Temple Secrets: Southern Humorous Fiction: (New for 2015) For Lovers of Southern Authors and Southern Novels (3 page)

“I shouldn’t have changed it,” Miss Temple says, talking to herself.

“You shouldn’t have changed what?” Queenie asks.

Within moments Miss Temple’s mood shifts, like the wind has changed direction and the storm downgraded. Yet, Violet and Queenie know better than to relax just yet.

Miss Temple turns to Violet again. “You are lovely,” she says.

Violet stands straighter. Her employer never pays compliments. She gives a quick, “Thank you,” wondering what this has to do with a found letter.

As Queenie can attest, to capture Miss Temple’s attention is rarely a good thing. She has observed more than one casualty from her employer’s venom. Violet remembers Rose, Miss Temple’s daughter who hasn’t returned to Savannah in decades. Venom goes a long way when used to poison a relationship, and Violet never wants to pass on anything like that to her girls.

“Are you married, my dear?” Miss Temple asks her.

Violet looks at her aunt and then back at Miss Temple. Should she refuse to answer?

“Iris, leave her alone,” Queenie says, but Miss Temple waves her comment away.

“I’m married to a man named Jack,” Violet says, hoping her response will end the tension.

“What does this Jack do?” Miss Temple asks.

“He teaches English at the community college.” Violet lowers her eyes.

“Do you have children?” she asks.

Violet hesitates. Then she thinks about how hard it will be to find another job without a reference from Miss Temple.

“Two daughters,” Violet says. “Sixteen and fourteen.”

Miss Temple looks thoughtful.

Violet’s face feels hot and her heartbeat races. She steps toward Queenie’s end of the table in an effort to flee. Under the table, Queenie makes a slight motion with her hand, as if guiding jets onto a tiny aircraft carrier at her feet. In their foxhole, Queenie and Violet have developed a type of Morse code, using a series of eye and subtle hand gestures to relay Miss Temple’s moods. If not for the seriousness of the situation, Violet would feel foolish making these gestures.

Meanwhile, Miss Temple scrutinizes Violet, as if overcome with great curiosity. After the main entrée is finished, Violet gathers the empty plates and goes back into the kitchen. She returns with crystal dessert goblets each filled with a scoop of blackberry sherbet. Violet waits near the kitchen door. Beyond this door is her territory, her safe place. The heightened tension in the room causes goose bumps to raise on her arms. Queenie must feel it, too.

In their agreed upon mayday signal, Queenie winks twice and jerks her head left, like the return on an old typewriter. Through gestures, Queenie tells Violet to save herself. Violet, however, refuses to abandon Queenie no matter how many times she winks and returns her carriage.

Not only are Violet and Queenie bonded as niece and aunt, but they are close like people who survive natural disasters are close. When Miss Temple has nothing for her to do, Queenie often helps Violet in the kitchen and knows intimate details about her and her husband, Jack, and their two daughters, Tia and Leisha. Sometimes Tia and Leisha come over for the day if they don’t have school and Queenie and the girls have Parcheesi tournaments in the kitchen, just like Violet and Rose and Queenie did decades before.

After taking her last bite of sherbet, Miss Temple nods, a signal to Violet that she is finished.

As Violet clears the table, Miss Temple pats Violet’s hand and thanks her.

Violet swallows a gasp and shoots an alarmed look in Queenie’s direction. Miss Temple never touches anyone, especially not a servant. Nor does she thank anyone for anything. If saved from a raging river, Miss Iris Temple of the Savannah Temples would expect her rescuers to thank her for the privilege of keeping her alive. Hubris she may have inherited from her father, a man who supposedly never liked children and made a daily practice of ignoring her. It is this fact alone that helps Violet tolerate her.

Queenie signals for Violet to save herself, but Violet refuses to leave. Miss Temple is up to something big. Something that feels dangerous. After having observed her employer for over twenty years, Violet knows one thing for certain: a predator is still a predator, even with claws retracted.

Miss Temple stands and stares at Violet like she is seeing her for the first time.

“Iris, are you sure you’re all right?” Queenie asks. “You’ve had a big day with the threat of the
Book of Secrets
getting released.”

“Of course I’m all right,” she says, her tone dismissive. But she doesn’t look
all right
at all. This crisis seems to have cracked her hard exterior, at least for now.

Violet and Queenie follow Miss Temple into the foyer, where she announces she’s going to bed early because she has a big day tomorrow.

At the base of the grand staircase, Miss Temple gives Violet a quick, tight embrace in a rare act of affection that feels more like a frontal version of the Heimlich maneuver that Violet learned in a Red Cross class. In response, Violet lets out a short gasp, waiting for her ribs to crack, and then lowers her eyes wondering if she should be terrified or relieved.

Miss Temple lets out a belch to rival her other emissions for the day and says, “Damn voodoo curse,” glancing back like she holds Queenie responsible.

Ascending the spiral staircase, Miss Temple discharges a slow windy release of gas with each step, like a lonely train whistle fading in the distance.

CHAPTER THREE

Queenie

The next morning Queenie chews a fingernail as she wonders who is behind releasing the coming secrets. Iris picks up the morning paper, skips the society section entirely and goes straight to the classifieds. Queenie lost sleep the night before, worrying that her secret might be the first one revealed. She imagines there are many people in Savannah with this very same fear.

As Iris runs a finger down the column, Queenie covers her ears awaiting the scream but hears a shriek instead. Iris’s lips disappear into her scowl.

“Who is doing this?” Iris points at Queenie as if she should know.

Queenie has no idea who is behind it. If she did she would offer them every penny in her savings account to keep her biggest secret out of the newspaper. Meanwhile, in all the years she’s known Iris, she has never seen her this unnerved. In a way, she finds it as refreshing as those scented dryer sheets Iris hates so much.

Iris throws the newspaper at Queenie and pieces cascade to the floor. Despite a personal visit to the newspaper and another trip to her attorney, the first secret has appeared anyway.

“Get the car,” Iris orders. She walks out of the sunroom and climbs the stairs heavy-footed like a child in the midst of her second tantrum in as many days.

Queenie quickly gathers the newspapers and reads the first secret in the classifieds:

Several Savannah patriarchs have mixed-raced children.

Contact Iris Temple for more information: 912-944-0455.

Queenie lets out a guffaw to go along with the relief she feels that the secret released is not one of her own. Even though she is of mixed-race, that scandal is old news. Almost immediately, the phone rings in the hallway and Queenie answers it.

“Keep your damn mouth shut,” a male caller says, before a loud click severs the call.

“Uh, oh,” Queenie says. She’d better warn Violet not to answer the telephone today.

An hour later, Queenie sits in the waiting room of Bo Rivers, Iris’s attorney, someone who probably has his own share of secrets in Iris’s book. Queenie wonders if he’s someone who actually might have access. It would be just like Iris to store a copy with her legal representative in case the banks failed. Iris could be a little paranoid sometimes.

Behind a heavy door Queenie can hear Iris’s raised voice and the low mumblings of Bo Rivers as he tries to calm her. Seconds later Iris appears from behind the door and slams it, and then strides past Queenie who scurries to follow. For an old lady, Iris has some pep. It reminds Queenie of when power walks were in fashion. Not that she ever did one.
Wouldn’t want to ruin my girlish figure,
she says to herself, and slaps her large hip. She has never understood why white women have to be skinny to be happy. Even Oprah falls for it from time to time.

Later that afternoon, Queenie waits in the grand foyer where the telephone has not only been unplugged but removed entirely. It is Queenie’s job to accompany Iris to the Piggly Wiggly grocery store across town. All household errands are relegated to Queenie, with the exception of one, which Iris insists on doing herself. This errand is to order exotic meats from Spud Grainger, the butcher at the Piggly Wiggly, with whom Iris had a storied affair in the 1970s. An affair—Iris told Queenie after having too much sherry on All Souls Day in 1983—that she blames on an article she read in
Vogue Magazine
concerning the free love movement.

Free love or not, what that man ever saw in her, I will never know
, Queenie thinks.

“How do I look?” Iris asks, her scowl softened. She joins Queenie with purse and keys in hand and dabs at her hair as though it might actually move.

“You look, uh, stately,” Queenie says.
And pissed,
she thinks, but she’s not about to say that to Iris.

“I’ve decided to put the morning behind me and go to the market as planned,” Iris says. Her face twitches, the closest she comes to a smile.

Queenie doesn’t voice her skepticism. She’s never known the Temples to keep the past behind them, and they have a house full of ghosts to prove it.

Though she can afford a multitude of chauffeurs, Iris insists on driving herself. Queenie follows Iris out the front door and around the side to the carriage house. Although cutting through the kitchen would make much more sense, Iris refuses to use any door that might be considered a servant’s entrance.

Once inside the car, Queenie buckles up and says a silent prayer that they reach their destination unharmed. Then she kisses the sweet grass bracelet her mother gave Queenie for protection. Between the good lord and her mama’s Gullah magic, she figures she has her bases covered.

Despite the snail-paced speed, a drive with Iris always proves harrowing. As far as Queenie can tell, Iris has never once used the rear-view or side mirrors on her black Lincoln Town Car. Instead, she uses the sidewalks in town as a kind of bumper car railing, to keep track of the edge of the road. All because Iris is so vain she refuses to wear her eyeglasses in public. What Iris lacks in accuracy, she makes up for in spite. Anyone she endangers with her recklessness, she deems somehow deserving. Some days it is all Queenie can do to not hang out the window and scream, “Get out of the way,” to unsuspecting pedestrians on sidewalks up ahead.

In the fire lane near the entrance of the Piggly Wiggly, Iris brings the Town Car to an abrupt stop and ejects herself from the car while leaving the engine running. The persistent alarm from inside the Lincoln does nothing to remind Iris that she may want to turn off the car and take the keys out of the ignition. Queenie completes the task and reminds herself that someday she will have to take the car keys away from Iris on a permanent basis, an action she looks forward to about as much as back-to-back root canals. Iris is not the type to give up control of anything, especially large, life-threatening motor vehicles.

With the sophistication of Savannah royalty, Iris enters the Piggly Wiggly. Queenie follows not far behind as store employees exchange their usual looks, as well as a few new ones. Queenie guesses that word has spread about the
Temple Book of Secrets
. Although Savannah is not a small town, it has some similarities. Gossip is savored, chewed, swallowed and then digested until it comes out the other end as compost, which is then used to create more secrets.

Iris walks down aisle three toward the meat department in the rear of the store. Despite being eighty years of age, her posture is impeccable, as if a flag pole extends from crown to coccyx. And though she is of normal height, perhaps five feet, seven inches, she seems much taller than everyone else. Even her wrinkles appear to align themselves properly and her solid white hair is coiffed to perfection like she and the Queen of England share hairdressers.

Queenie serves no particular function on this outing except to fulfill her half-sisterly duty as companion and keep her mouth shut. Afterward, she will get her hair washed and relaxed at the Gladys Knight and the Tints Beauty Parlor located in the shopping center adjacent to the Piggly Wiggly, a reward she looks forward to all week.

Iris arrives at the meat counter and gingerly clears her throat to get Spud Grainger’s attention. When this doesn’t work, Iris crescendos her query from
pianissimo
to
forte
. He turns around, causing Queenie to think:
If there was ever an example of love’s blindness, it is Spud Grainger’s affection for Iris Temple
.

Their affair began two years after Iris’s husband, Oscar, died unexpectedly of a massive heart attack while in a compromising position in his office with Queenie. Spud Grainger was a bag boy at the Piggly Wiggly at the time and a part-time jazz musician. The affair ended after six months, at Iris Temple’s insistence. Heartbroken, it is rumored that Spud Grainger never played the saxophone again.

“My dear Iris Temple,” Spud says, his southern accent smooth and lilting. “You get more beautiful every day.”

“Oh, Mr. Grainger. How very kind of you.” Iris radiates a smile that has received very little exercise over the years and her bottom lip quivers with the effort. Once weekly, Queenie marvels at her half-sister’s transformation into a somewhat pleasant human being while in Spud Grainger’s presence. Not to mention it is extra impressive that Iris can do this amidst the hullaballoo around the
Book of Secrets
.

Spud Grainger is not a day over sixty and has aged well. A solid white mustache hides his slightly crooked front teeth. He also has an affinity for bow ties. Today’s tie is lime green, with thin red stripes that match the beef tips on special, displayed in the glass case in front of him.