A Southern Exposure (32 page)

She seems to be finishing a conversation, which must have been brief. “…  that’s all right, then,” she hears Odessa
say, in a warmly welcoming voice. “I see you later. Soon, now. This here is long distance!”

She has not heard this friendly tone from Odessa before (why would she?), nor seen the happy face that she finds, walking in.

“Oh, Odessa, I thought I heard the phone. But it was for you? Well, that’s good.” She smiles vaguely, noting that Odessa’s expression is already fading back to its customary blankness.

But Odessa says (as though she owed an explanation), “That Horace. He back.”

“Oh good, that’s nice.” And then, from some sheer if diffuse goodwill, Cynthia adds, “You know, Odessa, if you and Horace both decide to come and live here, I’d be—well, that would be wonderful.”

“That so?” That is all Odessa says, for the moment, but Cynthia is amazed to hear the quick notes of pleasure and surprise in Odessa’s voice. And Cynthia thinks, My God, how terrible, Odessa is surprised and even grateful, just because I said her husband could live here too. Her
husband
, for God’s sake. How terrible!

“Well, you think about it,” she says to Odessa.

“Yes’m, we think.”

When I’m a lawyer, thinks Cynthia a little vaguely, a little ginnily, I will really try to change everything. I’ll come down here and take cases for Negro people, for free. She sees herself in front of a courtroom, passionately declaiming. Dressed in something incredibly simple and smart—a little black Balenciaga, perhaps. And then she chides herself severely: I’m going to be a lawyer, not a movie star. However, nevertheless, it wouldn’t hurt her cause for her to be well dressed—would it, really?

It is interesting, she also thinks, as she crosses the lawn, that almost no one at the party has mentioned her going to law school.

Several thoughts arrive at Russ Byrd’s mind simultaneously. He thinks, I’ll never be able to write a play again, or even the smallest poem. He thinks, I am terribly drunk. He thinks, I must go in swimming.

He slips down to the pool, strangely unobserved. Everyone else is too occupied with drinks and with talk; they are mostly stupefied, and paralyzed by the heat, and the gin.

But Russ feels an instant cool relief as he wades very slowly out into the pool. The water reaches his cock—ah, delicious!

He walks a foot or so more, and then, quite suddenly, as he might have known it would, the floor falls out of the world, and he has slid underwater, to where he cannot see or breathe. Where his mind will explode into a poem.

It is Abby who first sees that Russ is in trouble. That he is in fact about to drown. She jumps in, followed by Deirdre in all her clothes. Then Cynthia, just arrived at the edge of the pool. And the three women, somehow, pulling together, haul Russ out of the pool.

In some later versions it is Deirdre alone—“big as she was, she jumped right in with her dress on”—who saved Russ’s life. Other people say it was Cynthia, who, according to legend, “took a shine to Russ the first time she ever laid eyes on him, maybe even before.” Others said Abby, “that brave little Yankee girl, and not so little anymore.”

It is Harry, though, who gets Russ from the pool’s edge to the grassy space at one end, to a spread-out towel. Harry who sits astride Russ’s back, rhythmically pushing down on his ribs, then letting go. Repeating as he does so,
“Out goes the bad air,
in
comes the good.” An old Navy incantation.

As Russ comes back to life, he sees not a poem or a play but a movie in Technicolor. It seems to be about Heaven, with bursting clouds and the most beautiful angels, also golden and very sexy. He believes that he saved his own life, by agreeing to breathe again.

Cynthia thinks that Harry saved Russ, with his artificial respiration. Harry thinks Cynthia saved him, jumping in like that. There is never any general agreement about who or what saved Russ’s life, but it is a topic discussed locally for many months.

In the middle of the following November, a brilliant month of blue skies and scarlet and yellow leaves, and blue-gray wood smoke, Deirdre gives birth to a round, very amiable little baby girl. A golden girl, whom she and Russ name, without much further argument, SallyJane.