by Paul Theroux
She was just the right size to carry off a little black dress and make it seem elegant. This she insisted on buying herself with money she had saved. I gave her the money for new shoes, beautiful ones from a boutique on Main Street which added three inches to her height. Her Brazilian friend at the beauty salon did her hair and nails. The result was a vision of loveliness, a transformation, from a little Third World doll to a First World dragon lady of intimidating beauty, upswept coiffure, crimson talons.
I would never have guessed how much she liked dressing up, and not just putting on new clothes but being glamorous. Glamour is a little girl’s game, played with costumes and mirrors. New clothes made her a different person, one she liked better, someone who fitted in. And this transformation took her mind off the main event and made her less apprehensive.
Driving to the Club the night of the Figawi Ball, with Nhu beside me smelling sweetly, I thought again, My life is complete.
She said nothing. Silence was also part of the transformation, a kind of dignity and drama—and I suppose she was terrified, too.
The valet parkers eyed her, seemed to recognize her in some dimly admiring way, but no one else noticed us. The foyer was filled with members—men in suits or club blazers, women in gowns—all of them shouting excitedly at each other. I hurried Nhu past them to the ballroom, lifted two glasses of wine from a passing tray, and toasted her. She was both excited and shy, dazzled by all the people, bewildered by what I now saw as the roaring men and their shouting overdressed wives.
She stuck close to me. Rotberg and Nickerson from the Building Committee came up to me and started talking, saying how nice it was to see me, all the while staring at Nhu. They had detached themselves from their wives, who were standing to one side, casting glances our way.
I was hardly listening. I found that I was seeing all this with Nhu’s eyes, and I was keenly aware of being in a room of big loud oafs, who had nothing to say and not even the grace to apologize for opposing the building of my house on the Neck. Their attitude was: We’re all buddies now!
“Barghorn!”
Seeing that I wasn’t listening, they began bantering with Nhu.
Rotberg: “Hope you’re treating him all right!”
Nickerson: “Don’t wear him out!”
This seemed to me in bad taste, so I steered her away, but while I was getting more drinks for us, I saw a man approach Nhu and begin monologuing. He was Hal Walters from the Historic District Committee, his wife a little way off and glaring at Nhu.
They were all there, all the people who had turned me down, looking pleased that I had appeared at a Club dance for the first time ever. It was proof to them that I would not be a problem. I was one of them. I even had a woman in tow.
The music was loud, incomprehensible to me, but Nhu knew the lyrics and was murmuring them. Another revelation: she liked pop music. She seemed slightly drunk, but quite happy as long as she was by my side.
I monitored a few nearby conversations, all of them dishonest complaints—one bitching about the high price of real estate, another about winter storms, and one beefy-faced man was moaning that it was harder and harder for him to find parking space for his private jet at the airport. You had to be a resident here to know that all of this talk was a form of boasting.
Without warning, a woman blindsided us, and in a drunken and demanding voice said, “Aren’t you going to introduce me to your friend?”
I had no idea who she was, but it took me only an instant to see that she was not talking to me.
Nhu blinked and said, “Miz Row.”
That might have been “Lowell”—there was such a couple at the Club. Other women circled, seeing this Lowell woman close to us, and they hovered like hyenas.
Nhu smiled at her, and she seemed confused for, really, she had no name for me that could be uttered in a public place.
“I hope this doesn’t mean what I think it means.”
All the women smiled, hoping for a devastating remark from their friend.
“That you won’t be available to do my windows.”
After that, nothing mattered. I considered hitting her, or throwing my drink into her face and howling at her. But I smiled and steered Nhu to the exit, for I had a much better plan.
Only the feeblest, the weakest, the most naïve of them tried to stop me. The shrewdest, the strongest, the wealthiest, the truly connected ones did not lift a finger against me. They were smart enough to know that they would fail, that I would break them and bankrupt the Board of Selectmen—that it was much less costly for them to go along with me, to humor me, to praise my extravagant house.
And these fat ones also knew how lawless the rich can be. I was one of them. And the ways we break the law are trivial, mere nuisances, compared to the plunder and mayhem we get away with legally. The worst of us are seldom breaking the law. The law is on our side—it ought to be; after all, we are the ones who make it.
The ones who tried to stop me sent an emissary from the Building Committee, who appeared one afternoon on my doorstep, smiling and making small talk.
I said, “Now tell me what’s really on your mind.”
“Local ordinance, as old as the town. You can’t build without permission.”
“I’m building.”
“Then you need to apply for a permit.”
“I did that.” I smiled at him. “It didn’t fly.”
“If you try to build, we’ll have to stop you.”
“How?” I was still smiling. “A lawsuit?”
He blinked at me, perhaps trying to summon the courage to speak. I knew what I was about to say would be repeated a thousand times in town and would become part of the island’s mythology, so I kept it simple and memorable.
“Sue me,” I said. “You’ll lose. I’ve got more lawyers than you. I’ve got more money than you. I could tie you up for a hundred years. I could bankrupt your board. I could destroy you. Don’t talk to me, talk to someone who knows me. People who know me would not dare to stop me. This meeting is over.”
I did not shut the door in his face. I watched him stammer and sigh and turn away. He walked self-consciously down the path to the street.
Building a house on a small island is a public event. Every aspect is visible: the arrival of the container trucks, two a day, on the morning ferry; the deployment of workers, the coming and going of carpenters, plumbers, electricians—they filled the ferries, the commuter flights, the charter boats, the barges. The disruption of the island the rest of that year was constant; it continued through the spring and into the summer, season of shortages and stress and no space, and on into the fall.
Who could find a plumber or an electrician or a painter? I had hired all the best ones. I had commandeered the stock in all the warehouses and hardware stores. Islanders were told, “We’re out of cement,” “We’re down to our last roll of cable,” “No more rebar.” Other building projects on the island were put on hold because mine was proceeding. And there was nothing that anyone could do except reflect that they had brought this on themselves.
By Labor Day the house had risen and was clearly visible from town—although it was fifteen miles away. The talk reached me: the house was ugly, I was a monster, I was a junk dealer who had made money on drugs in the Third World, I was buying up the island, I was an interloper, I had a criminal record, I had physically threatened the Building Committee, I had committed similar outrages elsewhere.
The house was finished in time for us to spend Christmas inside. The wall around it was to code—four feet high—but behind the wall I planted Leyland cypress trees that would grow to twenty feet in no time, five hundred of them, a wall of greenery.
I was the subject of the most vicious gossip. The story was that I lived alone with my Third World servant. In one version, I was a tyrant who satisfied my lusts on her. In another, she was a shrew who tormented me.
All talk. At this stage of my life I am keenly aware of the malicious innuendo and falsehoods sprea
d about reclusive men my age. The things that people say! Just listen to the crap they talk about other people. Are they so much more scrupulous when they talk about you?
Instead of accepting that, I am writing this. I realize that what motivates most other writers in the world is the desire to have control over their obituary.
The other facts, then. We married off-island, in Las Vegas—her choice, and the day she came off the payroll, Nhu revealed a new side of herself, her love for gambling and her winner’s instinct for numbers. She won at blackjack, she knew when to double down or fold, she had a knack for remembering cards that had been played, she knew how to wait, when to collect her winnings, and when to quit. She claimed gambling was like fishing. I did not see that at all, which was probably why I was unlucky at both.
But I was lucky in having her.
She said, “I way you!”
“You might have had a long wait.”
She said that she had decided upon me early on, and that if I had not acted, she would simply have worked for me, whatever happened; no one else would do. All this was in her mind. The plan was fully formed as an intention, but she could not presume; it was for me to make the first move.
No long after that, I was diagnosed with all sorts of ailments—macular degeneration in one eye, cataract in the other, a bad knee—requiring surgery. Ringing in the ears. I was forgetful. Fishing for a box of cookies on a top shelf, I slipped off the chair and broke my collarbone. I was falling apart. Nhu was in great shape, still smoking, working every day to keep the house spotless, fishing now and then.
This is the life I dreamed of. I am ill, but bearably so. I am mild. She runs the house, she runs me. She is wiser, more experienced, shrewder. When we go fishing I steer the boat, she fishes and determines the route, the speed, the duration. I am her servant. It is what I want.
We seldom go out. We see no one. We phone for groceries now. We might take the boat for a run over to Edgartown on a calm day with a fair tide, or even to the Cape. But the rest of the time we live behind our hedge in the huge house I built for her on the Neck.
She will outlive me. She will continue in this house as the Junk Man’s widow. And I will rest easy knowing that long after I am gone, people just off the ferry will look east and, seeing our house, will make faces and say in shock, “What the hell’s that?” It is a symbol of our love.
Heartache
MOST OF THE still-intact small towns of the Deep South have a local diner, brimming with the tang of hot fat, where everyone is welcome. Good manners prevail, the mood is cheerful. Unless they’re saying grace, people look up from their food when someone enters. There might be a framed Bible verse on the wall or printed at the top of the sticky menu.
Louleen’s, in Peavy, Alabama, was one. I took the writer Kate Collier Delombre there for lunch two days in a row. Her lovely old house was outside the town. On the first day she said to me, “I have a heartache,” and on the second day, at my urging, she explained it, softly, with the fastidious pauses I’d found in her writing. She finished when we finished the meal. Perta Mae, her driver and housekeeper, listened with her head bowed over her plate.
“I wish I knew what to do.”
“Write it,” I said. “If you make it a story, you’ll ease your pain.”
“I’m too old for a long story.” She was a month shy of eighty-nine. She was fully alert, not sick but aged, small, fragile, easily wearied. Yet she was immortal-looking, with the mummified features you see in the very old, giving her the dusty glow of an idol, and still with an appetite for catfish.
“It’s been a furtive life,” she said, with the bird claw of her hand resting on her throat. Futtive and futtilize were words she made her own. “How did I manage all those years alone? People don’t ask. Twenty-eight stories published, and my memoir. So many stories started and put aside. The magic of getting it right—bliss for me, but who cares?”
“I do,” I said, and Perta Mae nodded, still chewing.
“Peavy people see an old white woman in a town of young blacks. I’m the minority now. They look at me with hatred. And why? In the secret history of the South we’re all related, by some ancient concubinage, persisting to the present. My work saved me. My work and Perta Mae. What makes me happy is my writing, like praying used to. I am speaking to readers as I speak to you. Readers listen, no one else does.”
Six weeks later I got a call from Perta Mae. “Miss Kitty,” and she swallowed, then a whisper, a sigh, “she pass.” I remembered how she’d lain her fingers on the back of Kate’s bird claw hand, black on white, to steady the menu. “Her heart give out.”
I asked Perta Mae whether Miss Kitty had done any writing in those weeks. She said no, just suffering. She invited me to visit. There was no story. The heartache was mine now, an obligation unfulfilled, mine to complete, or else to suffer.
Kate had adored her son, Jack, the more so because he was all she had; she’d been widowed when she was thirty and her son was five. He was Jack Delombre Junior, adopted in the second year of her marriage when her husband confessed (tears, his face in shadow) he could not father a child. He begged her to understand. His confiding this was a burden, but the appearance of Jack Junior crowded out the secret. Her husband was delighted when they saw this beautiful boy, who’d been put up for adoption by an unwed mother in the nearby town of Cow Creek.
Jack Senior was an attorney in Peavy. He was balding in his twenties, he looked old at thirty. He was a frail man, even sickly, ill with anemia, needing transfusions. Kate, sensitive to words, recalled “blood disease” and “his blood’s not strong,” and when he died, the doctor’s explanation: “a silent stroke.”
The child took his place as her companion until, at the age of twenty-six, he met and fell in love with Brenda Palmer, from Chattanooga. An intruder, so she seemed to Kate in the beginning, a stranger in a culture where an outsider with different ideas is taken to be an agitator.
In her solitude—Jack Junior soon married—Kate began to write stories. Writing gave her a purpose, made the day matter, and helped her to see. People from Peavy spoke through her stories, and local incidents were reshaped in them, the new tensions too, the way the balance of power had shifted from white to black, the whites feeling powerless and unappreciated, unremembered or wrongly remembered. In one story an old woman like Kate cannot understand directions, because the familiar streets have been renamed. She knew Dr. King, but who was Matthew Henson and who was Denmark Vesey?
Alabamans bring presents when they visit, a bottle of blueberry wine or homemade cookies or pound cake. On her few visits Brenda brought nothing, and Kate wanted to ask, “Is that usual in Chattanooga?” But Brenda glanced at her as though Kate had done something wrong, and Kate recognized an attitude toward blacks in the squint she gave Perta Mae.
The Brenda visits diminished, and then on the few that occurred she was late, which seemed more insulting than her not showing up at all. Was it resentment or disapproval? She never smiled. Nervy people have no sense of humor. She blinked a lot. At last Brenda stopped coming, and Jack Junior’s visits became less frequent.
Kate thought, To live with a humorless person is a martyrdom. But perhaps she didn’t know her.
Kate’s feeling of being snubbed, even shunned, gave purpose and vigor to her fictions. It was in this period of isolation that she sent stories to magazines, in the spirit of a loner posting a letter, yearning to be heard; and her first stories were published.
She wondered if anyone in her family, or in Peavy, would notice. No one did. Yet distant readers responded to her, and it seemed as though she was writing to them from a far-off land.
By now she had a granddaughter, Jackie. Kate had hoped to make her a friend, someone to whom she might leave her jewelry. But the girl was like her mother, sulky, disapproving, conveying a sense of blame in her squint. Kate was resigned to not seeing the girl and her mother; her sorrow was that she saw so little of her son.
Perhaps he was torn, but he sid
ed with his wife, and when the child Jackie proved to be a problem at school, Kate said, Nothing to do with me. They’d detached themselves from her, and maybe the mother was the influence, but they were all complicit.
Kate had been shy at first in sending out her stories, but meeting with approval she was encouraged, and writing became a career and a consolation. She was a witness to an earlier time, a whispered insistent voice, who’d known white privilege and conflict in the small world of the country town, hardly altered in her house where Perta Mae cooked and cleaned, as her mother had done for Jack Senior when he was small. Perta Mae was more loyal to her than Jack Junior, and her warmth and willingness took the curse off the rift with Brenda, if you could call that silence a rift.
“You’re like family to me,” Kate said to Perta Mae. “Better than family, based on the families I know.”
Perta Mae lifted her head as if to speak, but smiled and said nothing.
One of the stories Kate wrote was about an old white woman and her black housekeeper—the housekeeper the daughter of the white woman’s childhood servant, as Perta Mae’s mother, known as Mammy, had been to Jack Senior, in the same house.
To wish for her son back was hopeless. She mildly scolded herself for not being content and was reminded that her unease, her seeking resolution and order, impelled her to write. And she who desired her son’s happiness could not object if he found it with his wife and not his mother. But if Brenda had some good qualities, they were indiscernible, and if that little family was tormented, Kate didn’t see it. They were absent, younger people she’d once known, that was the whole of it, and being absent they defied interpretation. That was a lesson. Her stories as a consequence were impartial, without explanation or blame. But she ached over the words “my son,” and she resisted thinking of his adoption.
Her readers visited her now and then. They marveled at the old remote farmhouse, full of books, at the edge of its empty fields. She gave these visitors lemonade on her porch. In the Southern way they brought her fruit or cookies. They asked serious questions and listened gratefully when she replied.
