Sweet Water (21 page)

I
sat on the bed with the small volume in my hands. The binding was cracked, the red cover faded. The tiny lock on the leather flap had rusted; gilded page corners were two decades smooth. The key was lost or missing. “Diary” was scrawled across the cover in gold script.

Since Troy left I’d been going through the contents of the box, folded newspaper clippings and letters mostly, a few photographs. I hadn’t read anything yet. I was taking my time. I came across a black-and-white photograph of my parents, smooth-faced and smiling, leaning together awkwardly on a couch, holding a baby wrapped in a blanket between them—me. I studied the picture. When my mother died she was exactly my age. She had married, given birth; she left a legacy. What did I have to show for my years? Who would be left to remember?

As I held a sharp pair of scissors in one hand and the diary in the other, I imagined my mother holding it, anticipating what to say, how to make sense of her life. The act of cutting the flap felt momentous; scissors sliced through leather with a decisive snap. When I opened the book the musty pages stood up in stiff sections. On the frontispiece “Diary” was printed again, in black script, with “1959” in wide-spaced, tiny block numerals at the bottom. In watery blue ink my mother had written, “Ellen Iris Clyde, 1959–1962.” And in another, darker ink: “Ellen Clyde Simon, 1962—.”

I started at the beginning.

    Turning the pages, I found that the handwriting changed from year to year. The early entries were large and loopy; later the script darkened, condensed. As time went by—′60, ‘62, ‘63—my mother confided in her diary only periodically. On June 20, 1962, she had written:

Flipping ahead to the year I was born, I found this entry.

I turned to the final entry. The writing was cramped. I had to look twice to believe it: it was dated the day she died.

I put the diary down and sat very still for a minute. My heart was thumping against my chest. I reached into the box, pulling out and unfolding a yellowed clipping: “
FATAL CRASH ON ROUTE
6,” with a fuzzy photograph of the mangled bus turned over on its side.

I picked up another clipping, “
LOCAL WOMAN DROWNS AT SWIMMING HOLE
,” which was brief and vague, and then I leafed through the letters my grandmother had saved, all written by her, each one a carefully worded accusation of treachery and betrayal. One, I saw, was addressed to May Ford.

At the bottom of the pile I found a note on rose-tinted stationery, dated May 1940, written in a different hand. “Dearest Amory,” it read:

I folded the note, thinking about what Clyde had said:
You can look for the answer, but there isn’t one. Whatever you think you know, you’re better off to forget.
I remembered Horace telling me,
We don’t talk about what happened.
I picked up the newspaper clipping about Bryce’s death: “The accident took place on the property of Mrs. Constance Clyde, Mrs. Davies’ swimming companion.”

I went through all the letters again, but Bryce’s was the only one addressed to Amory. As I started to put them away I noticed a long silver pin in the bottom of the box. Holding it up to the light, I twirled it around slowly. The head, large and distinctive, gleamed gray-pink and silvery, mother-of-pearl. I studied it for a moment and then put it back, replacing the letters and tattered clippings as I found them.

Moving the box aside, I sat back against the wall. Now that there was room for him, Blue jumped up on the bed and started licking my face. I pushed him away, then pulled him close, stroking his head.

I thought of my mother downstairs in the kitchen, twenty-seven
years old, rolling up her sleeves to knead dough on a floured board, counting one, two, three, four. She is standing very still, cocking her head to listen—
You killed her, you knew, so you killed her
—and then she hears the crying, the feet thudding on the steps. When her father comes in to ask for the keys, his eyes are red and watery, his hands shaky, his body bowed in the doorway.

I imagined them hours later, alone in that bus on a narrow back road. The night is dark and cool and rainy; the pavement is slick. The car weaves back and forth across the road, scraping tree branches; wet leaves slap across the windshield. Gripping the passenger’s seat, she asks him,
Daddy,
she begs,
Daddy, please stop and let me drive.

Ellen,
he says,
don’t make me explain.

I picked through the bundle of clothing Troy had found in the basement. A short yellow skirt, a torn long-sleeved patterned blouse, a milk-colored bra. I stripped out of my clothes and tried the pieces one by one, flimsy fragments of fabric that smelled faintly of mold. The bra was too small; it didn’t fit around my back. I could get the skirt over my hips and zip it almost all the way, and the blouse, with its jagged rip down the side, buttoned easily. In the mirror above my dresser I looked awkward and gangly, my washed-out features overwhelmed by the faded geometric pattern of the blouse.

My glance fell on a small, curled color photo propped against the mirror. My dad, young and scruffy, was standing behind my mother with an intense look on his face, his wiry arms draped over her thin shoulders. My mother wore that familiar lime-green dress and a detached, ironic smile. Her pose was cool, and her eyes were bright and clear. I watched my reflection rub the wispy blouse, smooth the textured skirt, touch the rents and the rust-colored streaks splashed across the material. Bloodstains, I realized suddenly. These were my mother’s clothes. These were the clothes she died in.

In the car my grandfather is muttering to himself, cursing, his hands unsteady on the steering wheel as my mother pleads with
him:
Daddy, let’s go back, these roads are dangerous at night,
her eyes open wide in alarm. All at once, the back right tire thumps into a ditch, slamming her head against the seat, knocking her knuckles against the side window. He turns the wheel sharply to the left, straight toward a tree, then violently to the right. She is screaming, or maybe she’s too scared to move or cry out, her hands up in front of her face. I can see him hunched forward, his chest pressed against the wheel, choking out something she strains to hear.
You killed her—you knew, so you killed her—and
all she can say is
No—

W
hen I think about it now it’s funny that Amory acted like he was so worried about my driving but didn’t even pretend to be concerned about the reservoir a half mile from the house on our property where I spent so many afternoons alone. The kids had used it as a swimming hole for years; when they were little I’d pack picnic lunches and lead them, single file and barefoot, down a path Jeb had cut through tall grass and a short stretch of woods. I’d sit on a large rock and sew or read magazines while they splashed around. Sometimes I’d stick my toes in. I had never learned to swim, but for some reason we didn’t worry about that, and nothing ever happened to any of them. But when Horace got old enough he got it in his head to teach me.

I was afraid of the water, the cold blank surface of it giving no clue as to its depth, but nothing I could say would dissuade him. So I went to Carole’s Fashions and purchased a swimming costume—blue-striped with yellow flowers—and a matching robe, and very gently, very slowly, he coaxed me in and taught me to float. I’d lie on my back in three feet of water looking up at the heavy green leaves hanging over us, the blue sky with veins of white running through it, and Horace would say, “Relax, Ma, stretch into it, keep your chin up, weightless, weightless.” When I mastered that, he taught me the breast stroke and the crawl, and then it hardly seemed possible that I could have spent so many years stranded on the rocks.

For a long time Horace wouldn’t let me swim by myself. He showed me where to steer clear of jagged outcroppings and made me promise
to keep away from the whirlpool by the boulder. “One hundred feet deep right here,” Horace told me, standing on top of the boulder and pointing down. “If you get caught in the slide of that funnel it’ll be near impossible to get back out.” He showed me how to watch for mud-colored moccasins, which swim with the current and surface in the sun. He bought me a whistle to wear around my neck, to alert Jeb or Lattie up at the house if I was out too deep and got tired, or got bitten. I told him it was a silly idea: who’d have the presence of mind to blow a whistle when they were drowning, and what chance would they have of being heard anyway? But he said it would make him feel better, so I wore it.

As long as Horace was living at home he went to the reservoir with me or made sure someone else did. But after he left for college and Ellen went north and Elaine got married, I was free to do as I pleased. Some days I’d take my lunch and go down to the rocks and never even step in. I’d just sit and watch the way the leaves twirled on the glassy surface like hurricane patterns on the weather report, the way the wind ruffled the water like a shirred dress.

I was there by myself on the day JFK was shot. It was near the end of November, too cold to swim, but I was sitting on a blanket in a chiffon scarf and a sweater, writing a letter to Ellen. The whistle blasted at the mill and it wasn’t lunchtime, so I knew something was wrong. I jumped up, scared to death. All I could think as I hurried along the narrow path was that Amory was hurt and I needed to reach him as quickly as I could. When I got home I insisted that Jeb drive me to the mill to see for myself.

I arrived to find the workers listening to the radio, wiping tears from their eyes, and I knew the whistle had nothing to do with Amory. My husband was not hurt; in fact, he was nowhere to be found. Martha, his lazy, well-fed secretary, said he’d left a few hours ago for an appointment and probably wouldn’t be back. There was nothing in his appointment book, but that didn’t mean much, she said. And of course it was fine with her; she got to sit at her desk and read magazines until quitting time.

“Where is he, Martha?” I demanded. “The President of the United States has died and I need to know where my husband is.”

“I can’t tell you that, Mrs. Clyde. I honestly have no idea.”

“You’re lying.”

Twitching her nose like a fat little rabbit, she sat forward and stared at me. “If I knew I would tell you, but I don’t, so I can’t,” she said. Her voice was testy, but there was no malice in it, and I thought I could detect a note of pity. Amory had chosen wisely; she’d be loyal to the last.

There were plenty of these times when I’d run up against the obvious. It was almost as though people were daring me to say it: “He’s with another woman, isn’t he? He’s not at a meeting at all. He’s in bed at some hideaway on the other side of town.” When Horace cut his first teeth; when the telegram arrived from my mother—“Your father is dead. Come at once”; when the brains of the President of our country fell into the lap of his wife. When, on a warm and sunny day in 1967, Bryce Davies dived off a flat-topped boulder into the whirling depths of the reservoir on his property and never made it up for air.

    
I cannot recall a time, in all those years, when Bryce and I weren’t friends. When I found that first letter in my husband’s pocket, I did indeed confront him about it, but he took me by the shoulders and very kindly and patiently told me that it’s a hard reality of life, but sooner or later the wife of a successful man has to face the fact that a lot of women out there are going to find him attractive and are going to make up all kinds of malicious lies to try to get their way. He said he purposely left that letter there as an indication of the lengths some gals would go.

“Now, I’m not judging her,” he said. “Only God can do that. But I can surely understand if you choose not to be friends with her anymore.”

“But she’s the best friend I’ve got,” I said.

“Evidently not,” he pointed out. “And besides, there are other fish in the sea. I wouldn’t trust her as far as I could throw her.”

That made me suspicious. I may not have known much about the
world, but I had learned that there’s often a big gap between what people say and what they believe. When he said she was a ruthless back-stabber who only befriended me in a futile attempt to get closer to him, I was willing to concede that some of that might be true. But I also knew that my friendship with Bryce made Amory uneasy; he was afraid one would tell the other too much and he’d be caught in the middle with nowhere to turn. It would be much more convenient for him to keep us separate.

So Bryce and I stayed friends. I wrote her that letter to help me calm down, and then I took her letter and mine and sealed them in my box, and that was the end of it. We watched our children grow up together, sitting on the porch or over on her veranda, making up games for them to play, sewing costumes for school. And some afternoons I wouldn’t see her and I’d imagine that she was with him, sneaking down a back road, his arm around her waist, the wind in her long black hair.

Oh, it was terrible; it was intolerable. But I had learned to live with it the way I’d learned to live with other things, like the fact that I’d probably never be a teacher again, or that Amory would never really know how to show me he loved me, or that I’d probably never have the guts to find a man who could. After a while it got so that when I knew and she knew he was off with someone else I almost felt sorry for her, as if she was the one he was being unfaithful to. Without either of us saying a word, I could tell she’d grown to care for him almost as much as I did. I loved him for what we’d had together long ago, for what we’d been through over the years, for the day-to-day intimacies we shared as husband and wife. She loved him, I’m sure, because he was powerful, her husband’s boss, because he made her feel young and daring and free, because he thought she was exotic and told her so.

But all that was years before. By 1967 we had weathered Taylor’s pregnancy at age sixteen and her elopement with a local garage mechanic, Ellen’s move up north and marriage to a Jewish graduate student, a plant closing, a strike, the births of six grandchildren. I thought it was long over between them. I thought we were old. So when I found that hairpin in his breast pocket—a Thursday morning, rain
falling as soft as cats’ paws outside the bedroom window onto the roof—I felt a pain in my chest as if she’d stuck it in me. I held the pin to the light and looked at it closely: it was fairly ordinary, as hairpins go, except for the luminous quality of the head. I have never seen another one like it. I thought of her taking her hair down while we were talking, placing the pin between her lips while she made a chignon, and then carelessly, gracelessly, inserting the pin again to hold it together. There was no question that it was hers; I’d seen her wearing it hundreds of times. Did he take it as a keepsake? Did she put it there for him to find? It didn’t much matter. What mattered to me was that I thought it was over and it wasn’t, and the wounds I thought had healed were as raw, as painful, as the first time I suspected.

I locked the pin in my box of letters. I thought about how much time had passed. In some objective part of my brain I respected Amory for sticking with her instead of some bottle-blond twenty-year-old who laughed like a hyena and snapped her gum, though Lord knows he’d gone through plenty of those in his prime and probably still did. I thought about Bryce’s breasts: they were larger than mine, but they sagged more. I wondered where she kissed him and how.

I was alone in the house that day, and Amory called from the office to tell me he had a board of directors banquet in Chattanooga. I knew he was with her. When he came in, singing, around one in the morning, I pretended to be asleep. But I wasn’t asleep; I was lying there thinking about the two of them together. Thinking about the two of them together and me in that house by myself.

When I woke up the next morning he was gone. Around ten-thirty Bryce called. She was hot and bored, she said, and wanted to go swimming.

“I’m kind of busy today, Bryce,” I said. “Maybe another time.”

“What can you be doing that’s so dang important you can’t take out an hour to be with a friend?”

“I’m in the middle of spring cleaning.”

“Spring cleaning! Well, that can wait. I’m packing us a lunch, and I’ll be over in an hour. “

When Bryce pulled up in the little blue convertible Frank bought for her birthday, waving her hand gaily, a scarf around her head and black sunglasses sliding down her nose, it was all I could do not to lunge.

“Gosh, Clyde, darling,” she said, getting out of the car and reaching in back for the basket. “You look a little peaked this morning. Pee-kid’—is that how you pronounce it? I’m trying to learn a new word a week. You’re never too old!” She wagged a finger at me. “Now, I brought hard-boiled eggs and potato salad and cheese sandwiches and iced tea. I vote we take it down to the water and have us a picnic on the rocks. I’ve got my suit on underneath, so I’m all set. How about you?”

I told her I was feeling a bit under the weather and that I didn’t think swimming would help. “But I’ll go down there to keep you company,” I said. “I’ll sit on the rocks and stick my toes in.”

She seemed slightly irritated at this, but it was better than nothing, so I got my whistle and we made our way through the field behind the house to the narrow path that went down to the water. With a towel slung over one arm and the basket of food in the other, Bryce led the way. Walking close behind her, I could see single strands of white in the black of her hair. Her step was as sure and light as a ballerina’s. In the nearly thirty years I’d known her she had hardly gained a pound.

“Isn’t this fun?” she said, turning around suddenly. “Aren’t you glad you came? Now that we’ve got the kids out of our hair we should do this every day.” She closed her eyes and breathed deep. “There’s nothing finer than the smell of tree moss in the sun. Nothing,” she said, and turned forward again.

As soon as we reached the clearing Bryce began unbuttoning her blouse. She spread the towel on a large, flat rock and set the basket on it. I watched her as she let the blouse fall from her shoulders and stepped out of her skirt. I thought about Amory seeing the same thing and comparing her body to mine. Her skin was smooth and honey-colored, and her breasts were perky and firm in the pointy push-up bra
of her black bathing suit. The only real signs of decay that I could detect were a few spidery veins on the backs of her legs.

We sat on the rock and ate the picnic she’d prepared, she in her suit, I in my plaid shift, as the sun beat down on us from directly overhead and the trees around the reservoir reflected patterns on the water. Lying back against the warm rock with her eyes closed and her arms spread wide, she whispered, “Glorious!”

After a few minutes she sat up. “I don’t know if I can hold off any longer.” She edged over to the side of the rock, stuck her toe in, and quickly pulled it out. Again she dipped her toe in, more cautiously this time, and then up to her ankle, up to her calf. “I’m going to do it,” she announced. She looked up to the left and shaded her eyes. “Off the top of that big boulder over there, all at once. It’s better just to get it over with.” She stood up and stretched her arms over her head, her fingers interlaced. “Wish me luck!”

“Good luck,” I said.

I might have tried to stop her, to remind her about the whirlpool she knew herself was there, to convince her that the water was colder and deeper than it looked, to insist that she come back and wade in from the shore, where it was safe, but I did not. I didn’t say anything as she hopped from rock to rock in her shimmery black suit to get to the boulder, holding her arms out like a tightrope walker. I imagined I was Amory, admiring her strong, tanned arms, her long, perfect nose, the supple curve of her waist. When she smiled at me and crossed her fingers, standing on the slant of the big rock, I imagined Amory smiling and crossing his fingers back. When she dove in I heard the splash and then nothing, and I sat very still. I thought of Amory wanting her; I thought of him holding her in his arms. I sat there and gazed out over the water.

After a while I took off my Watch and waded in. The water was cold at first, but I clenched my teeth and submerged my chest up to my neck before dipping under to wet my hair. I waded back to shore and blew my whistle, three sharp blasts and one long one, and then climbed up
to the boulder in my dripping dress, up the same path Bryce had taken, and stood at the top peering into the swirling depths below.