The Undertaker's Daughter (38 page)

“God Almighty, I swear, these Southern daddies, Miss Mayfield, they are somethin’ else, somethin’ else. My daddy’s meaner than hell. I thought he was going to beat the shit out of me when I told him I was queer. Jesus Christ, Miss Mayfield, I was ready to fight him.”

Jemma and I could never figure out if my father knew that Jack was gay, but we took pleasure in watching for signs of such knowledge. Homosexuality was the second great taboo in Jubilee. If anyone in town at that time were actually gay, then they hid in deeper caverns than I did. What amazed me was that only thirty miles away in our small college town the whole world of gay life existed in a discreet but noticeable way.

Jack and I drove from school to Jubilee on a Friday evening, and as soon as we pulled into the driveway, he jumped out and headed straight for my father, who stood outside at the barbecue grilling his famous bacon-wrapped filets mignons from Omaha Steaks. Jack offered him a firm handshake and commented on the house, my father’s car, and the “best aroma in the world coming from your grill, Mr. Mayfield.” He was in.

Jack then went inside to meet my mother, whom he charmed in less than five minutes. My work was done. Everybody was happy. I’d greeted my father at the barbecue for twenty years. He had a habit of opening his arms in welcome with a kitchen towel in one hand and a pair of tongs in the other. He wrapped his arms around me with the instruments of his chefhood protecting my back. It was a good habit. A smiling man with his arms open—that is how I remembered my father just before he became ill.

No one could put a name to his illness. The doctor performed exploratory surgery; I thought it was an ungodly term for a look around inside. Whatever they were looking for, they didn’t find.
They told my mother it was neither his heart nor, surprisingly, his liver that was making him ill.

And like
Bleak House’s
Jarndyce vs. Jarndyce, the lawsuit over the house droned on and on.

The judge overruled a motion that George Davis could intervene. Immediately, Fletcher Hamilton filed another suit, this time including the state attorney general as a defendant. The decision was reversed and the judge ruled that George Davis could indeed intervene and sue my father over the will. In his suit, George Davis, under the guidance of Fletcher Hamilton, asked that the house be kept open to the public as a museum, and that if it was not, Davis should be declared the owner. It was incomprehensible to us that Miss Agnes’s express wishes could be ignored in this way.

My parents’ first choice to represent them was Charles Markham, a man who had been practicing law in Jubilee even longer than Fletcher Hamilton. My parents thought that dipping into the town’s resources was wiser than hiring a stranger from a larger town. But Charles Markham was busy on another big case and persuaded my father to put his trust in Charles’s son, Henry Markham. Henry performed well. He was smart, knew the law, and was not complacent, ever aware of the prevailing wind of his foe. But Fletcher was patient, and he continued to move forward with appeal after appeal.

In the midst of all this, my father began to fall apart.

 CHAPTER 16 

T
he summer my father became ill I decided that if I didn’t go to summer school, I would never pass college math. I sublet an apartment from a guy in the theater department and lived next door to an alcoholic married couple. They were always sunburned and somehow managed to exist without many teeth. The flow of drink into those yawning mouths was ceaseless. My impression from a few drunken remarks was that they were cousins.

Another reason I didn’t want to live at home that summer was because Evelyn had divorced and descended upon the house with her two children. The youngest, a beautiful boy still in diapers, was fathered by Jerry, Evelyn’s postdivorce relationship. At the time it was a disgrace to be unwed and pregnant, and to further her humiliation, Jerry bolted as soon as he was made aware of her pregnancy. For the first time in my life, I felt sorry for Evelyn. However short-lived those feelings would be, I gained no satisfaction in her predicament.

I didn’t like the idea that Jemma was left at home with her because they’d never gotten along, but then, no one ever got along with Evelyn.

My father spent the summer in the hospital in Greenville, and my mother stayed with him twenty-four hours a day. She found a room somewhere near the hospital. I never saw it, but I think it was soulless. She drove the hour and a half home every three or four days, just long enough to grab clean clothes and take care of any pressing business. I drove home from college on the weekends to collect Jemma and then went on to Greenville so that we could spend time with our parents. This was our flight pattern.

One weekend I stopped by my friend Gus’s house in Jubilee before I collected Jemma. The phone rang; Gus answered and handed it to me: “It’s Jemma.”

“I’ll be home in a few minutes to pick you up,” I told her.

“You’ve got to come now.” She was sobbing. “Evelyn is trying to kill me!”

I hung up and looked at Gus.

“What?”

“I’ve got to go. I think Jemma’s in trouble.”

“Call me if you need me. Okay? Call me.”

But I was already running to my car, sensing that Jemma wasn’t exaggerating.

She met me at the door, her whole face swollen. She looked at me through eyes that were not just frightened but anguished and set in bruised red-and-purple skin. I thought I would be sick. Then I was driven to act, not by courage, because I didn’t seem to be in control of my voice or my thinking. I simply took over the situation as if I had always known this day would come.

“Where is she, Jemma?”

“Upstairs.”

“Are you all right?”

“No.”

“Ice, you need ice . . .”

We raided the freezer.

“Check your teeth. Are any of them loose?”

Jemma started to cry and said she didn’t think so. “She knocked me down the stairs. She’s crazy! I swear, she’s psychotic.”

I didn’t hear her. I was already on my way up the stairs. “Stay down here.”

I found Evelyn in the upstairs den.

When she saw me, she stomped over to the telephone. “I’m going to call Mama.”

This completely threw me. “What?”

“I’m going to call her at the hospital.” Evelyn held the receiver in her hand.

“No. You are not going to disturb our mother.” I grabbed the phone from her and put it back on the hook.

She snatched at the phone.

Again I tore it out of her hands. “You are not going to bother her. What are you going to tell her—that you just beat Jemma to a pulp?”

“I’ll tell her that you and Jemma ganged up on me.”

Understanding now that Evelyn was already concocting an elaborate cover story and that she wanted to reach our mother before I did, I held the phone away from her.

Her son toddled by and she scooped the poor boy up in her arms and shielded herself with his little body. “You wouldn’t hit me with a baby in my arms.”

I had no intention of hitting her, but I wanted her to know that I was not frightened of her, either.

“Try me. You are not going to call our mother.”

Evelyn put the child down and went barreling down the stairs. “I’ll just use the phone down here then.”

“Jemma!” I panicked. “Jemma, go upstairs!”

Our younger sister scurried past.

“Go to your room and close your door, Jemma. Put a chair in front of it.” I turned to Evelyn. “Don’t touch her.”

“You fucking sissy! You’re both fucking sissies.” Evelyn laughed.

Downstairs, she picked up the phone. I grabbed it from her and we tussled until I won.

“Who do you think you are?” She had such venom in her voice that for the first time I wondered if I was doing the right thing.

Evelyn walked over to the kitchen drawer and pulled out a knife. She pointed the knife’s serrated blade at my stomach. “I should have killed you a long time ago.”

I can’t say that I wasn’t frightened. I didn’t move or say anything. The room, a large, open-plan kitchen and living room, suddenly felt cramped.

“I should have killed you the night you got caught with Jerry.”

Oh, for Christ’s sake,
I thought. For a moment I forgot about the knife and her fists and answered her from an angry memory. “Evelyn, I was never ‘caught’ with Jerry. I just gave him a ride home. You’re an idiot. I was never remotely interested in him.”

“You’re a liar. He told me you kissed him.”

“
He’s
the liar,” I shot back.

“You’re a goddamn nigger lover. Don’t think I don’t know about that.” She still held the knife. “You fucking mother of a cunt-faced whore!” she screamed.

She moved forward with the knife and I backed away.

“Don’t touch Jemma again. And put that knife away.”

She came toward me again, but bizarrely, this time she seemed to be using the knife to protect herself. Later, I realized that she must have thought I was going to hit her, even though I’d made no move toward her. If that was the case, why she moved in closer was a mystery. She ranted on for a few more minutes, spewing out the kind of language that might be heard in a prison brawl. I guarded the telephone and thought how insane it was that I was protecting a phone.

Suddenly, Evelyn turned and barged up the stairs. I ran after her again, thinking that she was going either for the phone or for Jemma. But this time she grabbed her son like a football and came back downstairs and went straight out the door, cursing under her breath. I locked all of the doors, including the inside door, to which she had no key, and the front door, to which no one had keys except my parents. She couldn’t get back in unless we let her in, or unless we left the house.

Jemma. I ran upstairs to tell her it was safe. She was vomiting. We didn’t know if it was a reaction from fear and nerves or whether it had something to do with the blows she’d received from the fists of our crazy sister. I should have called the doctor, but shamefully, I didn’t even think of it. Neither of us could think of anything other than staying safe and keeping this from our mother, who was already exhausted and anxious from the vigil she kept at my father’s bedside. Jemma stopped throwing up and ran from door to door, checking the locks. She couldn’t stop shaking.

Now that Evelyn was gone, I began to tremble, too. “They’re locked. She can’t get in,” I assured Jemma.

“What if she breaks the door down? She’s crazy. She’d do it.”

“Then we’ll call the police.”

“No, don’t do that. They’ll let her in.” Jemma started to cry again.

“Okay. Okay. We’ll just sit here for a while. She won’t get in, I promise.”

“I was home alone when Evelyn came in with her friend Valerie and the baby. I think Michael is with his other grandmother,” Jemma explained through cut lips.

We sat on her bed. It wasn’t even dark yet. It felt strange that something like this could happen without the cover of night.

“I was watching TV when they came in. I turned around and saw that Valerie was wearing one of my tops. I made a comment about it, and Evelyn . . . she was on her way up the stairs . . . turned and just starting cursing at me in the most horrible language. You’ve never heard anything like it. I followed her because I didn’t want her to go into my room. When we got to the top, she . . . she reared back and knocked me down the stairs.”

“You fell down the stairs?”

“I went down every single one of them.”

“Are you all right? Oh my God, you could have broken your neck.”

“No,
she
could have broken my neck. She came running down the stairs after me. I don’t know. She just lost control. She started beating on me with her fists.” Jemma spoke between little whimpers. “She wasn’t hitting, or slapping. She punched me like a man. She punched with enough power to knock me down. And every time I tried to stand up, she knocked me down again. I tried to hit her back, but it was useless. What do I weigh? About a hundred, a hundred and ten, something like that? Evelyn’s built like a refrigerator. She was punching like a crazy, psychotic person and cussed like an insane sailor.”

“Where was Valerie? What did she do?”