Teddy's uncle Ingersol was five years younger than Teddy's mother. He was a lighthearted man, tall and rangy and spoiled. Teddy's grandmother had spoiled him because he looked like her side of the family. Her daddy had died one year and Ingersol had been born the next. Reincarnation. Ingersol looked like a Texan and dressed like an English lord. He was a cross between a Texan and an English lord. His full name was Alfred Theodore Ingersol Manning. Teddy was named for him but his real father had forbidden his mother to call him Ingersol. “I want him to be a man,” his father had said, “not a bunch of spoiled-rotten socialites like your brothers.”
“My brothers are not socialites,” Teddy's mother had answered, “just because they like to dance and have some fun occasionally, which is more than I can say for you.” Teddy always believed he had heard that conversation. He had heard his mother tell it so many times that he thought he could remember it. In this naming story he saw himself sitting on the stairs watching them as they argued over him. “He's my son,” his mother was saying. “I'm the one who risked my life having him. I'll call him anything I damn well please.”
Teddy's vision of grown people was very astute. He envisioned them as large, very high-strung children who never sat still or finished what they started. Let me finish this first, they were always saying. I'll be done in a minute. Except for Eric. Many times Eric just smiled when he came in and put down whatever he was doing and took Teddy to get a snowball or to walk the springer spaniels or just sit and play cards or Global Pursuit or talk about things. Eric was the best grown person Teddy had ever known, although he also liked his uncle Ingersol and was always glad when he showed up.
All his mother's brothers were full of surprises when they showed up, but only Uncle Ingersol liked to go out to the amusement park and ride the Big Zephyr.
Ingersol showed up this day almost as soon as Big George and Teddy arrived in the truck. Big George was still sitting on the porch drinking iced tea and talking to Teddy's grandfather about fishing when Ingersol came driving up in his Porsche and got out and joined them. “I heard you were coming over, namesake. How you been? What's been going on?”
“Momma fell down some stairs and me and Eric had to bring her home.”
“Eric and I.”
“I forgot.”
“How'd she do that?”
“She said Eric tried to kill her. She always says things like that when she's hung over. She said to tell you Eric tried to kill her.” There, he had done it. He had done what she told him to do. “If she divorces Eric, I'm going to live with him. I'm staying right there. Eric said I could.”
His grandfather pulled his lips in. It looked like his grandfather was hardly breathing. Big George looked down at the ground. Ingersol sat in his porch chair and began to rub his chin with his hand. “You better go see about her, son,” his grandfather said. “Go on over there. I'll go with you.”
“No, I'll go alone. Where is she now, Teddy?”
“She's in bed. The doctor came to see her. He gave her some pills. She's asleep.”
“Okay. Big George, you know about this?”
“Just said to bring the boy over here to his granddaddy. That's all they told me. Eric wouldn't hurt a flea. I've known him since he was born. He'll cry if his dog dies.”
“Go on, son. Call when you get there.” His grandfather had unpursed his mouth. His uncle Ingersol bent down and patted Teddy's head. Then he got back into his Porsche and drove away.
“I'm going to stay with Eric,” Teddy said. “I don't care what she does. He said I could stay with him forever.”
Ingersol drove across the Causeway toward New Orleans thinking about his sister. She could mess up anything. Anytime they got her settled down, she started messing up again. Well, she was theirs and they had to take care of her. I wish he
had
thrown her down the stairs, Ingersol decided. It's about time somebody did something with her.
Teddy's mother was crying. She was lying in her bed and crying bitterly because her head hurt and her poems had not been accepted by
White Buffalo
and she would never be anything but a wife and a mother. And all she was mother to was three wild children who barely passed at school and weren't motivated and didn't even love her. She had failed on every front.
She got out of bed and went into the bathroom and looked at how horrible she looked. She combed her hair and put on makeup and changed into a different negligee and went to look for Eric. He was in the den reading a book. “I'm sorry,” she said. “I got drunk and fell asleep. I didn't mean to. It just happened.
White Buffalo
turned my poems down again. The bastards. Why do I let that egomaniac judge my work? Tell me that.”
“Are you feeling better?”
“I feel fine. I think I'll get dressed. You want to go out to dinner?”
“In a while. You ought to read this book. It's awfully good.” He held it out.
The Snow Leopard
, by Peter Matthiessen.
“Has the mail come?”
“It's on the table. There are some cards from the boys. Malcolm won a swimming match.”
“I wasn't sleeping with him, Eric. I went over there to meet a poet from Lafayette. It got out of hand.”
Eric closed the book and laid it on the table by the chair. “I'm immobilized,” he said at last. “All this is beyond me. I took Teddy with me to bring you home. For an alibi if you said I pushed you down the stairs. I can't think about anything else. I took that seven-year-old boy to see his mother passed out on the stairs in her pantyhose. I don't care what you did, Rhoda. It doesn't matter to me. All I care about is what I did. What I was driven to. I feel like I'm in quicksand. This is pulling me in. Then I sent him to Mandeville to your parents. He didn't want to go. You don't know how scared he isâof us, of you, of everything. I think I'll go get him now.” Eric got up and walked out of the room. He got his car keys off the dining-room table and walked out into the lovely hot afternoon and left her there. He got into his car and drove off to get his stepson. I'll take him somewhere, he decided. Maybe I'll take him to Disney World.
Teddy was sitting on an unused tractor watching his grandfather cut the grass along the edge of the pond. His grandfather was astride a small red tractor pulling a bush hog back and forth across a dirt embankment on the low side. His grandfather nearly always ran the bush hog into the water. Then the men had to come haul it out and his grandfather would joke about it and be in a good mood for hours trying to make up for being stupid. Teddy put his feet up on the steering wheel and watched intently as his grandfather ran the bush hog nearer and nearer to the water's edge. If he got it in the water, they wouldn't have time to ride the horses before supper. That's what Teddy was counting on. Just a little closer, just a little bit more. One time his grandfather had turned the tractor over in the water and had to swim out. It would be nice if that could happen again, but getting it stuck in the mud would do. The day was turning out all right. His uncle Ingersol had gone over to New Orleans to get drunk with his mother, and his cousins would be coming later, and maybe they wouldn't get a divorce, and if they did, it might not be too bad. He and Eric could go to Disney World like they'd been wanting to without his mother saying it was tacky.
His grandfather took the tractor back across the dam on a seventy-degree angle. It was about to happen. At any minute the tractor would be upside down in the water and the day would be saved.
That was how things happened, Teddy decided. That was how God ran his game. He sat up there and thought of mean things to do and then changed his mind. You had to wait. You had to go on and do what they told you, and pretty soon life got better.
Teddy turned toward the road that led to the highway. The Kentucky Gate swung open, and Eric's car came driving through. He came to get me, Teddy thought, and his heart swung open too. Swung as wide as the gate. He got down off the tractor and went running to meet the car. Eric got out of the car and walked to meet him. Crazy little boy, he was thinking. Little friend of mine.
The Blue House
N
ORA JANE'S GRANDMOTHER lived in a blue frame house on the corner of Laurel and Webster streets. It was there that Nora Jane was happy. There was a swing on the porch and a morning glory vine growing on a trellis. In April azaleas bloomed all around the edges of the porch, white and pink and red azaleas, blue morning glories, the fragrant white Confederate jasmine, red salvia and geraniums and the mysterious elephant ears, their green veins so like the ones on Nora Jane's grandmother's hands. Nora Jane hated the veins because they meant her grandmother was old and would die. Would die like her father had died, vanish, not be there anymore, and then she would be alone with only her mother to live with seven days a week.
“Let me set the table for you,” she said to her grandmother, waking beside her in the bed. “Let me cook you breakfast. I want you to eat an egg.”
“Oh, honey lamb,” her grandmother replied, and reached over and found her glasses and put them on, the better to see the beautiful little girl, the better to be happy with the child beside her. “We will cook it together. Then we'll see about the mirlitons. You can take them to Langenstein's today. They said they would buy all that you had.”
“Then I'd better hurry.” Nora Jane got out of bed. If she was going to take the mirlitons to Langenstein's she wanted to do it early so she wouldn't run into any of her friends from Sacred Heart. She was the only girl at Sacred Heart so poor she had to sell vegetables to Langenstein's. Still, they had not always been poor. Her grandfather had been a judge. Her father had gone to West Point. Her grandmother had sung grand opera all up and down the coast and auditioned for the Met. She kissed her grandmother on the cheek and swung her long legs out of the bed and began to search for her clothes. “You cook breakfast then,” she said. “I'll go pick the mirlitons before it gets too hot.”
She put on her shorts and shirt and found her sandals and wandered out into the backyard to pick the mirlitons from the mirliton vines.
A neighbor was in the yard next door. Mr. Edison Angelo. He leaned over the fence. “How's everything going, Nora Jane?” he asked. “How's your grandmother?”
“She's feeling fine,” Nora Jane said. “She's fine now. She's out of bed. She can do anything she likes.”
Nora Jane bent over the mirliton vines. They were beautiful, sticky and fragrant, climbing their trellis of chicken wire. The rich burgundy red fruit hung on its fragile stems, fell off into Nora Jane's hands at the slightest touch. She gathered a basketful, placing them carefully on top of each other so as not to bruise them. Mirlitons are a delicacy in New Orleans. The dark red rind is half an inch thick, to protect the pulp and seeds from the swarming insects of the tropics, for mirlitons are a tropical fruit, brought to New Orleans two hundred years ago by sailors from the Caribbean. Some winters in New Orleans are too cold for mirlitons and the fruit is small and scanty. This had been a warm winter, however, and the mirliton vines were thick with fruit. Nora Jane bent over her work. Her head of curly dark black hair caught the morning sun, the sun caressed her. She was a beautiful child who looked so much like her dead father that it broke her mother's heart and made her drink. It made her grandmother glad. Nora Jane's father had been her oldest son. She thought God had given Nora Jane to her to make up for losing him. Nora Jane's grandmother was a deeply religious woman who had been given to ecstatic states when she was young. It never occurred to her to rail at God or blame him for things. She thought of God as a fallback position in times of trouble. She thought of God as solace, patience, wisdom, forgiveness, compensation.
Nora Jane's mother had a darker meaner view. She thought God and other people were to blame for everything that went wrong. She thought they had gotten together to kill her beautiful black-haired husband and she was paying them back by staying inside and drinking herself to death. Still, it wasn't her fault she was weak. Her mother had been weak before her and her mother before that. It was their habit to be weak.
Nora Jane's grandmother came from a line of women who had a habit of being strong. One of them had come to New Orleans from France as a casket girl, had sailed across the Atlantic Ocean when she was only sixteen years old, carrying all her possessions in a little casket and when she arrived had refused to marry the man to whom she was assigned. She had married a Welshman instead, a man who had been on the boat as a steward. Each generation of women was told this story in Nora Jane's grandmother's family and so they believed they were strong women with strong genes and acted accordingly. When she was about four years old Nora Jane had looked at the strong story and the weak story and decided to be strong. It was the year her father died and her grandmother sat in the swing on her porch and watched the morning glory vines open and close and the sun rise and fall and believed that God did not hate her even if he had allowed her son to die in a stupid war. Many of the men who fought with him had written her letters and she read them out loud to Nora Jane. One young man, whose name was Fraser, came and stayed for five weeks and painted the outside of the house a fresher, brighter blue and put a new floor in the kitchen of the house. Every day he sat on the porch with Nora Jane's grandmother as the sun went down and talked about the place where he lived. A place called Nebraska. When all the painting was done and the furniture put back in the kitchen, he kissed Nora Jane and her grandmother good-bye and went off to see his own family. After he was gone Nora Jane and her grandmother would talk about him. “Where's Fraser gone?” Nora Jane would ask.
“He has gone to Nebraska,” her grandmother would answer. “He went to try to find his wife.”