The Day's Heat Page 29
“Well, they’ll just have to pay it then, won’t they?” Lee stood, finding at last some righteous ground to stand on. “If they keep taking what you-all dish out, nothing will ever change.” Without wanting to, knowing it wasn’t fair, she aligned the old priest with the segregationists, and from there one step beyond to all men: David Palmer, Charles, even her father-in-law Lon, and her brother-in-law Brother. If she’d accepted those men’s definitions of her, she’d have stayed the same too, been like her mother-in-law Claire.
“You’re not thinking clearly, love. And I can understand, considering what you’ve been through. But Algebra says this alliance will bring disaster.”
The priest’s level tone and his collaboration with the housekeeper gave Lee the quarrel she’d unconsciously been seeking. “Algebra’s like you, wants to keep things the same! It’s to her benefit.”
“Please, dear girl, don’t misunderstand. Miss Algebra has a viewpoint we have to respect. She says the coloreds should cling to their own kind for a time, have their own leadership first before they branch out. Like the Irish did in Boston; as your own Lebanese people did in Atlanta.”
Lee—though she didn’t want to listen to reason; easier to be angry—still could see the old priest’s and Algebra’s logic. Father Kennedy often boasted, as if he’d been there himself: “From the day the Irish landed on the wharves of Boston, and in only fifty years, we had an Irish mayor.”
Lee wondered, How long had the colored people been slaves? How long had they been segregated? It didn’t matter. She’d already told Willie Mae the house was hers. There was no going back.
“It’s too late, Father. Willie Mae expects to move in, and I can’t disappoint her.”
“Think on this, girl, long and hard. What’s going to happen to this woman and her children? To you and yours? Do you want your children to suffer because you’re blind to the place you live in?”
Like Father Palmer, too little and way damn too late, Lee thought, and like him too, making the decision more difficult, placing the burden of the children on her. An image flashed in her mind: National Geographic, an Australian squirrel with its babies, six or seven, too many and too large, but still clinging to their mother’s back. And the mother squirrel hunting, leaping from tree to tree, seeming not to mind in the least.
Lee turned and went into the kitchen, leaned on the counter, admired the arrangement of canisters and the wide uncluttered spaces she’d left in between. Why was it so much easier to keep house now, for her eyes only, than it had been with Charles? And why was no one pleased with the results but herself, and why wasn’t that enough?
“Two traits you Americans have that I cannot abide,” Father Kennedy continued as though Lee still sat at the table across from him. “You believe money will cure all ailments, and you insist on the individual over the community.”
“You’re probably the only person in Strickland who thinks of me as an American,” she argued back softly, doubting the old priest could hear her words.
And as if he hadn’t, he went on. “Selling your house to this woman is not good for her or the community.”
“What about conscience?” Lee asked louder, directing her question to the old man’s back and shaking white head. “What about being able to live where you want, when you want? Like you do?”
“Ha! Dear child. You’re mistaken there.” He turned in the chair to face her. “Do you think for one instant that if I’d had my choice, I’d have chosen south Georgia to live out my last days? Freedom’s an illusion, love. Learn that, and you need learn no more.”
Why was no argument ever one-sided and why did she always have to see both sides? Lee gave in, gave in at least to the tremor in the old man’s great head that now seemed more noticeable, gave in to his lonely resignation, an aura of dolor that could almost be seen, refracted around him from the kitchen light.
She poured more coffee. He lit his third and final cigarette, and this time, they sat silently, listening to the retreating rain, to a north wind that spoke of the coming winter against the window panes.
In the weeks that followed, Lee’s conjectures grew in her imagination. What should I do? What will it lead to? But there was no choice about selling Willie Mae the house and giving her the quit-claim deed. It was one promise she intended to keep, although nothing yet was signed or legal.
She picked up the papers from the lawyer’s office, saying she would send them to her brother in California to sign—giving her time, for what she had no idea—and Basila seemed satisfied with a promise to get back to him about filing “separate maintenance.”
No one’s really happy about this marriage breaking up except me and the lawyer, Lee concluded on leaving his office. But she had no taste for an alliance with such an obvious “Shylock”—Shakespeare’s character—the word, came immediately to mind. Basila had done everything but rub his hands greedily together, expecting to make what he called “suitable arrangements.”
No legal agreements with Charles—ever—Lee resolved, walking across the parking lot, if only to deny that lawyer his fee. And he wants more than money, she knew. This time, Basila had stroked the upper portion of her arm as he led her to the door. Would he be so interested if her breasts weren’t so big? In the car, she hugged herself, massaging the flesh, wondering what her arm felt like to him. There was no way to know.
Without planning, after picking up Lill and the baby from Denny’s, Lee drove to her mother-in-law’s house on Troupe Street. She was following a wish that had stayed invisible, under the dark currents of her mind, but this morning had risen to the surface. She needed, after being truthful with the two priests, to tell her mother-in-law that Baby Charlie was still her grandson and had always been. Claire, in her awkward and often misdirected way, had always been kind: for eight years her mother-in-law had tried to do what she thought was right, and Lee had not been able to forget the evening and the tentative kiss the older woman had placed on the infant’s forehead as though saying good-bye forever.
Driving up to the perfectly square red-brick house with the two-trunked oak in the front yard and the trimmed boxwoods, everything seemed remarkable to Lee in its well-cared-for neatness, familiar and yet new. It had been five months since she’d been to the Bettlemains’, since before Baby Charlie was born.
Lee parked, and Lill was out and inside her grandmother’s house before Lee could lift the baby from the front seat and make it to the back door. There, she stopped and waited. Willie Mae, her great dark cow eyes blinking with questions, stood behind the screen with Claire right behind her.
“Why, Lee,” Claire asked, over the colored woman’s shoulder, “is something wrong?”
Willie Mae sidled her bulk away from the door, away from between the two white women as if from between two sticks of dynamite, adopting what Lee had grown to call her cloak of invisibility.
“No,” Lee answered, still hesitating. “Nothing’s wrong.”
Claire wiped one hand on the bib of her blue checkered apron and with the other hand fumbled in the air in front of her as though she might reach out and hook the screened door latch, to lock Lee out. “I—I don’t think you should be here, hon.” She glanced past Lee as if checking for other people coming up the walk.
“Where are they?” Lee asked, pulling open the screened door and stepping into the den. She didn’t have to say who “they” were.
“Down to Madison,” Claire answered, using the same words Lee had used with the banker. Even as the older woman spoke, her eyes darted to the outside again, and then to and away from Baby Charlie.
“Here, take him,” Lee said. “He’s your grandson.” She pushed the baby against her mother-in-law’s arms, forcing her to stop wiping her apron and grasp the offered bundle. “He is your grandson, Claire,” she repeated. “I’m telling you the truth, but don’t tell Charles.”
The older woman took the baby, but held him out, away from her body. A blue blush, like the glaze on a plum, spread under her skin, from
her neck upwards. “Charles told me not to go see you again, for nothing. He said he’d mail money to you every week.” Her mouth was slightly open and tiny gasps for breath—like she’d been running—made her voice smothered, her words blurred. Her eyes kept returning to the door.
Poor Claire, Charles had given the money, and her mother-in-law had brought it. Lee sat down on an overstuffed brown plastic chair, folded her arms and held them at the elbows, determined to wait.
Lill came and put her head down in her mother’s lap. “I wanna go home,” she whined, pushing against her mother. Usually this childish blackmail set the grandmother and Willie Mae into a flurry of treat-finding: a chocolate, a cola, a promise of a trip to the store. But today everyone ignored the complaint.
“Do you understand me, Claire? This is Charles’s son. I know he told you differently, and he believes it, but he’s wrong. Baby Charlie is his and yours. Nothing can change that.” Lee spoke slowly and distinctly, as if to someone hard of hearing, and at the same time was aware that Willie Mae, in spite of having slipped into a bathroom just off the den, must be listening, too.
Claire trembled, still held the child out from her body as though she might give him back. “Why are you doing this, Lee? Frustrating me? I know, being from Atlanta, you think you’re smarter than all of us down here, but that don’t make us stupid.”
Ah, there was the other side. What Lee would never hear except in anger. “Claire, Memaw, please.” She used the children’s name for their grandmother, what Claire had wanted Lee to call her that first year.
“I’m not your Memaw, Lee!”
Claire’s color now was startling, the ashen-blue around her mouth had turned to purple, and her breaths came in quicker, more constricted gasps.
She’s old, Lee thought. What am I doing to her? She stood to steady Claire’s arm under the baby. “But you’re my children’s grandmother—the only one they really have.” It hurt to say it, for now she saw the two families clearly, and distinctly: a check, a phone call was all she could ever expect from her parents, and perhaps that was enough.
Claire walked cautiously to the couch as if moving in the dark and sat with the baby in her lap. Lee sat beside her mother-in-law, thinking how once she’d found Claire’s den and her choices of furniture, ugly and common, but now they seemed well-chosen, endearing. Large, fake leather, Naugahyde couches and chairs were actually comfortable and practical, the kind that could stand up under heavy, lolling men.
Lill, ignored, stared from her mother’s to her grandmother’s face and whimpered.
As if waiting for this signal, Willie Mae slid out from her hiding place just inside the bathroom door to hush the child. “Come with me, sweet darling. I got a fried pie in here for you: peach, your favorite.” She led an unwilling Lill to the kitchen, away from what she could not understand.
“He’s yours … your grandchild … always has been,” Lee said again, and stroked her mother-in-law’s fleshy, freckled arm, avoiding a burned streak, a line of fresh blisters at the wrist. “I can have blood work done to prove it.” It was the same thing she’d told David Palmer. Should she offer to take a lie detector test, too?
Claire’s eyes could not stop moving, glancing to Lee’s face, studying it for a second, and then glancing away. She knows I’m telling the truth, Lee thought, for the older woman started taking an easier breath, pulling Baby Charlie down, closer in her lap, rocking him although he wasn’t fussing.
“You need to put some salve on that burn,” Lee said, wanting to return to the ordinary things between them, to the practical.
“Then, why did you tell my boy something so outlandish, if it weren’t true?” Claire asked. “You broke that poor boy’s heart.”
Lee shrugged. Taking Charles’s side—that was to be expected—she reminded herself. “You know how it is with husbands,” she said, making it up as it came to her. “We were fighting, saying anything to hurt each other. And he needed to get away, to have some time to think.” Lee knew Claire, watcher of soap operas—someone was always going off “to think”—would accept that explanation.
“We must set things to rights,” Claire whispered, first directing the words toward the infant and then with a suppressed intensity, hissing toward Lee. “You must set things to rights.” She was trying to keep Willie Mae from hearing.
Lee wouldn’t have been surprised to see the colored woman’s ear, like a flower on the end of a vine, come snaking into the room. She could feel Willie Mae listening, straining to hear even through her mumbled conversation with Lill in the kitchen.
“There’s nothing you can do,” Lee whispered back. “Let Charles believe what he wants. I just wanted you to know, no one else. Promise me you won’t tell them.”
Claire took no notice. “It’ll be all right,” she started crooning into the baby’s dark hair. “Everything will be all right.” Her skin was pale now, neutral, with a thin sheen of perspiration as though she’d suffered some kind of attack and was over it. She held Baby Charlie up and kissed his forehead and cheeks. The infant laughed, lifted his scrunched red face to his grandmother’s.
I wish I could begin all over again with this woman, from the beginning, Lee thought, stronger for what I know, see her life differently, and with more generosity, right from the start.
Chapter 20
I’ll tell you a great secret, love
You must get up every morning and
reinvent yourself all over again.
Roberta Haas George
They stayed for lunch. Claire would not have it any other way. Lee ate a slice of ham, unnatural in its pinkness, and potato salad thick with mayonnaise; food she would have wrinkled up her nose at in the past. But it was good to be eating someone else’s cooking for a change. Willie Mae ate, too, standing at the small bar that held the telephone, although Lee asked her to sit with them at the table. Claire pretended not to hear the invitation.
“I’d rather eat here, Miss Lee,” Willie Mae answered, full lips pushed out, sulky, not comprehending the truce between the two other women, returned to all her old “I’m just the maid around here” reserve.
Later, out by the car, Lee asked her mother-in-law again, “Please, Claire, let this be our secret, just this once, okay?”
The older woman, her arms full of offerings: pound cake and a gallon of milk—“Sure to go bad if the children don’t drink it”—fussed happily, putting her gifts in the backseat. “You don’t understand, hon. Everything’s going to be all right now.”
Lee knew this fluttering optimism, Claire’s twittering pleasure at any good fortune.
“Keep a secret from them for a change,” Lee begged, hoping to find some deviousness in her mother-in-law, but there was none. Claire went on smiling, giving Cassie, Lill, and Baby Charlie kiss after good-bye kiss.
“Those men keep plenty from us. Don’t you ever wonder?” Lee wanted to elaborate: What of all those hours between work and coming home? All those fishing and hunting trips? The blustering, shame-faced explanations for being out all night? But she knew Claire’s answers already. “They’re men, honey,” she’d say, “they can’t help it,” or worse: “Boys will be boys,” profoundly agreeable to all the terms that trite saying implied. Lee could not bear to hear it again and drove off without waiting for her mother-in-law’s reply.
In the days that followed, there wasn’t much time to worry about what Claire would tell Charles, or Lon, or Brother. Cassie came down with red measles, and overnight her skin was covered with a fine, itchy rash. Her fever rose and fell, went from normal to 104° in an hour, spiked through the second night, though Lee sponged the shaking, red-speckled child with alcohol. At three in the morning, the little girl, thinking that ants were in her hair, clawed at her head, and screamed, “Get them off, get them off. I want my Daddy; I want my Daddy.” Lee remembered in June, a frantic Charles dousing Cassie with water from the hose, rubbing and rinsing fire ants off his oldest daughter.
Trying to make Cassie hold an i
ce cube in her mouth, Lee promised, “He’s coming, baby. He’s coming.”
“Wash them away. I want my Daddy, I want my Daddy,” Cassie cried again and again.
Lee pretended to brush the ants off, mimicked Charles’s actions, and then turned the pillow to the cool side, but nothing helped. The child’s cries for her father went from shrieks to whispers. She gnawed the back of her hand and bit Lee’s, too, when she tried to put her hand in between. In the half-dark—a gauze diaper draped over the lamp—Lee wrestled to hold Cassie onto the bed. The child’s moans became unintelligible, and her eyes rolled back in her head showing only the whites.
Releasing her—was Cassie dying?—Lee ran to the telephone, and, holding her breath to make her fingers go into the right holes, she dialed the Bettlemains’ number. Charles answered on the first ring as if waiting, as if the telephone were within arm’s reach.
Without explanation, Lee told him Cassie was sick, was crying for her father.
“I’m on my way,” Charles said.
“We’re at the Teflers’ house,” Lee explained, although she suspected that he had been told of the move. And in less than ten minutes, with tires churning the gravel, the Bettlemains’ truck rumbled into the driveway.
He must have driven 90 miles an hour, Lee thought, as she opened the side door upon what appeared to be a sleep-crazed man, shirt and pants half-buttoned, eyes swollen and bruised.
Down the hall, the child’s weak crying justified this wild appearance, this haste.
“She has red measles,” Lee said, unnecessarily pointing the way. “Thinks she has fire ants in her hair, like last summer. It’s terrible. I didn’t know what else to do.”
Lee followed in the weight of her husband’s shadow, stood in the dim lamplight and watched him lift and hold Cassie, the child’s arms and legs dangling like a tiny, broken puppet.
“Here, I’m brushing the ants off,” Charles said over and over, patting and catching his cracked fingernails in the child’s damp hair. Cassie closed her thick eyelids, turned her rashy face toward her father’s chest. “Daddy, I was crying for you, Daddy.” With both arms around the sick girl, his head rocking and crooning some tuneless chant, Charles lifted his daughter.