Net of Jewels

by Ellen Gilchrist

  Honey of love. For the promise of one drop of this fine stuff I drove across three states as fast as I could drive.

  At three I arrived in Alexandria. Jim’s plane wasn’t due until six. I turned off the highway and found my way to the neighborhood where Klane lived. Cars lined the street near her house. People were in her yard. I parked the car and got out and began to walk up the pathway to her house. I could hear the people talking. I could feel their eyes on me. A woman caught my eye and shook her head. A man in a white shirt got up from a bench beside the door and walked toward me. “She’s gone,” he said. “Klane Marengo’s left us.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “She’s dead. She hung herself.” He stared straight at me. Behind him other faces gathered. Children came out the door and stood beside us.

  “How could she be dead. I came to help her. I talked to her just yesterday. It isn’t true. I don’t believe it.”

  “She hung herself. Hung herself right here in this house with the children playing in the yard. Yes, ma’am, she is dead.” The man’s expression had not changed. No one asked me in. No one wanted me there. There was not enough air to breathe. It was so hot and still. “I’m sorry,” I said. “So sorry. I didn’t know enough. I don’t know what to do. I came to help her. That’s why I’m here.”

  “No one can help Klane now. She’s gone.” This from a tall black woman I had seen before. She stepped in front of the man and took over. “You might as well go on and leave now. There’s nothing here for you to do.”

  “I’m sorry. I’m so very sorry.” I backed down the path, almost tripping over a bicycle wheel. I backed away for ten or twenty yards and then I turned and ran to my car and got into it and started driving. I started in the direction of Speed and Karla’s house, then changed my mind and went into a drugstore and bought a Coke and a candy bar and began to eat it very slowly. It was the first food I had had in hours. I stood between the rows of patent medicines and magazines and ate my Hershey bar and began to weep.

  Much much later I was in a hotel room with Jim Phillips. We were lying on a bed with our clothes on talking. “Don’t you want to make love to me?” I asked. “I want you to. Don’t you want me to undress?”

  “No. I just want to talk to you. Are you all right, Rhoda? Are things all right for you?”

  “No. I don’t know what I’m doing half the time. Like all this mess. I wish I hadn’t come down here. Why did I do this? What did I think I could do?”

  “We can see about her children tomorrow and try to arrange things for them. There are things we can do.”

  “None of it makes any difference. It doesn’t change anything.”

  “We can try. I have friends here who may be able to help.” He patted me on the arm. He touched my hair. He kept on touching me but he wasn’t trying to make love to me. What was wrong with the man? I was getting mad.

  “Her sister will take care of them,” I said. “But she didn’t trust her sister’s husband. She didn’t trust him around her kids. I don’t know. Sometimes I think black people are nicer to children than we are. Other times I don’t.”

  “Some of them are better and some are worse. Try not to generalize about it, Rhoda. That’s the best way to understand.”

  “Well, it might be the best, but it doesn’t seem as true.” I sat up and pulled away from him. I began to straighten up my clothes. “I thought you wanted to see me. Don’t you want to make love to me?”

  “Of course I do. Anybody would. But I’ve been going out with someone. Someone you know.”

  “Who? Who do I know? I don’t know anyone you know but Derry. What are you talking about?”

  “I’m seeing May Garth Sheffield. She’s in Montgomery working with Derry. She thinks the world of you, Rhoda. She’s always talking about you.”

  “Well, that’s good. I’m glad you’re seeing her. I’m glad she’s got a boyfriend. She sure needed one.” I got up from the bed. “What time is it, anyway? I have to call my mother and tell her where I am. God, I keep seeing Klane’s body hanging from a rafter. Seeing her dead. I don’t know how I got into all of this. I don’t know what I’m doing here.” I got up from the bed and went over to the phone and called my mother. “I came down here to try to save my maid, Klane Marengo,” I said. “But she’s dead. She killed herself before I got here. I’ll come home in the morning, Mother. I’ll come as soon as I can.”

  “What in the name of God? What are you talking about, Rhoda? Where are you?”

  “She was dead, Momma. She killed herself. I’m in a hotel in Alexandria. I’ll come home in the morning and I’m sorry. I’m really really sorry.”

  “What am I supposed to do with these children, Rhoda? They’re asking for you. Little Malcolm’s been looking all over the house for you. I want you to come home tonight. Go out to the airport and see if they have a plane. Just get on a plane and get yourself back home.”

  “I can’t. I have a car. It’s too late. I’ll come in the morning. I’m really sorry, Mother. I’m as sorry as I can be. I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

  “Are you drinking, Rhoda? Is that what all this is about? Little Malcolm has an ear infection. I have to take him to the doctor in the morning and I had an appointment to get a permanent but I guess I’ll have to cancel that. Where are you? Where are you calling me from?” My father took the phone away from her. His voice came over the wires. “Sister, now you just settle down. Whatever’s going on can be fixed. Just tell me where you are, honey. I’ll come and get you tonight. You just stay put. Tell me where you are.”

  “I’m in a hotel in Alexandria, Louisiana, Daddy. My maid killed herself. Oh, Daddy, it was so terrible. Everything happens to me. I can’t do anything right.” I began to cry again, terrible tears of rage and fear and incomprehension. “Don’t worry about anything, Sister,” my father’s voice crooned to me. “I’ll be there in a few hours. Give me the number where you are. I’ll be there to get you.”

  “Hurry up,” I answered. “Hurry up, Daddy. Please come and get me. I want to go home. I want to go home and see my babies.”

  So my father chartered an airplane and flew down to Alexandria in the middle of the night and collected me. A man was hired to drive the car home and Jim Phillips was left to take care of Klane’s children and I flew home in a twin-engine Beechcraft with my daddy.

  “Don’t worry about anything, Sweet Sister,” he kept saying. “Your momma’s got the boys and everything will be all right. That’s all behind you now. They’ve got this new program at the stockbroker’s that I want you to take. It meets on Tuesday nights and you can learn all about how to invest in the markets. Dudley and I want you in the business with us. You just stop thinking about all that mess down there in Alexandria. Just try to sleep. Everything’s okay. It’s going to be fine.” He put his hand on my arm and patted me. He leaned up into the cockpit and looked at the pilot’s map. He took dominion everywhere. I closed my eyes and went back to sleep.

  Coda

  Many years later, when we were fifty-five years old, Charles William called me on the phone to tell me he was dying. After he told me that, we decided to talk all night. We talked from four in the afternoon until seven. Then I called him back and we talked until twelve. We talked about every single thing we had ever done or could remember. He told me things I had forgotten and I told him things he had forgotten. But some things were still vivid in both our memories. My green silk dress, the Siobhan McKenna recording of the Molly Bloom soliloquy from Ulysses, stripping wallpaper on Dex in the June heat, and every moment of the week Klane Marengo killed herself.

  “I’ll never forget you pushing Ariane down in the side yard. Jesus, Dee, I thought your daddy would kill us both.”

  “That was the night before. Klane didn’t call until the next day.”

  “I always think of them together. When I drove up you were tearing around in some tacky little aqua dress with your boobs hanging out and your daddy was right behind you. Then he was yelling at m
e to leave and Ariane was on the ground by the oak tree. I’d never seen white people act like that. It was better than a play.”

  “I only gave in because you were there. If I’d been alone I could have gotten away.”

  “Why did that bother you?”

  “I was afraid he’d say something to hurt your feelings. I was afraid he’d say something about you being gay.”

  “Oh, Dee, upper-class southern men didn’t mind gays back then. We weren’t any threat to them. Didn’t you know that? You were trying to protect me?”

  “I think I was. I remember it that way.” I started giggling. “What I can remember. I was pretty drunk.”

  “We were drunk a lot back then.”

  “We were drunk every day.”

  “Do you regret it?”

  “Hell, no. It was how we escaped. We never would have gotten free without it. It was the gate, the open sesame. But I don’t do it anymore. It’s like swallowing razor blades.”

  “I still do it.”

  “I know you do.” We were silent then. I wasn’t going to say, You’re killing yourself. “I love you, Charles William,” I said instead. “I wish to hell you wouldn’t die.”

  “Maybe I won’t. It might be a mistake. I think it’s a mistake.”

  “You could get a heart transplant. I just read this article in The New Yorker about the team that harvests the hearts. It’s fascinating.”

  “I couldn’t do that, Dee. I’m too fastidious to have someone else’s heart. Someone I don’t know.”

  “You’re right. It could be anybody’s. Jesus, think of the possibilities. Some big dumb born-again Christian from Missouri. Someone we’d hate.”

  “I read about this man in Minnesota who got mad because he got a black man’s heart. He’s suing the hospital.”

  “That’s about par for the course. Why would anyone mind a black man’s heart? Some huge sweet black heart beating out the rhythms of another continent. Nobody in the United States wants to have any fun anymore. What a bunch of pussies.”

  “My doctor won’t believe I’m not afraid to die. He doesn’t understand me, Dee, but I fascinate him, I think. He tried to talk me into a transplant. He was begging me to do it at one point.”

  “I’m not afraid of dying anymore. I believe in DNA, Charles William. That’s the only immortality.”

  “I believe in art, Dee. Five hundred years is a long time. I’m tiling the entrance to Eula’s old house. I wish you could see it. It’s like a mosque. I’m putting mandalas everywhere.”

  “Don’t die, Charles William. Please don’t die on me.”

  “I’ll try not to. I probably won’t. I think I’ll get a better report tomorrow.”

  But of course he didn’t and his great heart heaved and stopped and now I can’t call him up and read him this and see if it makes him laugh and, as the poet wrote, that makes all this difference.

  “The deep blue sky was flecked with clouds of a blue deeper than the fundamental blue of intense cobalt, and others of a clearer blue. … In the blue depth the stars were sparkling, greenish, yellow, white, rose, brighter, flashing more like jewels . . . opals you might call them, emeralds, lapis, rubies, sapphires.” Vincent Van Gogh, Aries, 1888