The Quaker Café (3 page)

             
A knot as big as a persimmon jammed in Maggie’s throat. She felt a stinging sensation race up the inside of her nose. She took a deep breath. “Daddy,” she whispered. “…we had more to do.”

Judge Corbett Kendall was the last male descendent of five generations of the
Kendalls who had built the old plantation home, Cottonwoods, on the edge of Cedar Branch. The whole town knew that he had dreamed of the day his only child, Maggie, would marry and produce heirs to carry on the family name; but now unmarried and fifty-five, with a law degree that shouted, I AM WOMAN, she made it clear the only house she ever intended to clean-out was either the one at the North Carolina State Capitol or in Washington, DC. When she moved back to be closer to her father and take over his law office,
politics
had become her only child.

             
A sob, like an echo rattling restlessly through a cavern came from nowhere. A chill ran up Maggie’s back. Had that been her? She found herself in the grip of a spasm unable to completely catch her breath. A sensation of drowning seized her and she gasped several more times before she could steady her breathing.

             
She laid her head on her father’s frozen chest and ran her hand down his arm until she clasped his hand; but there was no warmth, no reassuring squeeze as she laced her fingers in his. Her cheek wet his shirt and she unconsciously wiped her nose on his coat. “Maggie Dear,” she could hear his gentle reprimand. “A young lady needs a handkerchief at all times.” She waited. Wouldn’t he have something to reassure her that he had not left her yet; but the night remained as cold and sequestered as his corpse.

             
Maggie let out a moan that seeped into the floorboards and traveled the length of the room into the next. Liz and Billie waited and wrapped their arms around one another in a hug.

        
  “What am I to do?” Maggie sputtered.

              There had been issues he had promised her he’d resolve before he died. She felt betrayed—orphaned—vulnerable. 

Rage suddenly seized her and she kicked a chair hard, sending it
over backwards as she yelled loud enough for Liz and Billie to both jump: “Damn it, Daddy!  DAMN, DAMN, DAMN!”

             
When Liz drove Maggie home it had been past midnight. The headlights from the Judge’s Cadillac illuminated the asphalt avenue that stretched for a quarter mile to the formidable six columns rising out of the ground, up past the piazza on the second floor to the third floor pitched roof. The front steps vaulted to a main entrance off the piazza. The old Federal style plantation on the edge of town was dark. Reflections from the headlights on the crystal glass suggested the possibility of ghosts. Liz had no doubt that ancestors of the hallowed halls had gathered already to welcome their new arrival. She might not have felt the same if she still lived in St. Paul, but after living in the South for decades Liz understood that ghosts and old homes were as much a part of the culture as chopped barbecue and vinegar.

             
She drove around to the side entrance of the ground floor where a pair of French doors opened into the downstairs living area. Maggie got out of the passenger’s side and walked in ahead of Liz.   Billie promised to be at the house by 7:00 the next morning so that Liz could get to work for a few hours. All three knew that come daylight, the phones would not stop ringing.

             
“I’m going to fix a cup of tea,” Liz offered. “Would you like one?”

             
“That might help,” Maggie replied as she started up the stairs to her apartment. “There’s a sofa bed in Daddy’s office.”

             
An eating counter divided the den from the kitchen on the ground floor. Years ago Maggie and her father had their own bedrooms at the other end of the large room, keeping the entire living section of the house on the bottom floor. This was after a major renovation in the wake of her mother and grandparents’ deaths. The house had suddenly become too big for just two people. But as Maggie grew older and wanted more privacy, her father acknowledged that she needed a bathroom and study space of her own. An apartment had been added behind the living room/dining room area on the second floor. Three bedrooms were on a third floor. The Judge converted Maggie’s old bedroom on the ground floor into an office for himself, thus eliminating the need for him to climb stairs.

             
Liz put water on to boil and walked back to the Judge’s bedroom. A crumpled shirt lay across the bed, several pairs of shoes were pushed to one side, and a dresser drawer sat open. This was out of character with the rest of the house, which remained neat and picked-up; but Liz knew Maggie and her father didn’t do the cleaning themselves. She closed the bedroom door and walked into the office. A light on the roll-top desk emitted a soft glow. The sofa had a pillow and a blanket at one end, as if it had been used recently. Liz didn’t check for sheets. It didn’t matter. The bedrooms were larger on the third floor, but she didn’t intend to go up there. She knew the rooms would be dusty, and that sleep would be hopeless.

             
The whistle on the kettle sang and Liz fixed two mugs of hot tea and walked up the open kitchen stairs to the main floor and Maggie’s apartment.

             
“Maggie, you okay?”

             
No answer. She heard the shower turn off and walked into the formal dining room and placed one mug on the marble top of the credenza.
How ironic,
Liz thought as she surveyed the array of Kendall portraits hanging from the walls. “
Of all the people in town, Billie and I are the ones with her now. The outsiders. The Yankees.

             
It had never really crossed Liz’s mind that Cedar Branch would become her permanent home. She knew that Chase would want to practice in North Carolina, but she had wrongfully assumed that he would choose somewhere in the Triangle Area between Raleigh, Durham and Chapel Hill. When Frank Busby called to tell Chase he wanted to retire and hoped that Chase might consider buying the pharmacy, Liz was stunned. Had she not been so crazy-in-love, she probably would have objected more; but the excitement in Chase’s eyes and the fact that she was pregnant and hormonally imbalanced, convinced her otherwise.

After they moved to his home town they got a loan and poured their money and hearts into making the pharm
acy a viable business. With a one-year-old baby and a second on the way, they initially moved in with Chase’s mom and dad, both devout Quakers. Liz, a Presbyterian, knew very little about her husband’s faith.

When she’d asked Chase, he simply shrugged his shoulders and said, “It’s not
so different. There’s just no minister and no music.” He might as well have said that a banana split wasn’t so different from vanilla ice cream without the banana, chocolate sauce, whipped cream and two other flavors.

When Cedar Branch had been settled two hundred years earlier, eighty percent of the members of the community belonged to The Society of Friends, otherwise known as Quakers
. Up until fifty years ago the Quaker meeting disowned anyone who married outside of the faith. This shrunk their membership significantly. Quakers married Baptists and became Baptists or married Methodists and became Methodists. Rarely did the reverse happen. Just about everyone in town could talk about a Quaker grandmother or grandfather who had been
read out of meeting.

In general Quakers were quiet, delibera
te people with a focus on the testimonies of peace, simplicity, integrity, community and equality. Liz felt as if she was constantly under the scrutinizing eyes of Chase’s mother, Euphrasia Hoole, who encouraged Liz to simplify her ever complicated world. Euphrasia had an uncanny ability to keep Liz on the defensive without saying anything derogatory. Chase insisted Liz misinterpreted his mother’s words. Liz believed that what Grandma, as she called her, said, and what Grandma meant, were two different animals.

When Liz and Chase finally built their own home on the
Potecasi Swamp, she felt a surge of freedom. She had grown to respect the Quaker testimonies, and would be forever grateful that their four boys had been raised in a small community with a strong religious base and grandparents close-by. But Liz could never quite shed the omnipotent expectations of her mother-in-law, Euphrasia.

              The Quakers lived at one end of the town and the more prominent families of this small community inhabited the other. Blacks lived outside the town limits. This arrangement guaranteed that all elected town officials would be white, although the competition for county commissioners was dicey. The election always hinged on which race could get the most voters to turn out.

Downtown consisted of two blocks of stores
. From one end of the town limits to the other was less than a mile in both directions, with the white Methodist Church, Baptist Church, and Quaker Meeting spaced two blocks apart. After integration, the black school outside of town had been merged into the white school building on the Quaker side of town. No one lived far apart. The next little burg of a town was less than ten miles away, and small clapboard houses and trailers dotted the road between one town and the next.

But distance is never measured by miles, and just as blacks and whites moved in different social circles, so did Quakers and non-Quakers
. Grandpa and Grandma Hoole ate only infrequently at The Quaker Café,
an unnecessary extravagance.
Initially Liz’s knowledge of Maggie and the Judge rested only on what Chase told her. The Hooles frowned on idle chatter about other people, and Chase rarely indulged in gossip, although Liz was sure he heard plenty on a daily basis between the pharmacy and the café.

             
As a newcomer, Liz missed the municipal parks in her Midwestern home town that provided opportunities to meet other young parents at playgrounds and in the recreation centers. Impulsively, after living in Cedar Branch only four years, she decided to challenge the current county commissioner from their district. Grandma and Grandpa raised their eyebrows and told her to follow wherever her inner light leadeth.

Chase
chuckled and said, “Go for it.”

             
Liz had been in Cedar Branch long enough to realize the black vote rested within the black churches, and that the white vote surfaced somewhere between the country club and the back room poker games. She jumped at every opportunity to visit a civic club or church, and talked passionately about the public swimming pools and tennis courts in St. Paul and how much they provided for the community. She was good on her feet. She received polite applause and got trounced in the election.

             
While licking her wounds, she was surprised one evening when she and Chase stopped by The Quaker Café, and the Judge and Maggie pulled up chairs to their table. They had followed the election with interest and liked her spunk. Long after the regulars had left, they’d talked into the evening. They warned her that she needed to leave St. Paul out of the mix since few Southerners cared what they did in St. Paul, or anywhere else as a matter of fact. And she’d hit a sensitive nerve by running on a platform as racially charged as recreational facilities.              

“It isn’t a black-white issue,” Liz protested.

“Everything is a black-white issue,” Maggie warned her.

*****

              Although Maggie and the Judge had rarely used the formal living room at Cottonwoods any more, Liz had been to many gatherings here since that first meeting. Besides election night celebrations, there’d been a legendary New Year’s Eve party where the Judge greeted each guest he didn’t recognize with the query, “Who’s your daddy?”

Liz knew the names of each of the figureheads in the portraits, all
Kendalls, a formidable lot dating back before the Civil War. When she mentioned being impressed by their wealth, Grandpa Hoole had gently reminded her that originally the wealth came from slave labor.

             
Now Liz sank into one of the antique wing chairs and gazed across at the picture of Maggie’s mother, Sarah Richmond Kendall, with Maggie’s odd eyes, one brown and one blue. She looked so frail, not at all like Maggie. Liz rested her head on the back of the chair and dozed off. When she awoke with a start, her heart jumped and her pulse raced.

Maggie sat motionless in the chair next to her, staring at her mother’s portrait.

              “I’m sorry I never knew her,” Maggie said.

             
Liz took a deep breath.

             
“Daddy met her in New Orleans, at Mardi Gras, of all places. She was several years younger. He and a bunch of his law school buddies had just graduated, and Daddy was headed for an internship in Raleigh.”

             
Chase had told Liz parts of the story after she met Maggie. It remained one of the great tragedies of the town’s history, a love affair that went badly awry.

             
“You would think he had more sense than to marry on impulse. If he’d brought her to Cedar Branch first, I’m sure she would have refused to live here.” Everything Maggie knew about her mother she’d been told. Sarah’s death after Maggie’s birth had left Maggie motherless.