News of the Spirit (8 page)

Nothing
, was the answer to that, already clear to both of us. The fact is, I was just too much for Mama, coming along to them so late in life (a “surprise”), after my two older sisters had already “sapped her strength” and “lowered her resistance,” as she said, to all kinds of things, including migraine headaches, asthma, and a heart murmur. These ailments required her to lie down a lot but did not prevent her from being perfectly beautiful, as always.

My mother was widely known as one of the most beautiful women in Virginia, everybody said so. Previously she had been the most beautiful girl in Charleston, South Carolina, where she had grown up as Billie Rutledge and lived until she married my father, John Fitzhugh Dale, Jr., a naval officer stationed there briefly during the war. “Just long enough to sweep me off my feet,” as she put it. He was a
divine dancer, and my most cherished image of my parents involved them waltzing grandly around a ballroom floor, she in a long white gown, he in a snappy uniform, her hair and the buttons on the uniform gleaming golden in the light from the sparkling chandeliers.

Thus she became Billie Rutledge Dale, in a ceremony I loved to imagine. It was a wedding of superlatives: the handsomest couple in the world, a wedding cake six feet high, a gown with a train fifteen feet long, ten bridesmaids, a horse and buggy—not to mention a former suitor’s suicide attempt the night before, while everybody else was dancing the night away at the rehearsal dinner. I was especially fascinated by this unsuccessful project, which had involved the young man’s trying to hang himself from a coat rack in a downtown men’s club, after which he was forever referred to as Bobby “Too Tall” Burkes.

Some people said Mama looked like Marilyn Monroe, but I didn’t think so; Mama was bigger, blonder, paler, softer, with a sort of inflatable celluloid prettiness. She looked like a great big baby doll. People also said I took after Mama, but this wasn’t true, either, at least not yet, and I didn’t want it to become true, at least not entirely, as I feared that taking after her too much might eventually damn me into lying down a lot of the time, which looked pretty boring.

On the other hand, I was simply dying to get my period, grow breasts, turn into a sexpot and do as much damage as Mama, who had broken every heart in Charleston and had a charm bracelet made out of fraternity pins to prove it. She
used to tick them off for me one by one. “Now that was Smedes Black, a Phi Delt from UVA, such a darling boy, and this one was Parker Winthrop, a Sigma Chi at W and L, he used to play the ukulele….” I was drunk on the sound of so many alphabetical syllables. My mother had “come out” in Charleston; my sisters had attended St. Catherine’s School and then “come out” in Richmond, since nobody did such a thing in Lewisville, outside Lynchburg, where we lived. I was expected to follow in my sisters’ footsteps.

But then our paths would diverge, as I secretly planned to go up north to college before becoming (to everyone’s total astonishment) a
writer
. First I would write steamy novels about my own hot love life, eventually getting world-famous like Grace Metalious. I would make millions of dollars and give it all away to starving children in foreign lands. I would win the Nobel Prize. Then I would become a vegetarian poet in Greenwich Village. I would live for Art.

I had a big future ahead of me. But so far, nothing doing. No breasts, no period, no sex, no art. Though very blond, I was just any skinny, pale, wispy-haired kid on a bike, quick as a rabbit, fast as a bird, riding invisible all over town, bearing my awful secret.

I
KNEW WHO SHE WAS, OF COURSE
. E
VERYONE KNEW
. Her father, Old Man Byrd, had been the county judge for forty years. After retirement, he became a hermit—or as
close to a hermit as it was possible to be in Lewisville, which was chock-full of neighborly curious people naturally bound and determined to look after one another all the time. (“I swear to God,” my father remarked once in exasperation, “if the devil himself moved into this town, I guess you’d take
him
a casserole, too!”) Judge Byrd was a wild-looking, white-haired, ugly old man whose eyebrows grew all the way across his face in the most alarming fashion; he walked bent over, leaning on a walking stick topped by a carved ivory skull, yelling at children. He smelled bad. He did not socialize. He did not go to church, and was rumored to be an atheist. When he died, everyone was shocked to learn that there would be
no funeral
, unheard of in our town. Furthermore, he was to be
cremated
.

I remember the conversation Mama and Daddy had about it at the time.

“Cremated…” Mama mused. “Isn’t that sort of…communist? Don’t they do it in Russia and places like that?”

“Lord, no, honey.” Daddy was laughing. “It’s perfectly common, in this country as well as abroad. For one thing, it’s a lot more economical.”

“Well, it certainly isn’t
southern
,” Mama sniffed. “And I certainly don’t intend to have it done to
me
, are you listening, John? I want my body to remain as intact as possible, and I want to be buried with all my rings on. And a nice suit, or maybe a dress with a little matching jacket. And I want lots of yellow roses, as in life.”

“Yes, Billie.” Daddy hid a smile as he went out the door. He was Old Man Byrd’s lawyer, and so was in charge of the arrangements. I couldn’t believe my own daddy was actually getting to go inside Old Man Byrd’s house, a vine-covered mansion outside town, which everyone called “The Ivy House.” But of course my father
was
the best lawyer in town, so it followed that he’d be the judge’s lawyer, too. And since he was the soul of discretion, it also followed that he’d never mentioned this to us, not even when my cousin Jinx and I got caught trying to peep in Old Man Byrd’s windows on a dare. I still remember what we saw: a gloomy sitting room full of dark, crouching furniture; a fat white cat on a chair; the housekeeper’s sudden furious face.

Jinx and I were grounded from our bikes for a whole week, during which I completed a paint-by-numbers version of Leonardo da Vinci’s
Last Supper
, done mostly in shades of orange and gold, and presented it to my daddy, who seemed surprised.

“I’m sorry for trespassing,” I said. “I’ll never do it again.”

But I wasn’t sorry, not in the least. The incident marked the beginning of my secret career.

I lived to spy, and this was mainly what I did on my bike trips around town. I’d seen some really neat stuff, too. For instance, I had seen Roger Ainsley, the coolest guy in our school, squeezing pimples in his bathroom mirror. I’d seen Mr. Bondurant whip his big son Earl with a belt a lot harder than anybody ever ought to, and later, when Earl dropped
out of school and enlisted in the Army, I alone knew why. I had seen my fourth-grade teacher, prissy Miss Emily Horn, necking on the couch with her boyfriend and smoking cigarettes. Best of all, I had seen Mrs. Cecil Hertz come running past a picture window wearing nothing but an apron, followed shortly by Mr. Cecil Hertz himself, wearing nothing at all and carrying a spatula.

It was amazing how careless people were about drawing their drapes and pulling their shades down. It was amazing what you could see, especially if you were an athletic and enterprising girl such as myself. I wrote my observations down in a Davy Crockett spiral notebook I’d bought for this purpose. I wrote down everything: date, time, weather, physical descriptions, my reaction. I would use this stuff later, in my novels.

I saw Carroll Byrd the very first time I rode out there to spy on her, after the old man’s death. It was a cold gray day in January, and she was burning trash. The sky was so dark that I didn’t notice the smoke at first, not until I was halfway down the long lane that went from the road to the house—
her
house, now. In spite of the cold, she had opened the windows, flung the shutters outward, and left the front door wide open, too. Airing everything out, I guessed. The whole house wore a rattled, astonished expression. She had a regular bonfire going on the patio in the side yard—cardboard boxes, newspapers, old magazines. She emerged from the house with armful after armful of old papers to feed the yellow flames.

I had ditched my bike earlier, up the lane; now I dodged behind giant boxwoods, getting closer and closer. This was interesting. Neither my mother nor any of her friends would
ever
have acted like Carroll Byrd. In the first place, they all had constant help and never lifted a finger carrying anything. In the second place, Mama “would not be found dead” dressed the way Carroll Byrd was dressed that day: she wore work boots, just like a field hand; men’s pants, belted at the waist; and a tight, long-sleeved black sweater (
leotard
was a word I would not learn until college). Her dark hair, longer than any woman’s in town, was pulled back severely from her high forehead and tied with a string, and fell straight down her back. Indian hair, streaked with gray. I knew instinctively that she didn’t care about the gray, that she would never color it. Nor would she ever wear makeup. Her face was lean and hard, her cheekbones chiseled. She had inherited her father’s heavy brows, like dark wings above the deep-set black eyes.

While I watched, she paused in the middle of one of her trips to the house, and my heart leaped up to my throat as I thought that I had been discovered. But no. Carroll Byrd had stopped to eye an ornate white trellis, nonfunctional but pretty, which arched over the path between the house and the patio. Hand on hip, she considered it. She walked around it. Then, before I could believe what she was doing, she ripped it out of the ground and was breaking it up like so many matchsticks, throwing the pieces into the fire. Red
flames shot toward the lowering sky. She laughed out loud. I noted her generous mouth, the flash of white teeth.

Then Carroll Byrd sat down on an iron bench to watch her fire burn for a while. She lit a cigarette, striking the match on her boot. Now I noticed that she wasn’t wearing a brassiere, something I had read about but never seen done among “nice” women. When she leaned over to stub out her cigarette on the patio tiles, I saw her breasts shift beneath the black sweater. Immediately I thought of “Selena’s brown nipples” on
page 72
in Jinx’s and my dog-eared, hidden copy of
Peyton Place
. I was both disgusted and thrilled.

There in the cramped and pungent safety of the giant boxwood bush, I fell in love. We watched her fire, the two of us from our different vantage points, until it burned itself out. She ran a hose on the ashes before she went inside her father’s house and shut the door.

I sneaked back to my bike and rode down the long lane and then home, pedaling as fast as I could, freezing to death. But my own house seemed too warm, too bright, too soft—now I hated the baby-blue shag rug in my room, hated all my stuffed animals. I wanted fire and bare trees and cold gray sky. I went straight to bed and wouldn’t get up for dinner. After a while, Mama came in and took my temperature (normal) and brought me a bowl of milk toast on a tray. This was what you got in our house when you were sick, and it was delicious.

M
AMA WAS A GREAT COOK
. S
HE ALSO LOVED TO TALK
on the phone, and during the next weeks, I strained to overhear any mention of Carroll Byrd. I got plenty of material. But since Mama generally stayed home and was the recipient rather than the purveyor of news, it was sometimes hard for me to figure out what had actually happened.

“She
what
?”

“You’re kidding! Why, those rugs are worth a fortune! That furniture came from England!”

“Oh, he did
not
!”

“Well, that is the strangest thing I have ever heard in my whole life. The strangest!”

“You’re kidding!”

Et cetera.

I had to decipher the news: Carroll Byrd had given away the downstairs furnishings and the Oriental rugs to several distant relations, who showed up in U-Hauls to claim them and cart them away. Then she fired the housekeeper. She hired Norman Estep, a local ne’er-do-well and jack-of-all-trades, to knock down the walls between the kitchen and the dining room and the parlor, and paint everything white, including “that beautiful paneling.” (“Have you
ever
?”) Next, several huge wooden crates arrived for Carroll Byrd from Maine, and Norman went to the train
station and picked them up in his truck and took them to her house.

For Carroll Byrd was a painter, it developed. Not a housepainter, of course, but the other kind—an
artist
. The minute I heard this, a long shudder ran from the top of my head to my feet. An
artist
. Of course! She had decided to stay on in her father’s house because she loved the light down here as spring came on.

“The what?” Mama asked, puckering up her mouth as she talked on the phone to Jinx’s mother. “I mean, it’s light up in Maine, too, isn’t it?”

Well, yes, but Carroll Byrd feels that there is a
special quality
to the light here in Virginia that she just has to capture on canvas. So now Norman Estep is building frames, huge frames, for her canvases. And now he’s going all around to junkyards for pieces of iron, and now he’s buying welding tools at Southern States Supply. For her
sculptures
—turns out she’s a sculptor, too. Newly elevated to a position of importance by his privileged relationship with Carroll Byrd, Norman Estep is grilled mercilessly by all the women in town, and clams up. Now he won’t tell anybody anything. Neither what she’s painting, nor what she wears, nor what in the world she does out there all day long by herself. Norman Estep buys groceries for her in the Piggly Wiggly, consulting a list penned in a stark angular hand. He won’t even tell anybody what she eats! He is completely loyal to Carroll Byrd.