“And what makes you think that?” Mike snapped. She really did dislike this insinuating man.
“Oh, I read you sometimes, like I said. When I’m not reading Car and Driver or Penthouse. Seems like I saw something you did just recently in People. “
“I don’t write for People.”
“Well, then, it must have been the New Republic or the Nation. And then the Colonel’s told me a lot about you.”
Mike looked at her father, who had picked up a cast-off piece of toast and was chewing on it wetly. He did not raise his eyes from his plate. Behind his diminished figure she seemed suddenly to see another man sitting at another table in this same spot, in this same kitchen: a young man, fine-faced, erect, remote, contained. It was the first sense of John Winship as the man she had once known that she had had. The gray eyes of both men, real and spectral, were veiled with lashes, and did not look up. Then the shadow figure vanished and only the old man chewing toast was left.
Sam Canaday walked to the door of the kitchen just as J.W. Cromie came up onto the back porch.
“Good, here’s J.W.,” he said. “He’ll wheel the Colonel back to his room for a little nap, and you won’t need to worry about his lunch till midafternoon, since we had breakfast so late. Why don’t you take the car and get out a little while? Drive around, go see Priss Comfort, maybe? She’s real eager to see you.”
The thought was like sunlight pouring down onto dark water. Mike smiled with pleasure.
“Oh, yes, Priss. Oh, that’s a good idea, I will. How is Priss? Does she still live in that funny little stone house down by the ball field? Does she still knock back the bourbon in her iced tea? Do you know her well?”
“She still lives there,” Sam Canaday said, smiling at her tumble of words. “And no, I don’t think she’s had a drink in years. And yes, I do know her right well. I was by there after I left here last night, in fact. Priss is one of the main reasons I stay in Lytton. Her and the Colonel here.”
“Oh, maybe we can have her to dinner one night soon,” Mike said. “I’d like to show her that I really can cook. She used to say I was going to starve by the time I was twenty-five.”
“Priss Comfort hasn’t set foot in this house in more than twenty years,” John Winship spat from the chair where he had been chewing and nodding. “Not since the day you slunk out of here, Micah. So you want to do any cooking for her, you best plan on doing it in that rathole of hers.”
Mike went still-faced with the venom in the words. Anger crawled again in the glass. She stared at her father, who raised his head and gave her back the look.
“Then that’s just what I’ll do,” she said. “That’s a fine idea. Thanks for filling me in, Sam.”
“You’re real welcome, Miz Singer-Winship.” She felt, rather than saw, his amusement as she went smartly up the stairs to change her clothes. A moment later she heard the screen door bang softly behind him and knew he was gone.
15
PRISS COMFORT HAD NOT SO MUCH CHANGED IN TWENTY-TWO years as she had, simply, expanded. Before, she had had the look of petrified redwood, all massive, columnar height and rich, Renaissance coloring. Now her body was as formless as DeeDee’s, but it was androgynous, not DeeDee’s melted and sprawling femaleness, and she carried its bulk as lightly as she ever had. Her stride, as she moved through the familiar dim clutter of the little house’s living room to greet Mike, was as free and impatient as ever, and the eyes that glowed from the serene, unlined face were as raw a green. Priss’s face was like a great harvest moon, smooth and high-colored and magnetizing to the eye. Her shining coil of chestnut hair was still vivid, even with strands of vigorous iron gray woven through it here and there. Her arms around Mike were as solid as chestnut wood. Only the smell of her was different. Where once Priss Comfort had breathed forth warm gusts of bourbon and Lavoris, now she smelt powerfully of Calgon Bouquet and the arid, inoffensive sweat of age.
She held Mike hard against her for a long time, saying nothing, breathing audibly, and then held her off with both strong hands and looked at her. Priss’s smile had not changed, either; it was even more Buddha-like in the large, untroubled face. The fierce hawk’s eyes, unclouded and unprompted by lenses, searched Mike’s face like electronic scanners.
“‘For lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone; the flowers appear on the earth; the time of the singing of birds is come, and the voice of the turtle is heard in our land,’ “she intoned, in the powerful clarion voice that might have rung in Mike’s ears only this morning. Mike felt a surge of lightness and what might pass for joy.
“I’ve missed you,” she said, smiling at Priss. “I didn’t know how much until I saw you. Priss, you’re uncanny; you look years younger than you did when I left. And you still sound like Brünnhilde riding into battle. What on earth have you done, found the fountain of youth?”
“Laid off the sauce,” Priss said in her beautiful contralto, leading Mike across the room to where the deep old sofa and Priss’s shapeless leather Morris chair still sat. “When I stopped drinking I started eating, and all the wrinkles and crannies filled in. I’m not younger, I’m just stretched like a balloon. If I lost any weight I’d look like the picture of Dorian Gray.”
She stepped deftly over the objects strewing the faded old Navaho rug that had always lain in the middle of the floor, and Mike picked her way behind her. Shoes, a pile of books and magazines, an unopened sack of birdseed, and one rubber Wellington boot cluttered the path to the sofa. One anonymous heap uncoiled from the floor and scurried away under the coffee table, and Mike remembered Priss’s omnipresent cats. Time seemed to have passed the tiny house by entirely.
Priss sagged into the Morris chair and gestured at the pitcher of iced tea on the table. A plate of store-bought chocolate chip cookies sat beside it. Mike shook her head, and Priss raised one coppery eyebrow.
“I started eating and you stopped, apparently,” she said. “Are you anorexic, or is this what the best skeletons in the naked city are wearing these days?”
“I know, I know … I look like a gay young thing of a hundred and ten,” Mike said. “You don’t have to rub it in. I’ve just gotten in off a long assignment. I’ll make it up in a week.”
“You don’t look a hundred and ten, you look fourteen,” Priss Comfort said, frowning at her. “An Ethiopian fourteen. How old are you now, Mike? I forget exactly … thirty-seven? Thirty-eight?”
“I’ll be forty in November,” Mike grimaced. “You ought to remember, Priss. You saw me before anybody else in the world did, except the doctor and Rusky.”
Priss smiled. “So I did,” she said. “A ridiculous, squalling little scrap with a cotton boll on your head and the face of John Winship on you before you were an hour old. And that hasn’t changed, Mike. You look so much like your father when he was your age that it’s almost laughable. I’d know you were his daughter if I were meeting you for the first time today. Even more now, somehow. It’s the eyes, I think …”
“I’ve never really seen that,” Mike said.
“No,” Priss said. “I guess you wouldn’t.”
The cat came warily out from under the coffee table and wafted up onto Priss’s polyester lap and settled himself into its cushiony vastness. Like DeeDee, Priss wore a pantsuit, hers green with a mammoth floral top to complement the shiny trousers. The cat was white, with a large bullet head and thick neck and slanted, mad blue eyes. It stared steadily at Mike, purring like a Mixmaster and kneading its big front paws on Priss’s knee.
“This is Walker Pussy,” Priss said. “So named because of his startling resemblance to—”
“Don’t tell me,” Mike said, laughing. “He really does, doesn’t he? Can he write?”
“I suspect he can, and quite well,” Priss said, rubbing the big, blunt head. “But he’s been blocked ever since I had him. Found him last winter up that china-berry tree out back, where Cooper’s brute of a Doberman had chased him. He was so traumatized that he hasn’t written a word yet.
But I think it may break any day now. I hope so. People are going to forget who he is; you know how fickle the reading public is. He’s only as good as his last book.”
“You ought to be writing literature, not teaching it,” Mike said. “You’re wasted on ninety-nine percent of the little wretches in your classes.”
“What classes?” Priss Comfort said. “I’ve been retired for more than twenty years. I do absolutely nothing I don’t have to do now, except read, work doublecrostics, and take care of this failed poet here. And eat, of course.”
“Why did you quit?” Mike asked in genuine bewilderment. “I can’t imagine you not teaching English literature. It’s like the ocean without tides.”
“Mike, I’m exactly your father’s age. They’d have had to put me out to pasture eventually, even if I hadn’t wanted to retire. Which I did.”
Mike looked at Priss, huge and vital in the dimness of the room. That she could be the same age as the embittered and embattled cadaver back in the Pomeroy Street house was nearly incomprehensible. Yet she knew that it was true. Priss and her father had gone all the way through grammar and high school together.
“You seem about a century younger than he does,” she said.
“Four months and five days, to be exact,” Priss said. “The only difference is that I don’t have cancer and I haven’t had a stroke.”
“No,” Mike said. “That’s not the only difference.” But she did not pursue it, and Priss let the statement lie. They sat in peaceful silence for a space of time, memories and impressions from the nearly two decades of afternoons and evenings she had spent in this room rolling over Mike like a warm sea.
Presently Priss said, “Tell me what’s happened in your life since you left here. I don’t mean the divorce and all that … DeeDee’s kept me filled in on the mechanics. I mean what’s really been happening with you. I can’t tell from your writing. There’s nothing of you in it.”
“There’s not supposed to be,” Mike said, a bit testily. “A journalist isn’t supposed to intrude herself into her work. I’ve always tried to let my subjects speak for themselves …”
“I wasn’t criticizing your work,” Priss said, holding up one large hand and smiling. “I’m very proud of your work. You’ve made a good start on what you can do. But you’re by no means there yet. And I think you’re wrong. The best journalists … the very top two or three … aren’t afraid to let themselves show under and through their work. They don’t hide behind it. It’s what makes them the best; a kind of pentimento. You’re still hiding, no matter what you think. What has happened to you, Mike?”
Without meaning to at all, Mike found herself telling Priss. She talked and talked, about the early days of her marriage and her career, about the growing estrangement between her and Richard, and the divorce; about Rachel and her troubling transmutation and abrupt, agonizing defection; about the job and the apartment and all the other events of that bizarre and devastating week in May just past; about DeeDee’s importuning letter, and her own decision to come home and help her sister with their father. She said nothing of the terrible, killing fear that had struck her on the train to Bridgehampton, or of the flight to Derek Blessing and his betrayal; nor of the Xanax trance that had ended only the night before, in her old bedroom upstairs in the Pomeroy Street house, or of the bell jar that had since slid down over her. She simply and meticulously offered the bare, neatened bones of her life for Priss, aware as she talked of the brisk, neutral northeastern timbre of her voice in her own ears, of what DeeDee had called the “New Yorkiness” of her speech.
When she was through, Priss grinned at her.
“So the whole shooting match just fell in on you, did it?” she said. “And now here you are, back where you started out. Well, good for you, Mike, though I don’t for a minute suppose you came for the reasons you say you did. Since when did you give a tinker’s damn about helping DeeDee, or did she need help, for that matter? Duck’s sorry slob of a sister could take on that old harpy as well as he and DeeDee. She didn’t have to call you home. Whatever the reasons, though, I’m glad you’re here. It’s time you came home.”
“I’m not here to stay,” Mike said hastily. “I didn’t really come home to stay, Priss. Please don’t think that. This is just for a while …”
“Where will you go, then? When you do go.”
“Back to New York, I guess. Or almost anywhere my work takes me. On. I’ll go on. I always meant to do that. You know as well as I do that you can’t go home again,” Mike said.
“Sometimes you have to go home before you can go on,” Priss said. “Almost all of us do, Mike, some time or other.”
They were silent again, and then Mike said, “Is he really dying?”
“Yes,” Priss Comfort said. “He really is.”
“Does he know it?”
“I don’t know,” Priss said. “I haven’t talked to your father since the day you left that house. Seen or talked to him. I’m sure DeeDee has told you that, or John himself. It’s certainly no secret in Lytton.”
“Oh, Priss … why?” Mike cried softly. The old pain deep under Priss’s words, not the words themselves, hurt her in turn.
“Because,” said Priss Comfort, “I can’t forgive either one of us. Him or me.”
“Priss …” Mike began, but the older woman held her hand up again, a white blur in the hot red dimness of the room.
“No, Mike, I’m not going to talk about it with you, now or ever,” she said. “I was drunk and I let you down, and I will never forgive myself for it, and I stopped drinking that day … stopped teaching, too … but that’s neither here nor there. And I will not forgive your father for what he said to you that day, in that house, and I will not go into that house again while he lives in it. And if you persist in talking to me about it, I’m going to ask you to go home.”
“Priss, I can’t bear you punishing yourself for something that doesn’t matter,” Mike said urgently. “Believe me, I never …”
“Mike!”
“All right,” Mike said, a prickle of salt in her eyes and throat. “Then we won’t talk about it. Tell me about this business with the … what is it? The DOT? Tell me about the homeplace.”
Priss looked at her with the mulish, oblique look she remembered from her high school days, when Mike had stopped short of grasping some point Priss had been trying to make to her, or from arriving at some conclusion. There was no help in that look.
“Do you really care about the homeplace, Mike? Or any of this business with the Department of Transportation? I don’t think you do,” she said.
“No,” Mike said, relieved that once again Priss had read her thoughts, and that, in this house, at least, she did not have to pretend. “I don’t especially care, except that it’s obvious I’m going to be hearing it night and day while I’m here. It seems to upset him … my father … a great deal, and that’s obviously not good for someone who’s already had one stroke. I couldn’t care less what happens to that broken down old farmhouse—Dee’s probably right; he’d be far better off without the worry of it hanging over him, and after all, he would still have the land—but I can tell already that he’s not about to drop the suit, or whatever it is he and that Canaday person have going. I just thought it might be good for me to know a little of what’s been going on.”
“You really ought to ask Sam Canaday, then,” Priss said. “I’m hazy on the details and timing. All I know is that the whole thing boiled up about six months ago; I heard at the Food Giant that the state wanted to build an access road from all that new development over to the west of us, around Carrollton and all, to 1-85 over east yonder, and that it would come right smack through the old Winship homeplace. I can’t imagine why they want to do it; there’s another access road not five miles down toward Shelbyville. It’s not going to save anybody but about two minutes. Well, the next thing I knew, your daddy had hired Sam Canaday to fight it, and that’s really the gist and sum of it. You ask Sam. You’re right; yo
u really ought to know what’s going on if you’re in the house with it, whether or not you give a flip about the old place. Tell you the truth, it has gotten to be an eyesore since your daddy hasn’t been able to keep it up.”
“I don’t want to ask Sam Canaday anything,” Mike said. “He’s a boor and a bore and a professional Southerner, which is even worse, and I’m already tired of having him shamble around the house being all folksy and warm and cotton-mouthed. I don’t plan to have anything more to do with him than I have to. It’ll be easy enough to stay out of his way. How in God’s name did my father find him in the first place?”
“As a matter of fact, I sent him over there about four months ago,” Priss said enigmatically, feeding bits of chocolate chip cookies to the mad-eyed white cat, who gobbled them indelicately. “I knew John wasn’t up to going up to East Point every day to see that McDonough fellow up there, and there hasn’t been another lawyer in Lytton since your father retired. Sam Canaday came to town about a year ago and set up an office over the hardware store, in that space old Dr. Gaddis used to have … not much more than a slum now … and I had a little law business over a piece of property needing doing, and I didn’t want to drive to East Point to do it. So I went to see him, and he did a real good job for me and didn’t charge me an arm and a leg, so I told him to go on over there and see John Winship about this DOT thing, and he did, and the rest, as they say, is history.”
“I didn’t know reputable lawyers went around soliciting business door-to-door,” Mike said. “Though I haven’t seen anything yet to make me think he’s reputable.”
“Oh, he’s reputable,” Priss said. “He hasn’t had time to be disreputable yet. Only got his law degree a couple of years ago. Put himself through Oglethorpe University law school at night, I think. Came straight on down here from Atlanta and hung out his shingle. I think I was his first client, and John is probably his second and only one so far. Like to be his last, too. Folks down here don’t like him much.”
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