“Isn’t this something for Lytton?” DeeDee said proudly, surging down the steps to the pool terrace like a billowing, deflated circus tent. “I hope we can work it out so we can join by next summer. It’s too late to get anybody to stay with Mama Wingo this year, but Bay’s going to put us up sometime this winter.”
Behind her dark glasses, Mike looked around. At their entrance, the heads around the pool and the bridge tables lifted and myriad sunglass-shielded eyes were fastened on them. As had been the case all summer, she saw no face she recognized from her time here before. Maybe old Lytton, as DeeDee persisted in calling it, did not exist; had never existed except as a context for her childhood. Or perhaps it surfaced only once a century, like Brigadoon. In any event, the focused eyes had in them no ken for Mike Winship.
She could see that all conversation had stopped. DeeDee sailed down the steps and across the apron like the QE2 coming into Southampton, nodding to a group here and giving a little offhand wave and a trilled hello to one there. Her eyes played back and forth over the pool area, assessing and cataloging the crowd. Her smile included one and all. It was definitely in the nature of a royal progress. Mike, trailing in her sister’s wake, saw what DeeDee did not: the rolled eyes, the hands clapped to mouths to stifle laughter, the heads coming together again to follow her elephantine promenade. Mike’s face burned with embarrassment and fury. She wanted to crack the teased and sprayed heads together; she wanted to shake her sister for her preening complacency. She decided, feeling the virulent bite of the sun through the nylon of the fishing hat, that she would plead a headache and escape immediately after lunch. DeeDee could ride home with Duck.
DeeDee settled herself at an umbrella table at the far end of the upper terrace, and pulled off her sun hat. Her hair was loose again, down her back, spread like a cape over the sausagelike bulk of her shoulders. Mike could see the precise line near her scalp where the ebony dye ended and the rusted black of Dee’s own color began. She prayed that her sister would not remove the caftan. She could not imagine what she would look like in a bathing suit. DeeDee didn’t.
“Let’s have lunch first,” she said. “Then we can swim. Or you can. I’m thinking of playing a little bridge with Helen Apperson and her crowd over there, and I know you hate cards.”
She waved gaily at a thin, dun-colored woman at a nearby table, who gave her back a stiff little salute and a perfunctory baring of huge Chiclet teeth. The other three women at the table smiled, cutting their eyes at Helen Apperson and then staring again at DeeDee and Mike. Mike knew that they would talk about them both, the grotesque Wingo woman and her strange northern writer sister whom nobody ever saw around town. She could feel their eyes on her back, almost feel the smoking pits left by the avidity of the sensation-starved eyes.
“Come on over and I’ll introduce you,” DeeDee said. “I’ll take you around to all the others after lunch.”
“Oh, let’s eat first,” Mike said. “I’m starved, and they’re in the middle of a game.”
“Well, then, maybe you’d like to ask somebody to join us,” DeeDee chirped, favoring the assemblage with a sweeping smile. “Oh, there’s Lolly Bridges. She’s darling. Her husband’s a pilot and she does catering, really cute things. She’s real creative. Everybody’s using her now for weddings and anniversaries. Hey, Lolly,” she called to a leathery red-haired woman in a golf skirt and sleeveless shirt who had just come onto the terrace and was obviously looking in vain for an empty table. “Come join us and meet my little Yankee sister. She doesn’t know anybody anymore, and I was just telling her about you.”
The woman started, and then gave DeeDee a brilliant, totally false smile. “Oh, I’m so sorry, Mrs.… Wingo, isn’t it? I’d love to, but I can’t stay; I was just looking for my son, but I don’t see him so I guess he’s gone on … another time, though.”
“Oh, sure,” DeeDee sang out, smiling happily. “We’ll probably be joining this winter, so we’ll see plenty of you then.”
“How nice,” Lolly Bridges said, and fled the terrace. Heads turned to follow her, and one or two women put out hands and touched her arm as she passed and said something to her, laughing, and she shook her head rapidly and went around the side of the clubhouse.
“Save the whales,” Mike heard one of the women say, and everyone around the woman laughed again. Mike’s face and chest burned as if she were being martyred at a medieval stake. She shot an oblique look at her sister, but DeeDee had apparently not heard, for her face lost none of its self-satisfied well-being.
“This is the life, isn’t it?” she said. “It’s a pity none of old Lytton will join. Not that there’s much old Lytton left. But I doubt if these people would have anything to do with them, anyway. This is the in crowd now. Of course, Bay and his crowd would be welcome anywhere, but they’re the exceptions out of the old families.”
“Is Sam Canaday a member?” Mike asked.
“Oh, Mike, of course not. Who on earth would put him up for membership, much less vote for him? You may not think so, but it really is an exclusive club.”
“It looks it,” Mike said, taking in the snickering women on the pool apron. “I doubt very much if I’d make the grade.”
“Of course you would,” her sister said. “A Winship? How can you say such a thing? Besides that, anybody Bay nominated would be a member in a minute.”
Their waiter came then, and they placed their drink orders. DeeDee had a towering pink frozen daiquiri, and Mike ordered, perversely, a beer. When it came, she waved away the glass and drank it straight from the can. She did not like beer, but the first frosty gulps on a boiling-hot day like this one were always good. After that, it began to taste like soap. But she ordered another, simply because she knew DeeDee thought it unseemly, and then regretted the trifling spite. She swirled the tepid liquid around in the can and wondered if she could get a forkful of tuna salad down in this heat, and how quickly she could convincingly develop the headache. The air smelt powerfully of suntan oil, perfume, and chlorine.
A shadow fell over the table, and Mike looked up to see a small, round man with very pink cheeks and the only leisure suit she had seen in years standing beside them. He was not smiling, and his eyes, black and shiny like currants in a pastry, flicked from her to DeeDee. He looked, Mike thought, like the Pillsbury Doughboy. “Mrs. Wingo?” he said.
“I’m Mrs. Wingo,” DeeDee said, smiling her ferocious social smile.
“I’m Sonny Sampson, the club manager,” the little pastry man said, and DeeDee held out her hand graciously. He took it limply, as if he had been offered a dead sea creature to hold, and dropped it quickly.
“This is my sister, Micha Winship.” DeeDee dimpled. “You’ll know all about her if you read the newsmagazines.”
Sonny Sampson looked at Mike in vague alarm, and nodded.
“Miz Winship,” he said.
He obviously thinks I’m a hot ticket in the news, Mike thought, suppressing an unseemly bubble of glee. Somebody in Washington’s mistress who has just Told All.
“Mr. Sampson,” she said, and nodded.
“How nice of you to come over and say hello,” DeeDee warbled. “We’re guests of Bay Sewell’s. Bayard Everett Sewell. I’m sure you know him. He’s a very dear friend of my husband’s and mine. Won’t you join us?”
“No ma’am, thank you, I can’t stay. Ah … Mrs. Wingo, I hate to mention an unpleasant subject to one of our guests, but … uh … Mr. Wingo seems to have passed out in the men’s grill and I think we ought to get him home. Mr. Collingwood called me down just a minute ago; they can’t get him up …”
“Oh, my God,” DeeDee squealed, putting a hand to her throat in a gesture Mike had last seen Bette Davis make in Dark Victory. “What’s the matter with him? Is it his heart? Have you called a doctor?” She half rose from her seat.
“No, ma’am,” Sonny Sampson said, not moving to help her. “He’s not sick, Mrs. Wingo. He’s drunk. He was pretty abusive before he passed out, and he’s going to h
ave to leave the premises. If you’ll have the boy bring your car to the front, I’ll have a couple of the grill stewards get him around to it. I’m sorry, Mrs. Wingo. Mr. Sewell would be the first to tell you that the club can’t tolerate disorderliness.”
DeeDee’s face flushed a deep, dangerous crimson, and her chest rose and fell like a neap tide.
“My husband does not get … intoxicated,” she hissed. “And he certainly does not get disorderly. You’d better watch who you’re talking to, Mr. Sampson. Bay Sewell is not going to like this, not one little bit.”
“Your husband is drunk as a pig, Mrs. Wingo, and this is not the first time,” the little man drawled, an edge of wire-grass southern Georgia circling into his voice. “Last time he broke the pinball machine and scattered peanuts all over the floor arm wrestling. He’s run up a bar tab of seventy-seven dollars, too, setting up the house. Of course, Mr. Sewell always picks up his tabs, since he’s a guest, so I’m not going to push that. But this time he can’t cover his bets, Mrs. Wingo, and we don’t put up with that at this club. We think the world of Mr. Sewell, but we don’t put up with that at all.”
“You snotty little pipsqueak,” DeeDee began shrilly. “Don’t you call my husband a cheat! I’m going straight home and call Bay Sewell in Boston …”
Heads turned toward them, and conversation stopped again. Mike laid a hand on DeeDee’s arm. Her sister was quivering. Her breath was audible, hissing in her nostrils.
“Shh, Dee. Let’s just go. You don’t want to hang around here,” she said.
“I’ll have the boys bring Mr. Wingo around,” Sonny Sampson said. “But I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask you how he intends to cover his debt. The other men insist that he do so. They don’t want to have to go to Mr. Sewell with this.”
“They can go and be damned to them,” DeeDee said furiously. “I’m going to Bay myself, the minute he gets home. I’ll pay the debt myself. How much does he owe?” She reached for the gargantuan beach bag.
“It’s eight hundred and sixteen dollars,” Sonny Sampson said impassively.
“Eight hundred and sixteen dollars …” DeeDee’s voice sizzled out in a whisper, like air escaping from a balloon. “I … my checkbook is at home …”
“I’ve got mine, Dee,” Mike said, not looking at either one of them. There was a resinous stillness, in which all sound seemed to go out of the day, even the splashing of the children. All motion stopped. She slid her checkbook out of her tote and wrote out the check to the Lytton Country Club, and folded it and gave it to Sonny Sampson, who pocketed it.
“Thank you, Miz Winship. Sorry about this, ladies. I hate to do it, but I’m going to have to ask that Mr. Wingo not come back to the club.”
“You little stuck-up son of a bitch,” DeeDee shrieked. “You can take your two-bit club and you know what you can do with it! Bay Sewell will have your job so fast you won’t know what hit you! I wouldn’t come back to this crummy little place if my life depended on it, and neither would my husband! We can do better than this any day of our lives …”
“Hush, Dee!” Mike said, and DeeDee did.
Sonny Sampson gestured and two of the impassive black boys emerged from the men’s grill, half-dragging, half-carrying Duck Wingo between them. His head lolled down onto his chest, and he had obviously spilled a good bit of liquor on his plaid double-knit pants, because they were stained from crotch to knee. From the smell of him he had thrown up on himself, too. His white loafers dragged on the concrete apron as the two boys bore him around the clubhouse toward the front. He was semiconscious and mumbling. In the dead silence Mike could hear small gasps and stifled laughter from the bridge and pool women, and the pounding of her own heart. Sonny Sampson vanished abruptly back inside the clubhouse, and Mike steered DeeDee along behind the cumbersome procession. She could not see her sister’s face, but she could still hear her breathing. DeeDee said nothing. The walk until they gained the waiting Cadillac was interminable. Mike had never run such a gauntlet, not in Watts, not in Chicago, not at Kent State. She tried her old crisis trick, going far back into the core of her mind, completely and totally disassociating herself from her surroundings, but it did not work this time. The bell jar was gone. She was conscious with every fiber of her being of the eyes on them, and the following arrows of laughter.
The black boys wrestled Duck into the backseat of the Cadillac, and Mike hastily rummaged in her tote and pressed bills into their hands. She did not know how much she gave them. They muttered thanks and loped away. Mike pushed DeeDee gently into the front passenger’s seat and went around to the driver’s side. They drove away in silence. From the rear, amid the powerful fumes of vomit and liquor, Duck Wingo mumbled and cursed. “Motherfuckers don’t know their asses from a hole in the wall. Buy and sell those motherfuckers and their fuckin’ club this time next year; they’ll be shittin’ their pants to get me in the game next year …”
“I suggest that you shut up, Duck,” Mike said over her shoulder. “You’ll be lucky if Bay ever even looks at you again.”
“?l’ Bay?” He laughed, a slurring, snorting laugh. “?l’ Bay, he ain’t gon’ say a goddamn word to his good friend Duck. He gon’ treat his good friend Duck real good, he is …”
“Shut your stupid mouth or I’ll shut it for you,” DeeDee screamed. Duck fell silent.
Mike looked sideways at her sister. DeeDee’s great red face was splotched with white, and tears ran silently down her cheeks and into her mouth. Mike had not seen her cry since they were small. DeeDee had been a happy child, airy and pattering, but her fears—thunderstorms, the dark, large animals, and above all, abandonment—had been matters of desperation to her, and the occasion for bitter, frantic tears. Rusky’s or their father’s soothing ministrations could finally quiet them, but DeeDee sobbed just as despairingly and unfeignedly the next time she was frightened. Only much hugging and the magic incantation, “Everything will be all right,” could succor her. Now, everything was not all right, and had not been for many years; and in all those years there had been no one to comfort her. Mike’s heart turned like a gaffed fish in her chest.
“DeeDee, honey, please don’t cry,” she said. She put her hand over DeeDee’s clenched fists in her lap, and Dee gripped it with astonishing force.
“I hate him,” she whispered. “I started hating him not long after I married him, and I’ve never stopped. I’ve been so afraid, so afraid … I wish he was dead. I wish he would die. He’s never given me anything but work and worry and shame; I’ve never had anything, anything! And what I did get, what little I did scrounge, he’s lost for me. I can’t go back to that club now; how could I ever face any of those people? Mike, those are the people who matter in Lytton now. And now we don’t matter to them, and we never will, all because of that sorry, no-account son of a bitch I married. Showing off, getting drunk, bragging, cheating … ah, God, Mikie, I’m a Winship. A Winship! I could have had anybody! I could have married anybody in this town, and I wish to God I had. I could have been safe. I wish to God I’d stayed single, even; Daddy would have taken care of me. But I had to marry that and I’ll never have any kind of life as long as I’m stuck with him. Never!” She strangled on the tears. Mike took a deep breath.
“Dee … why don’t you leave him?” she said. “Daddy would still take care of you; and you know you’ll have the house and the homeplace property. You could do that. There’s nothing to stop you. Bay would help you. I’d help …”
DeeDee laughed, an ugly, watery little sound. “Thanks, Mike, but I’ll be able to take care of myself pretty soon. Pretty soon I won’t need Daddy or Bay, or you, and I’ll get rid of him so fast he’ll think a tornado hit him. You just wait. Just a little longer, and that bastard and his horrible old mother and that horrible little dump of a house will be gone!” There was something so abstracted and dreamlike in her voice that Mike stared across at her. DeeDee did not seem to see her, or the inside of the car, or the bright day that had brought her so much pain and shame
. Her blue eyes were fixed on middle distance, and they looked a little mad.
“What are you waiting for?” Mike said. “What’s going to happen that’s going to make it all right? It won’t get any better, Dee!”
“Oh … I just mean that it will take me a while to get myself together and figure out what to do,” DeeDee said. “I can’t just up and leave him, Mike. I don’t have any money and any skills. I haven’t taught in years. I don’t even remember how. I don’t know what I would do. I can’t just walk out …”
“Will you promise me you’ll talk to Bay about it when he gets back?” Mike said. “He can help. I know he can. Will you promise me that, Dee?”
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