Net of Jewels

by Ellen Gilchrist

  “Oh, God, this is so much fun. I’m so glad we’re doing this. So glad we got away.” I leaned back in the seat. The barren winter scenery seemed beautiful to me. Charles William and Irise in the front seat. Wine to drink, books to read, strange new poetry to enlist my dreams.

  “So you’re really divorcing Malcolm?” Charles William asked. “You aren’t going to change your mind and go back to him?”

  “I can’t. He’s so mean to me. He never lets me have any friends. And he told me I was fat. I’m not fat. You know I’m not fat.”

  “It’s all he knows how to say,” Irise suggested. “He’s not a very happy person.” She took my cup and filled it from the bottle, which she was holding between her legs. “You want ice in it or not?”

  “Put some in. There, that’s enough.” She added ice from the ice chest, then closed the lid, and put her feet on the top. Her skirt slid up her legs. I could see her lace-edged petticoat. I giggled.

  “Hand me a cigarette,” I said. “I smoked all mine. I’m out.” Irise handed me the package of Pall Malls and I lit one and sat back against the cushions of the backseat and inhaled. Charles William lit up and added his smoke to mine. The smoke curled around the ceiling of the car. The plains of Alabama rolled by. “Let’s don’t drink too much before we get there,” Irise said. “Then we won’t have any fun tonight.”

  “One more drink before Union Grove,” Charles William decreed. “Then one at Clanton. Then we’ll quit until we get to Montgomery.”

  Derry’s house sat at the end of an old boulevard. From the driveway all you could see was a long bluish green roof and banks of azalea bushes. Charles William helped us from the car and we walked down a stone path toward a wooden overhang that led to an indoor garden. “It’s Japanese,” Irise said. “Oh, Rhoda, isn’t it a dream?” I wasn’t sure. I had never seen anything so subtle. I couldn’t take it in. I stopped to admire a lantern built into a stone wall.

  “Come in. Come in.” A tall woman with curly black hair came flying out the door and began to embrace us. “I’m so glad you’re here. So glad you could come.”

  “Look at the roof, Dee,” Charles William said. “It’s made of copper. Have you ever seen one?”

  “It’s blue.”

  “Copper turns blue. It oxidizes. It will last forever.”

  “Come see the inside,” Derry said. “Did you notice the azaleas? Charles has been planting them. Forty azaleas and twelve Japanese magnolias. We call him the mad tree planter.” She smiled widely and I decided she was beautiful. And something more. Some kind of power I had never seen in a woman. I would not have wanted to cross her or make her mad.

  We went past an indoor garden into a room with a vaulted ceiling. A creek ran beside the garden and ended in a pond. In the center of the pond was a charred cross with flowers growing around it. There were walls of glass and skylights in vaulted ceilings. The floors were polished stone. There were Indian rugs and comfortable chairs and tables covered with books and pieces of sculpture. Stacks of papers and legal folders were everywhere, piled under tables, stacked up beside a fireplace, underneath a baby grand piano. Derry led us into the kitchen. She began to lay out cheese and crackers.

  “Tell me about yourself,” she said to me. “Charles William said you were a writer. That you wrote for a newspaper once.”

  “I’m not a writer. I just had a column in a little weekly newspaper. That was a long time ago. I’m nothing. All I do is take care of my children. Do you have children?”

  “They’re gone. They’re away at school.”

  “How old are they?”

  “Fifteen and seventeen. We sent them away when the trouble started. I’m lonesome for them. It’s killing me to have them gone.” She opened wine, found glasses, threw open the refrigerator, got out salad things, began to cut up salad for our supper. Servants walked in and out of the living room. She talked to them. She answered the phone. Every time she put the phone down, it rang again. “It’s all fear, Rhoda. Beware of fear. Tell me what books you got in Birmingham. Tell me about yourself.”

  “I haven’t always lived here. I just moved to Alabama. I thought it would be so wonderful. All my life they told me my life would begin when I lived back in the South but it bothers me now. I saw that magazine Charles William brought you. I can’t believe people do things like that. How can they do it?”

  “Ignorance and dogma. Fear, always fear. They grow up with fear and they live with fear and they impart it to their children. They are so unhappy they have to have an enemy. So the Negroes are the enemy.”

  “We saw the Klan. They had their capes on and this flaming cross. The cross was the worst thing of all. It was worse then the cockfight. I don’t believe in God. It wasn’t terrible because it was sacrilegious. One of the things I hate about the church is that goddamn cross. Imagine worshipping an instrument of torture. Every time I see one of those things I think about Jesus being crucified. I don’t think about him rising from the dead or any of that. I just think about him being nailed up there. Do they nail black people to the crosses?”

  “They hang them mostly, or drown them. Or beat them to death.”

  “How did you get involved in this? Why did you come down here?”

  “I was a reporter in Washington. Then Charles wanted to come home and I came with him. We got here in nineteen fifty-four, right before the movement started. A woman who worked for me came to me when the bus boycott started and I got involved in it. One thing led to another. Her sister works with me now. Her name’s Aurora. You’ll meet her.”

  “What are all these servants doing? You’re cooking dinner.” I filled my wineglass. I was completely comfortable. I could say anything.

  “They aren’t servants. They’re working in the office. There’s an office in the back of the house. We’ve been very busy the last month. Whenever a new semester is beginning there’s a lot to do. We’re trying to get some children ready for the schools in Arkansas. It isn’t easy to talk the parents into letting them go.” She put down a spoon she had been using to stir a pot of rice. “I wouldn’t let mine go. I don’t even have them. Charles won’t have them here.”

  “I’m sorry you are sad.”

  “There is a price for everything, Rhoda. Nothing worthwhile is free.”

  “‘For each ecstatic instant/We must an anguish pay.’”

  “‘In keen and quivering ratio/To the ecstasy.’” She smiled into my eyes. “Where did you grow up, Rhoda? If not in the South.”

  “In a small town in Illinois. I was a cheerleader and I wrote the school play. Then they dragged me to Kentucky but the schools there weren’t good enough so they sent me to a girl’s school in Virginia. Then they sent me to Vanderbilt, then I went to Tuscaloosa, then I ran off and got married and had two babies. So that is that. I want some more wine if it’s okay. Is there plenty?”

  “What do you mean? That is that?” She filled my glass. She leaned into me. “Go on.”

  “So now I’m home again. I live with my parents and they give me everything I want and they take care of the children. I don’t know what to do with myself. I don’t have anyone to talk to who’s interested in the things I am. Well, at least I’m here today. I want to look at your books if I may. I’ve never seen so many bookshelves.”

  “My father’s library is in the hall. And my books and Charles’s are everywhere else. Daddy had poetry from all over the world. Find some. We’ll read it out loud. Donald said you were a reader. He said he spotted you the minute you came bursting in his store.”

  “I read all the time. I’ve been reading all day all my life. Unless I was swimming or asleep or something.” The phone rang. It was Hodding Carter calling from Greenville, Mississippi. It was Roy Reed of the New York Times. It was Anthony Lewis. It was Stokely Carmichael. It was Constance Baker Motley. It was her husband, Charles, saying he’d be late for dinner. It was her youngest daughter calling from Arizona. “She’s only fifteen,” Derry said. “She isn’t adjusting. She’s ove
rweight right now. What can I do to help her? What would you suggest?” As she talked on the phone she had kept on fixing dinner. The salad was prepared. French bread was sliced, buttered, slipped into an oven. A roast was pulled from a second oven. A black woman came into the kitchen. “Let me help you, Derry,” she said. “Go sit with your company. Let me take over in here.”

  “All right. Thanks, Aurora. I think everything’s done. Constance called again. She wants Roy to come if he can leave Florida.” She put her hand on the black woman’s shoulder. They looked into each other’s eyes. The black woman reached up and covered Derry’s hand with her own. I had never in my life been in a place so charged, so energized. It seemed momentous things were going on around me as dinner was being prepared. It seemed I had waited all my life to be sitting in this room with Derry. But there was nothing I could do to be worthy of it. There was no way I could earn the right to even drink her wine but I kept on drinking it.

  “Let’s go find Charles William and Irise,” she said. “They went in the bedroom to look at the Wyeth. He lived in our apartment building in Washington. He gave us a painting for keeping his cat. Well, come along. Let’s find them before anyone else calls.” She swept out of the kitchen and through the beautiful open rooms. I followed carrying my wine. She stopped in the living room to answer the phone and talk to Roy Reed again. Then to someone named Thurgood Marshall.

  “Who is that?” I asked. “I’ve heard of him.”

  “A lawyer, a very brave man. It’s grown dark outside. Let me turn on these lamps.” She began to move around the living room turning on the lamps. She stopped in the middle of the room, became very still, rapt. “Charles will be home soon,” she said. “He’s so glad Charles William came to visit. We’ve been so cut off, you know. It’s been hard on him.”

  “Does he care what you’re doing?” I looked up into her beautiful troubled face. Except for Patricia Morgan, she may have been the first truly grown woman I had ever known, a full and complete woman who was free to act. I could not have expressed her fascination for me then. I only knew that I was drawn to her and for some reason she was allowing me to draw near. I had no idea that there was something in myself that could call up an answering love in such a creature. I thought of myself as a half-baked, not dry behind the ears, slightly overweight, pretty much ruined forever person. I could hide in books and I could pretend to love myself but it was a chimera in which I did not believe. If Derry allowed me to draw near to her, I thought it was some mistake or momentary lapse.

  “Does he care?” I repeated. “Does he care what you’re doing?”

  “I don’t know.” She reached down and took my face in her hands. “I don’t think so, Rhoda. He loves me, you know. He wants me to do what I have to do. He wants me to be happy.”

  I didn’t answer. It was too large an idea for me. I could hear the words but I could not understand them. I could not imagine such a thing being true.

  The phone rang again. It was Roy Reed again, calling to talk to her about Orville Faubus.

  We found Charles William and Irise in the master bedroom kneeling on an unmade bed, looking at a painting above the headboard. It was a painting of autumn leaves beneath a tree. “It’s a Wyeth,” Charles William said, and I shook my head. “There’s a catalogue of his things,” Derry added. “I’ll show it to you. He’s a northern painter. You might not have heard of him.”

  “Come here, Dee.” Charles William pulled me onto the bed and I knelt beside him and looked as hard as I could at the strange painting. It was so simple and so compelling. I examined the details, the seemingly messy brushwork. I think now it was the first real painting I had ever been close to. I had never been in an art museum. I felt small and uneducated and dumb but Charles William put his arm around me and brought me into the field of his pleasure. “It’s egg-based acrylic, Dee. It has the feel of oil but it lets him work fast. I read an article about it. I’ve been dying to see one.”

  “It’s great,” I said. “I love it. Where’s the book? I want to see the book.”

  We went back into the living room and Derry gave me a catalogue from a Wyeth show and I pored over it while she opened more wine and put a record on the record player. We sat back on the beautiful white sofas to wait for Charles to come home. “What is that music?” I asked. “What is that wonderful music?”

  “Toscanini and Heifetz,” Derry answered, giggling with delight. “Ludwig von Beethoven. Everyone said they could never work together, then they made this. It’s the Violin Concerto.”

  “I want to live here,” I answered. “I want to live and die on this sofa.” Derry came and sat beside me. Her face grew still. She reached out and touched my arm. Charles William and Irise were cuddled up together on the facing sofa. Someone had built a fire in the fireplace. I could hardly speak for joy, some joy I could not begin to sound or understand. Aurora came in and joined us. “That roast’s going to be ruined if Charles doesn’t hurry up,” she said. “What do you want to do?”

  “If he doesn’t come in fifteen minutes we’ll go on and eat.” Derry stood up. The phone hadn’t rung in fifteen minutes. I guess that made her nervous, as she went over and picked it up and dialed a number. Then the front door opened and Charles William’s cousin Charles came in. He was a handsome man, tall and intense with sandy reddish hair and powerful dark eyes. He embraced Charles William and spoke to everyone, then disappeared into the bedroom to take off his coat and tie. When he came back he sat down by Derry and kissed her and laid his hand upon her leg. After he arrived she began to talk in terms of him. Charles does, Charles thinks, Charles believes, was how she prefaced her statements when he was in the room. Derry says, Derry thinks, Derry wants, is how he prefaced his. The thing that was between them was like a force field and we were all drawn in. We moved into the dining room to take our places at the table. “Hold hands,” Derry said. “Let’s hold hands and say a blessing.”

  “Lord make us thankful for these and all our many other blessings,” Charles said. It was my mother’s old blessing. If she had said it I would have sniffed and been contemptuous, but here, with these people, I was caught up and said amen as though I meant it.

  “Jim Phillips called and said he’s coming over,” Aurora said. “He was leaving the courthouse when he called.”

  “Good,” Derry answered. “Did you ask him to dinner?”

  “I ask him anytime he calls. I love to feed that man.”

  “Jim Phillips is a lawyer from Washington who’s helping us.” Derry smiled at me. “He’s originally from Minneapolis. He worked for Hubert Humphrey. He’s a fabulous man. I’m glad you’ll get to meet him.”

  “Is he married?” Irise giggled. She was drinking wine, sitting very close to Charles William.

  “I don’t think so. No, of course he’s not.” Derry smiled back at her.

  “Pass those plates,” Charles said. “I am now serving this roast.”

  We were having dessert when the missing member of our party appeared. He was a short man with a smile as wide and eager and open as Derry’s own. He took the empty seat next to mine and turned the smile upon me. “Southern belles,” he said. “Where do you beautiful girls come from? What do your mothers do?” He was turned around in the chair toward me. His shirt collar was rumpled. His tie was rumpled. His jacket was rumpled. He needed a shave. His hair needed combing. He was an utterly adorable and charming and disarming man.

  “Well, I’m not a southern belle,” I said. “I have two children. I wouldn’t be caught dead being a southern belle. I’ve lived half my life in the North.”

  “Where in the North? How far north?”

  “Southern Illinois. I lived there from the sixth to the ninth grades. It is my favorite place in the world. Where I was happiest.”

  “You have children? You’re only a child.”

  “I have a baby face and two little boys. But I’m not married anymore. I don’t think I am, anyway. My father’s lawyers are getting me a divorce. I don’t know wh
y it’s taking them so long.”

  “I’m a lawyer. Did Derry tell you that?”

  “How’s it going by the way?” Charles asked. “At the court-house?”

  “Not well. But there will be appeals. There will be many trials and many appeals. It seems a damned long road. God, I’m tired tonight.”

  “First you eat and then we’ll talk about it. Derry, get this man some roast beef, please.” Derry got up and in a minute she and Aurora had put plates of bread and salad and roast beef and potatoes swimming in butter before Jim Phillips and he began to eat. I watched all this with great attention. Suddenly I became very conscious of the clothes I was wearing. I had on a short pleated plaid skirt and a navy blue sweater my babies had almost ruined by spitting up on when I burped them. I had had it cleaned several times but I imagined I could still smell the sweet decaying smell of thrown-up breast milk. I raised my fingers to my pearl necklace and ran my fingers around it.

  “What is the case about?” I asked.

  He stopped with a forkful of potatoes and lay the fork down and turned back to me. “A black man accused of raping a white woman. We have to proceed so carefully. But let’s not talk about that. Do you live here, in Montgomery?”

  “She’s visiting from Dunleith,” Derry said. “She loves poetry, Jim. Isn’t that your forte?”

  “I got this great book today,” I said. “The Oresteia. I just started reading it. It’s a new translation.”

  “The Oresteia,” he repeated. He ate the potatoes, then lay his fork down again. “I read it one night to cram for an exam. I remember getting about two-thirds of the way through it and thinking, damn, this stuff is good. I wish I had read this when I could pay attention to it.”

  “You could read it now. I would let you read it.” He smiled at me again. He was not paying attention to anyone at the table except me.

  “Charles William hasn’t told us about Frank Lloyd Wright yet,” Derry said. “Is a building like a play, Charles William? Can we learn our secrets from it?” The talk drifted into architecture and the summers Charles William had spent at Taliesin. We finished our dessert and coffee. I helped Derry take the plates to the kitchen. Anytime I glanced his way Jim Phillips was looking at me.