Where We Are Now (8 page)

Uncle George, judged 4-F at the war's beginning, kept serving his country his own way by continuing his business and looking after Miss Kate's rental property. Mother, after our long period of mourning, began confiding in me.

“I suppose you know George is involved with Marguerite.”

By then I knew she meant Uncle George spent his nights in Marguerite's bed.

“Is he going to marry her?”

“I doubt it. Your grandmother is against it.”

Marguerite had been around, according to Mother, longer than George's other women. When I was nine she had given a birthday party for me. Marguerite's party was on a grander scale than any I'd ever known, especially during the war. Other people hardly made cakes because of sugar rationing; Marguerite's cook Ada provided a three-layer
chocolate cake with my name written in white on it. She served it where I sat at the head of a long dining table with a bell hidden underneath the carpet to call the cook. My only problem was that children, dying to press it, had to be fended off by my equally hidden kicks. Marguerite's house, a large old one with white pillars and a long paved brick front porch, was near enough to Franklin for Uncle George to get there quickly. There was a small bar downstairs near the pantry, a larger one upstairs. I'd never seen a bar inside or out of a house. The upstairs one had three tall stools and on one wall, a Mexican sombrero. I climbed on one of the stools, put my elbows on the bar's shiny surface, and studied the sombrero. Multi-colored straw, its colors looped in bands spiraling bright green, yellow, purple, pink to a conical top. What would it look like on someone's head?

“Nobody would wear that hat,” said Mother.

I also liked Marguerite's canopied guest bed, the balcony over-looking the porch, a library walled with books, and Ada's family who lived nearby. Her husband farmed the place and their children, Doug and Emily, and I took turns swinging each other in a big hammock between two trees in the front yard. They were the only black children my age I had ever been around in a casual, friendly way. Everything seemed easy at that house. I was in favor of Marguerite. How could Grandmother keep Uncle George from marrying her?

“I don't think he really wants to marry. Besides … Marguerite drinks, and she's Catholic. Your grandmother is Church of Christ, don't forget.”

I didn't understand the Protestant-Catholic clash, but I knew Miss Kate was a great believer in her own form of religion. And I did understand drink. Both my grandfather and my father drank. The way Mother weighted the word, I knew she wasn't talking about cocktails before dinner or party drinking; she meant that Marguerite got drunk on
some uncertain personal schedule. And no one could change her. Mother and Miss Kate took a fatal attitude toward alcoholism—they never used the word. Miss Kate would take a glass of sherry, and Mother enjoyed an occasional drink. Getting drunk was reserved for men and, I supposed, a few women like Marguerite.

Even when the war was over, the Red Cross wanted Mother to leave town to make speeches; there was a lot of refugee work to be done. I was sent to spend a week with Marguerite. One afternoon she sat out on the front porch, Tom Collins in hand, watching the rainfall. It was a summer when rain drizzled steadily for days.

We rocked in two vast chairs. There were four others, just as large, on the porch. Marguerite frequented springs, those spas where people drank and also soaked in curative waters. Afterward they rocked in the same sort of chairs on hotel porches. Miss Kate, who liked the hot baths at various springs for her arthritis, had taken me with her to one.

Marguerite leaned over and put her glass down on the brick floor. Her eyes were dark and deeply lined. Her hair was dark also except for gray streaks in front. Though the same age, she looked a lot older than my mother.

“You see this ring, Marianne?”

“Yes.” Fire shone through its milky surface.

“It's an opal. George gave it to me. When I die, it will be yours.”

I liked rings, but the idea of someone dying and leaving something to me made the pit of my stomach shrink. I said, “You're not going to … to…. ”

“Everybody dies sometime.” She picked up her glass.

I escaped to the kitchen to make fudge.

Ada took it over when I gave up trying to beat it by hand. “This won't set. Maybe it's not cooked enough. Maybe it's the weather.”

In the wide hall where a grand piano marked the end of the circular staircase, we could hear the notes of a melody I didn't know. The doors to the bar near the pantry were pulled open and, in a few minutes, banged shut. Marguerite walked into the kitchen.

“You want some fudge?” I offered her a gooey pan full.

“Oh, God! No!” She thrust her hand out to push the pan away. Chocolate splattered on the floor.

Marguerite laughed, wheeled around, and almost fell going out the door.

Ada's hand touched my shoulder. “She be all right. She's going to bed soon.”

I looked over at the bright brown globs of chocolate on the polished floor. “Oh, Ada, I'm sorry.”

“Well, come on,” she said. She handed me a spatula and grabbed another one herself. “It never was going to set anyway.”

Ada fed me supper and left for her house in the twilight. I wanted to go with her. It was so quiet in the house, so empty even though I knew Marguerite was in her room. The place seemed full of echoes and odd noises, creaking sounds, water gurgling, wind sighing through shutters. By the time dark fell, the soft rain had given way to a storm which the canopied bed's ceiling and side curtains couldn't shut out. Rolls of thunder woke me. I sat up clutching a pillow. Marguerite didn't come to check on me. There was no one to call. Uneasy dread made me certain I had outstayed my welcome, and I had to be there three more days. Mother was still in Memphis. My grandmother had gone to visit someone. Where was Uncle George?

He turned up the next day. I couldn't see him though I
could hear his voice in the next room. I tiptoed to the hall and caught sight of him standing in front of the fireplace where blue dragons curled around two huge Chinese porcelain vases on either side of the hearth near his trousers. The sun shone outside. Drops still slid down the dining room windows, but Uncle George's accusing voice was a dry wind rasping through Marguerite's house.

“The war's hardly over, and you're running off to Europe to find cousins three or four times removed.”

“Of course I'm going. What's left of my mother's family—”

“Marguerite, you just got back from Florida last week.”

“You should have gone with me.”

“Some people have to work for a living.”

Marguerite laughed. She went to Belgium, stayed six months, and after she returned she and Uncle George spent a week in Hot Springs together. Marguerite introduced him to Jean, a rich Texas widow who George married in a little town in Arkansas.

“I wish I had been a fly on that preacher's wall,” said Miss Kate.

Mother sighed and told me, “Mama can't even imagine somebody getting married without a preacher. George probably married in a J. P.'s living room.”

“What about Marguerite?”

“Oh honey, Marguerite never really wanted to marry George.”

After Uncle George brought Jean back to Franklin they bought Marguerite's house, and she moved to California. Everybody seemed to be moving after the war was over. My first cousin Fergus came back from California to Tennessee with Aunt Lucy and Uncle Phillip. Half the people I went to school with were going to other states. Families were combining and recombining. It was a restless time.

Six years later, when I was off at a Virginia girls' school, I received a small box in the mail from Uncle George. He never wrote to me; I wondered if he wrote to anyone. Not until I opened the gray velvet ring box and saw the milky opal winking fire, did I know Marguerite was dead.

I sat on the edge of my bed and cried the easy tears of the young saddened by the death of someone they had known. The next one came harder.

My mother, restless herself in her peacetime Red Cross job, had gone to Europe. The small plane she took from Mallorca to Barcelona plunged into the sea. It may have had engine trouble. No one seemed to know what had truly happened. That flight was the first leg of her trip back to Nashville.

Miss Kate suggested her church in Franklin for the memorial service. The idea of people standing up, one of them blowing a pitch pipe—the Church of Christ didn't believe in musical instruments—to sing over an emptiness as vast as the drowning sea was unbearable.

“No,” I said, “we'll do it in her church here,” and called the minister. Miss Kate might try to have her way with me, but she wouldn't argue with a preacher.

For once Uncle George didn't have any say in the matter. Jean had restored Marguerite's house, redecorated it with her own antiques as well as the ones George bought, joined a bridge club and a Methodist Church. George, as my grandfather had done with Miss Kate, attended it with Jean only on Easter. His father had been baptized and buried by the Methodists; so far he remained completely unchurched. My mother, like her brother, fled Miss Kate's beliefs. She'd
joined my father's church. At her memorial I insisted on sitting alone; the rest of the family lined up behind me. I asked the minister to read the prayer for the burial of the dead at sea.

“Her body already committed to the deep,” he amended the borrowed Episcopal prayer while I sat numbly trying to recall my mother's face and voice.

Two weeks afterward I went to Uncle George's office again. Mother's lawyer, Lucius Atkinson, was an old friend of George's. They had known each other since grammar school. Lucius's office was on the same side of the square as George's, and they often did business together. He'd chosen what he considered a familiar place.

It looked much the same—there was the rocking chair with the carved ladies' heads supporting the arms, the glossy desk, and to one side, the mahogany table now emptied of its load of papers which, I guessed, had joined the other stacks on the floor. The stuffed owl still glared from his perch on top of the filing cabinet.

Lucius Atkinson, broad faced and gentle, pulled out a chair for me. Uncle George was already seated.

“It's really very simple, Marianne.” He laid my mother's will before me. There were two sheets of typed paper bound in a sheet of blue.

I looked at each page. I couldn't read it. I couldn't even read the witnesses' names. All I could see was her signature. She was named Katherine after her mother, but the curl on the “K” and the slant of the “t,” were entirely her own. My mother's breath seemed to be in that signature, her being spoke in every letter. Startled, I wanted to touch it, then I withheld my fingers. She wasn't there.

“Katherine wrote this when you were still quite young, soon after your father was killed. Everything goes to you. George is to be your guardian until you're twenty-one.”

My family was full of outspoken people. They said what was on their minds. Aunt Lucy and Uncle Phillip were the only quiet ones. From the first grade on my cousin Fergus sassed his teachers. Uncle George complained about the bank's service to the president's face. When Miss Kate told my mother she was simply being willful the day we moved out, my mother had said, “It's a trait I seem to have inherited.”

Lucias Atkinson, unlike the Moores, seldom spoke unless he'd considered his words carefully. When he pronounced “guardian,” loss made me shiver. I'd planned to leave, to run from Miss Kate's unstated yet obvious desire to produce another generation of ladies, to rush away from Aunt Lucy's fluttering wish to help, Fergus's wildness, even Uncle Phillip's kindness. I wanted no part of Uncle George's domination. The early years of travel and those spent in Virginia had widened my view. I meant to escape my family, the state, the South. I'd thought I might go to California to college, then perhaps to France for a junior year in Paris.