Homeplace Page 10

  “I remember,” Mike said.

  Passing the old gray stone Methodist church where they had always gone on Sundays and sometimes on Wednesday nights, DeeDee said, “By the way, Mikie, what does Rachel look like?”

  “Rachel?” Mike was startled out of her reverie. Aside from a perfunctory tongue-clicking at Rachel’s fatherlessness and urbanized state when they first met at the airport, DeeDee had shown little interest in her niece and had said only, when Mike had asked about her son John and her daughter, both now grown, or nearly: “Oh, they’re just grand. I’ll fill you in about them later, when we can sit down and have a regular old heart-to-heart.”

  “Rachel,” DeeDee said again now with elaborate patience. “Daddy keeps asking.”

  “Daddy asks about Rachel? What she looks like?” Mike realized she sounded stupid. The question was totally unexpected; John Winship had announced at her daughter’s birth, and DeeDee had relayed the proclamation, that Mike was to bring no little Jew child or big Jew husband home to Lytton while he lived. Mike had buried the comment deep, in the ice crypt with the rest of that time; she had not thought of it until now. The fact that Rachel was John Winship’s granddaughter had not occurred to her since the day of the child’s birth.

  “Several times,” DeeDee said. “Right after I told him you were coming, and again just last night. I had to tell him I didn’t know; you haven’t sent any pictures in years and years, you know. Anybody’d think you were ashamed of her.”

  Mike did feel anger, then; a smoking curl of it, but it was not directed at her father. She felt a sudden, bright rage at DeeDee, at the utter banality and ordinariness of the unmistakable barb. DeeDee sounded like any affronted aunt whose beloved niece has been somehow withheld willfully from the benison of her attention and affection. The old irritation leaped and bloomed.

  “Rachel looks like any little New York Jew, which is just what she is,” she said to her sister. “She has kinky hair and a nose just like Barbra Streisand. We hope she’s going to make us all rich doing impersonations.”

  “Mikie! You don’t mean that! The idea!” gasped DeeDee, truly shocked.

  “Oh, yes, I do,” Mike said silkily. “And you can tell him so for me. Too bad if he had his heart set on Brooke Shields.”

  I’m sorry, Rachel, she said silently to her daughter, who did, in fact, look unsettlingly like Brooke Shields. And then she shoved Rachel away, deeply, back into that ice crypt inside her, where the pain of her image did not threaten to blow her apart.

  “You all stow that stuff, now,” Duck said. “We’re here.”

  Mike turned her head and looked through the blue glass and the endless years at the house on Pomeroy Street where she had been born.

  13

  WHEN MIKE WAS ALMOST SIX AND BEGAN LYTTON ELEMENtary School, she first heard the house on Pomeroy Street in which she lived called the Winship Mansion. This extraordinary appellation was offered to her by Fletcher Grubbs, ten years old, fat with the rubbery toughness of a squid, mean as a junkyard dog, and the undisputed dean of Miss Tommie Golightly’s first grade.

  The name was proffered with no more intent to flatter than that of “Princess Chickenhead,” which was also the handiwork of Fletcher Grubbs, and seemed entirely appropriate for the downy-blond, wizened youngest inhabitant of that house. The jeering ring of seasoned elementary schoolers who had assembled to torment Mike cheered and laughed mightily at Fletcher’s creativity, and Mike sailed without hesitation into the first fistfight of her educational career. She did not know what a mansion was, but she did comprehend chickenhead, and with an embattled wisdom far beyond her tender years determined that they were going to earn dearly their continued right to call her and her home by the new names. The same wisdom told her that she could not win the fights, and she was right, but she could and did give her tormentors a run for their money. Mike remained Princess Chickenhead until a palsied child from Valdosta moved to town and provided new fodder for nicknaming. The Pomeroy Street house remained the Winship Mansion to an entire generation of Lytton children.

  The house was not a mansion, was not even particularly large, but it was possessed of a number of fanciful turrets and gables and ells and a great quantity of gingerbread, in the Victorian manner, and it sat far back in a dappled cave of overarching water oak trees. Great twin hydrangea bushes flanked the front porch, and the latticed side porches were hung with venerable, shaggy old wisteria vines, giving them in the late spring an incandescent lavender nimbus, a sort of enchanted purple milieu. All these embellishments, plus the trimness of the lawn and shrubbery … the handiwork of tyrannical, shuffling old John, from Lightning … made the house seem far more imposing than it was; gave it presence, a kind of charisma.

  There were not many Victorian structures in Lytton, not even many two-story residences. The town had not the distinction of being a real suburb of Atlanta, being too far away, and so there were few of the large homes one sees in all suburbs, and none of the really grand ones evident in some of them. Conversely, Lytton did not lie in deep agricultural country, either, so there were few vast gentlemen’s farms and no surviving antebellum plantations. General Sherman had attended to what antebellum edifices there were around the little town, but in any case there had never been anything on the order of Tara or Twelve Oaks. One-story shotgun, or dogtrot, houses were the rule, painted white or sided in gray or pastel green asbestos shingles. The only two other genuinely Victorian structures in Mike’s childhood were a shabby old behemoth in the center of town with, always, a yard full of mournful automobiles and a blue neon sign that said TOURISTS but that harbored only roomers, and the Reverend Ike Steed’s funeral home. This latter was shingled in funereal gray and sported black shutters like grief-closed eyelids; it was born to be, and said to be, haunted.

  So by default, the Winship house had become Lytton’s unofficial “great house,” and though Fletcher Grubbs and his followers had meant only to wound Mike with their taunts of “Winship Mansion,” she secretly relished the name, and felt, sailing into each defensive fistfight, that she was protecting the escutcheon of a grand and honored family seat. Privately, she came to love being Princess Chickenhead of the Winship Mansion. It gave her the only distinction she knew for a long time, until Bayard Sewell arrived and bestowed upon her the status of his girl, and indirectly, John Winship’s daughter.

  The house did not look grand now. It looked, flattened under the hammer of the midafternoon sun, totally unremarkable and, simply, small. The vast green lawn had somehow, in these ensuing years, shrunk to ordinary proportions, and the great hydrangeas were pruned stumps now, so that the pitted brick and lattice foundation of the house showed through on either side of the steps. All the shrubbery had been cut back to nearly ground level, in fact, and the lawn, though freshly cut, was the whitened green of summer-scorched Bermuda grass. The old oaks still spread protective arms over the gabled and mansarded roof, and the side porches were again purple with wisteria, but the concrete front walk was cracked in several places and the sun had burnt the smart whiteness out of the paint, so that the house seemed to bleed into the milky no-color of the blinding sky. Doors and windows were closed, and several upstairs and one downstairs window had laboring air conditioners churning in them. Mike could hear them through the closed windows of the Pontiac, and the stuttering drone of a power mower somewhere out of sight.

  Duck Wingo got out of the car and came around to her side, and simultaneously J.W. Cromie came around the side of the house, pushing the power mower, and stopped, mower still running, and stood still, looking at her.

  Mike felt a powerful jolt somewhere in the core of her, a jolt, then a stopping, and then a forward lurching, as if some interior motor had stalled and then regained itself. For a moment she felt very dizzy. Impressions flooded her; not memories, nothing so concrete, but visual images and a kaleidoscope of sensations, none of which she could seem to sort out or name. She sat on the edge of the car’s front seat, one foot on the curb beside the old
, softly hollowed carriage block that had always stood there, and looked back at J.W. She had no idea he was still in Lytton. Priss Comfort had written her, soon after she had married Richard Singer and begun college at Radcliffe, that J.W. had moved to Atlanta and started a little lawn service business. Mike had been glad to hear the news, had felt, somehow, faintly vindicated.

  She got out of the car stiffly, very conscious of her thinness, her pallor, the oversized black sunglasses and huge, battered Gucci tote that had been everywhere with her during the past ten years of assignments, her soft, slender Italian shoes. All spoke of citiness; seemed suddenly effete, alien. In the shadowless light J.W. seemed to have been untouched by the years. His yellowish, Indian-cast face was unmarked and his tall body lounged over the mower with a deceptive indolence that came sharply back to her. His mouth still had its sweet, adenoidal looseness, which sometimes had made him appear simpleminded to people who did not know him. His eyes were not the same, though. Once they had been deep, liquid with a kind of extra light, rich like wet black winter leaves. They were flat and opaque now, like dried river pebbles. He stood beside the stilled mower and looked at them, not moving forward. Mike felt a smile of involuntary pleasure curving her mouth. She started toward him, arms outstretched.

  He stepped back slightly from her arms.

  “Hey, Miss Mike,” he said.

  She faltered and stared. “Good God, J.W., what’s this Miss business? This is me. I’m glad to see you; I didn’t know you were in Lytton. You look good. You look fine, J.W., just like you always did. Tell me what’s been happening with you …”

  Aware that she was chattering, she stopped.

  “Nothin’ much be happenin’ in Lytton, look like,” J.W. said, looking thoughtfully at something in the distance, and then up at the sun. He squinted.

  “You lookin’ good too, Miss Mike. We hears about you down here …”

  DeeDee cut in brightly, “J.W. helps us and Daddy in the yard and around the house, and drives for Daddy sometimes, and I don’t know what on earth we’d do without him. He works down at the cemetery in the mornings, too. Come on, you all can catch up later. It’s almost time for Daddy’s nap, and he gets sort of confused if he misses it.”

  She took Mike’s arm and steered her up the crazed front walk. J.W. touched the bill of his Atlanta Braves baseball cap and turned away. He did not smile, and had not, and something akin to sullenness washed his mustardy face. Mike knew that J.W. had no sullenness in him. She felt like an actor in a play for which she had no script. What was the sense of that Negro dialect? She had not heard it from a black in years, only from the sort of whites she refused to know. J.W. had always spoken fairly precisely. Rusky, who had not, had insisted that he do so. She stopped on the walkway and pulled her arm out of DeeDee’s grasp.

  “How long has J.W. been doing yard work for you and Daddy?” she asked.

  “Oh, ever since right after you left,” DeeDee said. “Priss set him up in a little lawn business here, but nothing would do but Atlanta, so he went up there to make his fortune. It lasted about six months. What does J.W. know about running a business? He came dragging back here, but nobody in Lytton would hire him after … well, you know. Daddy took him in and gave him that room over the garage free and paid him a little something to keep the place up, and he’s been here ever since. He has a hot plate and a shower, and Daddy gave him some old furniture and a bed, and he has the job at the cemetery. Daddy got him that, too. He gets by real nicely. He’s real comfortable.”

  Mike’s face burned. John Winship had obviously felt obligated to help the badly used J.W. back onto the path from which she had so disastrously led him, and in doing so had cast around J.W. bars as real as those in the Fulton County Jail. For a moment she felt hot anger at both of them. Why on earth had J.W. accepted such an ignominous patronage? Surely there were other towns, other jobs.

  She looked over her shoulder at J.W., who was retreating around the side of the house, the mower grumbling once again. He wore what might have been the same faded overalls and work shirt that he had worn the day the two of them took the bus to Atlanta to join the protesters at Jojo’s. It struck Mike that they would be considered chic now in the circles in which she moved in New York. Derek Blessing sometimes affected the identical costume, especially if photographers were going to be present.

  “Come on,” DeeDee said again, and Mike took a deep breath that whistled a little in her dry nostrils, and went into the house to meet her father.

  At first she could see nothing; the gloom in the foyer was so intense, and the sunlight she had just left so bright. The Xanax calm cracked and broke. She felt the sudden panic of the blind person confronted by danger, but unable to see it. Her heart began the frantic, caged-bird struggling in her throat, and the buzzing fear ran up her arms. She thought she might faint, there in that same shadowy foyer that she had left in such pain so long ago, and for a moment the thought held great and simple charm and succor. Just not to be here, not to be …

  There was a movement in the gloom, and a wheelchair slid forward into the dusty sunlight filtering through the front door, and she saw him. Or saw, at least, a skeleton, a corpse, a cadaver, peering up at her from the sterile armature of the aluminum chair. She thought, suddenly and wildly, of a movie she had seen when she was ten or eleven that had frightened her so intensely that she sometimes still had nightmares about it, a movie called I Walked with a Zombie, in which a ghastly, enormously tall, impossibly gaunt Negro zombie stumbled blindly and inexorably after assorted shrieking young women on a dark beach in Haiti, the only sounds the huge, misshapen feet dragging in the sand and the eerie crooning of the warm night wind. The figure in the chair, the parchment face that looked up at her, wrecked and frozen, reminded her of the Negro zombie. But it was not black, and it was not dead; it only seemed so. It was the waxen yellow-white of the supermarket menorah candles Richard’s family had used, and it was her father’s. It must be. Was this not her father’s house?

  There was nothing in this creature of the man whose lean face she had last seen frozen in anger on this spot more than twenty years before. This man’s face was set in its own wreckage. This man was completely bald, the skull the decayed mottle of a long-rotted egg. This man was unspeakably frail, almost luminous, and bowed in the chair, and the gray eyes did not move or blink as he peered up at her. There was a sheen of tears in them, the easy tears of weakness, illness, age; they had nothing to do with greeting or memory. Even in the long moment of ringing shock, Mike knew that. One corner of the mouth and an eyebrow were drawn down into a permanent grimace. A transparent yellow hand plucked mechanically at the thermal blanket tucked around him. His breathing was light and shallow and audible, but he made no other sound.

  Something in Mike unclenched, relaxed so suddenly that it left her limp and hollow-feeling, scooped out. Her head rang with lightness and her knees and elbows felt unjointed. She thought again that she might collapse onto the foyer rug. There was nothing here of the tall, remote presence that had shadowed her childhood. This husk was not her father. There was not, in this house, anything left that could hurt her now.

  Mike moved forward a little, but did not speak. A kind of deliverance leaped in her. The beginnings of safety sang in her head.

  “Well,” John Winship said. His voice was thin and querulous, high and fretful as a child’s. No one’s voice that she knew. Not, certainly, a voice that could flay one alive. Gone, that voice. Gone.

  “So here you are.”

  “Here I am,” Mike said. She tried a smile. It stretched her dry mouth, a polite, social rictus.

  “You by yourself?” he said, after a space of silence in which his breathing came and went like a flaccid August tide.

  “You mean did I bring my Jew husband and Jew child?” Mike said, with something mimicking amusement. “No.”

  He appeared not to have registered that.

  “Did they tell you I couldn’t take care of myself?” he said, and his voice
seemed to pick up life and strength with use. “You think you had to come all the way down here from New York or wherever it is and look after me?”

  “Daddy!” DeeDee bleated breathlessly. “You know we talked about this! You know you said you thought it would be a good idea if Mikie came; you know I’ve got Mama Wingo at my house now and I just can’t …”

  The desiccated figure held up one hand. It was as spotted and brittle as a November leaf; light came through it, outlining clean old bones.

  “Daddy …” DeeDee began again.

  “Be quiet, Daisy,” John Winship said irritably. “I know what I said. I just wanted to see if Micah knew what she was getting into. Wanted to see if you all had told her the real score. Did they tell you about the diapers, Micah? Did they tell you they have to hand-feed me like a little bird, bite by bite? Tell you about havin’ to hold my pecker so the piss won’t go all over the—”

  “Daddy!” DeeDee squalled. Her chins quivered. “That’s not the truth! You know you can eat and … everything else … as well as you ever could! What on earth has gotten into you, lying to Mike like that? You know you’re the one that asked for her in the first place!”

  A cracked, keening sound came from the old man’s mouth, or from half of it, and Mike thought for a second that he was crying, but then she realized that the sound was laughter, and that the tears that runneled from the staring eyes were those of glee. Revulsion and relief, polar twins, leaped in her. She smiled around them.

  “Just wanted to see if Micah had any of the common touch left, a high-falutin’ big writer like her, down here to spread joy amongst us peasants,” John Winship said. “Just wanted to see if you had any life in you still, Daisy. Gettin’ boring in your middle age, you are.”

  DeeDee sniffed and laid her hand none too gently on her father’s shoulder.