ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS
FAULT LINES
This book is dedicated to the memory of my mother,
KATHERINE KITCHENS RIVERS,
who goes with me on every journey,
and to PETER WARD, who lit the way for this one.
CONTENTS
ONE
On the day of my husband’s annual fund-raising gala…
TWO
Pom was obsessed with the rats. The first thing he…
THREE
Mommee thought my daughter, Glynn, was the angel of death.
FOUR
Laura met me at the Los Angeles airport at two…
FIVE
In the middle of my first night in California I…
SIX
I called him first thing the next morning, though. Somehow…
SEVEN
The production studio where the test would be done was…
EIGHT
There was a note on a Post-it stuck to the…
NINE
That woke me was a soft scratching noise at the…
TEN
If you have been married a long time to the…
ELEVEN
I was given a gift that night, one that you…
TWELVE
It was Glynn who led us out. Glynn and Curtis…
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
PRAISE
BOOKS BY ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS
COVER
COPYRIGHT
ABOUT THE PUBLISHER
1
On the day of my husband’s annual fund-raising gala, I was down by the river liberating rats.
There were two of them on this day, massive, stolid, blunt-snouted beasts who bore no more resemblance to common house mice than beavers, or the nutria from the bayous of my childhood. Rattus rattus they were, or, more familiarly, European black rats. I looked them up in Webster’s Unabridged when Pom first designated me their official executioner. I figured that if you’re going to drown something, the least you can do is know its proper name. That was a fatal mistake. Name something, the old folk saying goes, and you have made it your own. Rattus rattus became mine the instant I closed Webster’s, and after that I simply took the victims caught in Pom’s traps down to the river and, instead of drowning them, let them go. Who, after all, would know? Only the dogs went with me, and, being bird dogs, they were uninterested in anything without wings. The leaden-footed, trundling rats were as far from the winged denizens of God’s bestiary as it was possible to be. My hideous charges waddled to freedom unmolested.
There were two and three of them a day in those first steaming days of June. Pom was delighted with the humane traps. The poison put down by the exterminating company had worked even better, but the rats had all died in the walls and for almost a month before we tried the traps the house smelled like a charnel house, sick-sweet and a pestilential. We’d had to cancel several meetings and a dinner party. The exterminators had promised that the rats would all go outside to die, but none of them had, and Pom was furious with both man and beast.
“Why the hell aren’t they going outside?” he said over and over.
“Would you, if you could die in a nice warm pile of insulation?” I said. “Why on earth did either of us believe they’d go outside? Why would they? They probably start to feel the pain almost immediately. They’re not going to run a 10K with arsenic in their guts.”
I hated the poisoning. I hated the thought of the writhing and the squeaking and scrabbling and dying. I never actually heard it, but somehow that was even worse. My mind fashioned grand guignol dances of death nightly behind my Sheetrock. I took to leaving the radio on softly all night, in fear that I would hear. The only result of that was that I would come awake at dawn with my heart jolting when the morning deejay started his drive-time assault and would lie there blearily for long seconds, wondering if it had been the phone I heard, or Pom’s beeper, or Glynn calling, or some new banshee alarm from Mommee upstairs. Only when I had listened for a couple of minutes did it sink in that I was hearing Fred the Undead blasting Atlanta out of bed and onto the road.
As early as I wakened on those mornings, Pom was invariably up earlier and was almost always gone to the clinic by the time I padded into the kitchen in search of coffee. I would find his usual note propped up against the big white Braun coffeemaker: “Merritt: 3 more, 2, in lv. rm. and 1 in libr. Call A. about Fri, I think there’s something. Blue blazer in cleaners? Worm capsules, 2 @. Mommee restless last night, check and call me. Home late, big bucks in town. See you A.M. if not P.M. XXX, P.”
Translated, this meant there were three new captives in the rat traps, and I was to dispatch them in the river. Then I was to call his secretary, Amy Crittenden, who loved him with the fierce, chaste passion of the middle-aged office wife, and see what our plans were for Friday evening; Pom frequently made social arrangements for us and forgot to tell me, so Amy became a willing go-between. I liked and valued her and seldom chafed at her fussy peremptoriness, though I was not above a moment’s satisfaction when I was able to say, “Oh, Amy, he’s forgotten we have plans for Friday. You really need to check with me first.” Then I was to locate his blue blazer and fetch it from the cleaners if it was there, which meant that the Friday mystery evening was casual and funky, like a rib dinner down in the Southwest part of the city, to show the flag in the affluent black community there. Much of Pom’s clinic’s work was done in and for the black communities south of downtown, and he endured the socializing as coin that paid for the free clinical work that was his passion. Pom was as impatient with the River Club as he was with the rib dinner, but knew better than anyone the necessity for both. In the twenty years that the network of Fowler clinics had been in operation, he had become a consummate fund-raiser. He was an eloquent speaker, a tireless listener to fragile egos, and without vanity himself, a rare thing indeed in a physician. The day his board of directors and auxiliary discovered this was the day that he began to move, imperceptibly at first, out of the office and onto the hustings. Because he was unwilling to surrender even a moment of what he considered his real work, diagnosing and healing the poor, he solved the conflict by simply getting up earlier and earlier to get to the clinic and coming home later and later. Now, two decades later, I virtually never saw him by morning light and often not by lamplight, either. Of course he didn’t have time to get his blue blazer out of the cleaners; of course I would do it for him. It was in our contract, his and ours. He would care for the poor and the sick; I would care for him and our family. If this grew tedious at times, I had only to remind myself that Pom and I were in a partnership beyond moral reproach. Caretaking, any sort of caretaking, was my hot button. The smallest allegation of moral slipshoddiness was my Achilles’ heel.
Next, the note bade me give the two bird dogs who lived in the run down by the river their worm capsules, two each. Samson and Delilah were liver-spotted setters, rangy and lean and sleek, seeming always to vibrate with nerves and energy and readiness. Pom had grown up bird hunting with his father, the Judge, on a vast South Georgia timber plantation, and he thought to take the sport up again when we bought the house on the river five years before, so he kept a brace of hounds in the river run at all times. But he had yet to get back out into the autumn fields with them, even though he belonged to an exclusive hunting club over in South Carolina, on the Big Pee Dee River. He did not spend much time with the dogs, and did not want me to make pets of them. It spoiled them for hunting, he said, and it wasn’t as if they were neglected or abused. Their quarters were weatherproof and sumptuous, their runs enormous, and he ran them for a couple of hours on weekends, or had me do it, if he couldn’t. Besides, they were littermates, brother and sister, and they had each
other for company. I will take them the pills in late afternoon when I decant the rats, I would think. Then I can spend some time with them and no one will be the wiser.
It had not yet struck me, at the beginning of that summer, how much of my time was spent doing things about which no one was the wiser.
Mommee restless: Nothing ambiguous about that. Glynnis Parsons Fowler spent her entire married life in her big house on the edge of the great plantation and ruled her husband, sons, and household help with an iron hand in the lace mitt of a perennial wiregrass debutante. As far as I know she was never called Glynnis in her life; her adoring Papa called her Punkin, her sons called her Mommee, and her husband Little Bit, but despite the cloying nicknames and her diminutive stature, she was a formidable presence always. Even now, ten years widowed and five years into Alzheimer’s, two of them spent under our roof, she ruled, only now with mania instead of will and wiles. A restless night meant muttering and shuffling around her room at all hours, which Pom, no matter how weary, never failed to hear and I, no matter how well rested, seldom did. The note meant that he had had to get up and calm her again, and I whose task this was, had not…again. I knew that Pom had no thought of shaming me about this. The shame I felt was born entirely within me. I should have heard her. I will spend the morning with her, I would think, and Ina can go for the groceries and dry cleaning.
Finally, the note told me that someone with the potential for major financial support for the clinic was in town, and Pom was wining and dining him, and might be taking him somewhere afterwards for a nightcap. Many of the clinic’s benefactors were from the smaller cities across the South, and liked to see what they thought of as the bright lights of the big city when they came to Atlanta. Not infrequently, that meant one of the glossier nude dancing clubs over on Cheshire Bridge Road. The first time Pom had come in very late from one of those evenings I whooped with helpless laughter.
“Oh, God, I can just see you with huge silicone boobs on each side of your face, hanging over your ears,” I choked. “Even better, I can see you with huge silicone boobs over your ears and half an inch of five o’clock shadow, glaring out from the front page of the Atlanta Constitution. ‘Prominent physician caught in raid on unlicensed nude dancing club.’ What would Amy say?”
Pom’s square face reddened, and his black hair flopped over his eyes as if he had spent the evening shimmying with a parade of danseuses, but he grinned, a reluctant white grin that split the aforementioned five o’clock shadow like a knife blade through dark plush. By the end of a long day Pom frequently looks like a pirate in a child’s book.
“She’d say it never hurt a real man to sow a few oats,” he said, leering showily at me and twirling an imaginary mustache. And I laughed again, because it was just what she would say, and because he looked, in the lamplight, so much like the much younger and far lighter-hearted man I had married eighteen years before. That man was intense and impulsive and endearingly clumsy, and somehow astonishingly innocent, though he was certainly no stranger to strip joints and bovine boobs. I had not seen that man in a long time. I held out my arms to him that night, and he came into them, and it was near dawn before we slept. That had not happened in a long time, either.
Pom has amazing eyes. They are so blue that you can see them from a distance; you notice them immediately in photographs, and the times I have seen him on television they dominate the screen as if they were fluorescent. It may be because they are fringed with dense, dark lashes and shadowed over by slashes of level black brows, and set into flesh that looks tenderly and perpetually bruised. His thick black hair is usually in his eyes. All of this darkness makes the whites extraordinarily white, and very often they seem so wide open that the white makes a slight ring around the irises. All that white should, I tell him, make him look demented, a mad Irish visionary, but it is the genesis of his apparent innocence, I think. Much of the time Pom seems wide-eyed with surprise at the world.
The rest of him is solid and muscular, and he moves lithely and fast on the balls of his feet, a tight package of coiled energy and strength. He has always reminded me, in his stature, of one of the great cinema dancers, Jimmy Cagney perhaps, or Gene Kelly. But Pom is an abysmal dancer. He is always in a hurry, and frequently stumbles and bumps into things. Oddly, he is an awesome tennis player, fast and savagely focused and powerful. He shows no mercy. I hate playing with him.
He is short, or at least not tall: five nine. My height almost exactly. He pads when he walks, like a tomcat or a street punk, and looks as disheveled as if he had been in a fist fight an hour after dressing, no matter how carefully his shirts are done by the specialty cleaners over in Vinings, or how perfectly Clifford at Ham Stockton’s fits his suits. The shirts and suits are my arsenal, my weapons against the sartorial entropy with which he flirts daily. Pom doesn’t care what he wears. He remembers the blue blazer because his father told him when he sent him off to Woodbury Forest that a man needed nothing else but a good dark suit and a tuxedo to dress like a gentleman. I think his heart leaped up when he discovered white medical coats. He would wear them everywhere if he could, not because he considers them becoming (they are), but because they are comfortable, correct, and there is a seemingly inexhaustible supply of them both at home and at the office. Amy sends them home to be washed twice a week, tenderly folded in tissue paper. She would wash and iron them herself if she could, I am sure. Pom said he saw her polishing his stethoscope once.
Mommee has always insisted that the Fowlers are of old Saxon stock, but both Pom and his brother, Clay, have Celt written all over them, as did his father before him, and his oldest son Chip is the same small, powerful dark creature of the Cornish caves or the wild cliffs of Connaught. Mommee herself is small and birdlike, with a thin, high-bridged nose, pale hazel eyes, and the jaw of a mastiff. A little Teuton in the Tudor gene pool there, no doubt about it. I think Jeff, the younger boy, looks like her, but since Pom’s first wife, Lilly, is short and giltblond too I can’t be sure of that. But in Lilly’s case the smallness is of the small-town high school cheerleader variety, not the Blanche du Bois sort, as Mommee’s is, and runs now to thumping curves that strain at her Chanels and Bill Blasses. And even I, with no eye at all for such things, can tell that the polished hair comes weekly from Carter Barnes. English or Irish, the Fowler provenance matters not at all to anyone but Mommee. Atlanta, and indeed most of Georgia except the old Creole coast, is far too raw and new and self-involved to make much of a distinction, requiring only strong Caucasian chromosomes and good teeth.
I met Pom at a fund-raising party for the new outpatient diagnostic center at Buckhead Hospital, on a spring afternoon in 1978. It was an old-fashioned all-day barbecue on the enormous back lawn of an estate on Cherokee Road in Buckhead that had been built in the early twenties for a former governor of Georgia and had just been renovated by the New Jersey-born administrator of the hospital. There was a gruesome whole hog turning on a spit over a pit of banked coals, hams and pork shoulders on grills, huge iron pots of Brunswick stew, and great bowls of potato salad and coleslaw iced and waiting in the pantry off the cavernous kitchen. Sweating black men and women in starched white and chef’s hats stirred and carried and grinned, looking for all the world like devoted family retainers, but they were, I knew, the cream of the cafeteria staff from the hospital. Others, bearing trays of drinks and hors d’oeuvres across the blue-shadowed green lawn, were waiters and bartenders from the Piedmont Driving Club, imported for the occasion not by the New Jersey administrator, who was not a member, but the silver-haired chief of Internal Medicine, who was. The miniature carousel and the aging clowns and the mulish Shetland pony and crisp young attendants minding the shrieking small children in the blue, oval pool at the far end of the lawn were from the city’s oldest and most favored party-planning establishment. The same sagging clowns had doubtless frightened many of the adults present and the same evil-tempered pony had certainly nipped them on their short, bare legs when its tender was not looking
twenty years before.
I knew all this because I had planned the party, or at least had helped. My advertising and public relations agency had long had Buckhead Hospital for a client, and had long done the PR and printed materials for its various fund-raisers without billing anyone’s time. Most agencies had these gratis clients, whose work was handled solely for the prestige and worthiness of their causes. I had been at the agency for four years, long enough to work my way up to copy chief and be in line for associate creative director, and this was my fourth Buckhead Hospital fundraiser. We had had a Parisian Street circus, a Night at the Winter Palace ball, and an Arabian bazaar. This time the board wanted to include families, and so Christine Cross, my art director friend, and I had suggested the barbecue and modeled it partly on the barbecue at Twelve Oaks from Gone With the Wind.
“Hell, it won’t be any work at all,” Crisscross said, dumping the ashes from her Virginia Slim into my tepid coke. “The board’s got ten Twelve Oakses between ’em, and about a thousand slaves. We won’t have to lift a finger.”
And we hadn’t, hardly. When I walked around the side of the big white house and stood looking down from the veranda at the barbecue in progress, it seemed to be surging and swarming along under its own volition, with everyone knowing exactly what part they were to play, and doing it faultlessly. The lawn was a sea of pink linen tablecloths and green tents and seersucker suits and pastel cocktail dresses and butterfly pinafores and sunsuits. The only jarring note was a thick-shouldered, dark-faced young man with his hair in his eyes and a red-splotched white physician’s jacket, crouching on one knee at the bottom of the veranda steps and attempting to mop a veritable bath of red off the furious purple face and arms of a bellowing, struggling small boy. The red looked shockingly like blood but a vinegary tang in the still air told me it was barbecue sauce. Behind the man a slightly older boy was dancing up and down, stark naked and dripping, waving a tiny wet bathing suit in his hand and shrieking, “Dry me off! Dry me off! Jeff peed in the pool and it’s all over me!”
Fault Lines Page 1
