News of the Spirit (11 page)

Mama sat downstairs on a tufted velvet love seat, where she had never sat before, at least not in my memory, vacant and glassy-eyed, asking for Daddy. Meanwhile, Aunt Judy was on the phone constantly, and Jinx’s mama answered the door.

“Where is John?” Mama kept asking. “I just can’t understand where John is.”

Nobody else could understand this, either. Aunt Judy couldn’t reach him out at Granddaddy’s old hunting cabin, where Daddy had gone for the night. He did this occasionally, though he’d read and reflect instead of hunt. It was his retreat.

Finally Aunt Judy dispatched his good friend George Long to get him, but an hour and a half later George called back with the perplexing message that Daddy was not at the
hunting cabin, and it didn’t look like he’d even gotten there yet. Our house was filling up with people and food; I was amazed at how fast the news spread. Jinx came back over to “be with me.” It was not until I saw her in her church dress that I realized the seriousness of what had happened.

The phone kept ringing and people kept coming in and going out. Arrangements were made. They were sending Mason’s body over from Norfolk in a hearse. It would arrive at our local funeral home by evening. Mr. Joines, the undertaker, came in. He talked to Mama, who did not seem to understand what he was saying. She smiled and smiled, in a way that scared me. My grandmother arrived, all dressed up, and started bossing everybody around.

There was so much going on that I barely registered the arrival of Mr. Kinney, Daddy’s foreman and “right-hand man” from the mill, still in his work clothes, holding his hat in his hands. Mr. Kinney went straight to my aunt Judy and took her aside for a whispered conference, then left without speaking to Mama or me. He ducked his head as he went out the door. And the afternoon wore on, the longest day I had ever lived through, the longest day in the world.

It was almost night when Daddy finally came home. Jinx and I were sitting in the windowseat in the living room, balancing plates of ham sandwiches and potato salad on our knees, when a red car pulled up and stopped at the end of our walk. I thought I had seen the car before, but I couldn’t remember where. I peered out through the gathering dark.
Daddy got out on the passenger side of the car and then I could see him plain in the light at the end of our walk. He looked years older than he had the day before.

Daddy stared at our house, then opened the door and leaned down into the car to say something. He straightened up and looked at the house again. The other door of the car opened and Carroll Byrd got out, wearing pants, her hair streaming down her back. She walked around the front of the car to Daddy, who put out his arms and held her for a long time, so long I couldn’t believe it.

Didn’t he
know
that this house was full of people who could look out the windows and see him, and see what he was doing? Didn’t he
care
? Didn’t he even care at all about Mama, or me, or anybody except himself?

Finally, Carroll Byrd stepped away from Daddy, who touched her cheek once and then turned and came slowly up the walk, as if to his own execution. Carroll Byrd got back in her car and drove away, and I never saw her again.

The funeral was held two days later at St. Michael’s Episcopal Church, though Mason had not been there or to any other church for many years, as far as we knew. The church was packed anyway, with Mama and Daddy’s friends and lots of people from the mill. Mason’s wife did not show up, but two of her daughters did, trashy girls in their late teens with curly red hair who cried like they meant it and told Mama that Mason had been a great stepfather to them. I know this was more important to Mama than anything else
that was said at Mason’s funeral. She clung to their arms, and gave them money later.

My oldest sister Beth could not come for the funeral, as she was nearing the end of a difficult pregnancy, but Caroline came, of course, with Tom—my beloved Tom, who immediately made himself indispensable to everybody, with his good sense and calm, reasonable manner.

After the funeral, Tom and Grandmother stood by the door and shook hands and talked to everybody who came to our house, while Mama and Caroline sat together on the love seat and cried. They looked like beautiful strangers to me—the big disheveled blonde, the pretty girl with mascara streaking her face. My old terror came back as I realized I didn’t have a clue as to what their family had been like, how they had acted with each other, who they were before I was born. I got the same feeling in my stomach that I’d had at the beach when Jinx and I spied on Mr. Womble. Daddy talked on the telephone back in his study with the door closed, though Aunt Judy tried several times to get him to come out and “act responsible.” (Imagine
Aunt Judy
saying this to
Daddy
!)

At length Grandmother left her post in the front hall and walked to Daddy’s study, magisterial in her black suit. I followed, slipping into the stairwell. I understood that Grandmother had been dressing for a funeral for years, and now was in her element. Grandmother went into the study and shut the door behind her. I am not sure what she said to
Daddy, but it all ended with her marching out and him shouting, “Goddamnit, Mama!” and slamming the door.

“But John!” Grandmother had apparently thought of something else to say. She turned and tried the knob. He had locked the door. She was furious, I knew, but when she saw me, her face fell into its customary haughty expression, and she sailed into the living room without another word, to shake hands and smile some more.

I headed to the kitchen for a Coke, and there I discovered Aunt Judy in the process of getting drunk. She’d done absolutely as much as she
could
, Goddamnit! she said. Now it was out of her hands entirely. Nobody could blame her.

It seemed to be out of
everyone’s
hands.

I got back to the living room just in time to hear Caroline announce her own pregnancy. Tom stood beside her, straight as a soldier, grinning from ear to ear, the bastard. I felt like I’d been kicked in the stomach.

“Oh, John,” Mama began calling. “Oh, John!” She blew her nose on her pink Kleenex. “Oh, John, come here, darling, we’ve got some
good
news after all, even on this awful day! Oh, John…” she kept calling, but Daddy never came.

I spent the night at Jinx’s. Locked in the bathroom, we smoked a whole pack of her mother’s Kents, which tasted awful. Then I slept for twelve hours solid. I awoke to find both Jinx and her mother sitting on the end of Jinx’s extra twin bed staring fixedly at me.

“Oh, thank goodness,” Jinx’s mother said in a fuzzy,
distracted way, which was not like her at all. “Oh, Jenny, honey.”

I could tell that she knew everything, all about Daddy and Carroll Byrd, which probably meant that everybody else knew everything, too. What a big relief! I didn’t realize how hard it had been to keep such a secret until I felt the weight of it leave me like a physical thing, like a rock being lifted off the top of my head. For the first time in months, I could cry—and I did. I cried and cried and cried, for Mama and Daddy and Carroll Byrd and poor terrible scary dead Mason, who had been the sweetest child, and for myself and especially for the loss of Tom Burlington, who would never be free to love me now.

T
HIS IS WHERE EVERYTHING GETS ALL HAZY IN MY MIND
. By the time I went home from Jinx’s, Daddy was gone. I did not have to be told where he was. I knew he was with her. Mama was brightly, determinedly cheerful, wearing that same crazy smile which had scared me so much before. She was in the kitchen cooking up a storm, banging the pots around, while Dot, our maid, watched her anxiously.

“Oh, hello, dear,” Mama said to me. “I’m making some potato soup, I think potato soup is just so
comforting
, and Lord knows, we can all use a little comfort, isn’t that right, Dot?”

“Yes ma’am,” Dot said.

Mama wore a green knit suit with lots of gold jewelry, including her famous charm bracelet. I looked to see if Daddy’s Deke pin was still on it. It was.

“Jenny,” she said brightly to me, stirring. “Did you hear that your daddy has had to go out of town on an extended business trip? He said to give you his love and tell you he’ll be back before long. I made this potato soup for you, honey,” she added. “I know it’s your favorite.”

It was the first time in my life that I had ever been unable to eat. Mama didn’t even try. She just sat across from me drumming her beautiful red nails on the table, rat-a-tat-tat, and sipping from a tall Kentucky Derby glass.

I thought she had water in the glass, but it was vodka, and she filled it again as soon as the level dipped below half, and did not put it down for the next two weeks. She never quit talking, either, to me or Dot or Jinx’s mother or one or another of her friends. They had arranged it among themselves so that someone was always with her, and every day when I came home from school, there they’d be, Mama and her visitor (Buffy, Bitsy, Helen, Jane Ann, etc.), talking a mile a minute, with Dot hovering in the background. Mama kept cooking those nice little suppers for me, which we never ate. Dinnertime was my time to entertain her, though, while Dot and Mama’s friends went home to their own families, before Aunt Judy showed up to spend the night.

Mostly we read movie magazines and talked about the lives of the stars. So much had happened lately that we had
a lot to catch up on. Judy Garland was divorcing Sid Luft, and that “ideal couple,” Cary Grant and Betsy Drake, had parted, amicably though. Jean Seberg was engaged to some Frenchman she’d met in the romantic resort town of Saint-Tropez, on the French Riviera, while she was filming
Bonjour Tristesse
. Tyrone Power married Debbie Minardos in a little chapel in her hometown of Tunica, Mississippi.

We were still reveling in Grace Kelly’s fairy-tale wedding to Prince Rainier, and in the Robert Wagner—Natalie Wood marriage. We could tell that Janet Leigh and Tony Curtis were truly in love; Mama explained to me that their union had brought Tony (born Bernard Schwartz) “up into a better class of people.” And Kim Novak was dating Sammy Davis, Jr., which outraged Mama. I didn’t care. I thought Kim Novak was beautiful, and planned to paint my entire room lavender, just like hers, whenever Mama would let me.

I still could not understand how the gorgeous Marilyn Monroe could have married such a dried-up pruny old guy as Arthur Miller, though Mama said he was a brilliant egghead intellectual. “They have their charms,” she told me, sipping from her glass, ignoring the fried chicken she had just cooked.

This was as close as Mama ever came to mentioning Daddy.

After supper we watched television together, an unaccustomed treat since Daddy didn’t like for the television set to be on in the evenings except for
Huntley—Brinkley
or an
occasional dramatic production. But now Mama and I watched everything, and she kept up a running commentary. Her favorites were the variety shows, where she could see the most stars. I thought
Ed Sullivan
and
Your Hit Parade
were okay, but I personally liked the Dinah Shore show the best, especially the end, where she sang, “See the
U
.S.A. in your
Chev
rolet,” and blew a big, smacking kiss to the studio audience. Mama invariably turned to me at this point and whispered, “Of course, you know Dinah has Negro blood.”

“How do you know that?” I’d asked the first couple of times Mama said this, but all she ever answered was, “Oh, honey,
everybody
knows it!” Whether everybody did or not, Mama believed it implicitly, as she believed in flying saucers and reincarnation and segregation and linen napkins and Chanel No. 5 and not going swimming for one hour after eating and not having milk with fish.

Mama and I watched television together until about nine o’clock, when Aunt Judy would show up to give Mama her pills and I’d be free to do my homework or go to bed and read for as long as I liked. I was reading
By Love Possessed
(pretty hot stuff), which had just arrived in a package from the Book-of-the-Month Club. I kept it under my bed.

We went on this way for about three weeks, until that awful night when we were watching
What’s My Line?
together. Now, I really liked
What’s My Line?
I felt that its question-and-answer format offered some good pointers for a combination spy and novelist such as myself. First “the
challenger” would come into the studio and sign in on the blackboard. The challenger could be a man or a woman, either one. Then words would flash up on the screen, telling the audience what the challenger did for a living. The job was always far out—one man polished jelly beans, another put sticks in Popsicles, another was a bull de-horner. I loved these jobs, which made me feel that the world was a much more open place than I had been led to believe thus far. It was clear that I was destined to go to St. Catherine’s and make my debut, but after college, who knows? I imagined going on the show myself someday as the challenger, the youngest best-selling author in the world. Anyway, the panelists asked questions to figure out the challenger’s line, such as:

“Are you self-employed?”

“Do you deal in services?”

“Do people come to you? Men and women both?”

“Are they happier when they leave?”

“Do you need a college education to do what you do?”

I imagined Carroll Byrd as the challenger, squirming while she tried to answer this question, cringing when Dorothy Kilgallen pointed a finger at her and cried: “You are an
adulteress
!”

On the night I am thinking about, the challenger was a professional fire-eater and the panel was closing in. “Oh, he’ll get it now,” I said to Mama, because it was Bennett Cerf’s turn and he was the smartest. “Don’t you think? Hmmm? Don’t you think?”

When Mama didn’t answer, I turned and saw that she had slumped over to one side in the easy chair, her head too far down on her shoulder, exactly like a bird with a broken neck. Her overturned drink made a spreading stain on her silk print dress. I watched while the Kentucky Derby glass rolled slowly off her lap and onto the carpet and under the coffee table. Then I got up and went to the telephone to call Aunt Judy, who didn’t answer. I let it ring and ring. Finally I realized: Aunt Judy was already on her way. I stood by the front door, not moving, until she got there.