by Gwen Florio
‘We were kids then. We can make our own decisions now. They don’t have any legal say over us anymore.’
He was serious. He was serious.
The good feeling leached from her body, chased by self-pity. Couldn’t they have had this one wonderful night? Why did he have to go and ruin things?
‘Speaking of legal – have you forgotten I’m married?’
He actually laughed, that silent shoulder-shake again, flash of teeth in the moonlight. ‘Have you forgotten divorce is legal? Look, I know it’ll take a while to get everything straightened out. But I’ll be waiting for you. And so will our son.’
She spoke very slowly and carefully.
‘Bobby. I can’t get divorced.’
His voice lost some of his lightness. ‘Wait – are you Catholic? Somehow I always thought you were Methodist, like everybody else around here. I guess we’ll just have to live in sin.’ Struggling now to fend off reality, just as she had been a few moments earlier.
Before, their parents had torn them apart. Now she had to do it herself. And she had to do it fast. How long had he been in her room? Not just her room – the room that on every other night she shared with her husband.
‘No. I can’t do it because … because I just can’t. Also, it’s getting late.’ She shifted on the bed, hoping to stir him into movement.
He didn’t take the hint.
‘You just … can’t.’ His mimicry like a slap.
She tried for the right mix of sorrow and decisiveness. ‘No. I can’t.’
‘Why, Penelope? Why can’t you?’ He wasn’t going to let her off the hook.
‘Bobby, you of all people know why.’ She put her arms around him but he shook her off.
‘I, of all people,’ he mused. ‘You’re right. I do know why. But I’m willing to brave it. I thought you were, too.’
She didn’t know she was crying until the tears pattered against the sheets. ‘I’m not brave like you.’
‘Oh, yes, you are.’
She raised her head, hopeful. He was going to make it easy, after all.
‘Big, brave white girl. Not scared to sleep with the black boy. As long as nobody – ’specially nobody white – never, ever finds out about it. Fuck him and then kick him to the curb and go on her merry way.’
‘Stop it! It’s not like that.’
He wouldn’t stop. ‘It’s not? Prove it.’
He was on his feet and so was she. They faced each other across the expanse of the rumpled bed.
‘I just did.’ She gestured toward the bed. ‘What we have – it’s special.’
‘So special it’s a secret best kept.’
She leapt at the lifeline he’d thrown her. ‘Yes! Yes!’
He hissed his reply. ‘Well, I’m done keeping secrets. From your people and from mine. You think it’ll be any easier on me than it will on you? But I’m willing to stand up for us. Shout it to the world. Trust me, Penelope – it’ll be such a relief once it’s out there.’
Was it a plea or a threat? Or the bravado of a young man who’d spent the last week fighting for a universal cause and was now prepared to take the battle on behalf of his own personal cause?
She had to be sure.
‘Shout it to the world? It’s just an expression, right?’ She attempted a laugh.
‘Watch me! I’ll lead the march tomorrow.’ He struck a pose. ‘What do I want? Penelope! When do I want her? Now!’
The words ominous when spoken in a whisper.
He came around the end of the bed and took her in his arms. ‘It’ll be all right. You’ll see.’
‘No. It won’t. You can’t do this.’
His arms tightened. ‘Watch me.’
She wrestled free. ‘Don’t.’
His arms fell to his side. He backed away, toward the window.
‘We have a son, Penelope. We have a son.’
‘Don’t leave like this.’ She’d raised her voice.
Down the hall, a door banged. A voice called her name. Hiram.
‘Bobby! Hurry. You’ve got to get out of here.’
But he didn’t move. ‘Is that your husband? Good. We can settle this now.’
Footsteps, approaching. ‘Penelope? Penelope? Are you all right?’
‘Bobby.’ She willed him out the window. Instead, he reached for the light. Switched it on. Stood shirtless in the middle of the room, eyes shining as he faced the door with the mixture of resolve and anticipation she’d seen when he marched up Commerce Street in the middle of the day to the jeers and disdain of dozens of white people.
Hiram’s footsteps halted outside the door. ‘Penelope?’ Courteous as always, not barging in the way anyone else would have.
It was too late.
Bobby opened his mouth to speak.
She flipped up the lid of the rosewood box on her nightstand, movements automatic.
Ease down the safety.
Rack the slide.
Squeeze.
FIFTY-SEVEN
‘Come. I’ll show you.’
Penelope’s command dragged Nora from the dark place into which she’d fallen as her mother spoke, a slow-motion tumble past images her mind refused to accept. Her mother, a gun in her hand. A man collapsing even as another burst into the room.
‘We told him it was a burglary,’ Penelope said as Nora and Grace, stunned and silent, followed her up the stairs. ‘My parents, of course, understood what was going on. My father was able to convince Hiram that it would be better for all concerned if it was kept quiet – which, as Chief of Police, he was able to do. “Chateau is already a tinderbox,” Father said. “What with everything happening in town, we’d set off a panic if people knew a black man had broken into a white woman’s bedroom.”’
‘The town blew up anyway,’ Grace reminded her.
Penelope looked over her shoulder. ‘Yes, it did.’ As calmly as if she’d said, ‘Yes, it’s raining.’
She pushed open the bedroom door – the room where Nora had slept nearly every night since her arrival – and, again, Nora saw the scene play out in her mind. Grace must have had the same thoughts.
‘Where?’ she asked.
Penelope flipped back a corner of the rug with her toe to reveal the damning stain beneath, dark and irregular, spreading across the wide floorboards as it must have that night when Bobby’s lifeblood leaked away.
‘We scrubbed and scrubbed but couldn’t get it out. Father even refinished the floor, but he couldn’t sand it away. It had sunk in too deep, and, of course, we didn’t dare call someone to replace the floor.’
‘Of course not.’
Nora wondered if Grace’s dry responses were a way of keeping the horror at bay. But Grace’s next utterance indicated she had every intention of drawing it nearer still.
‘Where was the gun?’
‘Why, in its box on my nightstand, where it always was. I still have it. Would you like to see it?’ You’d have thought she was a tour guide in a museum.
‘Yes. I would.’
Nora didn’t want to see it. Didn’t want to see or hear anything else that made it more impossible by the moment to deny the fact that her mother had killed a man. And not in self-defense, a burglar perhaps intent upon a far more heinous crime, as her father had been led to believe, but because he was about to embarrass her.
She bent double, gagging, and straightened to see Grace’s eyes upon her, cold and steady. If I can take it, so can you, they said.
Back down the stairs, the dog trailing, the cat disappeared to who knows where.
Penelope opened her bedroom door and stood aside. Nora followed Grace halfway into the room, watching as she lifted the lid to the box by the bed. A litter of jewelry lay within, earrings, a tangle of necklaces, a few bracelets, costume pieces that she wore for daytime.
‘I looked in there.’ Grace’s voice had lost its hard edge, rising in protest. ‘But I looked there!’
‘Look again.’
Grace started to lift out the jewel
ry piece by piece, then upended the box, its contents scattering across the table and on to the floor. She turned it so that Nora could see the gun-shaped recess within. ‘Useless,’ she snapped. ‘It wouldn’t have been proof, not without the gun.’
‘Which was in the coffeepot.’ A look of sly satisfaction crossed Penelope’s face. ‘You never touched the tea service. And we certainly never used the coffeepot. Not even Nora.’ A bit of bewilderment in those last words, incomprehension that someone would scorn the extra moments of preparation to pour their coffee from the elegant silver vessel with the swooping Smythe monogram, rather than a pedestrian glass pot.
Grace ran her fingers around the worn velvet depression inside the box, evidently reconsidering. ‘Maybe not completely useless. It would have shown a gun was missing from this house. Maybe even the type of gun. I would have known.’
‘You would have guessed,’ Penelope corrected her.
‘I would have guessed right.’
‘Yes.’
The gun in question hung in Nora’s hand. It was so small, yet so heavy.
Grace held the box out to Nora. ‘Here. You can put it back where it belongs. Hand it over to the police in a nice, pretty package.’
Nora took it and backed away. It was one thing to give up her grandfather, a man long dead, as Bobby’s killer. But her mother?
‘She could end up in prison. The press will crucify her,’ she protested.
‘She should. And they should.’
And still Penelope gazed off into the distance, as though politely waiting for Grace and Nora to finish a discussion about the weather.
‘She’s seventy years old!’
‘That’s about fifty more years than my brother got.’
Nora imagined Grace speaking those same words before judge and jury. The effect they would have.
She tried again. ‘She’s had to live every one of those years knowing what she did.’
Grace gave a long, ostentatious look around the room, its four-poster bed and crocheted canopy, the skirted vanity with its crystal perfume bottles and monogrammed silver-backed brushes, the brocade fainting couch across the room, the bathroom door open just enough to reveal the marble tub, the separate shower, the toilet and exotic bidet.
‘I’m just guessing,’ she drawled, ‘that a cell is about the size of that bathroom there. She should feel right at home. You just hang on to that gun. I’m calling the Attorney General’s Office first thing in the morning. Gun or no gun, they’ll want to talk with you. And with her.’ She lifted her chin toward Penelope.
Nora made a final supplication.
‘Grace, please. You know what happened now. Isn’t that enough?’
Grace opened her mouth to reply, but Penelope answered the question first.
‘No. It’s not.’
Grace left without the gun, wheeling on her heel and slamming the heavy front door – the one she’d only used once before – so hard the frame shook.
‘I told you that you should have left.’
Nora and Penelope stood in the hallway, watching Grace drive away, the view warped by the thick, wavy glass in the long windows beside the door.
‘The rain’s stopped,’ Nora said pointlessly. As she spoke, sunlight poured through a break in the clouds, spilling across the lawn toward Electra, setting her aluminum surface agleam.
‘The body shop did a good job.’ She couldn’t seem to stop talking about meaningless things.
Penelope turned back toward the kitchen.
‘Yes, he did. After all the work I put into it.’
‘What?’ Nora hurried to catch up with her.
‘Sit,’ Penelope commanded. ‘I’ll get you a sweater.’
Nora sat, shivering. The storm had dropped the temperature a good ten degrees, maybe even twenty. With the heat finally broken, Nora found herself wishing its return, missing the way the syrupy humidity slowed things down, softened them. Now everything seemed hard and cold.
Penelope returned with a light mohair sweater, draping it around Nora’s shoulders. She put water on to boil and retrieved the silver teapot, stepping around the companion coffeepot on the floor, untouched since it had given up the gun that effectively indicted her.
‘What do you mean,’ Nora asked, ‘about all the work you put into it?’
Penelope studied the tins of tea on a narrow shelf beside the stove. ‘Herbal, I think. We could all stand to calm down.’ Even though there were only two of them now.
She measured leaves into the pot. Nora smelled mint, an old childhood remedy when her stomach was upset. Penelope turned to her.
‘I painted it.’
Nora shook her head. She’d heard one too many unbelievable things on this day. ‘Painted what?’
A watercolor, she willed Penelope to say. An old chair that needed brightening. An accent wall in the bathroom.
‘Your trailer, of course. I thought it might convince you to leave.’
Left unspoken. And if you had, none of this would have happened.
Nora tried to imagine her tiny mother, clumsy in her boot, clambering on to a stepladder, a bucket and brush in one hand, to splash the scarlet words across Electra’s pristine surface.
‘When?’
‘That part was easy.’ Penelope poured the tea in cups and limped to the table. ‘You were always running off to town. I had plenty of time.’
The day she’d delivered the cake to Grace. Plenty of time, indeed.
Nora sipped her tea, nearly choking on a sudden thought. ‘Mother!’ She took what she’d hoped would be a steadying gulp of her tea, instead succeeded in burning her mouth. She touched her tongue to her lower lip. ‘The day the trailer came loose. You didn’t – of course you didn’t. You couldn’t possibly.’
Penelope’s lips quirked. ‘Oh, couldn’t I?’
When Nora gaped, she explained. ‘You left your checklist on the kitchen counter. It was so easy. I just followed the instructions in reverse. It wasn’t that hard – although those safety chains were terribly heavy. I unhooked them and looped them back into place so they still looked as though they were fastened. The same with that skinny wire.’
‘The breakaway cord.’
‘Is that what it’s called? And I took out the pin in the hitch.’
‘My God, Mother. You almost got yourself killed. And even if it hadn’t come off when it did, it could have killed someone else.’
Penelope poured more tea. ‘That wasn’t part of the plan. I thought it would come off somewhere toward the end of the lane. If I’d known you were heading to town so soon, I’d have postponed my walk. I thought if the graffiti didn’t scare you away from here, this surely would.’
She took her daughter’s hand in her thin, age-spotted ones. For the first time that day, tears shone in her eyes.
‘Oh, Nora. Why did you have to ask so many questions?’
FIFTY-EIGHT
Nora slept in Electra that night.
She couldn’t imagine ever sleeping in her childhood bedroom again, although Electra left her nearly as uneasy as she lay there imagining her mother stroking a red-dipped paintbrush down its side or fumbling to unhitch it.
The gun slept beside her, nestled in the soft velvet embrace of its case, rather than the cold interior of the sterling coffeepot.
She could throw it away. Open the box, lift it from within, follow the path of moonlight across the lawn and on to the dock, row the boat downriver toward the Beach and let it fall into the water somewhere along the way. Why on earth hadn’t her grandfather or even her mother done that? If Penelope was capable of unhitching a trailer, lobbing a gun into the river’s depths would have been the easiest thing in the world.
She hadn’t told Nora and Grace what happened after the shooting, but it was easy enough to conjecture. Her grandfather, maybe with her father’s help, had carried Bobby’s body from the house to the boat, and then dumped it at the Beach, where it would give a terrible fright to a man just hoping to pull a couple of perch f
rom the river before breakfast, bring them home to his wife to clean and dredge in cornmeal and fry next to his eggs. Instead, he was met with Bobby’s lifeless, accusing gaze, his body half in, half out of the water, head nodding gently with the current, the hole in his forehead washed neat and clean.
And then they all – her grandfather and grandmother, her father and, most of all, her mother – had gone about their lives without ever mentioning it again. Her grandfather had spent the next hellish weeks immersed in working with the National Guard to control the riots that followed Bobby’s killing, and to keep the town from erupting again once the protesters’ initial fury had abated.
Her grandmother would have slipped back into her First Families social set when Chateau finally returned to stultifying rhythms, the events of past weeks discussed only in the vaguest generalities, with a combined sense of dismay and airy relief that things were back to normal.
Her father would have gotten up the next morning and gone to his job as plant manager at Smythe’s Best Backfin, and every weekday morning thereafter, his drinking steadily increasing over the years until his liver became a scarred, petrified thing and his skin and eyes turned yellow, his stomach and ankles swelling to grotesquerie, and he died as quietly as he had lived.
And her mother? Nora wondered at the iron strength of will that enabled her to trip gaily through the rest of her life, sharing her husband’s bed – Nora herself the proof of that – even as every single day she came face to face with the woman who knew, or at least suspected, what she’d done.
Nora imagined the two of them, Grace and Penelope, locked in a sort of silent, mortal, decades-long combat, the unspoken subtext that ran between each sentence exchanged between them.
And now Grace was going to call the Attorney General’s Office. Who, without the gun, would have only circumstantial evidence. Grace was right – the press would swarm yet again. Grace would probably make sure of that.
But lacking the hard evidence of a murder weapon, Grace’s accusation could be framed as the rantings of a woman unhinged when her little brother lost his only son. Because as far as the wider world knew, Kwame remained Grace’s brother, not her nephew. White Chateau would be only too pleased to imagine Grace as a vengeful villain.
