by Gwen Florio
At least, they billed it as a surprise. In retrospect, it occurred to Penelope that they cooked it up as an antidote to their own bland, contented lives.
In high school they’d been part of a group of older girls whose circle had widened to include Penelope by dint of her relationship with Todd, admittance abruptly withdrawn as soon as she and Todd broke up. She didn’t care, of course, so deeply immersed she was by then in the fizzy Champagne haze of love and sex.
Now, even though they were well past the intrigues and rigid judgments of high school and into their new lives as young matrons, the old insecurities rose up as Penelope led them to the patio, carrying a tray of coffee and lemonade to accompany the meringue kisses that were Jayne’s ostensible reason for stopping by.
‘I picked up Alice on the way and said, “You know what? It’s just been ages since we’ve seen Penelope.” You two can be my test subjects,’ she simpered. ‘I want to include these meringues in the Newcomers Club baskets. How are they? Too dry? Too sticky?’
Perfection, Penelope assured her, even as she surreptitiously tried with her tongue to dislodge stray bits from her molars, where they’d settled like glue.
Alice gazed toward the river. ‘It’s so peaceful out here, Penelope. You’re lucky to be far away from everything that’s going on in town.’
Penelope shoved her tongue hard against a tooth, popping the meringue loose, and swallowed quickly. ‘What’s happening in town?’
They turned to her, eyes large and round and innocent. Which should have been her clue.
‘Don’t you know?’ A look passed between them. Penelope quickly flicked the remaining meringue on her plate into the boxwood, praying the blue jay swooping toward it wouldn’t drag it back into view.
‘Mother and I were supposed to run some errands yesterday, but she wasn’t feeling well and Father insisted upon doing them for her, so I just stayed home. What did I miss?’
‘Well!’ They leaned forward with the avid, hungry expressions the meringues should have provoked. ‘The whole town is full of colored people down from Baltimore. They’re doing those civil rights marches, trying to make out Chateau is some place like Alabama or Mississippi. Can you imagine?’
At one time, Penelope couldn’t have. But she’d paid the price, hustled out of town to the home of a relative she’d never heard of – in Arkansas, of all places – and then to private school in New England; the idea that black flesh had touched hers, not just touched but entered it and left a black baby inside her white body, apparently so abhorrent that nothing but banishment sufficed, leaving her to figure out for herself that childless and married was the only safe way to return.
So she offered an all-purpose ‘Mmm’ and forced herself to reach for another awful meringue.
‘And you won’t believe what else! The person who’s stirring up all the trouble? Someone who’s from here. Bobby Evans. Do you remember him? Didn’t he used to work for your family?’
And there it was, the thing she’d been expecting ever since she’d come home, a knife slipped between her ribs so skillfully she didn’t feel it until it was already carving into her heart.
She looked into their hard, bright eyes and wondered how long they’d waited for this chance; how they’d put it together. Although it didn’t take a genius. A white girl leaves town the same time as the black family whose children – one of them a boy her own age – had worked in her home. Something had happened, and it didn’t take too much imagination to guess what. Which didn’t stop them from trying to shake the truth loose with a swift and efficient thuggery barely masked by careful makeup and flowered summer dresses.
Penelope scrunched up her face as though she were thinking. ‘Has to be the same guy. Grace had a brother who did some yard work for us. But they moved away a long time ago.’
Jayne’s turn. ‘I guess she’s back, too. Both of them, right in the thick of it. Nobody feels safe going downtown. That’s why we came out here today. So happy to find you at home.’
Her eyes fastened on Penelope’s face, a cat ready to pounce at the slightest sign of a twitch. ‘Sure you don’t remember him? We saw him – Alice thinks he’s really handsome. Says if I hadn’t been there to hold her back, she might’ve thrown herself at him.’
‘Jayne!’ Alice shrieked and batted at her. ‘I would never!’
‘You sure? What about you, Penelope? Would you throw yourself at a colored boy?’
Two could play this game – especially when one’s future depended upon it.
‘Why, Jayne. You’re talking crazy. Did you sneak something into the lemonade? Alice, check her purse. Dollars to doughnuts there’s a flask in there.’
Alice hacked up a dutiful laugh and made a halfhearted reach for Jayne’s bag. The moment passed. But Penelope felt Jayne’s eyes on her for the rest of the too-long visit. Cold. Assessing. And – almost – knowing.
Getting downtown alone was almost impossible. Her father and Hiram went to work every day, of course, but her mother found excuses not to go to any of her lunches or clubs, and took to popping in on Penelope at odd moments – when she was getting dressed, or eating lunch on the patio, or even taking a swim in the river – as though to reassure herself Penelope hadn’t somehow slipped away.
She escaped in the most cartoonish way, wandering downstairs to breakfast one morning after her father and Hiram had already left, and flinching away from her mother’s offer of tea and French toast. ‘I don’t feel well. My stomach’s really upset. I’m going to go back to bed and try and sleep it off.’
She caught the flash of delight across her mother’s face before she turned and made her way upstairs, to the bed she’d convincingly – she hoped – stuffed with clothes in the approximate shape of her slumbering form. Her mother probably thought she was pregnant again, the best insurance policy against the possibility of more foolish, reputation-destroying behavior. The speed with which Philippa left the house told Penelope she was as sick of watching her daughter as Penelope was of being watched. Penelope gave her a fifteen-minute head start, then pedaled to town on her childhood bicycle, praying the tires she’d hastily pumped full of air wouldn’t go flat again before she got there.
She wasn’t sure what to expect. Shouting crowds? Snarling police dogs struggling to pull free of thick leather leashes? Broken windows?
A small crowd clogged the sidewalk, but nobody was shouting. She sidled through them until she had a view of Commerce Street and the row of black people, five across, walking up the middle. The row in front held a wide banner that rippled with their steps, the words briefly obscured and then unfurling: End Segregation Now.
A lone voice rose: ‘What do we want?’
Dozens replied: ‘Equal treatment!’
‘When do we want it?’
‘Now!’
Somewhere sniggered deep within the group of white onlookers: ‘What do we want?’
The answer came sotto voce: ‘A rope and a tree.’
‘When do we want it?’
‘As fast as can be.’
But she barely heard the vile words. It had been four years. She’d birthed a brown baby boy she’d clutched to her chest for only a few moments before he was wrested away by a nurse who didn’t even bother to hide her disgust. Married a man by convincing him that eloping would be a grand adventure. Returned to Chateau with her head held high, daring anybody to make anything of it. Nineteen years old and she thought she was steel amid marshmallows, tempered by more trouble than some people saw in a lifetime. She didn’t even know exactly what she wanted when she pedaled to town that day. Some sort of closure, a word that had yet to come into vogue, but that made sense in retrospect.
But as soon as she saw Bobby, she knew. She wanted him.
He marched in the front row, leading the chant, punctuating each ‘Now!’ with a jubilant raised fist, a broad smile on his face and a bounce in his step, looking as happy as she’d ever seen him. Her heart cracked. He’d moved on, as they say now. Found his lif
e’s work. The young women marching with him, features alight – had he found a new love with one of them?
‘Goodbye, Bobby,’ she whispered. She rubbed tears from her eyes. Took one last look.
His gaze caught hers. His eyes widened. He stumbled. Shook his head in response to something the person next to him said, and then looked her way again. Mouthed two words. Then another.
Her knees buckled.
Someone nearby caught her. Voices came from far away.
‘Miss. Are you all right?’
‘She fainted.’
‘No wonder. She shouldn’t have to see something like this.’
She struggled to free herself, desperate to nod toward Bobby before he passed.
‘I’m fine,’ she said, ‘It’s just the heat. I’m fine.’
‘You should go home,’ someone said. ‘This is no place for a young lady.’
‘You’re right. I’m going.’
But she turned for a last look, the marchers moving away, and as she pedaled home, she punched the air with the same sense of anticipatory triumph they’d displayed, the silent words Bobby had directed her way like a shout in her heart:
‘The Beach. Tonight.’
FIFTY-FIVE
The gun spun in ever-slower revolutions, coming to a stop in the middle of the kitchen.
‘That’s it.’ Grace looked at Penelope. ‘Isn’t it?’
All those years. All those places she’d looked. Inside every single book in the library fat enough to have concealed even a gun as little as this one, expecting with every new volume to find it hollowed out inside to conceal the weapon that killed her brother.
Every dresser and nightstand and desk and file drawer. Cupboards, closets, crawlspaces, the inner recesses of the grandfather clock. She’d dipped her hand into bins of flour and sugar and birdseed, removed the lids from toilet tanks, even slit a seam of Kathleen Mavourneen’s dog bed and felt amid the stuffing for a hard metallic object. And spent far too many moments at the end of the dock, staring at the hypnotic current, imagining the soft muck beneath where she figured the gun almost certainly lay, sinking incrementally deeper year by year, snails and other bottom-dwelling creatures attaching themselves to it as they would any innocuous rock or bit of jetsam.
But the one place she’d never looked was the goddamned silver tea service and its never-used coffeepot, so foolishly proud she was of her refusal to polish it.
Penelope took a step toward the gun. Grace hustled past her, but Nora was quicker, kicking it away and then leaping upon it, snatching it up and backing away, breathing heavily.
No one spoke or moved. The rain slackened, the storm’s fury abating, the sky slowly lightening. Just moments earlier, it had been so dark Grace would not have been surprised to hear the grandfather clock chime midnight.
‘That’s mine.’ She held out her hand, mentally compelling Nora to deliver it.
‘Actually, it’s mine.’ Penelope’s voice held both command and rebuke.
‘It’s evidence. Nora, give me the gun.’
‘I’ll turn it over to the Attorney General’s Office. Just like I did with the phone.’
Penelope gasped. ‘But Nora!’
Nora gripped the gun tight in both hands, holding it away from her as though afraid it might somehow go off and destroy yet another member of this strange, knit-together family. The dog stood stiff-legged beside her, a low growl starting.
‘The phone, that was different. Your mother knows why. Don’t you, Penelope.’ Grace didn’t make it a question. She didn’t need to. Penelope knew.
‘Nora.’ Pleading now.
‘What is it, Mother?’
Fifty years since her brother’s murder. Grace was out of patience.
‘That gun in your hand? It’s what’ll let the whole town know your grandfather shot my brother in cold blood. Isn’t that right, Penelope?’
She’d denied it before. She didn’t this time. Just lifted her chin and stared off into space as though facing some long-awaited reckoning and spoke.
FIFTY-SIX
1967
Penelope was in a state the rest of the day after seeing Bobby at the march.
She managed to get home before her mother returned, shedding her clothes and climbing back into her nightgown so as to maintain her fiction of illness. Not a moment too soon – she heard her mother’s car pull up as she finished changing. She kicked her clothes under the bed and climbed in. A few minutes later, her mother stood framed within the bedroom door.
‘You’re awake.’
She took a couple of steps into the room, then came closer still. She brushed the hair away from Penelope’s face and laid her wrist against her forehead.
‘You’re flushed. But you don’t seem to have a fever. Is … your stomach still upset?’
Penelope noticed the hesitation. Her mother would have thought it crass to come right out and ask if she was pregnant.
‘I’m fine.’ Stronger and sharper than it should have been. Penelope slumped on the pillows and made her voice small. ‘Sleep will help.’ She closed her eyes in dismissal.
But of course she couldn’t sleep. No wonder she was flushed. She was in a fever all day. Her brain buzzed with questions. The Beach – that same night. But what time? Midnight? Two a.m.? What if Todd and his friends were partying there? Then what? And how in the world was she going to creep out of bed without waking Hiram?
She could barely bring herself to be civil to him when he came home and rushed upstairs, radiating concern, stretching beside her on the bed despite her protestations that he might catch whatever had laid her low.
‘I don’t care, Bunny.’ A nickname for her that, until that very moment, she’d found endearing and suddenly despised – almost as much as she despised herself for how she was about to betray him. ‘I just want you to feel better.’
She spoke into his chest. ‘Maybe it’s best you sleep in the guest room tonight. I’d feel terrible if you were to get sick, too.’ Oh, how easily the lies came back, honed those years earlier during her too-brief time with Bobby. Was it so wrong to want to steal just a few more hours?
Still, she feared facing her father. She pressed her ear to a floor grate when he came home and was relieved to hear her mother dissuade him from checking on her. ‘Poor thing. Let her rest. I don’t want to speak too soon, but it looks as though we might be grandparents!’
A long pause, both of them obviously considering the incongruity of her words – and all too aware of Hiram’s presence.
‘That will be lovely,’ he said finally.
But then after an entire day on high alert, nerves twanging almost audibly, her body aflame with anticipation, Penelope actually dozed off as the house fell silent, her parents gone to bed and Hiram retreating to the guest room after tiptoeing in to retrieve his pillow and pajamas.
She awoke with a hand over her mouth and a voice in her ear.
‘Don’t say a word. Or they’ll kill us both.’
‘Bobby!’
His hand went back over her mouth. She nodded understanding and tried again. ‘Bobby,’ she breathed, his name sweet on her lips. ‘What are you doing here? How did you get in?’
His shoulders shook with laughter. ‘How many weeks did I spend up on a ladder at all of these windows?’
She went shivery as his lips moved at her ear. ‘I started to go to the Beach, but there were cars on the marsh road. So I came here. Was afraid you’d already be in the boat. So glad to find you here—’
She cut him off. ‘Not as glad as I am,’ and those were the last words they spoke for quite a while.
Later, they lay whispering, something she’d always loved, their conversations about anything and everything, falling back into the old easy habits. Even so, her voice shook as she finally asked the question she’d buried for all those years. ‘How is …?’
‘Beautiful. Smart and strong and funny. You’d be so proud. Hey. Hey. Are you crying?’
She was, her tears a hot, bit
tersweet mixture of joy and regret. He kissed them away, covering her cheeks, and then his lips found hers again. Earlier they’d fallen on each other with the famished, pent-up passion of four years, but this was slow, unbearably sweet. They teased each other, murmured words of love, lost themselves in one another, single-mindedly pushing reality away.
Bobby called it back.
‘We can do this, you know.’
‘Yes, we can.’ Penelope stretched and smiled, luxuriating in the mischief of even mildly naughty wordplay, something she was sure would have shocked her staid husband. ‘We’re pretty good at it.’
‘Yes, we are. But that’s not what I meant.’
She’d been drifting toward sleep – dangerous, she knew, but irresistible. ‘What did you mean?’ she mumbled, her words barely intelligible even to herself.
‘We can be together now. Things are changing.’
Her eyes flew open. She stared into the room’s blackness. ‘What do you mean, be together?’ She took a hopeful guess. ‘How long are you going to be in town? Can we be together again?’
‘A few more days. And yes, we can be together again. But not just while I’m in town. Forever.’
She sat up. ‘Forever?’
His hand again, over her mouth. ‘The world’s changed. It’ll still be hard, for both of us. My family won’t like it any more than yours. But we can leave. Get out of this little slice of Dixie and go someplace like New York, where nobody knows us and nobody cares. Take him with us. Be a real family.’
He was the Bobby she remembered, spinning dreams out of whole cloth, no more realistic now than they were when they were first together.
‘Our families won’t just dislike it. Don’t you remember how they were before?’ Her father’s white-lipped fury, the humiliation and fear on Gerald Evans’s face when her father summoned him to Quail House to spell out exactly what was going to happen, and the fate that would befall the entire Evans family if even a whisper got around.
