I don’t like balls and banquets, but I always enjoyed this one because so many of the doctors and their wives who came were old friends, and this was often the only time in the year that I saw them. There is a kind of emotional shorthand that binds doctor’s wives, and it is a sweet and easy thing to have friends with similar context. Many of the men had been close to Pom ever since internship and residency, and one, Phil Fredericks, had been his roommate at Hopkins. Phil was with him at the clinic now, and Jenny, his funny, volatile wife, was one of my few close friends. I did see Jenny, for tennis and auxiliary work and sometimes for what we called escape days, when we took off and spent afternoons at the movies or antiquing or hiking in the North Georgia hills an hour’s drive away. Or at least, I used to see Jenny.
I saw her now, waving from a round table half full of couples close to one of the tall windows that overlooked the twilight green of the Piedmont Park woods.
“I saved a place for y’ll,” she said. “Hey, Pom. Lord, Merritt, what have you done to yourself? Have you been to Canyon Ranch, or what? You look fabulous.”
“No Canyon Ranch. This is what’s called the last-resort look,” I said, hugging her lightly and smiling around the table. It was largely women now, most of whom I knew, two of whom I did not. The men had sucked Pom into their circle and swept him out onto the terrace, where a small knot of men I did not know stood holding drinks and munching hors d’oeuvres from the tray a waiter was passing. From the rapt attention that Pom’s group of doctors was according them, I knew they were visiting Big Bucks. I saw tall, skeletal Bill Ramsey talking, rocking back and forth with his hands in his pockets, and then there was a burst of laughter and I knew that Bill had told one of his scurrilous jokes in his exaggerated Savannah drawl. One of the Big Bucks said something and everyone laughed again, and Pom slapped him on the back. I stared. I could not remember ever in my life seeing Pom slap anyone on the back.
“Big bucks,” I muttered to Jenny.
“The biggest. Must be dead ripe, too. I don’t think I ever saw Pom whack anybody on the back before. What’s gotten into him?”
“I really don’t know,” I said. “Sunspots or El Niño or something.”
“Well, anyway, what have you been doing? I’ve missed the tennis and the escape days. Is it Pom’s mother?”
“She’s not doing so well,” I said. “She’s a little addled these days. I’ve been staying pretty close to home.”
“What I hear is that she’s absolutely wacko and ought to be in a nursing home,” Jenny said. “And that you’ve been looking after her full-time. Lordy, wasn’t it enough that you raised those two boys after Lilly took off? And then with Glynn and all…Pom is a darling and a saint, but he’s just like all doctors, blind to what’s ailing his family. You ought to go on strike.”
I sighed. I knew that Phil would have told her; there was practically nothing about Pom that Phil did not know or could not intuit, and he told Jenny everything. And if Jenny knew about Mommee, every other doctor’s wife at the table knew. Miz Talking Fredericks, Pom called her. But perhaps I could head her off before the two women I did not know heard every last detail about the saga of Mommee.
“I don’t mean to say he’s not a saint; we all know he is,” Jenny said hurriedly, seeing that she had made me uncomfortable. “I just happen to think that you’re a saint, too.”
“Not me,” I said. “That’s Pom’s department. One saint to a family.”
“Pommy always was a saint,” one of the strange women said, and Jenny and I looked at her. I smiled inquiringly. Had I met her before? There was something about the dark eyes, and the tiny, pearly teeth. A child’s teeth…
“I’m sorry, I thought you knew Sweetie,” Jenny said. “Sweetie Cokesbury. You know, she’s Leonard’s wife. Or bride, I should say. They’re just back from St. Maarten; they honeymooned on that enormous boat of Leonard’s, or should I say ship?”
“Oh, of course,” I said. “I’m sorry. We have met. I think it was a while ago, though—”
“It was,” said the woman. Her voice fluted like a tiny wind instrument. “It was way back when Pommy was still in private practice. I had just lost my darling husband, and Pommy took pity on me and asked me to a lovely party you all gave at the River Club. I always tell Pommy that he saved my life that night, because that’s where I first met Lennie, and one thing led to another, and…here I am. I don’t wonder you don’t remember. I was considerably slimmer then. I swear, after eating my way through the Caribbean, I’m the one that ought to go to Canyon Ranch. Lennie’s always trying to put meat on my bones, as he calls it. Can’t stand skinny women. I bet you can eat like a hog and not gain an ounce! Back when Pommy and I were growing up I was a little bitty thing, too.”
I remembered then. Sweetie Carroll she had been when we met, tiny and dark and so cloyingly flirtatious that I was amazed that the men at the party did not think her a caricature of a Southern belle as I did, but they had not seemed to. Most of them hung on Sweetie’s every honeyed word. Now she was as solid and round as a butterball and tanned to a deep bronze, and so blond that her pouffed hair seemed spun of gilt. She wore a black dress so low-cut that her ponderous, sun-speckled breasts seemed in danger of bobbing out of it, and her ears and throat and fingers flashed with diamonds and emeralds. Leonard Cokesbury was one of the richest men in the Southeast. He had inherited a fortune in Coca-Cola stock.
“I remember,” I said. “I’m sorry. I forgot my glasses along with everything else, we were running so late. You and Pom are from the same hometown, aren’t you?”
“Childhood sweethearts since we were three,” she said, laughing a tinkling laugh. I thought of crystal shattering. “Our daddies were in the timber business together. I was in and out of Mommee’s house so often she used to say I was her only daughter. I tell you, the trouble Pommy and I got into, you just wouldn’t believe. There wasn’t a day that passed, hardly, that we weren’t together. I could tell you some tales about that husband of yours that would curl that pretty hair of yours! He gave me my first little kiss, and took me to my first prom, and I used to go up to dances at Woodbury Forest. Mommee used to say she already had my weddin’ gown picked out. But then he went on up there to Baltimore and got involved in all that civil rights stuff, and he changed, he surely did. And now look at him. A real entrepreneur, as well as a saint. Who would have thought it? I’m so proud of Pommy, I surely am. And proud of you, too, Merritt. I hear what a saint you are in your own right. It’s so good for Pommy, after that Lilly person. I thought Mommee was going to die when he brought her home the first time.”
I simply stared at her. Her words were like mercury spilling out of a broken thermometer; there seemed no way of stopping them, of picking them up. Pommy? Mommee? I had never heard anyone call Pom’s mother that but Pom and then us, his family. This ridiculous woman seemed to know as much about my family, especially my husband, as I did. I smiled stiffly as the words tumbled and skittered on. Beside me I heard Jenny snicker softly.
“Well,” Sweetie went on, “I just wanted to tell you that all Pommy’s old friends were so happy for him when he found you, and proud, and all that. Taking those poor little boys to raise after that woman ran off, and giving up your own career, and your sister on your hands all your life and then her going off like that, and of course poor little Mommee, and then I understand your daughter hasn’t been at all well…”
She looked at me with eyes as avian and voracious as a starling’s. Her smile widened; the sharp little teeth gleamed.
“My daughter’s just fine,” I said, smiling back. My mouth felt stretched.
“I’m so glad! As I said, you are truly to be admired, you surely are. You all come see us real soon. I’m having a glorious time doing over that big old white elephant. Tell Pom I’ve put in an old-fashioned rock garden just like his grandmother Parsons used to have at Sea Island. He’s really just got to see it.”
“I’ll tell him,” I said.
She waggled her fin
gers at us and tottered off to join the circle of men on the veranda. I could see the peeling, brown, bald head of Leonard Cokesbury in the crowd. From behind she looked like a little black cube topped with cotton candy, but she had beautiful legs, tanned and shapely. Her skirt was very short.
We were silent for a moment and then tall, raw-boned Dot Crenshaw across the table said, “We’ll watch until she goes to the ladies’ room and then we’ll rush her. Jenny can tackle her, I’ll stick her head in the john, and you can flush it, Merritt. God, what an awful woman!”
“But rich,” Jenny and I and Pam Crocker next to Jenny said together, and we all laughed.
Later, after dinner, I went to the ladies’ room to see what I could do about my naked, sweating face. The heat on the terrace, where we had had coffee, was stifling, even at ten o’clock. I washed my face and was standing there dripping and blinded, groping for my towel, when the door whooshed open and I heard Sweetie Cokesbury’s piccolo voice again.
“Sweetie, hello,” she bubbled. “You have the right idea; it’s simply sweltering, isn’t it? Let me hand you that…”
She passed me the towel and I mopped my face and looked at her. She was gleaming and enameled; there was not a gilt hair out of place. I wondered what she had sprayed herself with to preserve her surface in the heat.
She dabbed at my skirt with a paper towel.
“Here, you’ve splattered,” she said. “Listen, I really meant what I said, you know. Not many women I know would have had the gumption to stick it out, to hold things together after everything else you’ve been through, when that silly business at the clinic came up. When was it? A long time. I remember Bush had just been elected…”
I looked at her in the mirror. She was smiling brilliantly at me.
“What business was that?” I said.
“Oh, that little nonsense about the Negro doctor. Or was she Indian? None of us were sure. And none of us believed it, of course. It was just that Pommy always did adore the Negroes—”
The door swished open again and Jenny came in.
“Pom’s looking for you,” she said, and stopped. I think now she must have seen something on my face, though at the time it felt perfectly still and blank.
“I have to run, too,” Sweetie said. “I just wanted you to know you have a real fan on Habersham Road.”
She bustled out, leaving a trail of Opium behind her.
“What was that all about?” Jenny said, looking after her.
“Did Pom ever have an affair with a black woman doctor?” I said.
“What? No! Of course not! Did that bitch tell you he did? She’s lying…”
Jenny’s voice rose in incredulity and anger. She caught herself and lowered it, and took my hands and looked into my face. Her hands felt scalding hot. Mine must be ice-cold, I thought stupidly.
“Do you know that he didn’t, Jenny?” I said.
“Of course I know it,” she said, almost hissing in her effort to keep her voice low. “Don’t you think Phil would know if he had? Even if nobody else on earth knew, Phil would, and he would tell me. He’s never said a word about any affair with any black doctor. God, I suppose she meant Bella Strong. She’s that Jamaican doctor they had on staff for a year or two, before she went to Africa, you remember. That’s just ludicrous. Bella had a fiancé on the faculty at Morehouse; she married him and they both went to Biafra or somewhere—”
“She didn’t mention a name,” I said. I felt as though I were speaking through a mouthful of Kleenex. My mouth was desperately dry.
“Somebody should throttle her,” Jenny spat. “She’s been after Pom for years, I thought you knew that. Phil said she used to follow him around like a puppy before he went off to prep school, and I think he did ask her to a dance or two up there, mainly because his mother made him. When he married what’s-her-name, in Baltimore, she practically went into mourning. To hear Phil tell it, the whole stupid little town did. When that broke up, her husband conveniently kicked off—I wouldn’t be surprised if she didn’t put rat poison in his juleps—and she high-tailed it up here to grab up ol’ Pom before somebody else did. But it was too late. He’d already met you. She hung around for several years trying to get into our crowd, but nobody invited her anywhere, and finally Lennie married her. Well, hell, Lennie’ll marry anybody. You can just imagine how much she thinks of you, can’t you? Of course she’s lying. Can’t you see what she’s trying to do to you? I’m going to tell Phil the minute we get in the car. I don’t care how much money Lennie Cokesbury has; the clinic ought not touch a penny of it. And they won’t, either, if Phil has anything to do with it. God, but Pom’s going to be furious—”
“Tell Phil not to mention it to Pom,” I said. I knew it would do no good to ask her not to tell Phil. “I mean that, Jen. It’s…I just can’t stand the thought of people talking about us that way. I’ve never once in twenty-six years thought of Pom and anybody else—”
“Well, that’s because there hasn’t been anybody else,” she said. “I’ll tell Phil not to tell Pom, but somebody ought to put the fear of God into that lying bitch. I’d love to do it myself.”
I turned to the mirror and began dabbing lipstick on my mouth. My hand was shaking so that the lipstick ran wildly up my cheek. I began to scrub at it with a tissue.
She reached over and put her hand on mine, and I stopped scrubbing and looked at her in the mirror, and let my hand drop. I felt hot and then cold, all gone inside; I ached all over as if I were getting the flu.
“You do believe me, don’t you?” Jenny said.
“Of course I do,” I croaked. I cleared my throat and said it again, more strongly: “Of course I do.”
“If you have any doubt at all, ask him. Ask him, Merritt. You know he won’t lie to you.”
“Maybe I will,” I said. She was right. Pom would not lie to me. He never had.
“Do it,” Jenny said.
But I did not think I would. Partly it was because I did not believe Sweetie Cokesbury’s words; Pom? An affair? Simply impossible. I would have known.
Partly it was because it did not matter. No matter what my mind believed, something deep inside me must forever look at Pom now as a man who had or had not had an extra-marital affair. There was an option, no matter how incredible, where none had existed. We were in new territory, a place with a different geography. It was as if I stood on a shore and saw, not the horizon that I had always seen, but a new shore-line, another country. I did not believe Sweetie, but still I could see that other shore. Possibility rejected still exists.
From that it was only a small step.
With anybody else, then? All those nights and weekends away at the clinic, all that time…if not this Jamaican Bella, then someone else?
I tossed away the Kleenex and followed Jenny out of the ladies’ room. I believed her with all my heart, but something in my guts hurt; my very womb ached.
Pom and Phil were waiting for us in the doorway of the dining room. Pom came up and put his arm around me and buried his nose in the wilted hibiscus.
“Tondelayo wait up for big man?” he said.
“Big man going out on toot?” I said, my heart sinking.
“Big man going to take Big Bucks bwanas out for—Oh, hell, you can guess where the Charlotte contingent wants to go. I’ll try to palm it off on Phil after a little while. You take the car and go on. I’ll get a ride. Don’t wait up; I was only kidding. We’ll probably be a while.”
“I wish you wouldn’t,” I said, and he looked at me. I had never said it before.
“I have to, honey. These guys are almost sewed up. There’s nothing on the agenda for a long time after this. And Cookie’s there, so you should be able to sleep without having to check on Mommee.”
“I know,” I said. “I just miss you sometimes.”
“Me, too,” he said, tightening his grip on my shoulders. “I changed my mind: do wait up.”
“Maybe I will,” I said, smiling, and he smiled back and started across t
he dining room after Phil. Halfway across he looked back and then dropped to one knee and flung one arm out and laid the other hand across his heart.
“But soft,” he shouted, “what light from yonder window breaks? It is the East, and Merritt is the sun!”
And I laughed, my heart turning over beneath the white halter. Just before we were married we went to see a rerun of Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet, that consummately beautiful film in which the luminous nakedness of the two young principals ignited such a controversy. I had been so moved by it that I had wept mutely when it was over, and was unable to speak for a time after we left the theater for the sobbing that kept bubbling up in my throat. Pom, trying uneasily to comfort me, stumbled in his haste and clumsiness and went down on one knee. Looking up at me, he laid his hand over his heart and said those words, and I stopped crying and laughed, and then wept again at the flood of love that welled up in me, to see him there on the asphalt of the parking lot, telling me in those ineffable old words that he loved me.
I had not thought of the incident for a long time until tonight. Now, the same tide of love surged through me. This time I laughed and did not cry.
“Have fun, you incredible fool,” I called back to him. When the Cherokee came round, I rolled down the window on my side, and found the late-night jazz program from Clark College. Don Shirley curled out into the warm night: Orpheus in the Underworld; I had had the album at school. I hardly thought of the ugly words Sweetie Cokesbury had spoken in the ladies’ room during the entire soft, mimosa-smelling drive home to the river.
Hardly.
3
Mommee thought my daughter, Glynn, was the angel of death. When she had first come to stay with us Mommee was still able to watch television, or at least, to sit fairly quietly and watch whatever it was that she saw on the screen. Only later did she become so agitated and distractible that she could not sit still, but got up to shuffle and roam and mutter after a few minutes before the set.
Fault Lines Page 7
