THAT AFTERNOON 17 page

“Oh, I think Bessie reads that, doesn’t she, Stooley? I’ll have to ask her when I go in the kitchen.”

“Well, if she doesn’t, she sure as hell will now.” The Senator laughs.

“Stuart said you were trying to get into more serious subjects. Anything particular?”

Now everyone is looking at me, including the maid, a different one from the door, as she hands me a glass of tea. I don’t look at her face, terrified of what I’ll see there. “I’m working on a . . . a few—”

“Eugenia is writing about the life of Jesus Christ,” Mother pops in and I recall my most recent lie to cover my nights out, calling it “research.”

“Well,” Missus Whitworth nods, looks impressed by this, “that’s certainly an honorable subject.”

I try to smile, disgusted by my own voice. “And such an... important one.” I glance at Mother. She’s beaming.

The front door slams, sending all the glass lamps into a furious tinkle.

“Sorry I’m so late.” Stuart strides in, wrinkled from the car, pulling on his navy sportscoat. We all stand up and his mother holds out her arms to him but he heads straight for me. He puts his hands on my shoulders and kisses my cheek. “Sorry,” he whispers and I breathe out, finally relax half an inch. I turn and see his mother smiling like I just snatched her best guest towel and wiped my dirty hands all over it.

“Get yourself a drink, son, sit down,” the Senator says. When Stuart has his drink, he settles next to me on the sofa, squeezes my hand and doesn’t let go.

Missus Whitworth gives one glance at our hand-holding and says, “Charlotte, why don’t I give you and Eugenia a tour of the house?”

For the next fifteen minutes, I follow Mother and Missus Whitworth from one ostentatious room to the next. Mother gasps over a genuine Yankee bullethole in the front parlor, the bullet still lodged in the wood. There are letters from Confederate soldiers lying on a Federal desk, strategically placed antique spectacles and handkerchiefs. The house is a shrine to the War Between the States and I wonder what it must’ve been like for Stuart, growing up in a home where you can’t touch anything.

On the third floor, Mother gaggles over a canopy bed where Robert E. Lee slept. When we finally come down a “secret” staircase, I linger over family pictures in the hallway. I see Stuart and his two brothers as babies, Stuart holding a red ball. Stuart in a christening gown, held by a colored woman in white uniform.

Mother and Missus Whitworth move down the hall, but I keep looking, for there is something so deeply dear in Stuart’s face as a young boy. His cheeks were fat and his mother’s blue eyes shone the same as they do now. His hair was the whitish-yellow of a dandelion. At nine or ten, he stands with a hunting rifle and a duck. At fifteen, next to a slain deer. Already he is good-looking, rugged. I pray to God he never sees my teenage pictures.

I walk a few steps and see high school graduation, Stuart proud in a military school uniform. In the center of the wall, there is an empty space without a frame, a rectangle of wallpaper just the slightest shade darker. A picture has been removed.

“Dad, that is enough about—” I hear Stuart say, his voice strained. But just as quickly, there is silence.

“Dinner is served,” I hear a maid announce and I weave my way back into the living room. We all trail into the dining room to a long, dark table. The Phelans are seated on one side, the Whitworths on the other. I am diagonal from Stuart, placed as far as possible from him. Around the room, the wainscoting panels have been painted to depict scenes of pre-Civil War times, happy Negroes picking cotton, horses pulling wagons, white-bearded statesmen on the steps of our capitol. We wait while the Senator lingers in the living room. “I’ll be right there, y’all go ahead and start.” I hear the clink of ice, the clop of the bottle being set down two more times before he finally comes in and sits at the head of the table.

Waldorf salads are served. Stuart looks over at me and smiles every few minutes. Senator Whitworth leans over to Daddy and says, “I came from nothing, you know. Jefferson County, Mississippi. My daddy dried peanuts for eleven cents a pound.”

Daddy shakes his head. “Doesn’t get much poorer than Jefferson County.”

I watch as Mother cuts off the tiniest bite of apple. She hesitates, chews it for the longest time, winces as it goes down. She wouldn’t allow me to tell Stuart’s parents about her stomach problem. Instead, Mother ravishes Missus Whitworth with degustationary compliments. Mother views this supper as an important move in the game called “Can My Daughter Catch Your Son?”

“The young people so enjoy each other’s company.” Mother smiles. “Why, Stuart comes out to see us at the house nearly twice a week.”

“Is that right?” says Missus Whitworth.

“We’d be delighted if you and the Senator could drive out to the plantation for supper sometime, take a walk around the orchard?”

I look at Mother. Plantation is an outdated term she likes to use to gloss up the farm, while the “orchard” is a barren apple tree. A pear tree with a worm problem.

But Missus Whitworth has stiffened around the mouth. “Twice a week? Stuart, I had no idea you came to town that often.”

Stuart’s fork stops in midair. He casts a sheepish look at his mother.

“Y’all are so young.” Missus Whitworth smiles. “Enjoy yourselves. There’s no need to get serious so quickly.”

The Senator leans his elbows on the table. “From a woman who practically proposed to the other one herself, she was in such a hurry.”

“Dad,” Stuart says through gritted teeth, banging his fork against his plate.

The table is silent, except for Mother’s thorough, methodical chewing to try to turn solid food into paste. I touch the scratch, still pink along my arm.

The maid lays pressed chicken on our plates, tops it with a perky dollop of mayonnaisey dressing, and we all smile, glad for the mood breaker. As we eat, Daddy and the Senator talk about cotton prices, boll weevils. I can still see the anger on Stuart’s face from when the Senator mentioned Patricia. I glance at him every few seconds, but the anger doesn’t seem to be fading. I wonder if that’s what they’d argued about earlier, when I was in the hall.

The Senator leans back in his chair. “Did you see that piece they did in Life magazine? One before Medgar Evers, about what’s-’is-name—Carl . . . Roberts?”

I look up, surprised to find the Senator is aiming this question at me. I blink, confused, hoping it’s because of my job at the newspaper. “It was . . . he was lynched. For saying the governor was . . .” I stop, not because I’ve forgotten the words, but because I remember them.

“Pathetic,” the Senator says, now turning to my father. “With the morals of a streetwalker.”

I exhale, relieved the attention is off me. I look at Stuart to gauge his reaction to this. I’ve never asked him his position on civil rights. But I don’t think he’s even listening to the conversation. The anger around his mouth has turned flat and cold.

My father clears his throat. “I’ll be honest,” he says slowly. “It makes me sick to hear about that kind of brutality.” Daddy sets his fork down silently. He looks Senator Whitworth in the eye. “I’ve got twenty-five Negroes working my fields and if anyone so much as laid a hand on them, or any of their families . . .” Daddy’s gaze is steady. Then he drops his eyes. “I’m ashamed, sometimes, Senator. Ashamed of what goes on in Mississippi.”

Mother’s eyes are big, set on Daddy. I am shocked to hear this opinion. Even more shocked that he’d voice it at this table to a politician. At home, newspapers are folded so the pictures face down, television channels are turned when the subject of race comes up. I’m suddenly so proud of my daddy, for many reasons. For a second, I swear, I see it in Mother’s eyes too, beneath her worry that Father has obliterated my future. I look at Stuart and his face registers concern, but in which way, I do not know.

The Senator has his eyes narrowed on Daddy.

“I’ll tell you something, Carlton,” the Senator says. He jiggles the ice around in his glass. “Bessie, bring me another drink, would you please.” He hands his glass to the maid. She quickly returns with a full one.

“Those were not wise words to say about our governor,” the Senator says.

“I agree one hundred percent,” Daddy says.

“But the question I’ve been asking myself lately is, are they true?”

“Stooley,” Missus Whitworth hisses. But then just as quickly she smiles, straightens. “Now, Stooley,” she says like she’s talking to a child, “our guests here don’t want to get into all your politicking during—”

“Francine, let me speak my mind. God knows I can’t do it from nine to five, so let me speak my mind in my own home.”

Missus Whitworth’s smile does not waver, but the slightest bit of pink rises in her cheeks. She studies the white Floradora roses in the center of the table. Stuart stares at his plate with the same cold anger as before. He hasn’t looked at me since the chicken course. Everyone is quiet and then someone changes the subject to the weather.

WHEN SUPPER is FINALLY OVER, we’re asked to retire out on the back porch for after-dinner drinks and coffee. Stuart and I linger in the hallway. I touch his arm, but he pulls away.

“I knew he’d get drunk and start in on everything.”

“Stuart, it’s fine,” I say because I think he’s talking about his father’s politics. “We’re all having a good time.”

But Stuart is sweating and feverish-looking. “It’s Patricia this and Patricia that, all night long,” he says. “How many times can he bring her up?”

“Just forget about it, Stuart. Everything’s okay.”

He runs a hand through his hair and looks everywhere but at me. I start to get the feeling that I’m not even here to him. And then I realize what I’ve known all night. He is looking at me but he is thinking about . . . her. She is everywhere. In the anger in Stuart’s eyes, on Senator and Missus Whitworth’s tongues, on the wall where her picture must’ve hung.

I tell him I need to go to the bathroom.

He steers me down the hall. “Meet us out back,” he says, but does not smile. In the bathroom, I stare at my reflection, tell myself that it’s just tonight. Everything will be fine once we’re out of this house.

After the bathroom, I walk by the living room, where the Senator is pouring himself another drink. He chuckles at himself, dabs at his shirt, then looks around to see if anyone’s seen him spill. I try to tiptoe past the doorway before he spots me.

“There you are!” I hear him holler as I slip by. I back up slowly into the doorway and his face lights up. “Wassa matter, you lost?” He walks out into the hallway.

“No sir, I was just . . . going to meet everybody.”

“Come here, gal.” He puts his arm around me and the smell of bourbon burns my eyes. I see the front of his shirt is saturated with it. “You having a good time?”

“Yessir. Thank you.”

“Now, Stuart’s mama, don’t you let her scare you off. She’s just protective, is all.”

“Oh no, she’s been . . . very nice. Everything’s fine.” I glance down the hall, where I can hear their voices.

He sighs, stares off. “We’ve had a real hard year with Stuart. I guess he told you what happened.”

I nod, feeling my skin prickle.

“Oh, it was bad,” he says. “So bad.” Then suddenly he smiles. “Look a here! Look who’s coming to say hello to you.” He scoops up a tiny white dog, drapes it across his arm like a tennis towel. “Say hello, Dixie,” he croons, “say hello to Miss Eugenia.” The dog struggles, strains its head away from the reeking smell of the shirt.

The Senator looks back at me with a blank stare. I think he’s forgotten what I’m doing here.

“I was just headed to the back porch,” I say.

“Come on, come in here.” He tugs me by the elbow, steers me through a paneled door. I enter a small room with a heavy desk, a yellow light shining sickishly on the dark green walls. He pushes the door shut behind me and I immediately feel the air change, grow close and claustrophobic.

“Now, look, everybody says I talk too much when I’ve had a few but . . .” the Senator narrows his eyes at me, like we are old conspirators, “I want to tell you something.”

The dog’s given up all struggle, sedated by the smell of the shirt. I am suddenly desperate to go talk to Stuart, like every second I’m away I’m losing him. I back away.

“I think—I should go find—” I reach for the door handle, sure I’m being terribly rude, but not able to stand the air in here, the smell of liquor and cigars.

The Senator sighs, nods as I grip the handle. “Oh. You too, huh.” He leans back against the desk, looking defeated.

I start to open the door but it’s the same lost look on the Senator’s face as the one Stuart had when he showed up on my parents’ porch. I feel like I have no choice but to ask, “Me too what . . . sir?”

The Senator looks over at the picture of Missus Whitworth, huge and cold, mounted on his office wall like a warning. “I see it, is all. In your eyes.” He chuckles bitterly. “And here I was hoping you might be the one who halfway liked the old man. I mean, if you ever joined this old family.”

I look at him now, tingling from his words . . . joined this old family.

“I don’t . . . dislike you, sir,” I say, shifting in my flats.

“I don’t mean to bury you in our troubles, but things have been pretty hard here, Eugenia. We were worried sick after all that mess last year. With the other one.” He shakes his head, looks down at the glass in his hand. “Stuart, he just up and left his apartment in Jackson, moved everything out to the camp house in Vicksburg.”

“I know he was very . . . upset,” I say, when truthfully, I know almost nothing at all.

“Dead’s more like it. Hell, I’d drive out to see him and he’d just be sitting there in front of the window, cracking pecans. Wasn’t even eating em, just pulling off the shell, tossing em in the trash. Wouldn’t talk to me or his mama for . . . for months.”

He crumples in on himself, this gigantic bull of a man, and I want to escape and reassure him at the same time, he looks so pathetic, but then he looks up at me with his bloodshot eyes, says, “Seems like ten minutes ago I was showing him how to load his first rifle, wring his first dove-bird. But ever since the thing with that girl, he’s . . . different. He won’t tell me anything. I just want to know, is my son alright?”

“I . . . I think he is. But honestly, I don’t . . . really know.” I look away. Inside, I’m starting to realize that I don’t know Stuart. If this damaged him so much, and he can’t even speak to me about it, then what am I to him? Just a diversion? Something sitting beside him to keep him from thinking about what’s really tearing him up inside?

I look at the Senator, try to think of something comforting, something my mother would say. But it’s just a dead silence.

“Francine would have my hide if she knew I was asking you this.”

“It’s alright, sir,” I say. “I don’t mind that you did.”

He looks exhausted by it all, tries to smile. “Thank you, darlin’. Go on and see my son. I’ll see y’all out there in a while.”

I ESCAPE TO THE back PORCH and stand next to Stuart. Lightning bursts in the sky, giving us a flash of the eerily brilliant gardens, then the darkness sucks it all back in. The gazebo, skeleton-like, looms at the end of the garden path. I feel nauseous from the glass of sherry I drank after supper.

The Senator comes out, looking curiously more sober, in a fresh shirt, plaid and pressed, exactly the same as the last one. Mother and Missus Whitworth stroll a few steps, pointing at some rare rose winding its neck up onto the porch. Stuart puts his hand on my shoulder. He is somehow better, but I am growing worse.

“Can we . . . ?” I point inside and Stuart follows me inside. I stop in the hallway with the secret staircase.

“There’s a lot I don’t know about you, Stuart,” I say.

He points to the wall of pictures behind me, the empty space included. “Well, here it all is.”

“Stuart, your daddy, he told me . . .” I try to find a way to put it.

He narrows his eyes at me. “Told you what?”

“How bad it was. How hard it was on you,” I say. “With Patricia.”

“He doesn’t know anything. He doesn’t know who it was or what it was about or . . .”

He leans back against the wall and crosses his arms and I see that old anger again, deep and red. He is wrapped in it.

“Stuart. You don’t have to tell me now. But sometime, we’re going to have to talk about this.” I’m surprised by how confident I sound, when I certainly don’t feel it.

He looks me deep in the eyes, shrugs. “She slept with someone else. There.”

“Someone . . . you know?”

“No one knew him. He was one of those leeches, hanging around the school, cornering the teachers to do something about the integration laws. Well, she did something alright.”

“You mean . . . he was an activist? With the civil rights . . . ?”

“That’s it. Now you know.”

“Was he . . . colored?” I gulp at the thought of the consequences, because even to me, that would be horrific, disastrous.

“No, he wasn’t colored. He was scum. Some Yankee from New York, the kind you see on the T.V. with the long hair and the peace signs.”

I am searching my head for the right question to ask but I can’t think of anything.

“You know the really crazy part, Skeeter? I could’ve gotten over it. I could’ve forgiven her. She asked me to, told me how sorry she was. But I knew, if it ever got out who he was, that Senator Whitworth’s daughter-in-law got in bed with a Yankee goddamn activist, it would ruin him. Kill his career like that.” He snaps his fingers with a crack.

“But your father, at the table. He said he thought Ross Barnett was wrong.”

“You know that’s not the way it works. It doesn’t matter what he believes. It’s what Mississippi believes. He’s running for the U.S. Senate this fall and I’m unfortunate enough to know that.”

“So you broke up with her because of your father?”

“No, I broke up with her because she cheated.” He looks down at his hands and I can see the shame eating away at him. “But I didn’t take her back because of . . . my father.”

“Stuart, are you . . . still in love with her?” I ask, and I try to smile as if it’s nothing, just a question, even though I feel all my blood rushing to my feet. I feel like I will faint asking this.

His body slumps some, against the gold-patterned wallpaper. His voice softens.

“You’d never do that. Lie that way. Not to me, not to anybody.”

He has no idea how many people I’m lying to. But it’s not the point. “Answer me, Stuart. Are you?”

He rubs his temples, stretching his hand across his eyes. Hiding his eyes is what I’m thinking.

“I think we ought to quit for a while,” he whispers.

I reach over to him out of reflex, but he backs away. “I need some time, Skeeter. Space, I guess. I need to go to work and drill oil and . . . get my head straight awhile.”

I feel my mouth slide open. Out on the porch, I hear the soft calls of our parents. It is time to leave.

I walk behind Stuart to the front of the house. The Whitworths stop in the spiraling foyer while we three Phelans head out the door. In a cottony coma I listen as everyone pledges to do it again, out at the Phelans next time. I tell them all goodbye, thank you, my own voice sounding strange to me. Stuart waves from the steps and smiles at me so our parents can’t tell that anything has changed.

chapter 21

WE STAND in the relaxing room, Mother and Daddy and I, staring at the silver box in the window. It is the size of a truck engine, nosed in knobs, shiny with chrome, gleaming with modern-day hope. Fedders, it reads.

“Who are these Fedders anyway?” Mother asks. “Where are their people from?”

“Go on and turn the crank, Charlotte.”

“Oh I can’t. It’s too tacky.”

“Jesus, Mama, Doctor Neal said you need it. Now stand back.” My parents glare at me. They do not know Stuart broke up with me after the Whitworth supper. Or the relief I long for from this machine. That every minute I feel so hot, so goddamn singed and hurt, I think I might catch on fire.

I flip the knob to “1.” Overhead, the chandelier bulbs dim. The whir climbs slowly like it’s working its way up a hill. I watch a few tendrils of Mother’s hair lift gently into the air.

“Oh . . . my,” Mother says and closes her eyes. She’s been so tired lately and her ulcers are getting worse. Doctor Neal said keeping the house cool would at least make her more comfortable.

“It’s not even on full blast,” I say and I turn it up a notch, to “2.” The air blows a little harder, grows colder, and we all three smile, our sweat evaporating from our foreheads.

“Well, heck, let’s just go all the way,” Daddy says, and turns it up to “3,” which is the highest, coldest, most wonderful setting of all, and Mother giggles. We stand with our mouths open like we could eat it. The lights brighten again, the whir grows louder, our smiles lift higher, and then it all stops dead. Dark.

“What . . . happened?” Mama says.

Daddy looks up at the ceiling. He walks out into the hall.

“Damn thing blew the current.”

Mother fans her handkerchief on her neck. “Well, good heavens, Carlton, go fix it.”

For an hour, I hear Daddy and Jameso throwing switches and clanking tools, boots knocking on the porch. After they’ve fixed it and I sit through a lecture from Daddy to never turn it to “3” again or it will blow the house to pieces, Mother and I watch as an icy mist grows on the windows. Mother dozes in her blue Queen Anne chair, her green blanket pulled to her chest. I wait until she is asleep, listening for the soft snore, the pucker of her forehead. On tiptoe, I turn out all the lamps, the television, every electricity sucker downstairs save the refrigerator. I stand in front of the window and unbutton my blouse. Carefully, I turn the dial to “3”. Because I long to feel nothing. I want to be frozen inside. I want the icy cold to blow directly on my heart.

The power blows out in about three seconds.

FOR THE NEXT TWO WEEKS, I submerge myself in the interviews. I keep my typewriter on the back porch and work most of the day long and into the night. The screens give the green yard and fields a hazy look. Sometimes I catch myself staring off at the fields, but I am not here. I am in the old Jackson kitchens with the maids, hot and sticky in their white uniforms. I feel the gentle bodies of white babies breathing against me. I feel what Constantine felt when Mother brought me home from the hospital and handed me over to her. I let their colored memories draw me out of my own miserable life.

“Skeeter, we haven’t heard from Stuart in weeks,” Mother says for the eighth time. “He’s not cross with you, now, is he?”

At the moment, I am writing the Miss Myrna column. Once ahead by three months, somehow I’ve managed to almost miss my deadline. “He’s fine, Mother. He doesn’t have to call every minute of the day.” But then I soften my voice. Every day she seems thinner. The sharpness of her collarbone is enough to tamp down my irritation at her comment. “He’s just traveling is all, Mama.”

This seems to placate her for the moment and I tell the same story to Elizabeth, with a few more details to Hilly, pinching my arm to bear her insipid smile. But I do not know what to tell myself. Stuart needs “space” and “time,” as if this were physics and not a human relationship.

So instead of feeling sorry for myself every minute of the day, I work. I type. I sweat. Who knew heartbreak would be so goddamn hot. When Mother’s lying down on her bed, I pull my chair up to the air conditioner and stare into it. In July, it becomes a silver shrine. I find Pascagoula pretending to dust with one hand, while holding up her hairbraids at the thing with the other. It’s not as if it’s a new invention, air-conditioning, but every store in town that has it puts a sign in the window, prints it on its ads because it is so vital. I make a cardboard sign for the Phelan house, place it on the front doorknob, NOW AIR-CONDITIONED. Mother smiles, but pretends she’s not amused.

On a rare evening home, I sit with Mother and Daddy at the dinner table. Mother nibbles on her supper. She spent the afternoon trying to keep me from finding out she’d been vomiting. She presses her fingers along the top of her nose to hold back her headache and says, “I was thinking about the twenty-fifth, do you think that’s too soon to have them over?” and I still cannot bring myself to tell her that Stuart and I have broken up.

But I can see it on her face, that Mother feels worse than bad tonight. She is pale and trying to sit up longer than I know she wants to. I take her hand and say, “Let me check, Mama. I’m sure the twenty-fifth will be fine.” She smiles for the first time all day.

AIBILEEN SMILES AT THE STACK of pages on her kitchen table. It’s an inch thick, double-spaced, and starting to look like something that can sit on a shelf. Aibileen is as exhausted as I am, surely more since she works all day and then comes home to the interviews at night.

“Look a that,” she says. “That thing’s almost a book.”

I nod, try to smile, but there is so much work left to do. It’s nearly August and even though it’s not due until January, we still have five more interviews to sort through. With Aibileen’s help, I’ve molded and cut and arranged five of the women’s chapters including Minny’s, but they still need work. Thankfully, Aibileen’s section is done. It is twenty-one pages, beautifully written, simple.

There are several dozen made-up names, both white and colored, and at times, it is hard to keep them all straight. All along, Aibileen has been Sarah Ross. Minny chose Gertrude Black, for what reason I don’t know. I have chosen Anonymous, although Elaine Stein doesn’t know this yet. Niceville, Mississippi, is the name of our town because it doesn’t exist, but we decided a real state name would draw interest. And since Mississippi happens to be the worst, we figured we’d better use it.

A breeze blows through the window and the top pages flutter. We both slam our palms down to catch them.

“You think . . . she gone want a print it?” asks Aibileen. “When it’s done?”

I try to smile at Aibileen, show some false confidence. “I hope so,” I say as brightly as I can manage. “She seemed interested in the idea and she . . . well, the march is coming up and . . .”

I hear my own voice taper off. I truly don’t know if Missus Stein will want to print it. But what I do know is, the responsibility of the project lays on my shoulders and I see it in their hardworking, lined faces, how much the maids want this book to be published. They are scared, looking at the back door every ten minutes, afraid they’ll get caught talking to me. Afraid they’ll be beaten like Louvenia’s grandson, or, hell, bludgeoned in their front yard like Medgar Evers. The risk they’re taking is proof they want this to get printed and they want it bad.

Date: 2015-01-02; view: 739