The Day's Heat Page 22

  “My god, she couldn’t have. she’d have been too weak.”

  “I have it right here before me; a copy of the discharge.”

  “How did you manage that?”

  “I have my ways,” Algebra laughed, sneaky pleased.

  “Have you told Father Palmer?” It was good to have someone to say his name to.

  There was a bit of silence on Algebra’s side and then, “Why? why should I?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. Because the poor woman suffered so long and her child died.”

  “But she’s not Catholic. There’s nothing here in the space for religion.”

  “But I think I heard her call on Jesus. I’m sure she’s a Christian.” Somehow Lee was also sure that Algebra wouldn’t see that Catholic and Christian were one and the same thing.

  “But not Catholic,” Algebra said again, and then before Lee could answer, “I must say good-bye now, Lee. I did so enjoy our talk this afternoon.”

  “Me, too,” Lee said, not having time to thank Algebra or to question her further.

  The nightlight from her daughters’ room glowed, and Lee stood in the dim hallway for a long minute after she hung up the phone. A disturbed spirit stood beside her, had actually been there ever since Lee came home from the hospital, and only now took on a more substantial form. It was a person with empty arms, one who had suffered much and for nothing. Feeling this person’s loss, Lee leaned forward to say a quick “Hail Mary” in order to touch, comfort, acknowledge, and only a sudden start from Baby Charlie made her realize that once again she had covered his nose and he was struggling to breathe.

  Chapter 15

  A lie serves better than the truth in almost all situations.

  Sir Aubrey Adams

  Dr. Yuller’s six-week ban on driving gave Lee an excuse not to attend Mass, though the face of David Palmer flared in her imagination every time the phone rang, every time someone knocked at the door. She hadn’t seen the priest since the hospital, although Algebra had said he’d been up there every day. Afterwards, the whole of July and August shimmered by without his calling or making an appearance; a stretch of life she wouldn’t remember, but which, in reality, was a reprieve, a waiting-out time. The wire of fascination that had held her for so long now seemed a thin thread of sadness, which she could pick up or lay down. And more and more often, she chose to let it lie.

  The choice had something to do with the three or four times a day she nursed her son, felt the heavy giving slide down into her breasts and saw the pale blue-white milk bubble at the corner of his mouth. She could stop thinking of anything during those moments, for almost an hour. The replete, almost-narcotic sleep that overwhelmed the baby soothed her, too, and when she burped him, he sagged on her shoulder, deeply lost in slumber. She would pull him up by the scruff of his bunched undershirt and lower him into the bassinet like a baby kitten. Cassie and Lill helped with their brother, rocking him endlessly, leaning over and against Lee while she nursed, so that the hot afternoons often found them, four bodies, asleep on the couch in the living room.

  At last the September morning came when Claire didn’t bring Willie Mae to help, and after Charles left for work, Lee dressed Cassie for her first day in first grade and drove her to St. Anthony’s along with Lill and the baby. Cassie wore a St. Anthony’s navy-blue and white plaid skirt and white starched blouse. Lill did, too. The little girl had set up such a howl to have the same as her big sister that Lee had made an extra one when she sewed Cassie’s school uniform skirts. Book bag, brown paper sack lunch, the wrapped baby and his diaper bag, Lee juggled it all as they got out of the car and walked toward the beckoning arms of a poster-sized Sacred Heart of Jesus taped to the open metal door of the classroom. Looking out at the pecan trees, Lee marveled that not even a full year had passed since that November morning when David Palmer’s tooth was knocked out.

  Inside, Sister Margaret, the first-grade teacher, 200 pounds in a black habit, stood like a monument beside a narrow wooden desk. Her arms were folded under the white bib of the habit, and her dewlaps were squeezed into folds by the wimple as she turned from side to side, surveying the first graders. The tiny desks held the miniature students, each one shining, each one rich in new shoes, new uniform, new book bag, and new pencil box. Toward the front of the room, a step apart from everyone else, a circle of distance around them, a light-skinned colored woman in a white nurse’s uniform stood next to a small dignified chocolate-brown boy with close-cropped hair. Father Palmer stood to one side of the pair as if perched on the edge of a circle.

  Was he escorting, hovering, guarding? Lee couldn’t tell. She looked away, rearranged Baby Charlie in her arms, and took Lill to stand next to the wall with the other mothers who had come to see their first graders off on the first day. Keeping her eyes on the baby’s gleaming forehead, she mentally listed what she’d done in preparation, in case the priest took notice: her children and herself, washed and brushed and fussed over, all with an eye to how things went together, of how they would look to him. Cassie’s and Lill’s black leather shoes with a buckle across the top were not unlike the low heels Lee herself was wearing, her son’s pale-blue blanket against the new tailor-made, top-stitched navy blue of her dress. We make a nice picture, she assured herself.

  Father Palmer, in what Lee recognized now as his official voice, said the opening prayers, ticking off who was to be thanked, all the way up to God—precisely the same way that Sister Ellen used to do. Then he dedicated the coming school year to the dead principal: “Sister Ellen Russell’s memory will live here as long as there is a St. Anthony’s school.”

  Little enough, Lee thought, and then the priest was leaving, saying he had to give the same speech for the other grades.

  Lee gave herself permission to breathe.

  Sister Margaret spoke, her voice taking on more authority as Father Palmer left the room. She welcomed the children and parents and then read from a long list of what the first graders would learn in the upcoming year: the Sign of the Cross, all the important prayers—there were three—the first third of the Baltimore Catechism, all the numbers and letters, the basics of reading and math, the etiquette of toilet and cafeteria, and the Pledge of Allegiance to the Flag—starting now.

  The large nun placed her great hand across the stiff white of the wimple and with a faint following of mothers’ voices and an even fainter one of students began: “I pledge allegiance ….”

  Then, the huge nun dismissed the parents, and Lee escaped with Lill and Baby Charlie, giving thanks on the way to the car that all the numbers and all the letters, and all the important prayers did not loom before her to learn in one short year.

  At the car, it was an act of discipline to lay Baby Charlie down on the front seat and steer Lill into the back and avoid looking to see if the priest was still on the grounds, perhaps by now out under the trees, raking up the leaves to begin a new season of pecans. Instead, Lee fixed her eyes on the paved road leading out of St. Anthony’s and forbade herself to look back. As she drove, she told Lill, “We have a busy day ahead of us, girl, and we’ll practice Cassie’s lessons together this evening, so you’ll be the smartest girl to start kindergarten next year. First, we’ll straighten the house, and then put in the wash, and then do the sewing, and then tonight learn the ABCs—not just the song—and then we’ll eat supper, and then we’ll all go to bed.” Lee wanted to add a few more “and thens,” but there were not enough and thens in the world to take up the empty place in her chest.

  “We have our health, don’t we, Lill?” she asked, not having an inkling of what brought that observation on, except it’s what her father often said when his wife was in the hospital drying out, or perhaps it was just to make her daughter respond to the sound of another human voice. But Lill had opened her sack lunch and was eating the peanut butter sandwich, concentrating in between bites on digging the thick stuff off the roof of her mouth with a finger.

  Lee wanted to ask her daughter other questions: “Did you
see that little colored boy up near the front with his mommy? What do you suppose Cassie and the other children will think?”

  But she didn’t. She remembered St. Jerome’s church steps, her daughters playing with the colored children, free of all thoughts of difference. Instead, she said, “My word, girl, can’t you answer? Can’t you say anything? Cat got your tongue?” It was her mother’s question. Poor old Darcy, Lee thought. She must have been lonely, like me.

  That evening, Charles bellowed from the kitchen, “Where’s my beer?” like a wounded moose. “Where the hell’s my beer?”

  Lee on the couch, nursing Baby Charlie, could tell by the lack of any other sound from the kitchen that he was standing, holding the refrigerator door open, looking in at the crowded shelves as if hoping a beer bottle would jump out and into his hand.

  “In the same place it was yesterday, just a little farther back, behind the milk,” Lee yelled, equally loud, matching her husband’s angry pitch exactly, making the baby in her arms shiver. She’d known when putting the gallon milk jugs on the top shelves that she was pushing her husband’s beer bottles to the back, effectively hiding them from him as if she’d put them into a closet.

  Charles bought the long-necked bottles by the case, kept a dozen or more on the bottom shelf, and moved them up to the top in sixes, lined up next to the wall where he could pull one out with hardly a glance. Through the seven years of their marriage, Lee had gone along with the arrangement: she cut melons in half, turned milk jugs on their sides, shifted catsup and pickle jars, all to avoid blocking his reach to the brown bottles. If it meant so much to him, why not?

  But since coming home from the hospital, she’d realized that the beer, along with his other rules of place—underwear and socks in a certain drawer, a comb on the back of the commode, his recliner down, no toys in the driveway—were the only things that pulled Charles into her and the children’s world, pulled her husband into words. And then it was in a loud complaining way that seemed to justify more evenings off with Brother for a few more beers. Her furious responses, a blend of her mother’s drunken courage and the thought that she had no such sacred places, seemed to amaze Charles but also to goad him into repayment. He’d spent three nights at the Bettlemains’ in the last two weeks. “I got too sloshed with Brother to come home,” was his explanation.

  Now, he hollered from the kitchen, “God damn it, woman! Can’t a man have a beer in this place without cleaning out the frigging box?”

  “That’s a wonderful idea,” Lee called back gravely, softly, so as not to make Baby Charlie startle again. “Clean out the refrigerator every time you get a beer. It could use it.”

  In the kitchen, Charles answered with a fierce shifting and clanking of glass on glass. Coming into the living room, he waved the bottle in between swallows, kicked the recliner’s footrest into the down position, and said, “I’ve had enough of this! You’re doing it on purpose!”

  Lee switched the baby to the other breast and without changing the slight smile she’d given the child, said kindly to her husband, “Then why not leave?” It was the same as the “Cat got your tongue?” question to Lill that morning—a question straight out of her mother’s repertoire; a question from her mother Darcy to her father Abram: “Then why not leave?”

  Charles frowned, a bulldog grimace, his narrow lips drawn down at the corners, and said, “You say that. Think that damn sewing money’s gonna get you by, but you’ll play hell without me round here to take up the slack!”

  “I mean it,” she said, still softly. “Go. You’re not getting all the care you deserve. Go back to your wonderful family and stay there.”

  Laughing a wet snort, Charles shook his head, unconsciously taking on his father’s face, set and blotchy. “You better hope your fat ass I don’t move back with my folks.”

  Lee saw it was a thought he’d considered and wondered at the anger that filled the room, wondered that her milk didn’t curdle with the acid she felt at the back of her throat. Charles shifted in the recliner, put the foot rest down, rose to change the television channel, spun the dial—metal grating—thrust the footrest of the recliner up and down each time with an angry jerk. It was the same way he’d driven the truck home from the hospital.

  Four years ago, coming home with the new baby, Lill, Lee had tried not to cry; he could have looked over and seen tears shining through her eyelashes. And tonight, she caught his sidelong appraisal, between the angry adjusting of the set and the chair, a watching in his eyes.

  What does he want, need? she wondered. So to soothe him, and, because it no longer mattered, she rubbed her eyes hard with her fingers, as though trying to hold back the tears. Give him something besides calmness and humor, she reasoned, or he might hit you. And the pretense costs nothing, she added.

  “And what will you do when it costs?” something inside asked back.

  Seemingly satisfied, Charles flipped the lever of the chair still farther back, stretched and scratched his stomach, and watched the television screen with heavy, empty eyes.

  Now, that he wasn’t looking, she smiled again at the baby at her breast. Did Charles know about the first payment of her weekly allowance from Lon? Fifty dollars in an envelope, more than she’d hoped for. Claire laid the white rectangle on the dining-room table as though there was something embarrassing about passing money from hand to hand. Lon probably wouldn’t mention the allowance to Charles since he never seemed to discuss anything with his sons except their autumn passions: football, hunting, and fishing. But would Claire let it slip? Lee tried to invent the scene: “Charles, your father started Lee on her allowance this week.”

  But Lee knew that wouldn’t happen either. The son’s and mother’s conversations were limited to minor repairs around the house, food and whether Charles liked a particular dish or not. Lee knew the money was hers to spend or to save.

  You’re a manipulative little miser, as bad as a Silas Marner counting his coins, she silently accused herself but kept adding. She’d put $15 of Lon’s $50 in the savings account in the morning, keeping out $5 for Willie Mae. Tomorrow, the deposit would bring the balance to over $1,000.

  The account had grown even though Ray’s donations had grown farther and farther apart; only one during the month of August, $200, making up in size for what it lacked in timeliness. And in spite of her promise to Claire, Lee had kept on sewing, hiding the bundles of clothes in the back closet, only pulling them out at night or when her mother-in-law wasn’t around. There seemed to be some great need to make as much money as she could, a necessity to shore up against some disaster on its way.

  A savings account won’t do you a damn bit of good if there’s a nuclear bomb, she warned herself. The newspapers were full of the need for bomb shelters and a private supply of water. But it will help with anything short of that, she countered.

  Baby Charlie’s small comma of a body curved against hers so closely that he might as well still be inside.

  The following Thursday night was an entirely different matter. Someone on the job had told the Bettlemain men that the Catholic school was integrated.

  “Why in the hell didn’t you tell me on Monday? You knew them niggers were gonna be there all along, and you just didn’t bother!” Charles, growling, loomed in the side doorway.

  Lucky, Lee thought, that it was after eight o’clock and the girls were in bed, although she knew they could still hear, were probably listening to every word, as she had once listened to her parents’ arguments.

  “You weren’t here to tell,” Lee said. “It was one of those nights you stayed over at your folks.” Her excuse wasn’t true, but Charles wouldn’t remember. Was the world full of men like Charles, who could be told anything, even about themselves, because they didn’t keep track of the days or the hours?

  A blue vein pulsed in her husband’s thin hair line, and he slammed the door and answered with angry curse words that she pretended not to hear.

  I should be afraid, she thought, looking back
over their arguments through the years, her appeasements, as if seeing them in a progression of mirrors, the tiny almost imaginary slights in the beginning growing into this ugly reality.

  “Cassie’s not going to St. Anthony’s tomorrow, ya hear!” he bellowed. “She’s gonna go right down the road to B. F. Rutledge where she should have gone in the first place!” Charles took on a more pronounced country twang when he hollered, a swagger as he hitched his dirty work pants up, the same belly thrust of that man, George Wallace, standing in the doorway of the governor’s mansion in Alabama.

  “There’s only one little colored boy in first grade,” Lee said. “His mother’s almost white, and she’s a nurse. And the public schools are going to be integrated soon anyway.”

  “It ain’t gonna happen in Strickland. And Cassie ain’t going to St. Anthony’s no more, not with those niggers!”

  “There’s just one.”

  “No, there’s three, in other grades, but it don’t matter. They ain’t gonna last long!”

  Were there three? How did he know? But as she’d learned—the silence of captives—she didn’t ask. She stood, watching herself in the Sear’s mirror, pinning her hair to one side with a white mother-of-pearl barrette, a dollar purchase at the St. Anthony’s Thrift Shop. It caught rainbow flashes in her dark curls, matched the sheen of the crepe robe she put on now only in the evenings. She turned in profile, admiring the span of white material that flowed from her shoulders, slid her hands down over her full breasts as if she were alone. The nipples tightened and showed through the cloth. Ray’s turquoise pendant lay, safe in its nest. I will never look better, Lee silently told her reflection, but what does it matter? Who am I trying to please, or to entice?