The Day's Heat Read online

  Unseeing, Charles walked behind her, took a sentry’s turn in the mirror, still muttering about the niggers, about Lee going behind his back. He set his feet, tried to lengthen his steps but each time came up against the coffee table or the jutting partition that separated the living room from the kitchen.

  “Sit down,” Lee said, and sat down herself; “make yourself at home.” But her husband’s nervous steps told her he’d be leaving soon. It’s what he did when he was waiting for Brother to drive up, to beep the horn outside.

  She watched as his pacing continued. He maneuvered around the furniture, veered across the living room and down the short hall, then reversed to do it all over again until there was a knock on the front door.

  Oh, that’s what he’s expecting, Lee thought, for she could see the expectation satisfied in the back of his neck.

  Charles opened the door to his mother and behind her in a line came Peggy Higgins and then Janet and Bill Hampton.

  The four people filed in, filling the room with a sense of deputation. Claire was breathing hard, and Lee saw, as if for the first time, her mother-in-law’s fleshiness, the clown spots of rouge on her cheeks, the thin white mustache on her upper lip. Peggy and Janet, Lee knew, were from her mother-in-law’s bridge club; in their stiff clothes and importance they could have been her fat and thin sisters. They all had the same pink faces, the same matching fashionable dresses whether the clothes suited them or not. And Bill Hampton seemed made for counterpoint: a stooping, sallow, unhealthy scarecrow of a man, plaid shirt and blue jeans, among the pumpkin women.

  They’re frightened—and frightening. Why are they here? Lee wondered. She shivered, would have liked to turn the heat on even though a gush of warm evening air had come in with the opening of the door.

  “Well, here we are,” Claire piped, touching her throat with fingers that trembled. Charles shook Bill Hampton’s hand and motioned for everyone to sit. To make room, Lee rose and rolled Baby Charlie’s bassinet back into the dim hallway, giving herself a chance to stare at a closed closet door and ask again, “Why are they here?”

  Returning, she found the four people silent, waiting like oversized children for a teacher. Charles and Hampton had taken the only chairs, and the three women sat on the couch, too close, hitching at their girdles, patting their crimped curls, holding their enormous pocketbooks on their laps.

  “Would you care for some coffee or tea?” Lee offered, standing by the dinette table, drawing herself up straighter, ready if they refused, to pull a chair out and sit as far away from them as possible—not in the same room—outside their sway, whatever that was. “There are still some brownies.”

  “I didn’t even get to see the baby,” Peggy started, but Janet fanned the air with a speckled, ringed hand, and bleated: “That’s not what we’re here for, Peg, and you know it.”

  Lee sat then, felt Hampton’s eyes follow her hands as she draped the soft white robe out across her slippers. She had an urge to pull the cloth up in front of her face so as not to see those visitors or her husband, who sat on the armrest of his recliner. But she couldn’t resist looking. It was as though the details were magnified, menacing: the stiff ruche of lace that folded into Janet’s thin crinkled throat, the black and white dress that girded Peggy’s body in wide convict stripes, and Claire’s pale blue, a color someone had once said matched her eyes, condemning her to that watery choice ever since.

  Why am I so nervous? Lee asked herself. She smoothed her knees and waited, holding back an impulse to say: “Excuse me, you must have business to discuss with Charles. I have to go to bed, right now.”

  “I don’t know where to begin,” Claire started in slow, halting tones. “It’s hard for us, Lee. We’re not Catholic, you know. We don’t really understand how you people think.”

  “Where’s Lon?” Lee asked, not looking at her mother-in-law but folding the cloth of the robe on her thigh into five narrow pleats and then releasing it only to fold again.

  “Oh, uh, he couldn’t come—uh, what I mean ….” Claire began anew.

  “What she means is she don’t want her grandkids going to school with no damn niggers,” Charles blurted, standing, starting to pace all over again in the tiny square that was left in front of the coffee table. “You don’t have to worry, Momma,” he said, turning his head in his mother’s direction, cutting the air in front of him with a rigid hand. “I’m taking Cassie out of St. Anthony’s tomorrow morning and putting her in B.F. Rutledge!”

  The other two women, careful not to touch each other’s elbows, objected, in unison, “No! No! That’s not what we want. What we want is to bar the school in the morning. Put sawhorses across the streets. keep them darkies from coming in.”

  For Lee it all came clear in a rush: they all had children in St. Anthony’s school.

  Hampton hocked a noise in the back of his throat as if calling for attention.

  The women on the couch immediately hushed.

  Lee wanted to say, “Speak, oh oracle. Tell us what we should do.”

  On Janet’s bridge afternoons, Hampton, a shoe salesman at Belks Department Store, was considered a nuisance, standing first at one table and then another, making foolish jokes, kibitzing on the women’s cards and their manner of playing. But now, he seemed to have found a new and better role to play, to be useful—to be someone.

  Hampton closed his eyes slowly, opened them, and swallowed. “Let’s be reasonable,” he said in a sonorous, almost tearful drawl. “We sent our kids to St. Anthony’s against our better judgment in the first place—to keep them away from people who didn’t care about a good education for their kids.” At this, as though practiced, he swallowed and closed and opened his eyes again. “Let’s face facts. Soon the public schools will be integrated, I can see it plain. Then before long, it’ll be fifty-fifty, colored on white.” The sad repugnance of this thought pulled Hampton’s lips into a ragged crescent that seemed more like a cut in his face than a mouth. “But if we can keep St. Anthony’s segregated, pure ….”

  As he spoke, Lee continued pleating the cloth that covered her leg, and she started humming again. Anything, so as not to be like these people, so focused on this man’s slow sermonizing. She remembered a small piece of the silk fabric left over that she could smock into a nightgown for Lill. She bent her head over the folds, seeing how the smocking would look, and hummed only slightly louder than the September moths outside, beating against the window screen. Beyond the pleating and humming, she realized that Hampton had, at last, stopped talking and was waiting for a reply—from her.

  She glanced up and back down again, breathed in, and said, “Well ….” Then she stood, the line of pleats falling away from her fingers. “Since this had nothing to do with me, I really am very tired, nursing the baby at night and all ….”

  “Lee!” Charles ordered.

  “No, Mrs. Bettlemain! Please!” Hampton held up his arms like a traffic policeman. “You must help us. We’ll all go to Father Palmer and that other old Reverend in the morning. We’ll be united … head up a delegation ….”

  “It won’t do any good.” Lee held back a chuckle. “Father Palmer’s the reason St. Anthony’s is integrated in the first place. He’s the cause of it all. And the other ‘old Reverend’ (be glad he didn’t hear you call him that) is retired. Besides, as you said, the public schools are going to be worse in no time at all, so you’re stuck with us, the Catholics. Now, I really must—my baby’s only a few weeks old.” She purposely took on a look of tired suffering and walked from the room, praising herself as she went: I have nerve, she thought, if nothing else.

  Charles’s angry voice followed her down the hall: “Lee, you come back here, this minute!”

  Without answering, she rolled the bassinet into the back bedroom, closed and locked the door, and leaned against it. Her husband didn’t call again.

  With her ear against the rough wood, Lee could hear Hampton’s sad, explaining tone start up all over again, droning through the wal
ls, apparently taking up where he’d left off.

  Without turning on the light, she went to the window, and as though hiding, stood to the side of the lace curtain and gazed out on the uncut lawn of the neighbors next door. Sometime during her stay in the hospital, the Teflers—known only to the street for their shouting, their night-time disagreements—had moved away. Now, the air between the two houses was empty of sound, the windows across the way turned into dark reflecting blanks, and a realtor’s sign stood in the tall grass. Evidently the Teflers’ lives had changed, Lee thought; they’d changed and moved on. She recalled that the houses were not exact duplicates, that the Teflers had hardwood floors like the rectory, only the boards were narrower. She repeated the name of the real-estate company on the sign and tapped her front tooth with a fingernail. I have to make a change, too, she told herself. And all the while the voices from the other room—the women’s lighter, higher, the men’s lower, weightier—continued.

  At last, after what seemed a long time, the delegation—Lee had dubbed them that from the beginning—was leaving. She could hear Charles out in the yard, saying goodbye. She felt like rushing around, doing something, but all she did was, silently—not letting the latch ping—unlock the bedroom door. Then she sat on the edge of the bed and listened to her husband’s heavy footsteps sounding his return back into the house and down the hall.

  If it goes on like this, we’ll take the Teflers’ place, she thought. We’ll be the loud, fighting couple of the neighborhood.

  Charles reached the door and turned the knob with a fierce twist, showing that he thought it might be locked. The catch gave instantly and the door banged against the wall, and off balance, he tipped forward a step into the room.

  “Well, so much for backing me up out there, in front of those people,” he complained, grumbling into the heavy air, cooler now by a bit of wind that came from the window. Framed by the dim light behind him in the hall, he was a black shadow, his thick neck and sloping shoulders those of a Neanderthal man.

  Lee, who had felt a moment of fear when she heard the cars start up and leave, now felt that fear slip away. She turned deliberately on the bed, brought her knees up to her chest, wrapped her white robe under her feet as if settling in for a friendly chat.

  “I only told the truth, Charles. They want to use St. Anthony’s. Keep it their ‘pure’ white school.”

  “What’s wrong with that? There’s gotta be some place we can send our kids with no gov’ment interfering. A man has a right not to ’sociate with niggers if he don’t want to, and not have his kids ’sociating with them neither. Why do they wanna go where they’re not wanted?” He slapped the door frame with an open palm in time with each of his declared points.

  In spite of the resounding smacks against the wood, Lee realized there was a curious sense in what he said, something akin to her father’s long ago declaration: “Wait till those sons o’ bitches beg the Lebanese to join their damn country club.” But in the darkened room, with Charles in the doorway, she was too anxious to reason, to link up connections. Still, somehow on the periphery of her mind, she knew that just like his father, Charles was not going to join the Hamptons in the morning for a protest, if there was one. That this anger, as with all their arguments, was just another excuse for bad temper, to vent dissatisfaction, and now to take Cassie out of St. Anthony’s, which he’d wanted to do from the beginning.

  “Your kids! Your children! When were you ever so concerned with your family? You come home hours after work. You stay overnight at your parents!” She hissed the words, aware that this low threatening response was more effective than his hollering, and it did, for a moment, stop the hand slaps on the door frame.

  How does a mind work? Lee was able to question even as her own thoughts unfolded. Her jeering use of the word “your” sliced the mood of the unlighted room, a downbeat, the beginning of an audible tune from what until that moment had only been a jumble of notes. Hearing, seeing a way out, a way to change, she stretched out defenseless across the bed, grasping in an instant that all her righteous sputtering about “your children” would not change things, would not take care of Charles nearly so well as this idea that had sprung up—a lie so perfect and so fully formed, that it must have been there all the time.

  “Of course,” she said gently. “I can understand why.”

  “What?” Charles stammered. Confused by Lee’s softer words, he took a step closer to the bed.

  “I’ve been meaning to talk to you for some time now, Charles, to tell you something, but I didn’t know where to begin.” Straight out of one of your mother’s soap operas, Lee thought.

  Turn around, there’s no going back: the idea blinked red, but Lee relaxed into the guise she was taking on. Better to be hit by that hand that had stopped slapping the door frame, better to be beaten than to pretend to cry anymore—or to let Cassie go to B.F. Rutledge.

  “We haven’t had a marriage for years, Charles. Wouldn’t you agree?” Make it years; he’ll begin to think it was true. “And I’ve done something terrible.”

  “The charge card?”

  “No, no, nothing that simple.”

  Prepare for a great rage, my dear husband, Lee said silently, a copper taste bubbling up in her mouth and then as if stepping off a precipice. “This last baby …. You know we haven’t had sex in for … forever.”

  Charles moved forward.

  Go on, be done with it! she ordered herself. “This last baby isn’t yours.”

  It was good that the room was in shadow, with only the hall and street light filtering in. Lee didn’t want to see Charles’s face or have to control her own as she waited for the idea, the lie, to take hold, as she rationalized: Baby Charlie could have been David’s. And which one of them deserved the truth?

  “What?” The word had the sound of one of Charles’s plumbing tools clattering in a tool chest in the truck. He took a step closer to the bed and then stepped back.

  “I know. It’s terrible. But I have to make a clean conscience of it before I can make a good confession.” Give him that Catholic stuff. Bound by no religion himself, Lee knew her husband was absolutely sure of hers.

  “I don’t believe it!” Charles said, warily, but without confidence. Lee could feel more than see his eyes narrow.

  “It’s true. And I’m truly sorry.” Here, at least, there was some honesty. Lee felt a great sweeping regret at what she was doing and would keep on doing until he believed. The need to shoot the dog that has been run over.

  “Who? When?”

  Ah, she thought, take a turn, my dear husband, at being bewildered. Wonder at my motivation—if it’s in you to wonder.

  “Who the father is doesn’t matter,” Lee started.

  But before she could finish, Charles was upon her, kneeling on the bed, pulling her up, one hand twisting in her hair, another on her throat.

  “Tell me the bastard’s name, goddamn you, right now! I’ll kill him! I’ll kill you, I swear. He can’t have you!”

  There was a simplicity in his rage that Lee had time to envy, though his fingers around her windpipe had cut off her breath. Ah, the other man. So that’s what’s important? In an alarming clarity, with the blood starting to pound in her ears, she knew she must come up with someone immediately, but she discarded David Palmer’s name in the same instant. That would be too interesting. No telling how that would turn out.

  “It was no one from around here, I swear. Just the one time—just passing through.” She used the image of the traveling salesman of her father’s vulgar stories to the uncles—the jokes she’d overheard.

  Charles shoved her away from him like a snake he’d picked up by mistake. The back of her head hit the headboard, but from inside the biting pain that shot through to her temple, she could still hear him.

  “Just like Daddy told me: ‘Don’t put nothing past foreigners.’”

  Lee closed her eyes and felt in her hair for the knot that was already swelling on the back of her head: warm and
sticky, the blood pulsed out from a small cut on top of the lump. Careful not to let the blood get on the white robe, she rolled to her side of the bed and pulled a pillow tightly across the back of her head.

  Chapter 16

  If you can bear to see the things you gave your life to broken and stoop and build it up with worn-out tools.

  If, Rudyard Kipling

  Lee tried not to shiver as Charles backed up and turned on the light. She tried not draw back as he came to the dresser near the bed and began opening drawers and dropping clothes into ragged stacks on the floor. She watched, keeping the pillow pressed to the back of her head, touching the fingers of her free hand together to feel the blood, sticky at the tips. The possibility of her husband actually leaving seemed unreal, impossible. He moved from the dresser to the bureau, left the room and returned with a grocery bag to put the clothes in. The brown paper sagged, would not stand up straight and stay open. Charles tried to anchor it with his feet, tried to wedge the underwear and socks into the top, but the bag bent along the fold lines.

  “Here, I’ll get you a suitcase,” Lee said, and rose, feeling the blood dribble down her back, knowing she would have to rinse out the white material with cold water as soon as he left. It will give you something to do, she told herself, and went into the hall to get the largest suitcase from her blue honeymoon set, returning and opening it on the floor beside the sack.

  “I’ll bring it back,” he said in a rough voice, without looking at her. “You’ll be needing it.”

  “For what?” Lee asked.

  “Well ….” He stared past her at the wall as if having some private insight into something that only he was entitled to know.