“He says he wants to keep in touch,” my father sneered. “Get to know us better before he meets his Maker. Swann told me he came back to the funeral home after we left and tried to bribe him to open the casket.”
“Fat chance,” I said.
“Most people have their price,” said my father.
“But if Mr. Swann had taken the bribe he wouldn’t have told you about it, would he?”
“I probably shouldn’t say this, Helen, but I look forward to the day when you can spot the unsavory truths about human nature for yourself.” He crumpled the letter in his fist and to my disappointment shoved the whole wad, envelope included, into his jacket pocket. No chance now of my fishing it out of the wastebasket. Without bothering to put in fresh ice, he sloshed more Jack Daniel’s into his iced tea glass and lurched upstairs.
I wandered into Nonie’s room, which was on the ground floor, next to mine, and climbed up on her bed. I turned down the spread and buried my face in her pillows. Her smell was markedly fainter than yesterday. The insidious Sunday afternoon light pushed at me through the drawn curtains. Nonie, who could bend time to her purposes, was no longer here to protect me from emptiness. Even when she had closed her door to lie on her three pillows and take her appointed afternoon rest, the connection between us had been maintained. It always felt like she was in there refueling for us all.
Desperate to burrow back to that connection, I ground my face and body into her bedclothes. This time last Sunday she would have been lying here. The sheets had not yet been changed. She had died on Monday, and Mrs. Jones, whose day was Tuesday, had been postponed for a week. Nonie’s black satchel purse presided aloofly from the top of the dresser. Inside was the little vial of nitroglycerin, useless now. “Handsome” languished, unseen on Easter Day, in its hatbox on her closet shelf.
How could she be so here and not here? I tried to make myself cry into her pillows before the smell of her cold cream vanished altogether. If she was gone, what parts of me had she taken with her? The parts she talked to, taught things to, told her stories to, would never again be addressed by her. And yet her way of saying things was all around me, they were inside of me.
All around me was our house, which pulsed with her stories of it. Old One Thousand she called it, because that was its number; it was the last house at the top of Sunset Drive. She and my grandfather and their young son had shared its rooms and porches with the Recoverers, back in the days when it catered to a few well-paying convalescent tuberculars or inebriates, and occasional souls whose nerves weren’t yet up to going back to ordinary life.
If Nonie were still here, lying on her raised pillows on this Sunday afternoon, I would likely be upstairs on the Recoverers’ south porch, reading or daydreaming on the faded horsehair cushions of a chaise longue. Back when Old One Thousand had also been Dr. Anstruther’s Lodge, there was a view of the town below and the ranges of mountains encircling it, but now the view was blocked by a hectic tangle of branches just beginning to leaf out. The Recoverers would sit on this porch playing cards and sharing the news of their latest clean X-rays or sobriety day- counts or sessions with the local psychiatrist until the sun had moved over the roof; then they would gather their things and move over to the west porch. They were all just figments now, the real people departed long before I was born, but Nonie had told me about them and also about the grandfather I hadn’t known, Doctor Cam, a man thirty years older than herself. How she as an eighteen-year-old girl had been walking to town carrying her valise, running away from the farm and her greedy new stepmother and menacing stepbrother, when this man had reined in his horse and called down in a low-country accent from his cabriolet: “Young lady, can I carry you somewhere?”
“It was a turn of phrase South Carolinians used, but I’d never heard it before. A cabriolet? It was a small, two-wheeled buggy with a retractable hood. The hood was down, so I could get a good look at him before I decided whether to get in. He more than passed inspection—he had a neat gray mustache and nice clothes and was old enough to be my father, if I had been lucky enough to have such an elegant one—so I climbed aboard. While we were settling my valise in the little space in front of my feet, he asked where I was wanting to go and I said, ‘Today I’m only traveling as far as the Battery Hill Hotel, so anywhere you let me off in town will be fine.’ I had prepared this answer in case I was offered a ride. The Battery Hill was the best hotel, and I was hoping to get work there as a maid or laundress, but I wanted to convey the impression I was staying there as a guest waiting for a train the next morning. He said it would be no trouble to take me to the hotel, and then started right in giving information about himself, the way thoughtful people do when they want to put you at your ease. He was a physician and a widower from Columbia, South Carolina. His wife had died of TB in a sanitorium here, and he had fallen in love with the pure air of the mountains and decided to stay on and establish a home for convalescents who were out of danger but still needed rest and care. This morning he had gone to an estate auction in the country and had been lucky enough to acquire some useful items, including a twelve-gallon ice cream freezer, which he was having delivered. It was the same estate sale my father and stepmother and odious stepbrother had gone off to that morning, which had given me my opportunity to escape. I remember sitting in that cabriolet taking me further and further away from the farm and recalling Elise telling my father that very morning she was going to come home with that ice cream freezer if it was the last thing she did. It made me smile, and the doctor noticed it and looked at me so kindly that I almost told him the truth right then. But I thought better of it. It’s best to keep yourself to yourself —especially when you are running away. So I just smiled and kept silent. Oh, I can still see that horse’s sleek rump rotating in the sunshine, and I can smell the leather from the reins in the doctor’s hands and the masculine scent of the toiletry he wore. It was a beautiful May morning and everything was starting to bloom. Before he let me off at the Battery Hill Hotel he gave me his card and said he sincerely hoped I’d get in touch if he could be of further assistance. The card had his Columbia address scored through and he’d written below in a fine copperplate hand: Anstruther’s Lodge, Cameron Anstruther, M.D., Director, and the local address.
“That was the first Anstruther’s Lodge; it was right in town. We bought this house on Sunset Mountain when Harry was going on ten and people had cars. I’ll take you past the old lodge if you like, but do keep in mind it was in a better part of town in those days and looked a lot nicer than it does now.
“I got a job as a laundress at the hotel until they found out I could cook and promoted me to the kitchen. But then my father tracked me down and sent my stepbrother, Earl Quarles, to bring me home. Earl made a scene at the hotel. But I had things to hold over him, and I told him if I was forced to go back to the farm I would see that my father was informed of those things and Earl would be out on his ear.
“What things? Oh, darling, Earl had so many bad traits it would be hard to single one out for you. Let’s just say he was sneaky and bullying and thought nothing of taking what wasn’t his. He had his eye on that farm from the beginning. I don’t know what lies he told them when he returned without me, but Father didn’t send him back again.”
“Didn’t you and your father ever make up?”
“No, darling, we never did. Fate was unkind in that regard. After I had Harry, I was planning to go out and see Father and show him his grandson. And then I opened the paper one morning and saw his obituary. He was only fifty-two but had died of a massive heart attack. The obituary was in the paper from several days back so I couldn’t even go to his funeral. But I’m getting way ahead of myself.
“Earl’s scene at the hotel had cost me my job. It was not the kind of hotel where visitors of employees were allowed to threaten and scream. It was then that I remembered the doctor and called on him at his lodge. It was only a few minutes’ walk from the hotel. I started cooking for his convalescents and ran the household for him. Until one day he asked me if he was too old for me to love, and I gave him a good long look and said, ‘No, you are exactly right.’”
NONIE WAS A born storyteller. It is not so remarkable that I have made a life and a living from storytelling. But there were dangers and drawbacks in her ways of telling and her ways of not telling. Gradually I have come to wonder how deeply her methods have infiltrated mine.
III.
Flora had three interviews for primary school teaching jobs in Alabama and couldn’t come to us until the second week in June, but my father was to report for work on June first. He had his gas coupons and four new tires from the Ration Board for his second summer at Oak Ridge, where he was being promoted to paymaster for a big
