Long Upon the Land (13 page)

“Thank you, and please call me Deborah.”

She did smile then. “How prescient of your parents.”

“Excuse me?”

“To name you Deborah. ‘
And Deborah judged Israel at that time.
’ I believe she’s the only female in the whole Bible whose prominence did not derive from a male relative.”

I smiled back. “What about Esther?”

“Wife of a king and brought to his attention by her cousin Mordecai,” she said scornfully.

“Ruth?”

“On the basis of that mawkish ‘
Entreat me not to leave thee
’ speech, which was said not to a man but to her mother-in-law?”

I laughed. “Who promptly married her off to the richest man in the neighborhood.”

“Exactly! Which eventually led to her becoming King David’s great-grandmother, which is the main reason we remember her.”

“You really are into genealogy, aren’t you?” I said.

We beamed at each other and she gestured for me to be seated next to her on the sofa.

“Coffee, Aunt Jo? Or tea?” asked Mr. Raynesford.

“No, thank you, dear.” She looked at me expectantly. “Something for you, Deborah?”

I shook my head and her nephew said, “Then if y’all will excuse me, one of our guests has booked a tour of the town for two o’clock.”

“In that Cadillac convertible parked at the curb?” I asked.

He nodded. “My dad’s first car. My son keeps trying to talk me out of it. I just hope I can keep it running till he’s ready to take over the tours. Nice meeting you, Judge.”

Miss Raynesford smiled indulgently as he left us. “I’m afraid New Bern’s going to seem much too dull for young Walter after four years at Chapel Hill.”

On the coffee table were several thick loose-leaf notebooks and she picked up one labeled
Raynesford 1850–1950
.

“My nephew tells me you’re seeking information about a Walter Raynesford, who may have been killed in the Second World War. I’ve looked in my records, but the only Walter of that era came home safely and died in the eighties. There was a Herman Raynesford who was killed, but—”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I must not have made it clear to your nephew. Raynesford was the middle name of the man I was looking for, not his last. Walter Raynesford McIntyre.”

“McIntyre?” She frowned. “We do have McIntyre cousins, but none in our direct line.” She put aside the first notebook and began to leaf through one labeled
Collateral Raynesfords
. “Still, if his first name was Walter, then he must be closely connected. If we had his dates…”

As she turned the pages, I remembered the lighter, which I had dropped in my purse this morning. “This was his. A birthday present from his girlfriend.”

I pulled it apart and showed her the date engraved on the inner case:
11/11/1934
. “If this was his twenty-fifth birthday, then he must have been born in November 1909.”

“November 1909,” she murmured under her breath, her thin fingers running down lines of typescript. “Ah! Here he is. Walter Raynesford. Son and third child of Mary Elizabeth Raynesford and Gerald Scott McIntyre. Born November 11, 1909. Died 1974, Paris. No children.”

“Paris? 1974?” That was unexpected. “He didn’t die during the war?”

“Apparently not. The notation is my mother’s handwriting and she was a stickler for accuracy. Is it important?”

“Not really, I guess.”

“You haven’t yet said why you’re interested in him.”

“It’s sort of complicated,” I said.

“Oh, good! I love complications!” She repositioned the cushions on the sofa and leaned back against them. “Tell me.”

When I hesitated, she patted my arm. “I am very discreet, Deborah, and there aren’t many complicated family stories I haven’t heard over the years. The details may vary, but the broad outlines are often the same—love, hate, birth, death. How did you come to have my cousin’s lighter?”

“He gave it to my mother before he went overseas. She was supposed to hold it for him till he came back, but he never came back or got in touch, so I think she assumed he’d died in action. She said he changed her life, but she didn’t say how and I was too stupid to ask before she died.”

I told her about Daddy and how Mother had been gently raised while he’d had to scrabble for everything he had.

“They were so happy together but I get the feeling that she wouldn’t have let herself fall in love with him if it hadn’t been for this Mac.” I showed her the musical notes engraved under Leslie’s name and hummed them aloud. “This may have been their song, but it was Mother and Daddy’s song, too.”

I sighed for all the questions that would never be answered. “I wonder why he didn’t come back to New Bern?”

“Maybe it would have been too painful for him without his Leslie,” she said. “Did your mother tell you why she killed herself?”

I had to shake my head. “And now we’ll never know.”

“People here have long memories, Deborah. If only you had that poor child’s last name.”

She looked down at the notebook still open on her lap. “Your Walter McIntyre had two siblings, a brother Gerald Junior and a sister Mamie. The brother died unmarried in 1983, but his sister…” She flipped over more pages and ran her fingers down the lists. “Here we are. Mamie McIntyre. She married a Lovick Middlewood. Middlewood? Hmmm. I wonder if that’s Edgar Middlewood’s father? If so, Edgar’s right here in New Bern.”

She pursed her lips. “I hadn’t realized we were cousins.”

“You sound as if it’s not good news that you are.”

Miss Raynesford smiled. “Very perceptive of you. Edgar and I used to attend the same church. We even served on the pulpit committee together. He wasn’t happy when we welcomed black people into the congregation, but when a black man was made a deacon, he moved his membership to a more conservative church.”

She closed the notebook and stood. “Let me give him a call.”

J
o Raynesford might have had misgivings when she realized that Edgar Middlewood was a cousin, but he seemed thrilled. Less than fifteen minutes after she called, he was sitting happily on a chair in her sunroom.

“Cousins, you say, Jo? My Grandmother McIntyre was a Raynesford? Well, well, well! Mother never mentioned that but then she didn’t ever talk much about her family. Think of that!” he marveled. “Kin to one of the oldest families in New Bern and she never mentioned it.”

He appeared to be a few years younger than Miss Raynesford, but age had stooped him and, despite hearing aids in both ears, he was somewhat hard of hearing, which is probably why his voice was louder than normal. He wore a blue bow tie with a buttoned-up blue-striped shirt and his eager dark eyes darted around the sunroom before coming to rest on some framed snapshots clustered on a side table next to his chair.

He picked one up for a closer look. “That’s you with the mayor, isn’t it? And here’s you and Walter with the de Graffenreids the last time they came to New Bern. Was this the dance for them out at Tryon Palace? I heard it was a real fancy party. You visited them in Switzerland, didn’t you? Did you stay at their mansion?”

Without waiting for her answer, he said, “Never been out of the country myself. Or even west of the Mississippi, for that matter.”

His eyes had passed over me when he first entered even though Miss Raynesford had tried to introduce us. Now he all but shouted, “Sorry, ma’am, I didn’t catch your name.”

“Deborah Knott,” I said, enunciating as clearly as I could.

“She’s a judge, Edgar,” said Miss Raynesford and his long narrow face rearranged itself into a respectful interest that had been missing before he heard my title.

“Didn’t know I was being asked in to meet a judge,” he boomed jovially. “She says you want to ask about my mother?”

“About your mother’s
brother
,” she corrected.

“Uncle Gerald? What about him?”

“Not Gerald. Walter.”

Puzzled, he cupped a hand to his ear. “Water?”

I was nearer, so I said, “
Walter.
Walter Raynesford McIntyre.”

“My Uncle Walter was named Raynesford?” He frowned and drew back as a sort of wariness came over him. “What about him?” he asked suspiciously.

“He was a friend of my mother’s,” I said. “Did you know him? Can you tell me about him?”

He glared at Miss Raynesford. “Is this some sort of a joke, Jo? Did you ask me here to insult me? To smear my family’s good name?”

He jerked himself up from his chair and headed for the door.

“Edgar, no!” she cried. “We only wanted to ask you—”

He turned with so much anger that for a moment I thought he was going to hit her and I sprang up, too, to stop him, but he stepped back, as if suddenly remembering that he probably shouldn’t hit a judge.

“We may not be as high and mighty as the Raynesfords, so ready to sit in judgment of God-fearing white Christians who follow God’s commandments,” he said to me. Then looking past me to Miss Raynesford, he snarled, “But I won’t have you dragging my family through dirt. Walter
Raynesford
McIntyre!” His voice dripped venom. “I should’ve known that was his whole name. No wonder he went whoring off to Paris after the war. Ashamed to come back home even though you’d’ve welcomed him back to your church. Seated him on the front row next to some—some—! You people make me sick!”

And with that, he stomped out of the room and down the hall where he slammed the front door so violently that I expected the glass to shatter.

Miss Raynesford let out the breath she’d been holding and gave me a wry smile. “Well, at least we now know why Walter Raynesford McIntyre didn’t come home to the bosom of his loving family.”

“Do we?” I asked.

“You heard him. ‘God-fearing white Christians who follow God’s commandments.’ Back when we were taking a vote to elect a black deacon, Edgar got up and quoted scriptures that commanded servants—read
slaves
—to respect and serve their masters. And did you know that the takeaway lesson of the Tower of Babel was separation of the races? So they wouldn’t mix?”

“Leslie was black?”

“This is the South, Deborah. If men like Edgar still foam at the mouth at the very thought of mixed marriages in this day and age, think what it was back then. Miscegenation. It was illegal for blacks and whites to marry in this state as late as the mid-sixties.”

She sighed. “Even that song. The words were running through my head while we waited for Edgar to get here. It was popular when I was young and I remember that it kept asking whether or not two young people should fall in love. Maybe that’s why your parents took it for their song, too. In some ways, from what you’ve told me, their social differences were almost as great as Walter and Leslie’s. They had to wonder whether or not those differences should keep them apart. Maybe he encouraged your mother to follow her heart as he had.”

“And Leslie killed herself because of that? Because their marriage would be impossible here in North Carolina?”

“Young people do a lot of foolish things for love.” Her smile was sad. “Or when they think they’ve lost it. For all we know, he might have been the one to break it off.”

I shook my head. “No. I can’t believe that. He wouldn’t have kept the lighter if he didn’t love her.”

“Guilt, maybe?”

It was a logical explanation. Not a satisfying one, but logical. And it would explain why he lived out his life in freewheeling Paris rather than return to uptight New Bern.

I stood to go and she accompanied me to the front door. “I’m sorry, Deborah. I wish I could have helped.”

“You did help,” I told her. “At least now I have a sense of why Mother seemed sad when she spoke of him. And not just because she thought he had died in the war.”

After that emotional session, it felt anticlimactic to drive over to see Dr. Livingston.

As before, he was in his office when I opened the screen door and walked in. A ceiling fan high overhead stirred the air and a nearby floor fan helped make the room comfortable.

“Oh, good!” he said, and his leather swivel chair squeaked as he stood to welcome me. “I hoped that was you when I heard the door. I couldn’t remember when you said you’d be back and we didn’t exchange email addresses, did we?”

After the usual pleasantries, I said, “Did you find my mother?”

He was beaming. “And Captain McIntyre, too.”

He sat down, picked up one of those red leather-bound diaries, and opened it to the entry he had bookmarked. “Dad used a lot of abbreviations, so I’ll just read it to you.”

Dr. Livingston gave an apologetic wave of his hand. “I
did
tell you that my father was as randy as a billy goat, didn’t I?”

I smiled. “Does he get clinical?”

“I wish! No, it’s just crude barnyard language. I’ll spare you. This is from a few nights later.” He turned back to the diary.

“
Finally got Sue S. to dance with me. Betty Grable gams, breasts like soft ripe peaches—
” From the sheepish look he gave me over the top of his glasses, I had a feeling that his father had used different words. “Sorry. He goes on to catalog your mother’s beauty and her many physical charms and then says she just laughed at him when he tried to put the moves on her. She wasn’t the first nor the last to resist him and he was usually pretty philosophical about it when he got turned down. Here’s what he wrote about her when she slapped him down a week or two later:
With so much low-hanging fruit, a man would be a sap to let himself stay blue just because he can’t take a bite out of every apple on the tree.
”

“Poor man,” I said.

He grinned. “Don’t cry for him, Argentina. He got through a lot more apples than most men. I think he and your mother eventually became friends. Or maybe sparring partners would be more accurate. She teased him about being a sheep in wolf’s clothing, because he never really forced himself on a woman. Just took advantage of any opportunities. But then I found this.”

He opened to a bookmarked page much deeper in the diary. “This is from three months later.”

Dr. Livingston closed the diary. “There’s only one more casual mention of her and none about McIntyre. Shortly after that, Dad was transferred to Walter Reed and finished out the war there.”

“So even though he and Mac were both from New Bern, it doesn’t sound as if they were particularly close.”

He shrugged. “Well, he would have been a little older and he was probably upper-class town while my dad was a country nobody. Raynesfords ran the town a hundred years ago and set the tone for strict morality and civic responsibility. Defenders of the faith and all that.”

“Really?” I was surprised. “I visited Josephine Raynesford right before I came here and that’s not how she struck me. In fact, I gather that she wanted to open the faith to everybody.”

“Oh, you heard about that, did you? Yes, she marched and demonstrated with the best of them in her day. Bet her ancestors almost rolled out of their marble mausoleums. All water under the bridge now and the name’s pretty much died out except for Miss Jo and Walter. He’s got a son, but the boy lives with Walter’s ex-wife up in Raleigh and I doubt if he’ll ever come back in New Bern.”

He placed the diary back on the bookshelf behind his chair. “Was Miss Jo related to Captain McIntyre?”

“I believe they were second or third cousins through his mother and she didn’t know the name till I asked her, but she found him in a notebook her mother compiled.”

“Did she have more information about him?”

“He wasn’t killed in the war,” I said, abruptly deciding not to bring Edgar Middlewood into it. “He died in Paris. That’s all she could say for sure.”

“Interesting.”

We spoke a few minutes more and as I thanked him for his time, he said, “I hope you don’t mind, but my father was so taken with your mother that I have to ask—was it a happy marriage?”

“Very happy,” I said.

“You were lucky, then.”

“His marriage wasn’t?” I asked.

Dr. Livingston shrugged. “Don’t ask me. They stayed together for fifty-two years and they were always polite to each other and kind to us kids. He was quite successful. Gave her anything she wanted except fidelity. She pretended not to know and eventually, I suppose she quit caring.”

As I drove home with the afternoon sun in my eyes, I was okay with what I had and hadn’t learned. Jo Raynesford might or might not be right about Leslie and why she had killed herself. I might never know Mac’s whole story or precisely why Mother said he’d changed her life, but for the moment, that was no longer important to me. She and Daddy had loved each other utterly and completely and that love had spilled over to my brothers and me.

What else does any child really need to know?