The Day's Heat Read online

  “We have to put her in ice water,” he said.

  “No!” Lee argued. “She has measles. She can’t get wet!” But her voice sounded reedy in her own ears, without sureness.

  “It’s the only way to break the fever.”

  Charles took Cassie into the bathroom and began running water into the tub. “Get all the ice cubes,” he ordered. And when Lee hurried back with four trays, he had Cassie, still in her pajamas, in the cool water. He motioned for the ice to go into the water at the child’s feet. With one hand he held the tiny lolling head up and with the other poured cupped handfuls of water over the child’s hair and face. Cassie, except for the red dots, was as white as the porcelain she lay on, but she gave her mother not quite a smile, but the hint of a smile, and Lee had to make a joke, “We’ll get your Dad to wash your hair from now on.”

  “Uh huh,” the six-year-old girl nodded.

  A half hour later, when Cassie was toweled off and back in dry clothes, Lee, without a word, left her husband and daughter on the twin bed in the girls’ room. She stretched out on her own bed and fell into a sleep so quickly and so deep that it felt like a faint.

  Sometime later, still groggy, Lee rose and walked to the edge of the girls’ bedroom to watch Charles’s great shoulders rise and fall, like a huge breathing hill, asleep beside his daughter, who was also a much smaller but calmly breathing hill. Without touching Cassie’s forehead, Lee knew the fever was broken, that the child rested easy although her breaths were lost in her father’s great snores.

  No listening for prowlers with that racket going on, Lee thought, and apparently it was true, for even Furlough had abandoned his nightly patrol of the hall and his occasional, obligatory “woof.” In the reverberating snores, steady and akin to the beat of ocean waves, Lee went back to bed and back to sleep.

  At eight the next morning, Charles was gone, and Lee awoke to Baby Charlie’s wails. He was soaked from head to foot and had overslept his feeding time. Rushing, she changed his diaper, undershirt, and gown. The tiny mouth searched, tried to catch her fingers and hands as she pulled the clean undershirt on, tried to suck her neck and cheek as she held him up. Her heavy warm breasts leaked milk down the front of her gown while she worked. Thank goodness I don’t have to make him wait to heat up a bottle, she thought: just take the little rascal back to bed and get another hour of sleep.

  Lill, barely awake, rubbing her eyes and stretching, tottered in, like walking on stick legs. “Daddy slept with Cassie last night—made her all better,” she announced, smiling adult-like, as though satisfied by competent medical core. She crawled into bed with her mother and brother, bunched the covers up under her chin, and they all drifted away.

  When the late November sun forced Lee up at ten, Cassie was much “better” if not “all.” From the kitchen, Lee could hear the two girls jabbering in their room over their “special treat”—pancakes—on breakfast trays: how their father had come in the middle of the night as though he, clairvoyant about Cassie’s measles, had charged in upon a white horse. Ruefully, Lee could hear it, too, even twenty years from now, her daughters telling how wonderful their father had been—his three-hour rescue infinitely more commendable than two days and two nights of constant bedside nursing by their mother.

  “Who do you think called him?” she muttered to the toaster, but instantly warned herself against bitterness or jealousy, to try and remember that a father’s love was more important to girls—to love the father best was the normal pattern for daughters. “You loved your father best, too, remember?” she said to the coffee cup as she carried it to the table.

  The day passed. Cassie slept and Lill, pretending to read her sister’s school books, staying in the opposite bed as though keeping watch. Lee, not sleepy but supremely lazy, went from bed to couch and back again, nursed Baby Charlie, watched the dust motes drift down through the light onto the floor. It’s good to rest, she thought, admitting that “off guard” she’d slept better with Charles in the house, not realizing she’d been “on guard” before. Feeling a new kindness toward her husband, she wondered if David was already on his way to South America and whispered, “God’s speed and grace to you, my poor lied-to darling.”

  In the evening, she opened a can of tomato soup and made grilled cheese sandwiches, and she and the girls ate their dinner on TV trays beside Cassie’s bed.

  “I’ll have measles, too, won’t I, Mommy?” Lill insisted. “And Daddy’ll take care of me, too, won’t he? Won’t he?” She kept on, insisting until Lee agreed.

  That night there was a soft knock that Lee heard only because Furlough padded through the living room and whined at the front door.

  “Is it too late to come in?” Charles asked. The street light behind him served as illumination, for although it was only nine o’clock, Lee had already put the children down, shut off the lights, and gone to bed herself.

  “No, of course not,” Lee answered, and stepped back, holding the door as much for support as for courtesy. She turned on the lamp in the living room, hugged her flannel night-gowned chest with her arms, partly to cover herself and partly to show in a squared-off way that she was not pleased with this late visit.

  Her husband, in a thick work jacket, faded jeans, and heavy, partially laced brogans, stood as David Palmer had last week, turning, inspecting the room that lay before him. Only then did Lee notice the woody-stemmed lavender flowers he held in his hand.

  He raised them to her. “You always liked these,” Charles said, watching her face intently.

  The flowers were altheas, a bunch of spiky, pale purple blossoms from Claire’s yard. Lee took the bouquet, knowing it wouldn’t last the night. Altheas were hardy outdoor plants, blooming all summer long until the first frost, but they wilted in an hour inside a house, in a vase.

  “Yes, I do,” Lee said, making a nod of false appreciation. But on a bush, in the yard, she added silently, where they can keep on blooming and don’t die. She went to the kitchen and came back with a mason jar of water, put the already-drooping flowers in, and set them without ceremony in the middle of the table.

  Charles, with closed lips and unhappy eyes, tried to smile, as if over a first hurdle.

  The traditional cut flowers—what florists advised. It’s all he knows, Lee thought, in puzzled regret, and gave him only half credit. Last night’s visit had earned him more than enough.

  “What is it?” she asked, still standing, not willing to let him sit. Unlike last night, tonight he’d not been invited, and already the house felt different, less like hers for his having seen it, been in it.

  “We gotta talk, Lee.” Awkwardly, he shifted his hands, upward and out but then let them drop. His arms hung from his great shoulders, swung slightly. “Momma done told me, and we gotta clear things up between us.”

  Yes, Lee agreed inwardly, wondering how Claire had managed. Still it seemed the thing to do, to come to some arrangement, to straighten things out between them for once and for all. “Separate maintenance” maybe, as the lawyer had said—but no lawyer, no legal papers. Was it possible? Lee pulled a chair out at the table, moved the flowers aside, and Charles took the opposite chair as though in agreement. This would be bargaining, this would be as Claire had said, “setting things to rights.” There was an equality to it that Lee liked. No sitting on the couch across from her husband, him lying back in the recliner, no TV set overriding her voice.

  “Momma says the baby’s mine?” Charles asked, unsure, questioning, his water-blue eyes looking out from under thick pale eyebrows, searching Lee’s face for the answer. Unconsciously, his hand on the table formed a cup, a supplication of sorts.

  In the gesture Lee saw that just like his mother, Charles had no deviousness, no desire to confuse. And in despicable contrast she saw herself. Whatever Charles was, he was following a pattern, and it was an acceptable one, one he’d been taught from childhood. She, God forgive her, was following no course, was always muddling through, often choosing deception—it seemed so
now—for no other reason than it was more entertaining.

  There was no way, she decided, but the one she’d chosen with David, the truth, accepting how little satisfaction and entertainment that had brought. “Yes, he’s yours, Charles—always was.”

  Her husband nodded, silent, believing, not even asking the question his mother had, “Why?” Maybe underneath, unconsciously, he knows, Lee hoped.

  With a work-scarred hand, he pushed what was left of his hair from his forehead, and it fell back in silver strings, exactly the color of his daughters’ hair. “I almost figured that out,” he said, convincing himself, Lee knew in the moment, in some kind of masculine superiority, that he was capable of such comprehension, just as he had convinced himself of the exact opposite on the night he left.

  Then they sat in silence. The small room, the table between them, the corner dish cupboard with the plates and cut glass they’d chosen and had been given in the early days of their marriage seemed to wrap around them. Charles clasped his hands in front of his stomach, sunk into absorption. Lee felt the blood in her cheeks, a vein pulsing in her lip. She folded her arms on the table and lay her head down, wishing he would go away.

  Charles cleared his throat and asked, “How’s Cassie?”

  “Much better today—practically well.” Lee spoke from the envelope of her arms, without raising her head, without resentment, her voice muffled. “You’re getting all the credit.” She felt she could explain the bond between fathers and daughters to him but not for his sake, but just to draw the conversation away from the inevitable. She kept her head down and closed her eyes. If he thought she’d fallen asleep, he might leave.

  Charles shuffled his brogans on the floor, scratching the wax, Lee knew. “Your lawyer, Basila, called,” Charles said.

  Without volition, the words jerked Lee’s head up, but Charles was looking down as though confiding this information to his shirt front. “Said to keep it on the QT, but that you was giving the other house,” he motioned, with a hitch of his shoulder, to their former house, “to—a brother? Louie Waters?”

  Incredulous, Lee ran a searching, detective’s eye back over her two visits to Basila, trying to catch a missed clue to this double-dealing, but she saw none. Dumbstruck at her gullibility, at her deluded belief in her charm, she could do nothing but hear Charles out.

  “I remembered you talking about how that was Willie Mae’s real name.” Here he looked up and almost smiled. “Couldn’t shut you up ’bout us not knowing our coloreds, not even their real names.”

  Lee stiffened at “shut up,” but in the same thought knew he’d said “coloreds” instead of “niggers” for her sake.

  “You’re gonna have a heap of trouble, Lee, if you let Willie Mae and those girls of hers live next door.”

  “Only Denny and her daughter.”

  “Still, it’s gonna bring the whole town down on you.”

  “It’s too late, Charles. I’ve already promised her, taken the down payment.” This last wasn’t true, but Lee felt it added weight to her side of the argument. Basila had probably offered Charles a way to stop the sale of the house.

  “Those women you sew for ain’t gonna bring their clothes to you no more neither. Once they find out you’re trying to desegregate the neighborhood, block-bust.”

  “I’m not desegregating anything. I’m not interested in that. Willie Mae’s my friend.”

  “Well, first there was the school taking in coloreds and now this.”

  “That was the Church’s doing, Charles, not mine. And I’m sure Basila has told you some way now, so I can’t sell the house.”

  “No, I don’t much like talking to him.” Charles leaned back, as his body had probably leaned away from the phone when speaking to Basila—Lee knew her husband’s usual reaction to any intrusion without having seen it. “He’s kinda like that C&S fellow—told him it was your business, your house. Do what you wanted.”

  Lee saw clearly: money, people with titles, authority, even discussing salary with his own father, those things put Charles at a disadvantage, made him withdraw. Still she was grateful for his reticence; it had given her, her freedom.

  “I want to come back, Lee. I want to come home. I can’t sleep over there.” Here, he half-laughed again, glanced to his old chair. “Dad’s got the recliner.”

  Lee had to smile, too, but was silent.

  “It’s not the main reason though. I want my family back—my life back. I want you loving me again.”

  You mean trying to love you but not able to, she thought, but held the words in her mouth.

  “You were the best there for a long time, Lee, and I was too dumb to ’preciate it. And you’ve done a good job here too, fixing up this house.” He looked from the ceiling to the floor. “And I can see why you’d want to help Willie Mae—her helping you and all. But it’s gonna bring a heap of trouble. If you go through with it, you’re gonna need me—like last night.” He paused, pressed his thin lips tight together.

  “I thought you were against the coloreds, going to college and all?”

  “I don’t know. I can’t figure it. Them in their place and us in ours, that’s the way it’s always been. It’s hard to do different. I guess it was them getting a chance to go to Georgia, the school I flunked out of. Seems, now, just an excuse to fuss—not like I was gonna do anything about it. But with Willie Mae, that’s different. God a’mighty, she partway raised me. I don’t wanna to see her hurt. You need me, Lee. She’ll need me, too.” He seemed to be tallying up, listing the reasons his wife should take him back. He thought of another: “‘For better or worse,’ ain’t that what it says in the Bible? We’ve had the worse; now maybe we can have the better?”

  A sharp “Ha!” from Lee caused him to take a deep breath and back up and start over.

  “Okay, so I’ve not been a good husband. But I’ll change. I can change.”

  She could see him searching his mind for a concession to make, and then inspiration flaring in his tired eyes: “I’ll go to church with you and the girls. I’ll become Catholic—anything. Anything you want.” It was like when they’d first talked of marriage, how they would raise the children: “Give me the papers; I’ll sign.”

  She reached out and took his rough hands in both of hers and shook them slightly, shocked as she always was by their sandpaper coarseness, admitting all over again how hard he worked. Why all this pity, she wondered, for everyone, myself included? “I can’t talk about it now, Charles, I’m just too tired,” she said, knowing it was delay, giving her time.

  Rising, still holding on to one of her husband’s hands, she pulled him up and led him to the door. There was a teenage quality to the tugging hand involvement that she could see pleased him. Coquette, she accused herself silently, as with the lawyer—for all the good that it did.

  “I’m going to leave it up to you, honey. I know you’ll do the right thing. You’re a good person, Lee—I’ve always known that. I’ll go along with anything you say,” Charles said, and stopped in the middle of the room, resisting being led further.

  She tried to pull her hand away, twisted it, and then let it go slack, but he held on. “The kids need a daddy, and you need me, too—I can feel it.” He reached and touched her cheek, tried to smooth her hair back, then pulled her to him—trying to convince her at least physically. “I made a big mistake, honey,” he said to the top of her head. “I miss you and the kids terrible. I miss your Lebanese cooking, I miss you talking to me—all the things I thought I hated.”

  “Charles.” She let him hold her, found his large body to be like a tree one is used to leaning against. “Listen, I’ll let you know something tomorrow,” she whispered.

  She pushed his arms from around her and took a step back and went to the door and held it open.

  “Okay, okay, I’ll call tomorrow,” Charles agreed. “I’ll do anything you say, honey. I’ll give you so much money a week, same as Dad—make it up all legal if you want. We’ll go to a lawyer.”

&nbs
p; The mention of Basila made Lee quiver inside. She pointed with a finger and directed, “Go on now. It’s late and you have to work tomorrow.” Furlough thought it was an order for him to go back outside and the dog jostled past. Charles followed, something similar in his unlaced walk to the dog’s loose-skinned shamble. Lee closed the door and threw the bolt, leaned and touched her forehead to the painted wood, held in a sigh of strained nerves and relief and then let it out silently. Charles called through the glass jalousies, against the opposite side, “I’ll come back tomorrow evening, Lee. I love you.” She felt his warm breath through the edges of the glass.

  When the truck pulled out of the driveway, she let Furlough back in and turned off the light, then sat on the kitchen floor in the dark beside the dog. She softly counseled: “Life’s a mystery, old buddy.” The animal’s tail whipped across her bent legs, and when she rose, he followed her down the hall to crouch beside the bed.

  “If I were Charles, I’d have been glad to be rid of me,” she murmured, pulling the sheet up over her shoulder, stretching her hand out to touch Furlough’s soft muzzle. “Maybe not the children, but I’d have been glad to have seen the last of this foreign bitch.” Lee tried her best to view the marriage from Charles’s side but couldn’t. He’d escaped children, bills, an unsuitable wife, all the things Lee was sure he wanted to be rid of—not without wounds, of course—but now he wanted back into the mess.

  Worn out with trying to understand, she fell into a state halfway between sleep and wakefulness, speculating instead on the male arrangement in Strickland, almost a network it seemed. The banker getting in touch with Charles—she’d guessed at that—but the lawyer’s calling her husband absolutely baffled her. Wasn’t a lawyer bound by some sort of code, some rule of privacy? Lee blamed herself for being taken in by Basila’s compliments, by his cordiality. Give her the banker’s cold, gray honesty any day.