The Three Miss Margarets

by Louise Shaffer

  “What things matter to you?” Maggie asked faintly.

  “Being important. Which means being useful. That’s the standard way for women like us, isn’t it?”

  “Women like us? I don’t—”

  “Of course you want to be useful,” Li’l Bit broke in impatiently. “There’s no other reason for you to have come home. This is a terrible place for someone like you.”

  For a few irrational seconds, paranoia ruled in Maggie’s brain as she wondered exactly what this strange girl knew about her.

  “You’re a fun-loving person, that’s obvious,” Li’l Bit went on. Maggie breathed a small sigh of relief. “There’s not a lot of fun to be had here. Particularly not in the profession you’ve chosen.” The blue eyes that were now studying her, she saw, had something of Harrison’s shrewdness in them. “You’ll make your mark on this place,” she continued. “You might even be able to change things for the better. You’ll be very useful. And for whatever reason, that’s what you’ve chosen. Like me.”

  Maggie wanted to run. She wanted to shout that she hadn’t come back for something as sad and hopeless—and loveless—as being useful. She hadn’t given up on fun. Or life. Or romance.

  She got herself away from Harrison’s bizarre daughter as fast as she could. She called Catherine and went into Atlanta that weekend. She didn’t fight with Catherine once, even when she sulked. They went to a restaurant and a movie, and Maggie spent money she didn’t have. And when she came back home she told herself how much she loved Atlanta and how much she had missed it.

  The clinic was built in the old sweet-potato warehouse that sat next to the railroad station. Since the train was the only means of transportation for most of her patients and it stopped at the warehouse five times a day, the location was perfect.

  The night before Maggie was supposed to open her clinic, she couldn’t tear herself away from it to go home. She was circling her shiny new empire, marveling at the wonder of it, when there was a knock on the door behind her.

  She turned and saw Lottie standing in the doorway. It was the first time they’d seen each other, close enough to talk, since she got back home. Which could have been because they’d both been so busy. Although she doubted it.

  Lottie’s face was thinner; there were too many frown lines carved in it and not enough of the grooves caused by smiles and laughter. She was wearing the shapeless gray uniform Garrison Gardens foisted on all its maids, but Maggie could see that she had thickened through the middle. The long legs were still slim, and she hadn’t resorted as the other maids did to the soft wide slippers that were easy on swollen feet. But there was a heaviness to the woman standing in front of her. The Lottie of today wouldn’t run through fields so fast she made her own breeze, and she wouldn’t climb up pecan trees so high it was like she was soaring. The loss seemed heartbreaking, but then Maggie reminded herself that she didn’t soar or run much herself these days. And Lottie would hate it if anyone felt sorry for her.

  “Hey, Maggie,” Lottie said. Maggie felt something in her chest tighten. She was Maggie. Not “Miss Maggie” or “Dr. Maggie,” just plain Maggie. All the times she’d imagined this meeting, she’d been afraid she wouldn’t be.

  “I’m glad to see you, Lottie,” she said, in a voice that wasn’t shaking much at all. “Want to come in?”

  Lottie stepped inside. There was no reading her. That was new. When they were young, Charlie Mae was always on Lottie for showing too much of what she felt.

  They stared at each other a little too long; then Lottie said, “I wanted to see—” at the same time Maggie said, “Would you like to see—” and Lottie smiled. It wasn’t her old bright smile, it was a much more subdued one. But it was all right. Because at that moment Maggie understood they were not going to talk about what had happened all those years ago in the barn. They were not going to go back and clear the air because they were not the kind of people who did that. And that was all right too. So she said again, “Would you like to see this place?” And Lottie said yes.

  “Let me give you the grand tour,” Maggie said.

  When it was over, Lottie smiled her new subdued smile and said, “It’s fine, Maggie. It’s real fine.”

  And Maggie asked, “Would you like some lemonade from my fancy new icebox?”

  Lottie hesitated. Then she said, “Just for a minute. I got to get home. James is working and Momma’s watching James Junior. You know how Momma can be when she’s mad. And my young ’un can try the patience of the Lord.”

  Maggie pulled two wooden chairs up to her examining table and Lottie sat down.

  “How have you been?” Maggie asked.

  “Good.” Lottie paused. Then, as she always did when she had something on her mind, she came right out with it. “We’re going to leave Charles Valley, Maggie. James wants to go up north.”

  It took a couple of seconds, but then Maggie heard herself ask, “Where are you going?”

  “To Detroit. His sister Julia went there with her husband and her kids. Now it’s all James can talk about.”

  “Do you want to go?”

  There was a pause. “Julie earns more money working for one white lady than I do cleaning twenty rooms a day at the resort. Her husband earns more in a week than James makes in a month. But I made James take me to Detroit to see it; his brother works for the railroad and he got us a pass.” Lottie stopped and rubbed her eyes. “Maggie, you never saw anything so dirty and ugly in your life. It smells. There’s no yard for the kids to play. Julie can’t put in a garden. Near where they live it’s called Paradise Valley. It’s a terrible place, pool halls and dance halls going all night. Julie’s oldest boy sneaks off to go there with his friends. She’s going to have trouble with that child, I know it.”

  Anger and relief mixed equally in Maggie. “If you feel this way, you shouldn’t go.”

  “There are more chances there. James says that, and I guess he’s right. I know he is.” She paused, swallowing hard. “But you have to be strong to live in a place like that, Maggie. I’d like to wait until the children are older, then go. But James . . . he hears what he wants to hear and he sees what he wants to see. He saw streets paved with gold in Detroit.”

  Maggie knew she was hearing a distilled version of an argument that had been going on for months, round after weary round. Then something hit her.

  “You said ‘the children’?”

  “I’m going to have another baby. That’s why James wants to go soon. He wants his children to be Northerners.” Lottie stood up. “I have to go home. Momma will be all over my child if I don’t.” She started for the door, but Maggie stopped her.

  “Are you sure about Detroit?”

  “I’ll have the baby here, and I’ll wait for a while. But I’ll go. Not for the streets paved with gold. James says he doesn’t want to raise his son where he has to be afraid to look a white lady in the face. He doesn’t want the kids to grow up where we have to be afraid. That’s what I’m going for.” She turned and started out. At the door, she stopped and looked once more around the room. “This place is just the way it should be. I knew you’d do it right, Maggie,” she said, and she left.

  Maggie wasn’t sure how long she sat in her new examining room, staring at nothing much.

  The next weekend she broke it off with Catherine, who didn’t seem too surprised or upset. Maggie started going to mass in the little chapel near the resort. After two Sundays she told the priest she wanted to become a Catholic.

  She asked Li’l Bit Banning to be her assistant in the office, and they began a campaign to vaccinate every child in the county against smallpox, typhoid fever, and diphtheria. Sometimes Maggie paid for the drugs out of her own pocket, sometimes Li’l Bit underwrote the cost from her trust fund. They were starting to make a difference. Maggie knew she was very useful.

  Lottie had a girl and named her Nella. By that time the world had already turned upside down because Japanese planes had bombed a military base on Hawaii called Pearl Ha
rbor. Young men Maggie had gone to school with raced to the town hall to sign up. Their baby brothers went too. The young male doctor who was supposed to be taking over Doc Brewster’s practice was in flight school somewhere up north. Overnight Maggie was the only doctor in town. Her private clientele became as big as her clinic practice. She was able to make a down payment on an X-ray machine, and she could afford to have her nails done regularly. From Atlanta she heard that Catherine had joined the Wacs.

  For a while the news from James’s sister in Detroit was grim; the car factories were retooling for the war effort and the Negro workers were the first to be laid off. But those stories quickly gave way to tales of a boom town, and James wanted to be in the middle of the action. Lottie finally agreed that the time had come to leave. In June, he went north ahead of her to get a job and find a place for them to live.

  At around four in the morning, as he was getting off a streetcar near the Roxy Theater on Woodward, he was caught in the race riots that rocked Detroit that summer. He was one of thirty-four people killed, twenty-five of whom were Negroes. Lottie’s brother-in-law shipped the body home to be buried.

  Lottie asked Maggie if she could move back into the cabin with her babies and Charlie Mae. She couldn’t afford the rent where she was without James’s salary. Without even waiting to ask her parents, Maggie said the cabin would always be Lottie’s home.

  So Lottie didn’t leave Charles Valley. The lines got deeper on the sides of her mouth, and even the new subdued smile was gone. She sent her son up north to live with her brother-in-law as soon as he turned sixteen, because that had been her husband’s wish. She wrote James Junior letters, reminding him to say his prayers and stay away from Paradise Valley, and she sent money every week to Julie for his keep. But she didn’t send her baby girl north to join her brother. She said she was waiting for Nella to get more grown up, but Maggie thought she kept the girl with her because she’d gotten lonely by then. Whatever the reason, Nella grew up in the cabin where Lottie was raised. And then Nella’s daughter, Vashti, lived there. For a while.

  MAGGIE TURNED OFF THE HIGHWAY. The Nature Preserve, Garrison Gardens, the resort, and Charles Valley were behind her. Pretty subdivisions and minivans gave way to sagging farmhouses and trucks loaded with hogs on the way to slaughter. Maggie spent several minutes behind a tractor that slowed traffic until the driver finally turned off at a small feed and grocery store with a gas pump in front.

  Then, like some kind of ancient fantasy city rising out of the mists, a collection of modern buildings appeared on her right. She drove through an entrance gate under a sign that read PLEASANT VILLAGE, ASSISTED CARE FACILITY and headed for the wing of the large building where Lottie now lived. The slice of cake sat on the seat next to her. She’d called ahead to let the nursing staff know she was coming, so Lottie would be waiting.

  Chapter Eleven

  LAUREL WAS ONLY TEN MINUTES LATE for work, but Hank was there already. He stood in the doorway of what his mama somewhat grandly referred to as the lobby of the Gazette. The building that housed the paper had been through several incarnations since it was built in the twenties. Before Hank took it over for the Gazette it had been a bakery. In the rainy weather a faint aroma of vanilla still lingered. Hank’s mama’s so-called lobby was where the display cases for the cakes had been.

  The man standing in front of Laurel was not a vision of masculine beauty. When he put himself in hock to his mama for the rest of his natural life by buying the nearly moribund Charles Valley Gazette, Hank had decided quite rightly that the survival of his project was going to depend not on readership but on advertisers, so he had adopted a personal style designed to be reassuring to the business community. His crisp suits and sports jackets were purchased from the Brooks Brothers discount outlet in Dothan, Alabama. His knitted ties were pattern-free, and he kept his thinning hair military short. It wasn’t the most flattering look for a round face with protruding eyes and a little red rosebud of a mouth.

  Laurel was expected to wear skirts and hose when she was on the job, but she was exempt from the dress code on weekends.

  She and Hank split all the work of the newspaper. They laid out the paper together in a weekly all-nighter. Hank did the editorials and Laurel did the editing. He covered the stories that could be called news. She did the fluff and fielded hysterical phone calls from tigress mamas who were pissed about the way the paper covered Betty Lou’s engagement or the bridal picture that made Samantha Claire look like a panda bear in a wedding dress.

  To give Hank his due, he was good at what he did. His editorials tended to be long on God and the collapse of moral standards in society, but that was what his readers wanted. He covered all the town news thoroughly, and most people supported his efforts to keep the Gazette alive. The paper had been around since the twenties, after all.

  “You’re late,” Hank said. Laurel ignored him and went to her desk. The working area of the newspaper was partitioned into three cubicles, the largest of which served as Hank’s office. Laurel’s space was in the back where the daylight never reached and the air seldom stirred. In between were the computers. Laurel slid into her chair. Hank, who had followed her, parked his chubby ass on her desk.

  “I hear someone had quite a night last night,” he said. His tone was disapproving but his large eyes glittered. One of Hank’s nastier hobbies was imagining her sex life. “That’s no excuse to be late. You’re lucky I’m in a good mood this morning, missy. I told you if this happened again I’d dock you.”

  “It’s only a few minutes.”

  “You’re supposed to be here on time, ready to do your job—”

  “I’m here now. Let me do it.”

  “You’re not supposed to be sleeping in because you spend your nights catting around with strangers.”

  “What I do with my time off is my business.”

  “You better watch your step, Laurel, or you’re gonna wind up just like—” He had the good sense not to finish the thought.

  “Just like my ma. Is that what you were gonna say?”

  Even Hank knew when he’d gone too far. “I’m only saying it for your own good.”

  They stared at each other with mutual dislike. If he could have found someone else who’d work as cheap as she did and do as much, he’d have fired her long ago, in spite of his creepy fantasies about her. If she could have found another job that gave her the same pride as working for a newspaper, she’d have quit. One day one of them was going to snap and end it.

  But not this morning. Hank stomped to his cubicle and came back with a sheaf of papers torn from a yellow legal pad and covered in a spiky old-fashioned longhand. He thrust them at her.

  “Take a look at the column Reverend Malbry sent in for the opinion page,” he said. Reverend Malbry was one of their “volunteer columnists,” a rotating group of ministers who delivered three or four paragraphs of personal opinion on a variety of subjects every week. It took hours of editing to make the volunteers sound professional—or even comprehensible.

  She took the sheaf of papers silently. “If anyone needs me I’ll be at the sheriff’s office,” Hank said. “Picked up a tip on the police scanner. Vashti Johnson’s body was found in Dr. Maggie’s cabin. I called Ed and he confirmed it. She committed suicide.”

  “How the hell do they know that so fast?”

  “She left a note. Seems she was sick. Cancer; she’d had it for a couple of years.” He paused and she could see he was already composing a headline for the story in his head. “CHARLES VALLEY DAUGHTER COMES HOME,” he intoned goopily. Hank’s writing style landed somewhere between the Bible and a Mother’s Day card.

  “I don’t see how you can say this was her home,” Laurel said. “The woman hasn’t been here since her mother’s funeral.”

  Actually there had been a sighting of Vashti two years earlier, or the rumor of one. If the kid who worked at Brown’s Convenience Store could be trusted, Vashti had stopped in one afternoon for gas and some vinegar-and-sal
t chips.

  “It doesn’t matter where else she lived or how often she came back, she was one of ours. And this paper is gonna do justice to her death.” Hank marched out.

  At her desk, Laurel picked up Reverend Malbry’s manuscript and forced herself to start deciphering his illegible handwriting. But her mind was back at the cabin in the woods where Vashti had chosen to die and had chosen to have the three Miss Margarets there with her. Whatever that was about.

  LOTTIE’S ROOM WAS IN THE BRIGHTEST WING of the nursing home, the one that got the most sun and overlooked the pretty garden. Maggie had seen to that. The orderlies had already pulled Lottie’s chair up to the window so she could look out. Talking was difficult for her since the last stroke, so it was hard to know what she liked anymore, but the staff said the sight of the garden seemed to soothe her.

  Lottie wasn’t looking out the window now. The slice of cake Maggie had brought sat untouched on the plate. She was sitting upright, her stroke-ravaged face expressionless except for the eyes trained on Maggie and the tears spilling over them.

  “It’s over, Lottie,” Maggie said gently. “We brought her back to the cabin last night. And we stayed with her to the end.” She reached out to wipe away Lottie’s tears and rub her cold hands. For so many years she had been afraid to touch Lottie. Now none of that mattered.

  “She didn’t want you to know until she’d done it, dear one. That was the only reason I didn’t come and tell you. It was very quick. She was ready. She’d been through so much.” The tears had stopped. Lottie nodded ever so slightly and leaned in. “Tell me,” she said, working hard to make the words clear. “I want to know, Maggie.”

  “Vashti was diagnosed two years ago. Remember?”

  Lottie nodded. “Tumor,” she said. “They operated. She was better. I thought.”

  “It came back. She always knew it could. That’s why she started working so hard for the children, and on her own research, of course. That’s what we have to think about now. She never gave speeches or made public appearances before her diagnosis. In a way it spurred her on, and we have to be grateful for—”