Charlotte laughs. My cheeks feel hot. I mumble, “Hi.”
“You can call him Long Schlong John. That’s his trade name.”
“Shut up, Cage.” I elbow him in the ribs.
“You in college down there?” Charlotte presses two menus to her chest and leads us to a booth. “What’s your major?”
“I don’t know.”
“Whatcha going to do with that?” She sets the menus on the table.
“Strip, I guess,” I say, sitting down.
“Bring him to our next party.” She smiles at Cage, touching his arm for a second. The moment she’s gone, another waitress, red-haired this time and with an Irish lilt, slams down two glasses of water, puts her hands on her hips, and says, “What happened to you, Cage? I waited three hours at the Chicken Shack.”
Cage just sits there smiling at her until her tight-set mouth breaks into a grin.
“Molly, sweet Molly, my leprechaun Molly, I told you I might get hung up finishing off that job ’fore the owners arrived today. This, by the by, is my little brother, Harper.”
“Fair family resemblance.” She studies him, then me. “You a naughty lad like your brother?”
“He’s not naughty,” Cage answers for me. “He’s nice.”
“Won’t be for long under your evil influence. So what’s your fancy tonight?”
Cage tilts his head and narrows his eyes.
“From the menu.”
As she walks toward the kitchen, Cage says, “You’re in for an exciting summer. A southern accent breaks a lot of north Atlantic ice.”
“Yeah, with you as my wingman, I might—”
For a moment Cage looks as if his eyes are tearing up. He takes a deep breath. His voice sounds far away: “What do you remember most about Nick?”
I stare at the small candle burning in an orange glass on the center of the table. “I try not to think about him but I did on the plane today. He wasn’t outgoing like you. He was serious, quiet, and when he spoke, it made you pause. He was the star of the family. I struggled to make Bs and he was at the top of his class. I was always jealous. What do you remember?”
Molly sets down two mugs of beer, gives Cage a hard look, shaking her head, then walks off without a word.
“The way he used to quote poetry.” Cage takes a big swallow.
“Yeah.” I laugh. “He told me poetry was the best way to get in a girl’s pants. He also said that there’s a special place in hell for guys who use great poetry to seduce innocent girls.”
“Then that’s where you’ll find Nick,” Cage says.
“Remember that time outside Giamanco’s in Baton Rouge? You said something about Claudia Parlange, remember her? Nick hit you in the face and the next moment y’all were rolling around on the parking lot. Dad whisked Mom and me into the car and drove off. We left you slugging it out. You had to walk home.”
“Brothers will fight. Law of nature. But brothers ought to always back each other up, that’s what Granddad used to tell us. Even over women.” Cage sticks his hand across the table. His grip is strong, a carpenter’s.
“I’ll stick by you, Cage,” I say finally.
“There was this French guy at Sewanee named Gilles du Chambure. He was a big, handsome rugby player who’d gone to a fancy school in England. He was the most dashing and sophisticated guy any of us southern boys had ever seen. I used to type papers for him.” Cage is telling this to Robert Wirth, a Wall Street guy with a huge house on the beach where Cage is building a new deck. “Every girl fell for Gilles before he even opened his mouth. Then, when they heard the accent, they just about started taking off their clothes in the middle of the pub. I used to take him rock climbing and he was about the best friend I had. After college I’d get an occasional postcard from London and then Hong Kong. He was that kind of guy.”
Smiling and nodding, Wirth opens another bottle of beer. Cage shoots his empty bottle across the deck into a trash can and takes the fresh one.
“So, summer after my second year in law school, Nick gets us both jobs with the forest service in Montana. We’re out cutting trails and fire lines. There’s one pretty girl at the headquarters named Caroline whom I’m flirting with every time we’re in Missoula, and she’s promising to catch a supply truck to our camp when she gets a week break toward the end of the summer. I’m marking off the days on a calendar like a prisoner.” Cage shakes his head. “The idea of her arrival is the only thing that keeps me going through August. You know, it’s a funny thing what deprivation will do. A girl who’d hardly turn your head on Nantucket starts to look like a goddess out in the mountains.”
“I hear you.” Wirth laughs.
“About two days before she’s coming, I twist my ankle so badly I can’t walk. I just sit in a camp chair and read and dream about Caroline.” Cage stretches out on his back along a large wooden table. “The night before she’s due I can’t sleep, so the next day I’m napping when she calls out my name and I look up and she’s standing there in the door of the tent, a vision of beauty.” Cage lifts his neck and visors his forehead with one hand like he’s peering through into glare. “‘Come here, Caroline, and give me a hug. I can’t stand up.’” He props himself up on one elbow. “‘God, you’re a sight for sore eyes.’ She comes over and kneels by my cot and gives me a hug. I’m thinking, Hallelujah, praise the Lord, the two-backed beast will be sleeping in this tent tonight. Then I look over her shoulder and who do I see standing in the doorway of the tent with a big, guilty smile on his face?”
Wirth guesses, “Nick?”
“Nah, it was someone I hadn’t seen for years.”
“It was Gilles.” I laugh. “Fucking Gilles du Chambure.”
“Under normal circumstances I would have been jumping off the cot to give Gilles a hug. But all I can manage, knowing that I’ll be awake again, listening to the two-backed beast moaning from a spare tent, is, ‘Oh, hey. Great to see you, um, guy.’”
I look at Cage with unabashed admiration. He’s obviously Mr. Popularity on the island. From the lumber stores to the inner circles, everyone’s charmed by him. And while Wirth spits out a mouthful of beer, laughing at another of Cage’s stories, I think this guy—my big brother—really has it all wired.
The Green of the Garden of Eden
1960
A
n hour before daylight on an April Sunday, Margaret Madeline Cage Rutledge screamed and jerked her hands against leather restraints. From the time she was too small to remember, the conversation among the women in her clan had led her to believe that this would be the most painful moment in her life, more agony than any man would ever experience. It was worse than she expected. And it was only beginning, though it had been going on for hours. A clock on the wall over the door showed 4:28. Each time she glanced over, the hands seemed to be moving backward. She wished that dawn would end the darkness. She wasn’t sure which was worse, the contractions or Mrs. Hennessey sticking her hand inside her every ten minutes. Two hours and her womb had not dilated even a half inch. She pictured a melon, a tiny hole in the depression where the stem had been. Her womb, woven with bundles of powerful fibers, a perfect egg of muscle, was pulling itself open in infinitesimal fractions, drawing up along the floating plates of the fetus’s soft skull.
“Where’s the goddamn doctor?” Margaret yelled when the pain seemed about to kill her. It was the first time in her life that she had broken that commandment, and in her mind she was safe because she had deliberately thought it in a lowercase
g
. The door beneath the clock opened. Wearing nurse whites and hat, Mrs. Hennessey came inside, shut the door softly, crossed the room, took Margaret by the hand, looked at her sternly. “Dr. Trout will be here soon, honey. Now you just try to relax. You’re going to be fine.”
Suddenly Margaret’s womb was still and her eyes flicked to the clock: 4:29. The nurse wiped the sweat off her brow. Breathlessly Margaret whispered, “Please undo these straps.”
“They’re for your own good.” Mrs. Hennessey reminded Margaret of her mean-spirited fourth-grade math teacher.
“Beg your pardon?” Margaret panted, trying to catch her breath. “I feel strapped to a table in the Spanish Inquisition.”
“You don’t want to scratch yourself or the baby,” Mrs. Hennessey said. “Why, they’ve used restraints at Thebes County General since before I started.”
“Since Oedipus was king,” Margaret muttered, watching the red second hand sweeping again at normal speed. Mrs. Hennessey put her thumb and two forefingers on Margaret’s wrist.
At 4:31 Margaret bellowed. Her uterine muscles were like fingers clawing the edge of a door, straining to open it against an overwhelming force. She screamed from fury as well as pain—the tail of an eight-month-long comet of fury. Margaret had been cross from the moment the doctor confirmed her fear, which was a few weeks after she lost her virginity. A honeymoon baby. Possibly conceived even that first night of their marriage. Margaret was angry because she and Frank had taken precautions. Of course they wanted children. But not nine months after they were married. Margaret had goals. She had just graduated from the University of Tennessee, had done very well, particularly in English. She wanted at least a master’s degree. She wanted to teach literature at a high school or college. Back in her hometown, Margaret was proud of her handsome husband from Memphis, proud to be the rector’s wife. She wanted to become a leader of the women at the new mission church. She wanted to help Frank convert select Methodists and Baptists of Thebes into Episcopalians. She wanted to reach out to the poor and to the oppressed colored community. She wanted to help Frank climb from a congregation of two hundred in her farm town to a parish of thousands in Nashville or Louisville or Atlanta, climb all the way to the bishop of Tennessee. Through the year of their engagement, when it was difficult not to succumb to the great passion, the palpable temptation, Margaret planned the first three years of her coming marriage. She wanted to wait at least that long before devoting herself to raising babies. She shouted, “Where in Christ’s name is Dr. Trout?”
Mrs. Hennessey snapped, “Save your breath, young lady.”
Margaret’s wailing carried fifty feet down a corridor through swinging doors to the waiting room. The Reverend Franklin Malone Rutledge tensed his mouth with each shriek. The loudest made his whole face wince. He sat alone, dressed for the eleven o’clock in a tan poplin suit, black shirt, and white clerical collar. For a heartbeat he did not believe Margaret had taken the Lord’s name in vain. The second time he smiled. She never ceased to amaze him. Her spirit. That temper. He stood up and paced, remembering when he had asked her father for her hand. “Every girl needs a bit of bulldog in her,” her father had said, smiling. “Margaret’s blessed with quite a bit.” As her screaming peaked, Franklin prayed aloud very softly, “Dear Lord, spare her pain, deliver them both safely into my arms. In Christ’s name I pray.” Her screaming stopped and Franklin stopped pacing. He squared his shoulders, stood up straight and tall, three inches over six feet, his posture perfected a decade before on a two-year tour at Fort Knox which had ended with an offer of a scholarship to West Point. He had possessed no hesitation declining, though it meant working his way through UT as a journalism major and then through seminary at Sewanee.
“Morning, Morgan, Mary Lee.” Franklin’s smile was strained as Margaret’s parents arrived in the waiting room. “It’s going very slowly but she’s doing just fine. Mars has got true grit. That’s what the nurse says. She looks like she ought to know.”
“Mrs. Hennessey knows her business.” His mother-in-law smiled and nodded.
“Where’s Trout?” Morgan asked. “Looking for the hair of the dog that bit his hindquarters last night?”
Look who’s talking, Franklin thought, though in all fairness Morgan Elijah Cage V had been dry for over a year. He turned his palms toward heaven. “The good doctor is AWOL.”
“That old s.o.b. ought to be here by now.” Morgan reached inside his seersucker jacket for a cigar, stuck it in the corner of his mouth.
“Now, Morgan,” said his wife soothingly. Dressed for church, Mary Lee Drake Cage perched on the edge of a chair with her handbag on her lap. She smiled, thinking, Whatever You in Your wisdom grant us will be a blessing. Oh, but there is nothing sweeter than a little girl.
Out of the silence came Margaret’s crescendo of screams as if she were being set on fire.
Mary Lee thought back to 1937, the year that Margaret was born. Soon after, she had come down with the fevers. She pictured the hospital room where she had wasted away for six months in Nashville. She remembered the day everyone thought she was dead. As her daughter screamed, Mary Lee recalled the scene vividly, how she looked down on a woman who was herself. She talked to Margaret silently: I never told anybody this because I didn’t think that they would believe me. I had been through so much. That whole period is a blur but one day I remember. I was hovering high over the doctors and your daddy and grandmother, looking down at them, looking down at myself with the most wonderful feeling of comfort and joy, just this marvelous feeling, and I kept thinking, This is so good and I’ll just go on, and I thought, No, I can’t leave that baby for Mother and for Morgan to take care of. That just wouldn’t be right. I can’t go on. I’ve got to stay here. I’ve got to go back.
Wrenched over and over, her daughter wrestled the pain, tried to fight back at the pain. But the pain kept coming, relentless and vast as a thunderstorm.
In the waiting room Morgan was chewing his cigar and staring out the window at the first pink hues of dawn, occasionally cursing Dr. Trout under his breath. Several times Mary Lee took off her white gloves, then put them right back on. Franklin stood erect, chest high, breathing in slowly as if he could inhale his wife’s agony.
Daylight filtered in through venetian blinds. Mrs. Hennessey looked down and thought the girl’s eyes now resembled those of a doe dead on the highway. “Margaret.”