“That’s a wonderful idea.” I smile at Mother, then look at Cage staring into space with his forehead pinched. I am thankful that he did not shoot himself. Harper sighs and lets go of my hand. For a long time he has been uncomfortable with public affection. “Mother, why don’t you start?”
“Yeah, Nanny, you’re the matriarch,” Harper says, and takes a big swallow of wine.
“Well, there are so many people who don’t have anything.” Mother’s voice always reminds me of a down duvet. “Three thousand homeless on the streets of Nashville. So many people who are down at the missions, people with jobs who can’t afford a place to live. We should be thankful for our homes and a family that loves us.”
“You couldn’t have phrased it more eloquently, Mary Lee,” Franklin says, “or more to the point. People forget too quickly how much they have. And forget those who don’t have anything.”
“Most of the homeless are mentally ill.” Cage speaks very slowly, looking at everyone in turn. “I am thankful that you all brought me back here, that I have someplace to go. It’s kinda surreal being here.”
“This will always be your home,” Mother says.
“You have a family that loves you, Cage.” I squeeze his hand. “I’m grateful to have you all in my life, a mother over ninety who can still cook a delicious holiday meal, a husband who has cherished me for forty-one years, two handsome, bright sons who have made me proud. And Nick, whose spirit is with us.”
Harper clears his throat loudly and pours more wine in his glass.
Franklin says, “Harper, is there a particular motive behind your disruption?”
“No, sir,” Harper says with a sardonic smile.
“He’s just hungover. Irritable.” Cage’s voice is hollow. “New York is a party town.”
Smiling like a naughty child, Harper shrugs his shoulders and eyebrows.
“This year,” Frank says, “I give thanks to God that he delivered Cage safely home to us through his perilous journey and pray every day that Cage will get stronger and stronger.”
Cage smiles sweetly at his father and for a second love eclipses the pain in his eyes, then he says, “So do I. Back to being the designated patient, the focus of everyone’s anxiety.”
“Hapuh?” Mother asks from the end of the table. “We haven’t heard from you.”
“I’m thankful for the women in the family.” Harper raises his fork and is about to stab a slice of turkey when Mother says, “That’s very gracious, Hapuh, might you kindly tell us why?”
“I love women,” Harper says. “And our family has beautiful, sensitive, caring, strong women. To my mind the women in our family tower over the men. In fact, in society as a whole, women tower over men. Wars, crime, everything that’s wrong with the world is mostly men’s fault.”
Mother, Franklin, and I laugh. Cage is staring again into space, probably taking the blame for all the men. I say, “Well, your father—”
“Dad’s great. He rarely lost his temper with us. He was always ready to listen,” Harper says. “But he was an industrial dad like all the rest of them. He wasn’t around all that much. It’s a societal thing, not particular to him.”
“Your father is a wonderful man,” Mother says. “Why—”
“He never taught any of us how to throw a baseball, how to bat. By the time I arrived, when he wasn’t working, he was in his office studying for his doctorate,” Harper says matter-of-factly. “He—”
“His father was
never
around.” Cage looks at Harper with haunted eyes. “Dad took us backpacking every chance he got. He gave us the mountains.”
Frank listens calmly, his face neutral like he’s counseling a couple. Mother stares at Harper and says, “Your father worked hard and provided—”
“I’m not complaining, Nanny. You asked and I want to toast the women in our clan.” Harper raises his wineglass.
“To the Cage women.” Frank laughs. “God bless them.”
Cage is the last to lift his glass. With his voice wavering he says, “The paradigm, Nanny, is your grandmother. I thought about her in—when things were tough. I thought about her being eighteen, alone on their farm at the end of the war. Her own mother dead, her father still gone, no one left but her.” Cage’s voice becomes steadier. “I imagined her waking at first light to see Yankee soldiers rounding up the cattle and tying the mules together and her running out into the field and calling her mare and climbing up on it bareback and refusing to come down, sitting straight and tall all day long while the soldiers ransacked the house, just sitting there until the soldiers moved on. She must have been something.”
“Why she wasn’t shot or raped is a mystery,” Mother says. “She was a little slip of a girl.”
“Her slaves had run off?” Harper asks. “That’s why she was alone?”
“They didn’t have slaves,” Mother says. “Not in the mountains of East Tennessee. They were too poor.”
“She passed on the expression ‘to take hold,’” I say. “I remember my grandmother—her daughter—telling me. When times were rough, you just have to take hold.”
“She never let go, once she took hold,” Cage says.
But how do you take hold of your son’s illness? A boy with such promise, now a man who can’t bring himself to walk to the front gate. I see the sadness in Frank’s eyes and know that he is thinking the same thing. What do we do now? Why has God wasted such a bright mind? When and how will it end? If we cannot somehow provide for him after we die, will he end up an old crazy man on the streets? Harper wouldn’t necessarily take care of him, not if Cage repeatedly stole from him in his manic episodes and wrecked everything he touched. Harper might be forced to cut him off. Tough love. Looking at Cage now, it is impossible to conceive that he could lie, manipulate, and steal. Just as impossible to imagine that he could hold down a job and manage independence.
“To Great-Great-Grandmother Madeline.” Harper raises his glass. “And all her female descendants.”
Frank reaches over and taps his glass against mine, saying, “And to Mars, who carries those tenacious genes.” He leans back and smiles. “She’s the power behind the throne. Only the secret is out. In half the churches in the diocese they don’t even call me the bishop anymore. They refer to me as the husband of the bishop’s wife.”
Mother and Frank laugh genuinely as Cage looks on like a smiling ghost and Harper has an amused, slightly superior look. When he smiles now, Frank’s eyes are simply slits, little crescents. Frank turns the glass in his hand by the stem and takes a sip.
Harper says, “The ultimate in henpecked.”
Laughing, Frank almost coughs up wine, then clears his throat. “That’s your mother. Domineering. Controlling.”
“I am not!” I protest, my eyes wide in disbelief. It’s true that when the boys were young and misbehaved, I always won the arguments over what was just punishment. I put my foot down because Frank, taking a self-serving position, always wanted to let them off too easy. Of course our biggest quarrels were over money. Frank always insisted that we tithe, even when it was so hard just to pay bills. That’s one contention I never won. It infuriated me that he would not ask the vestries for bigger raises, that I had to run the household finances like a draconian efficiency expert. But that’s all long ago.
“They call Margaret the bishop’s wife because she’s so active,” Mother says. “You boys ought to admire her. She’s a wonderful woman. She works so hard.”
“We know that, Nanny,” Cage says.
“Nanny, I admire you both.” Harper smiles. “I just toasted you.”
“After we moved to Memphis I became more involved in the church as a way of helping Frank,” I say. “Perhaps at first it was to fill up the hole from Nick’s death.”
Mother looks at me with a sad, sweet smile, then says, “Well, the food’s getting cold.”
“It looks delicious, Mary Lee,” Frank says. “I don’t know how you do it.”
I lean over and give Frank a kiss, thinking how neither of us has raised a voice in anger at the other for years, how we’ve grown with each other. If I could assemble anyone who ever lived around this big table, it would be Carl Jung, Louisa May Alcott, C. S. Lewis, Emily Dickinson, who’d be too shy to come, Walker Percy, and Franklin Rutledge. I wouldn’t get to say a word! I whisper to Frank, “I’m most thankful for you.”
I
n the back of a cab from the Village to Chelsea I wait for Betsy to complain about why I canceled the trip to Cozumel on the weekend. I’ll apologize fifty times, remind her that I’m eating the tickets and hotel, suggest that she take someone else. Maybe I should tell her that I’ve gone off sex, that I think I’ve had sex with too many women. Dooner told me today, “You’re always down on yourself when you’re getting too much pussy.” As the taxi slows to the curb outside Bungalow Eight, I see about twenty people waiting in the cold and tell Betsy, “Forget it. I’m not standing around freezing my ass to be blackballed by those punks corrupted absolutely by their tiny bit of power.”
“Gripe, complain, whine.” Betsy climbs out onto the sidewalk. “Like Oscar the Grouch. Once upon a time you were a lot of fun.”
“Reminds me of the velvet ropes they sometimes use for altar railings.” I pay the driver. “We come humbly beseeching to enter the kingdom of your bar.”
“Ronnie!” Betsy yells, pushing through the crowd and dragging me by the arm.
“Betsy, darling!” the smaller of the two doormen squeals, unhooking the rope. “You look divine. Love the shoes.”
“Ronnie, this is my ex-boyfriend, Harper.”
I give her a quizzical look.
Clutching a clipboard to his chest, Ronnie winks at me. “Pass him my way.” He turns to the big Latino bouncer in a long leather jacket and says, “Elisabeth Sloan is royalty. Don’t you ever forget.”
The muscleman nods seriously and opens the heavy metal door.
“See you, sweetie.” Betsy kisses Ronnie, then tugs me. “Come on, grumpy.”
A bass beat pulsates through a dark corridor. I push open the next door into a dim pond of noise, hip-hop and the roar of young New Yorkers making themselves heard over the music. What’s Isabella Ballou doing right now? Thursday night in Memphis is show-and-tell at Incognito, a black gay bar, where she is occasionally one of the few white clientele watching big black men impersonate Tina Turner and Diana Ross. A heroin-thin hostess comes up and talks to Betsy, touching her lightly on the shoulder. Betsy turns back to me and shouts something about a table upstairs. I smile and nod. The girl then leads us away from the stairs to two seats at the bar, says something to Betsy, and walks off.
“Two greyhounds,” I shout at the bartender, then to Betsy, “Perfect place for quiet conversation.”
“What?” Betsy raises her eyebrows, then she smiles and yells, “Maybe this was a bad idea.” When the bartender delivers the drinks, Betsy throws down a hundred before I can reach my wallet, then she holds up two fingers. The barman smiles and turns away and Betsy shouts, “Immediate resupply!”
Drinking with Betsy is very much like drinking with a guy, only she drinks faster and holds her liquor better than most traders I know. After knocking back half the first drink I decide that it’s not so bad to be in a noisy club with my buxom friend. I rub her neck and put my lips to her ear. “You are a great American. And a beautiful woman.”
“I want to explain something to you,” Betsy shouts.
Here it comes. Cupping my hand to my ear, I lean toward her face.
“I feel like when we first got together. It was exciting. But something has happened between us. You’re ambivalent about seeing me. It breaks my heart—I’ve had more fun with you. I feel so comfortable around you.” Betsy drains her first drink, sets it down.
Shaking my head slightly, I’m confused. Did she think we were in a monogamous relationship? I had assumed that she was fucking other guys on occasion, but was I leading her on, letting her think that we were a unit?
When I don’t say anything, Betsy takes a sip from a full glass. “I can’t make all the effort. I want to be courted. What woman doesn’t? There are so many men out there and I don’t want to be with one who makes me feel bad about myself.”
“I make you feel bad about yourself?”
“
Duh
. You can’t even tell.” Betsy narrows her eyes. “Is that all you can say?”
“Do you have any blow?”
Betsy’s eyes widen into an insane glare.
“I was just joking, Bat Girl.” I put my arm around her shoulders. “I’m sorry, really. I love you. I think you’re great. Look—”
“You don’t love anyone but yourself.”
“That could be true.” I take a gulp from the backup greyhound. “You’re better off with one of the high rollers who’re always chasing you with limos and roses. I’m a lost boy.”
“Hey, Harper.”
I turn and see Caitlin with a couple of girls I vaguely recognize and my stomach falls and I try to smile. The first night we met, after I got her number, lit on blow like a lightning bug, I called Cait about two a.m. and told her that it was love at first sight and I couldn’t sleep until I came over and ravished her until dawn, which I did that night and many more, but lately I’ve been dodging her calls. “Hey, Caitlin.”
“Get back early from Hong Kong?” she shouts.
Betsy is craning around me with a who-the-fuck-are-you? face.
“Caitlin, may I present Betsy. Betsy, Caitlin.”
“I’ve seen you on TV,” Caitlin says.
Betsy smiles benignly.
“Is that why you wear so much makeup?” Caitlin asks.
“What?” Betsy looks fierce, the old attack forward on the champion lacrosse team ready to slam into a defender.
Caitlin ignores her. “So you never went to Hong Kong?”
“Hong Kong?” Betsy shouts.
“So you were just blowing me off.” Caitlin drops her sarcastic expression, suddenly looks hurt.
I puff my cheeks like a blowfish. “No, no. I—”
The bartender shouts something at Caitlin and her friends.
Someone taps me on the shoulder and I spin around and nearly fall off the barstool at the sight of Camille, a young lawyer from Baton Rouge, a very close friend and rare lover. She’s seen me evolve from Cub Scout to playboy, and when she’s between boyfriends, we sometimes get roaring drunk and practice the
Kama Sutra
. As it happens, she just dumped a guy at Goldman a few days ago.