divine instrument is entitled to material compensation, he figured, or should be, and he overcame his fear and returned to the lie that was his miraculous life.

Like all the best lies, Bernard Levy’s life was entirely plausible. Every weekday morning, he rose at seven and ate what his wife had their cook fix up for him. He left for his office by eight o’clock like every other vigorous man on his street. Upon arrival, he exchanged pleasantries with his secretary and entered his inner sanctum. There, he read the newspaper, telephoned his cronies, and crafted spurious correspondence for his secretary to type up and mail to out of state drops maintained by the scant handful of associates who knew his true identity. At least once a week, he ordered a transfer of funds from a secret place to his marital accounts at Sassaport Savings and Loan. The orders, written in a code his secretary could not decipher, requested things like: “Kindly ship posthaste seventy-two pounds of chicken feed, 20 percent protein, 32 percent filler, by rail to Fine Fellow Plantation, Greenville, as a sampler.” By choosing secretaries more interested in reading
True Confessions
and
Photoplay
than raising livestock, he was secure none would question his curious percentages and arcane weights. Lunchtimes, he went home for a big meal of his favorite delicacies. For an hour or so, he played with his daughters and admired his infant son. Afterward, he often took a nap on the couch in his office, the door closed to avoid accusations of indolence. Other than that, his days were passed in schmoozing. He was a champion schmoozer. He could spin tales with the best of them and was an attentive audience as well. When that comical face of his went serious, he looked kindly and blameless as a picture book saint prompting people to tell him their troubles and ask his advice. And he’d give it, he’d give it gladly with a flair he’d learned from his daddy while perched upon that wastrel’s knee.

Son, Bernard’s daddy told him when he was no bigger than a hound dog pup, there ain’t nothing a sufferin’ man likes better than havin’ a hope or two. Whenever you’re givin’ a brother comfort after hearin’ the sad tale of his wretchedness, be sure to tell him somethin’ that’ll make him think everything’s gonna be alright, even if you can see plain as day he’s hurtlin’ down a fast road straight through the gapin’ gates of hell. Tell him his woman loves him unto death no matter how round her heels are and that little bump the doc cut outta his baby’s face ain’t nothin’ more’n a boil. Tell him with a straight eye and back it up with a story you have on the best authority is God’s own truth. Foreign stories work the best. I’ve found most people will believe anythin’ you tell ’em if the principals hail from France or Brazil.

It was the most useful thing the man ever said to him. There might have been more, but Bernard’s daddy disappeared downriver before the boy was six years old. Bernard did not remember much of him. He often thought the only way he’d managed to hold on to that particular memory was that the man’s knee was exceedingly bony and hurt to perch upon. Pain wipes out memory, he told Beadie when she’d survived her first labor and wondered aloud how it was women ever decide to get pregnant twice. Then again, he went on, sometimes pain etches memory deep in the mind. But there’s no middle. Why, I recall a man I met once. Good-lookin’ fellah. Tall and black-haired with a handsome mustache just like John Barrymore’s. Now he was from . . .