by Lamar Herrin
It was this pale, fond, sad, grateful little laugh, as if she didn’t expect to have another one and at least could be grateful for that.
Poor Rosalyn. I can’t get her out of my mind holding that tray, standing there—stranded there—at the foot of your bed.
She said, Jimmy, I’ve forgotten what you call it, that little tuft of hair at the end of the chin.
A goatee, Rosalyn?
That’s it. He has this little goatee, mostly gray hairs, the silliest little thing. Not like that beard you used to have. That was a man’s beard. My father had one like that.
I’ve seen dozens of photographs of my grandfather James Pritchard, I assured Walter, and he was clean-shaven in every one of them.
You think she was losing it, then?
No, I think Leland Oldham had a scraggly little goatee, which she despised. I think she revered her father and she still loved me, and to save some space in her mind she put the two of us together as a way of saying sorry for when Big Howie had run Phil Hodge and me out of town. And in that saved space I think she knew exactly what her options were and what she wanted me to do. And she even knew the legal term for it—remember, this was some time ago, in a little town down south.
Let me guess, Walter said.
Go right ahead.
The term Rosalyn was thinking of was “prenuptial,” and if you couldn’t talk Ellie out of falling under the matrimonial spell of this man, you were to talk her into preserving her share of the family fortune.
Which was enormous, a pipeline coming directly from her father. You’re good, Walter. With or without hindsight.
Like I told you, I feel for Rosalyn. Anyone living in Big Howie’s shadow all that time, who lived to pile things into other people’s arms …
She did not believe her daughter was in love with this toad of a man. The Pritchard girls, beautiful women all, did not fall in love with toads. But she knew her daughter was vulnerable, perhaps not that she had begun to drink as much as she had—which would be a drop compared to what she would eventually consume—but vulnerable and divorced and perhaps assuaging the pain and loss just a bit through drink, the taste for which, after all, also ran in the family. And would I get her away and talk to her and demystify her and, if she insisted on marrying the man, who was more my age, not hers, would I get her to sign what Rosalyn had, yes, come to understand was a prenuptial agreement that would protect her inheritance from Leland Oldham and his four children, with ambitions of their own, and allow her, Ellie’s mother and my favorite aunt, to die in peace?
She did not say this last, she did not plead to be left to die in peace, but it was the backdrop for everything she did say. She had taken her reading of Mr. Oldham and knew him to be unscrupulous, a demon of a man with or without the goatee, and knew with a fatalistic foreboding that he would strip her daughter of everything and allow her to die a pauper. Rosalyn could provide for Ellie’s two daughters in such a way that Mr. Oldham could not get at it, or so she thought, but her own daughter was trophy game, and if I could not stop the marriage, I could stop a hemorrhaging of riches, which Rosalyn was convinced would be tantamount to a hemorrhaging of her daughter’s lifeblood. I had been spared by the heroic intervention of a Boston bulldog named Bing, and would I, the firstborn to the first of the Pritchard girls, repay the debt and save the life of little Ellie, the last-born to the last of those girls?
I drew a long breath and slowly let it out.
Walter said, She didn’t say that part about Bing and the rattlesnake, did she? There’s no final accounting for that story, is there, no firsthand authentication, I mean?
I drew another breath. Closed and opened my eyes and let them drift over the water. Such a peaceful afternoon on this lovely little lake, with the neighbors setting out in their canoes for what amounted to their early evening walk, their promenade, their paseo, and it came back to me, Little Howie watching those festive wheels turning within wheels in his little Latin American town. Bella something. He would soon step into a church and offer his thanks to the virgin overseeing it all.
I said to Walter, What she said was for me to stop it, however I could. Stop it with no questions asked. And then I added, I think you can bring that bottle out now.
Ha! Walter cheered and, ten years my junior, shot out of his chair with a youthful bound. We were drinking Jim Beam, with the Beam men from the eighteenth century on pictured on the label. It was a steady stream of Beam blood, father to son, winding up with one nephew. But Walter took his time coming back with the bottle and glasses. Perhaps he’d visited the bathroom, or up in the seclusion of the cabin had received a call, or, conceivably, had made one, in violation of an agreement we only tacitly had, and while he was gone I watched the canoe tied to his dock rocking invitingly on other canoers’ small waves. One couple paddled close enough to realize it was a stranger sitting in one of Walter Kidman’s chairs, and their greetings were restricted to nods. Still, I might have paddled out. There weren’t that many canoes on the lake, but I could have found a way to get lost among them, and the story I had to tell could have sunk to a whisper and been borne away on the first call of a loon. Or a loon might have dived with it and left it deep down below before coming up to call again. The lakes up here, unlike the man-made ones down south, which had flooded farms and crossroad towns, cemeteries, church steeples and windmills, were mostly glacially formed, tolerable for pickerel but less so for bass, cold and probably too deep for loons to dive to the bottom. But if things did make it down there, they stayed. Last, nonswimming members of the Ice Age might still lie down there while canoes, with a sort of civil inconsequence, passed high overhead. Ice Age malefactors might. Ice Age opportunists out to deprive orphaned young women of their fortunes might lie at those icy depths. I was about to push up, I was gathering the strength to go canoeing, when Walter returned offering apologies. Nature, not his wife, had indeed called.
He poured our drinks, one on his armrest, one on mine, and we clinked glasses. The toast had been, simply, Salud. But the clink of the glasses carried well in this unsultry air and, in what I took to be an unprecedented occurrence, Walter’s next-door neighbor, the cellist, Byron Wainwright, in that moment stepped around the bushes blocking Walter’s dock from his and appeared before us.
He’d come to offer his apologies. He’d been rude the evening before, we’d caught him, he claimed, at what he called a delicate moment during his recital, and cued by the clinking of our glasses had come to ask if he could join us in that drink now.
He said, his words, I didn’t mean to be a crank, it was just that damned Bach.
He had a long face, a long neck, and folds beneath his eyes. He wore very baggy pants—I couldn’t be sure they weren’t pajamas—and he stood in such a flat-footed way, it was a mystery how he’d sneaked up on us. The truth was, without his cello he looked bereft.
In spite of his touted neighborliness, Walter seemed taken entirely by surprise, and I stepped in to tell Byron Wainwright that I’d enjoyed his serenade and had begun to wonder why all lakes didn’t come accompanied by the sound of a cello, it was such—the word I chose was “evening”—it was such an evening-sounding sound.
Byron Wainwright might have flinched, but without a bow in his hand all his movements seemed jittery and abrupt. I might have qualified what I’d said, I might have added morning and afternoon to evening, hence a twenty-four-hour sound, but Wainwright played at five p.m. for a reason, and it was Walter who rose out of the chair he’d just settled back into and invited his neighbor to occupy it while he went up to the cabin for another glass, more ice, and one of the wicker chairs from the screen porch.
I had not meant to suggest that Byron Wainwright had entered the evening of his life, but I had no idea how sensitive this man was, or how cranky he could be, and when Walter’s neighbor didn’t move to occupy the vacated chair, I had to resist an urge to rise and stand beside him until Walter returned. Wainwright, I felt sure, had ignored the invitation to sit in Walter’s c
hair because once down into its slanting trough he’d have to wonder if, unassisted, he could ever get out. Entering the evening of your life, you did not sit in Adirondack chairs, even though the Adirondacks was where you happened to be. Or in its foothills. You did not go begging your neighbor or your neighbor’s guest to help you get upright again. You sat on your stool and played your cello, and when the time came to rise, you used your instrument, if necessary, to pole yourself up. And when your cello had suffered enough abuse, you married again, a younger woman, and humbled yourself before her. Or before your children, you learned how to sweet-talk them. Grandchildren. Here, have a piece of candy. Help the old man up and I’ll play you a pretty tune.
I found myself staring holes into Bryon Wainwright, just beneath his bony, dewlapped chin. Our eyes didn’t meet, but he surely felt the force of my stare with no way to know that once someone like Leland Oldham had gotten into my mind, it was impossible to get him out, although no toad of a man could be said to have a bony chin. Toads were chinless. They made croaking sounds, they didn’t play a cello every evening at five. They lived in filth, in bogs, not overlooking crystal clear lakes. They ate flies, they ate bugs, overate and enlarged.
Before Walter could return, Byron Wainwright, without excusing himself, had disappeared back behind his bushes. But Byron Wainwright was not the toad. He was a lonely, ill-adapted man who was visited by penitent impulses he couldn’t sustain, who worked it all out through his instrument and gave his neighbors in the canoeing stage of their lives something to look forward to each evening. And I told Walter, when he did return with another glass and ice and a crackling wicker chair under his arm, that Byron Wainwright had left as mysteriously as he’d appeared and to my regret I’d done nothing to stop him. As his proxy I had let Walter down, and I expected him to show some disappointment. But, with the wicker chair still under his arm and Wainwright’s glass in his free hand, he instructed me to bring the bottle and the other glasses and get up to the cabin fast before the music began and Ellie and this Oldham fellow and my dear aunt and the story I’d begun to tell got drowned out and we’d have to start all over again.
The mistake I’d made, I explained to Walter once we reached the safety of the screen porch, was agreeing to meet Ellie in town and not somewhere a safe distance away. I’d likewise made the mistake of allowing Rosalyn to put a phone into my hand, perhaps because the past, the play of the past, had a way of charming me out of my right mind, and I remembered Big Howie, at that same table, placing a live phone in my hand so that I could call my mother and she and he could lock horns. Ellie had been a four-year-old then, a sporting little girl wide-eyed before the spectacle of her father and her uncle-aged cousin going head to head. I hadn’t seen or talked to Ellie in years. She had not been told her mother had sent for me. But somehow Rosalyn knew her daughter was home that day with time on her hands, and once I had her on the phone, I told my cousin that as chance would have it I was passing through town. Ellie wasn’t out of her twenties yet, but already you could hear a trace of a liquor slur in her voice and, when she laughed, a certain hoarseness and hollowness that went deep. Jim … Cousin Jim … she repeated my name, professing delight which I chose not to doubt. Isn’t this wonderful, Jim! How long’s it been? No, I don’t want to know. Jim, I’m so happy you’re here! What do you mean you’re just passing through town? Not if I have anything to say about it, you’re not!
I glanced at my aunt, who could not have been privy to what her daughter had been saying, but at just that moment Rosalyn gave me an imperative little nod, and I made the mistake that would undo my efforts and dash my aunt’s hopes. I said it was true, unfortunately I was just passing through town, but I had time for lunch so why didn’t Ellie meet me somewhere and why didn’t she choose the place. I glanced at Rosalyn and she nodded, so it was both of our mistakes. Oh, Jim, oh, Jim, Ellie moaned, the girls are with their father today, and they’ll want to see you, too, it’s so cruel you’re in such demand, but if that’s the way it has to be … and she named the place, an old columned home on the outskirts of town, there before the Whalens had arrived, antebellum I assumed, where a nice breeze always blew under some old oaks, and why didn’t we meet there if my schedule was so busy and that was all I had time for. I looked at Rosalyn, mouthed the name of the restaurant—the Chambers House—and she nodded, so it was both our faults.
I don’t understand, Walter said.
You will.
It was indeed an old house with many small rooms because rooms and people were smaller back then, but with a wide entrance hall running from front to back, and at the back a staircase to the second floor passing diagonally overhead. I arrived before Ellie and was lucky, or unlucky, enough to get a free table at the back of the hall with a direct view up to the front door, which had been left open. There was a screen door to keep out the flies but not the breeze, and it was through that screen door I got my first look at Ellie in these last six or seven years. And it was down that hall, with old family photographs hanging on the walls that I had not even glanced at, one family being enough for me then, that I watched Ellie walk, not unsteadily but somehow still feeling her way, like someone unsure of her mission, until she saw me and broke into a tremulous smile.
We kissed on the cheek, I held her, then held her back, gazed at her and, I suppose, did “dwell in her eyes,” which were easily her most fascinating feature, quite large, or maybe the rest of her face just seemed more drawn than I remembered and her complexion had lost its bloom. Regardless of what stage of her life you placed her in, Ellie did not look well. Of course, her marriage had broken up and her mother was nearing the end. Soon she would be alone and easy pickings for a man like Leland Oldham. In her haste she had misapplied or overapplied her makeup, and the base was flaking, which made her look a little parched. To be sure, women in correspondingly small towns up north did not wear much makeup, certainly not as much pancake base, and I suddenly felt a deep sympathy for this young cousin of mine, one step ahead of some terrible unmasking. She wore a yellow pants suit and a florid blouse, which only made things worse. Except for a tiny locket around her neck, no jewelry, and in that she was right. I didn’t see how jewelry would help.
Before I could speak, she practically shouted out her greeting, as though from one hilltop to the next, another southern characteristic. How are you! Tell me the truth!
I told her I’d settled in up north where things were not as chilly as you were led to believe, but that I was sad to see her mother declining so, and asked her, in a quieter voice, just what the doctors had said.
She lowered her head and shook it, then raised her eyes to mine. First her brother, then her father, and now her mother. Among the vanished I could also include her husband, I suppose. It’s so, so sad, Jim, she said. She won’t go to the hospital. There’re clinics that might make her more comfortable, but she remembers all Howie went through and says she’s not going to drive herself crazy like that. The doctors are the last people she wants to talk to. You’ve seen how she is.
I’ve seen how worried she is, she’s worried about you, I was about to say, but I thought we should eat before I got into that, and that, I told Walter, was another mistake. Walter said he still didn’t understand, and I told him to wait, Ellie and I had to order, we had to be served. She ordered a quiche of some sort, which she only picked at as every so often she half twisted around in her chair to glance up the hall to the front door, where any other restaurant not worried about being quite so old-time would have taken that screen door down, forgone the breeze, and allowed air-conditioning to do the job, but that was not the restaurant that Ellie had chosen and Rosalyn had okayed. We both had iced tea, sweetened, oversweetened, which was another way you knew you were in the South. The waitress came to clear away the plates. There were various pies, which we declined. I leaned in over the table. Ellie kept glancing back up the hall. She’d gotten jittery. She looked weaker in that moment, as if she hadn’t eaten in days.
I know, Wa
lter said.
You do? What do you know?
I know what’s going to happen. I understand.
You’re sure?
Do you want me to tell you?
I gave it a moment’s thought, real thought, considered the consequences, which were not inconsiderable. Walter as narrator would not be one to sidestep an issue. I had heard him work in court. No, don’t do that, I said. Here’s what happened.
I went back to where we’d stopped the conversation when I was on the point of telling Ellie that her mother was worried about her in ways she might not want to admit, and in the presence of her daughter might not want to let show. I understood Ellie had a job now, a commendable job helping disadvantaged children, and that there was a man in her life, an older man with quite a large family, whether a widower or divorced, my aunt Rosalyn didn’t know. I spoke slowly but conversationally, centering my concern on Rosalyn, not Ellie, it was Rosalyn’s last days we were talking about here, it was Ellie’s mother’s quickly declining health that was the issue. And in that context, I risked interjecting what I presented as observations, concerns of my own. I told Ellie that any mother in the best of health might have serious reservations about what Ellie was getting into, a man that old with a family that large and a past that—well, that uncertain. But, I supposed, a mother terribly sick might find she could think of little else. At the end we all feel a need to put our affairs in order, and a mother maybe even more so, especially when she’s worried that her daughter might be making a serious mistake, and at the end there’d be nothing a mother could do. I was not above reproach when I said all this, I knew I was overstating the case, but I also knew there was every chance in the world that Rosalyn had a right to be worried and that finally you had to play the odds. I put what was a blunt question as gently as I could. Did Ellie plan to marry this man?
She turned to look back down the hall to the door and narrowed her eyes as though trying to see through that screen. Then she looked back to me. She’d been such a charming child when I’d first met her, half-hidden behind her mother, looking up at this bearded cousin come down from the North. With those eyes, and all that color in her cheeks. Forget fishing, come catch me! she’d taunted. Let’s play!
