The Goodbye Summer (14 page)

Caddie shook her head, but she did know. She hoped.

“Carl and I wanted children so badly, but in those days there weren’t as many miracles as there are today, so—we just couldn’t. And now look. In my old age, my
golden years,
look what I’ve found. I hope that doesn’t embarrass you.”

“No. No.” Caddie kept her gaze on their touching hands, not quite able to look Thea in the eye. It hardly ever happened that she got her heart’s desire. “I feel the same,” she said in a murmur. “I didn’t have much of a mother. She was a musician. Always leaving. Always…”

The phone rang.

“I didn’t call in the middle of a lesson, did I?”

It was Christopher. “Hi, no, it’s fine. I have company, though.”

Thea made a knowing face. She pointed to herself, pointed to the dining room door, started to get up.

Caddie walked over, pulling the tangled phone cord tight, and pressed her back down. “It’s my friend Thea, from Wake House. We’re just having coffee, sitting here having such a nice—”

“I only have a sec,” Christopher interrupted. “I’ve got an appointment. Just wanted to make sure we’re still on for the weekend before I make the reservation.”

“We absolutely are.”

“You canceled what you had to cancel?”

“Yep.” Nine lessons, three on Friday afternoon, six on Saturday. Rescheduling had been a nightmare.

“Excellent.”

She could hear the smile in his voice. “Excellent,” she repeated, grinning like the Cheshire cat.

“Okay, then we’re on.”

“Who’s driving? I don’t mind driving.”

He laughed heartily. “That piece of junk? No, thanks, I’ll drive.”

“I resent that—my car’s a classic.”

“Classic piece of junk.”

She started giggling and couldn’t stop. This was how most of their phone conversations went, at least on her end.

“Drive it over to my place tonight, though,” he said in a different voice. “I’m dying to see you.”

“Well, I don’t know, what if it broke down? Maybe I shouldn’t take the chance.”

She wanted to keep on teasing him, but he had to go. “See you tonight,” he said, and hung up.

“That was Christopher.”

“I gathered,” Thea said dryly. “Are you going on a trip?”

“I’m so excited—we’re going to Washington for the weekend. He’s only been once, when he was a little boy, so I’m going to show him around.”

“I am
dying
to meet this man.”

“I’ll bring him to Wake House soon—he wants to come. He’ll probably bring King—that’s his dog I told you about.”

“The perfect dog for the perfect man.”

“Oh, Thea. Wait till you meet him.” She gave a tight-shouldered shrug of excitement.

“Is this getting serious?”

“I don’t know!
I’m
serious. Oh, God, I’m so…I finally get what they’re talking about in love songs.” She blushed. “I mean, I always
got
it, but now—I’m
having
it.”

“Ah, that stage. You never forget it. What’s he like, this Christopher?”

“Well…he’s very handsome.”

“Of course.”

“He’s serious, but he’s also funny. He’s a really
good
person. His whole life is like one long good deed, and that makes him happy. I think people who love what they do are so lucky, don’t you? It’s what
makes
them good. You can’t be mean or unkind or nasty if you
love
your work. Anyway, that’s my theory.”

“Don’t you love your job?”

“Well, sometimes. And I’m pretty good at it—that’s satisfying.”

Thea put her elbow on the table, chin on her hand. “What’s missing?”

Caddie hesitated. It was easier to talk about Christopher.

“What would you be if you could be anything?” Thea asked.

She laughed. “Regardless of skill, you mean.”

Thea shrugged. “What would you be? Still a musician?”

“Oh, yes. It’s my only talent.”

“Well, what kind of musician? If you could be
anything.
”

She laughed again—to show in advance that this was all a joke. “Okay, I have this fantasy. That I’m singing the blues in a smoky jazz club. You know, Billie Holiday, Peggy Lee. I’m a lounge singer!”

Thea didn’t laugh. She narrowed her eyes. “Oh, yes, I can see it. You in a slinky black dress with that blonde hair—stunning. Do you sing?”

“Not like Billie Holiday! Ha! No, and anyway, pop music isn’t for me, I’m completely classical, that’s the kind of person I am. It’s all I know, and really, it’s all I want to know. It suits me.”

Thea raised a skeptical eyebrow.

“Plus I get terrible stage fright,” she confessed. Might as well tell Thea everything.

“Stage fright? Really?”

“I used to play the violin in the Michaelstown Community Orchestra, but I had to give it up. Terrified.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know! I wasn’t even
first
violin. I just—” She gave a mock shudder. “I’m too self-conscious, and then I get scared. So I just don’t play in front of people anymore.”

“What a shame. Do you know why Henry took up skydiving?”

“What?” The question was so unexpected, she couldn’t think.

“Do you know why Henry took up skydiving?”

“No. Why?”

“Because,” she said distinctly, looking straight into Caddie’s eyes, “he was afraid of heights.” She got up and carried her cup to the sink. “My cab’s coming. I’d better wait by the door so I can see it.”

Caddie followed her out to the hall, frowning. She didn’t much care for parables. If Thea had advice for her, she wished she’d just come out and say it.

“So you’re going to simplify my song, right?”

“Yes, I’ll either find or make a very rudimentary version, and I’ll tape it, record me playing it. Probably in a different key, something easier than whatever it’s in. For some reason I keep thinking A-flat major.”

“And you’re going to record it
slowly.
”

“Very slowly. Dirgelike. And we’ll use that for our starting point. I have no idea how this is going to work—I hope you won’t be too disappointed, Thea, if it doesn’t. But I have to tell you, you’ve chosen one of the worst songs in the world for your one and only song.”

“But it
is
going to work! You worry too much.”

“But I think it’s wonderful that you want to learn it, I really—”

“You mean,
at my age.
”

“Yeah. No—I mean—”

“I agree with you, I’m very admirable.” She leaned against one side of the screen door, Caddie leaned against the other. “And this is only
one
thing I want to do. I’ve got a whole list.”

“You do? What else is on it?”

“Well, one thing, I definitely want to smoke weed.”

Caddie’s eyes bulged.

Thea laughed gaily. “I do! Everybody in the whole world has smoked pot but me, and I want to try it. You don’t have a dealer, do you?”

“A
dealer
?”

“Or know of one?”

“Sorry.”

“I know—I’ll ask Magill.”

“Good idea,” Caddie said, chortling with her. “He’s probably got a secret stash in his room.”

“Or a plant.”

The taxi pulled up.

Thea got halfway down the walk, turned, and spread her arms wide. “How,” she called back, “
how
could you not love these sculptures? Look at them!”

“I have. Every day for years!”

She shook her head. “Bye—thanks for the lesson. If I don’t see you before the weekend, have a
grand
time in Washington.”

“Oh, I will.”

Thea cupped her ear.

“I’m planning to!”

Dolores, Mrs. Brill’s youngest daughter, drove up from the Washington suburbs once a week to visit. When she heard Caddie was writing down Wake House residents’ life stories, she asked if she would mind writing her mother’s. Caddie said yes, gladly. Mrs. Brill talked about the weather, about flowers, and about the food at Wake House—if it was good; if it wasn’t, she said nothing—and she sympathized with other people’s physical ailments but wouldn’t discuss her own (which must be numerous, since she was forever going to some doctor’s appointment or other). What she never talked about was her personal life, and Caddie was curious. And “Sunday School Teacher, Retired” was a pretty skimpy biography—she was sure she could do better.

They sat out on the front porch on a clear, sunny day, Mrs. Brill, Dolores, Caddie, and Dolores’s seven-year-old daughter, Keesha. Caddie planned just to jot down notes while Dolores chatted with her mother, drawing out dates and major events of her life, but pretty soon she could see things weren’t going to be that easy.

“Mama,” Dolores began, “when were you born?”

“Now, I don’t see why anybody needs to know
that.
” Mrs. Brill had a
daunting way of holding her head back and looking down at you through thick glasses that magnified her eyes and made them seem closer to the lenses than they really were. And she always looked like she was either on her way to church or just getting back.

Dolores didn’t look like her at all. She was a thin, nervous woman in her early fifties, with smart gray eyes and the longest fingernails Caddie had ever seen. Today she had on white capri pants and platform shoes, and a soft perfume that smelled like lilacs. When she turned her head, rows and rows of beads in her hair clacked like dice. “Uh-oh,” she said, crossing her legs and setting her chair to a fast rock. “Question number one, and we’re stuck already.”

Mrs. Brill hesitated, then gave a regal shrug. “September the fifth, nineteen and twenty.”

“She’s a Virgo,” Dolores told Caddie.

“Well,
that
I don’t hold with. What I am is a
Baptist.
”

“What was your maiden name?” Caddie asked.

“Dwiggins.”

“And your first name?” She’d never heard it, she realized; nobody called Mrs. Brill anything but Mrs. Brill.

“Eula Bernice.”

“Tell where you were born and so on, Mama,” Dolores said, “don’t make her drag it out of you.”

“Alamance County, North Carolina, a little town called Ossipee.”

“And you were the seventh of nine children,” Dolores prompted, “and your father was a preacher. The fire-and-brimstone kind.”

“He was a minister of the church,” her mother corrected, with a frown. “We were all in the choir, all nine of us. Papa farmed, too; not tenant land, either, he owned his own plot and raised vegetables and chickens. We all went to school and were expected to do well, and we did.”

“Except for Uncle Clay. And Aunt June.”

“I won’t hear ill spoken of the dead.” She put one hand on her walker, as if to remind everybody she could get up and go anytime she wanted.

“Well, shoot, Mama, you’re the last one. If we can’t speak ill of the dead, we can’t speak ill of anybody.”

Keesha giggled.

Mrs. Brill turned her intimidating scowl on her granddaughter, then smiled.

“You lived in Ossipee till you were ten,” Dolores prodded, “then what?”

“Well, it was the Depression, people couldn’t make a living doing what they used to do, so we moved, all of us except my sister Martha and my brother Tom, who were both married and had families by then. The rest of us moved up north to Wilmington, Delaware, and Papa gave up preaching and found work in a factory that made ready-to-install windows.”

“Was it hard to leave home?” Caddie asked. “Or exciting?”

“It was hard, because I dearly loved that farm. Seemed to me like everybody was happy there and living a godly life. I think back on that time now and it feels like paradise.”

“And Aunt Calla,” Dolores said softly.

“My sister, the nearest in age to me, the one I was closest to, she got a lung disease the first year we were in Wilmington, a dirty, filthy city, and she passed away. Twelve years old. So you could say it was hard leaving home.” She pressed her wrinkled lips together and reared her head back further.

“Mama, tell about the time you saved the little white girl on the pony.”

Keesha, who’d begun to fidget, sat up at that. “You saved a white girl, Neenie?”

“You didn’t know that about your old granny, did you? No, I’ll tell that story later, honey, it’s not the kind of thing I want for this history Caddie’s doing.”

“Oh, Mama, why not? It’s just
exactly
the kind of thing
I
want for it.”

“Maybe, but it’s not your history. Besides, if Caddie wrote down every little thing that happened to me, we’d be here a week.”

“But this wasn’t a little thing. Caddie, when she was eleven, she saved a little girl’s life—the girl fell off her pony and Mama found her and carried her two miles to the hospital in a wagon. She got a reward from the family, and it was even in the newspaper. It’s a
wonderful
story—”

“Which I will tell my granddaughter one of these days when I’m feeling
up to it. Now, the next event that happened was my first marriage, and the less said about
that
the better.”

“What? But you haven’t even mentioned being in show business yet!” Dolores’s hair beads rattled in protest.

“In
show
business,” Caddie said in amazement. Mrs. Brill?

Even Keesha knew about that. “Neenie, tell about the lady you used to sing with.”

“Oh, well, that’s nothing much. I had a brief singing career with my friend Ruth Nash. It was the early 1940s and we called ourselves the Melody Sisters. The most famous place we ever played in was the Sweet Club in Harlem, which of course nobody ever heard of nowadays. Then in ’44 I got married to K. C. Meecham, a bass player, and had my first child the next year. End of my singing career. We had three more children, and then we had a parting of the ways. Ruth got sick and died of TB in 1948.”

Dolores folded her arms. “This is the most
—discreet,
the most
boring
—”

Mrs. Brill gave a loud, threatening cough that silenced her.

“I worked as a maid for three different white women while I raised my children, and in 1952 I got married to Lewis Johnson, a milkman, who had two young children of his own. We moved to Baltimore because he had people there, and I had my last child in 1953.”