by Chris Wiltz
Looking at the falling wallpaper she remarked, “I'm surprised Aunt Althea let the house go like this.”
“When she gave up, the house looked to give up with her,” Delzora said.
“What do you mean, when she gave up?”
“She jus come downstairs one mornin and said, ‘Delzora, I decided I'm goin to die now.’”
“She decided to die and she did, just like that?”
“No, it took her ‘bout two years.”
This was curious, Aunt Althea's decision to die. Zora spoke of it as if it were simply another of her aunt's whims: I want a sapphire-and-diamond dinner ring to wear with my blue chiffon dress; I want a pink gazebo in the backyard; I want to go to Miami for Christmas; I want to die now. Thea felt sorry for Zora, having to put up with this last grandiose desire of her aunt's. All of Aunt Althea's desires had been grandiose, all-consuming, demanding everyone's attention until gratification was secured. It was this way even if Aunt Althea wanted to give you a gift. You were required to become totally involved in her desire to give you something, something she had decided you should have, which you should be present to purchase and which did not necessarily have anything to do with what you wanted. She never presented you with a package, a surprise, and she took great offense if you suggested you didn't want or need what she had decided to give. You were turning down an expression of love, for this was the only way Aunt Althea knew how to express love. She did not know how to be affectionate or compassionate or interested in someone else's life. She was entirely too self-absorbed. Her gifts were for the gratification of her desire to give, the sole manifestation of her ability to give anything at all of herself. And she was always very generous; she dominated you with her generosity. She had controlled Thea's mother with it, giving her younger sister things she could not afford herself, buying clothes and shoes for Thea. Thea's mother had felt both grateful and obligated, and she had passed those feelings on to Thea.
“She weren't interested in the house no more,” Delzora said, “she didn't want to go out, she weren't interested in nothin ‘cept her will. She was always callin up Mr. Untermeyer, tellin him to rewrite it. He flat refused when she tole him she was leavin everything to Clarence.”
“Clarence? Her old gardener? I thought he retired before I left.”
Zora nodded. “But he use to come by and check on her once or twice a year, ask her if she needed anything.”
“Wait a minute. Clarence came by once or twice a year and she was going to leave him this house?”
“She liked the attention, honey. Anyway, she fired Mr. Untermeyer on the spot for refusin to favor Clarence in her will. I tole her them boys of Clarence's would take all her money and spend it on fancy cars. She fired me too but I didn't pay her no mind. I jus kep comin to work and she didn't say nothing to me about it. Pretty soon she called up Mr. Untermeyer and tole him she decided she weren't goin to rewrite the will. He said that was fine by him but he considered himself fired forever, to talk to his nephew from then on.”
From the grave, she was doing it from the grave, manipulating Thea's emotions, frustrating her with ambivalence. Thea was grateful to her dead aunt, plenty grateful enough to feel sorry for her that she had been rejected by Aldous Untermeyer, who she always said was in love with her (although he was quite happily married); grateful enough to pity her aunt's hopelessly skewed perception of reality, to suffer guilt for her own rejection of the old woman (Thea, her namesake, had changed her name legally to the shortened form the moment she left town), and to be angry, very angry, that Aunt Althea really hadn't wanted to leave her anything at all because of her audacity, leaving New Orleans, turning down an education at Sophie Newcomb College, moving to Massachusetts with a man.
“Why in the world Clarence, Zora? Why not you?”
“Well, you know, she always preferred mens.”
It was true. Thea could have done whatever she'd wanted if she'd been male and Aunt Althea would have said, “Isn't that just like a man,” and instantly forgiven her. Aunt Althea lit up when a man was around, becoming chatty and coquettish, though she liked to give orders—get me a drink, move this plant, reach something for me—so she could have a man doing her bidding, under her control. She acted that way with all men, her husband, her gardener, delivery men, Thea's boyfriends, except with Michael and, a long time ago, Nick Tamborella, her sister's husband.
Thea sighed. “I guess maybe we'd have gotten along better if I'd been a man.” But her second thought, to herself, was Maybe not, not the son of my father, the lowly Italian grocer Althea despised because he once told her that she treated every man she met as either a lover, a potential lover, or an ex-lover.
Thea opened the curtains. In the sunlight the room was less oppressive, less tawdry too, just shabby. “If I'm going to sell the house, I'll have to do something about this awful wallpaper,” she said.
The light from the long floor window glinted on Delzora's thick glasses, making them opaque, blocking from Thea's view the dread with which she heard those words. That they were what she had expected made them no less dreadful. But she said, “Burgess do that kind of work. I can have him come round tomorrow.”
Delzora's saying that brought up another feeling Thea associated with her aunt, that of being railroaded, having decisions made for her before she had a chance to make them herself. But this was not Aunt Althea, this was Zora.
“Sure,” she said, “I'll talk to him about it.”
Through the window they saw the Cadillac drive up in front of the house.
“Here my ride,” Delzora said.
And here must be Zora's experience with fancy cars. Dexter got out of the car dressed in the blue leather pants and vest.
“Is that Burgess?”
“No, that ain't Burgess, but that's his car. He sends it for me every day ‘cause of all the crime on the streets.”
“He must do very well,” Thea said.
Zora blew air through her nose and made a sound of disgust deep down in her throat. Thea felt her cheeks burn with the in-appropriateness of her remark. After all, didn't black men like to spend their money, whether they made a lot or not, on fancy cars? The Convent Street Project was full of fancy cars. She was going to have to learn all over, remember not to make such remarks.
Thea helped Delzora gather her bags and followed her out to the front walkway. Dexter, his back to them, shrugged out of his vest and put on a white shirt. He unzipped his leather pants to tuck in the shirt.
“Dexter,” Delzora called, “next time you get dressed at home, do you hear?”
He zipped up his pants and turned toward her. Thea started at the sight of his face, badly beaten, beaten out of shape.
“Yes ma'am,” he said.
6
Bobby Buchanan came to visit Thea carrying his trademark can of beer in one hand, the remainder of the six-pack in the other. The city of New Orleans seems to have a larger than normal share of men like Bobby. They are from good families, families with money, which they have inherited and which affords them the opportunity not to work if they don't want to, or not to work very hard. They are wastrels, good-natured, easygoing, mild-mannered, the life of the party. They are observers for the most part, though they enjoy engaging in repartee. They don't appear to be complex people, but sometimes they are. Bobby, for example, was more complex than he allowed even himself to know; what he did know was that he sometimes did not feel very well mentally, and when he felt bad he did not know how to make himself feel better, so he drank.
Bobby had been Thea's boyfriend during most of their high-school years, part of the in-group of socially prominent teenagers from the neighborhood where Aunt Althea lived, and even though his part in the group was the clown, the cheerful drunk, without him Thea wouldn't have been part of the group at all. She was the outsider, the girl from the Catholic school, the girl who had moved in the middle of the year because her parents had been murdered. Aunt Althea had insisted she transfer to the exclusive private sch
ool not far from her house. Most of the girls at the new school had known each other since first grade. Their cliques were formed in cast concrete. It might have been different if, when Aunt Althea had married Cecil Dumondville, she'd been accepted by the blue-blooded Dumondville family, but she was forever an outsider too, only she hadn't seemed to know it. Thea didn't know how she herself could be so acutely, uncomfortably aware of her group status and her aunt so aggressively oblivious, playing her part of one of the daughters-in-law of the illustrious Dumondvilles, apparently never seeing the difference between herself, a middlebrow who'd been Cecil's bookkeeper before he married her, and the other two brothers’ wives, who were themselves part of uptown New Orleans cultured society and snubbed her.
Bobby had saved Thea from being nobody except the girl whose parents were murdered. He was fun to be with, he was always saying he loved her, but he made no demands upon her, only small forays that were easily discouraged, perhaps too easily. Thea would hear the other girls talking about their boyfriends’ wanting them to go all the way, the constant pressure, the danger of it all, and it made them seem so worldly-wise and sophisticated. Mostly she and Bobby just made out until their lips hurt. Bobby was easy, someone to go to parties and school dances with, not someone to get heated up over, to take seriously. He didn't seem to want to be taken very seriously. In a way he was the story of her life—steady, lightweight, always on the edge of the action but never the cutting edge, part of the group but never a key player.
When Thea opened the door she was struck by the possibility that Bobby had spent the past ten years in a time warp. He looked exactly the same, from his short curly blond hair to the boat shoes on his feet, no socks, and everything in between too: a white button-down Oxford cloth shirt with the sleeves rolled up to his elbows, khaki pants, the can of beer. And he still dispensed with polite social greetings and cut straight to irreverent one-liners.
“So now you're an uptown rich-bitch,” he said, and she was surprised at how glad she was to see him, hugging him to her, his arms around her, what was left of the cold six-pack dangling at her back.
It was dusk, a time of day Thea liked during the warmer months in New Orleans, coming more as a cool drink borne by the breeze than as a fading of light. Thea took Bobby out to the screened porch at the back of the house to sit and drink it in along with some beer. Overhead the ceiling fan circled slowly and hummed, and outside the foliage swayed and swished gently, backup harmonies to the soft singing of the cicadas. In the midst of all that nature was the pink gazebo, looking every bit like the crown of a wedding cake clumsily dropped at a nuptial of the gods. To Thea it was a fatuous symbol of her aunt's yearning for some romance in her life, another of those consuming desires—months spent refining the design, adding froufrou, latticework and tiny turrets all around the roof, trying pink after pink until she found exactly the right shade.
“I wonder,” Thea said, “if Aunt Althea pictured herself waiting in the gazebo for some polite southern gentleman caller to come woo her, Aldous Untermeyer maybe.”
“That ugly old fart? He has terminal dandruff.”
“As long as she didn't wear her glasses, she wouldn't have known. And she never wore her glasses in front of old farts— gentlemen callers.”
Bobby squint-eyed the gazebo. “I can see it. She'd be wearing her hoop skirt.”
“Reading a romance novel.” The shelves in the back room were crammed with them.
“Her bosom heaving under her tightly laced bodice.” Bobby threw his arm up over his forehead. “She swoons . . .”
“She'd break her spine,” Thea said. “Have you ever tried to swoon on one of those benches?”
Bobby looked pointedly at her. “No. Have you?”
It was good to be with him. He knew her history, had lived part of it with her, been a victim of her aunt's flirtations. He could laugh about it with her as they had ten years ago, as if ten years had never interrupted their friendship. What they were having trouble doing was catching up on the ten years.
They sat in wicker rocking chairs, their feet stretched out in front of them, sipping beer and watching the light ease away. It sank back, disappearing into a dense wall of bamboo and banana trees, cherry laurel and wild hibiscus that enclosed the yard. A passion flower vine grew up over the tall wood fence to one side of the porch. Somewhere in the yard night-blooming jasmine was opening, its sweetness airborne on the light breeze.
Bobby finally broke into the silence of the sweet-thickened dark. “Will Michael be coming?”
“No,” Thea shook her head. “No, he won't be coming.” And she told him about the breakup of her marriage, a marriage Bobby knew nothing about, that seemed to startle him. She told him how, after six years of living together, the marriage had spoiled their relationship, how Michael had started running around on her and two years had been as much as she could take.
But one thing she did not tell Bobby, could not bring herself to tell him or anyone: she was still sleeping with Michael. He'd been in bed with her the night Aldous Untermeyer called to tell her Aunt Althea was dead and she was rich. She could not tell anyone about sleeping with Michael because she loathed and despised herself for letting it happen.
Bobby thought about telling her she'd broken his heart when she'd gone away, but before he could decide if he should, she asked about his family and he told her that his father had died a couple of years ago. “I lost my best fishing buddy,” he said, and Thea could tell he was still quite sad. “I hardly ever go anymore.” She asked why but he just shrugged. He couldn't tell her that being out on the boat made him feel such guilt that a case of beer couldn't wash it away. How could he tell her about the stupid, petty problems surrounding his father's death when her parents had been gunned down behind the counter of their grocery store by two black men who'd taken forty-eight dollars and fled? As for his mother, he told Thea that she was confused a lot of the time. “She forgets my father is dead,” Bobby said, explaining she had Alzheimer's, advanced to the point that she required round-the-clock care.
But Bobby left something out of this story too: he didn't tell her that his mother sometimes spent hours railing at him, thinking he was her husband, for losing most of the family money; he didn't say that his mother's illness was probably going to take what was left. He was too worried to talk about that. He finished off another can of beer.
The darkness settled around them. Thea remembered how she used to think she felt the weight of the darkness whenever she sat on the porch at night but it was the weight of her grief she felt.
“I used to sit here and dream that I lived in this house with my parents,” she told Bobby, her voice modulating itself so as not to drown out the sounds within the darkness but to become part of them. “We had lots of pets, all the animals I never could have because we lived above the grocery store: I put pedestals around the porch for the cats to sit on. From there they would watch the birds, who were in cages hung from the ceiling. The dogs would claw at the pedestals, trying to reach the cats, but after a while they would get tired and lie at the base of the pedestals, waiting for the cats to come down. The cats, of course, would jump from chair to chair, always out of their reach. The cats knew they could never get the birds, and after a while the dogs realized they couldn't get the cats, and finally they all lived peacefully together.”
“So now you can have all the pets and pedestals you want,” Bobby said. He found he wanted desperately for her to stay in New Orleans.
“I'm going to sell the house, Bobby.”
So he told her about the oil bust and people forced to move out of town, out of the state, by the depressed economy. They put their houses up for sale; some of the For Sale signs had been up for over two years. “It'll take a long time to sell your house, Thea.” He wasn't used to having to be persuasive. He turned in the rocker, the wicker creaking beneath him, and put his hand on her forearm. “Why don't you just live in it, at least for a while. Stay here.”
Her first impulse
was to cry out, I already have a life, I must get back to it! But why would she return to a job in a health-food market now that she was rich? What did she have to look forward to there? Being promoted from assistant manager to manager of the store? What else? Fucking Michael once a week, if he showed up, if there wasn't someone else he'd rather fuck? She couldn't even think of anything she'd left behind that she would bother to return to get except her books, a few papers, the photographs of her parents. And Michael could ship all that to her. It was the least he could do. Some life. It could be packed in a few boxes and shipped, then Michael could take the rest of the contents of the apartment he'd once shared with her and dispose of them.
Thea was feeling a bit tipsy from the beer. “Okay,” she said to Bobby. “But if I stay, the gazebo goes.”
Bobby stood up. “You got it. We'll need a long rope.”
They tried the garage but found no rope suitable for the task hanging from the pegs or neatly coiled in one of the cabinets, everything in the garage as neat and organized as everything in the house.
“We could try the attic,” Thea said.
Bobby shook his head. “No, I know right where we can find one—my house.”
The beer and their sense of purpose made Thea feel a giddy excitement. She'd missed this about New Orleans, the fun, the craziness. She didn't do very many spontaneous things in Massachusetts. Her life there was staid. Dull. Oppressed. She was oppressed by Michael there, either by his presence or because she was waiting for him. As she got into Bobby's car she experienced a sense of freedom that was new, brand new, and it wasn't just Michael's absence, it was also Aunt Althea's. She had moved from one oppression to another and tonight she was free.
