Liberating Paris

by Linda Bloodworth Thomason

  “Evangeline?”

  “Please don’t tell Wood you saw me here. I promised him I would never set foot in this store.”

  Sidney stared at the large can of poison. Slim defended it. “I have a gopher problem. A serious one.”

  Then she surprised herself by not wanting to go on with this story. It was as though, since she had nothing to gain anymore, she suddenly had nothing to lose, either. “If you must know, Sidney, I’m trying to kill myself.”

  Then she began laughing, gesturing toward the massive structure, “I should’ve known better than to come to the Astrodome to do it. Lloyd Case, down at the hardware store, would’ve known exactly how much poison you need to kill yourself. But then he would’ve also called my son. The only good thing about this whole dreadful place is the lack of personalized service!”

  Slim laughed again, but Sidney just stared at her and said, “Could we get that cup of coffee now?”

  Slim and Sidney Garfinkel were seated in a booth at the Motor Harbor. A waitress, who had leathery skin and looked like someone in her past had been cruel to her, sat two cups of coffee down in front of them. Besides some truck drivers and local farmers in coveralls, there was a boy and a skanky-looking girl with white-trash hair sitting at the counter. The girl wore a T-shirt that said, “Keep your hands off my squirrel.” Some of the older farmers seemed puzzled by this and tried not to look at it. Several stopped at Slim and Sidney’s table as they were leaving and Sidney stood, enthusiastically shaking hands with them. Then he sat down and resumed his conversation.

  “Don’t do this, Evangeline. This will pass, as it always has.”

  Slim sat for a minute. Then she said, “I’m tired, Sidney. And I don’t have Mac to help me fight it anymore…. My God, he was strong.”

  “Then use me. I’m strong, too.”

  “That’s crazy. You don’t even know me really.”

  “I know you’re not ready to make this decision. Give me six months. And then if you still feel the same way, I’ll leave you alone.”

  “Six months? Why? What can you do?”

  “I’m a survivor. You must know I know things.”

  There was a pause as Slim pondered this. “Secrets?”

  “Yes. And tricks, too.” He raised his eyebrows in a way that told her not to doubt him. If Slim had not been suffering from the Brown Meanness, she surely would have laughed at this strange, tall man telling her he had tricks that could save her—this man who only days ago she could not have imagined telling her most personal thoughts to, much less that he would place himself as an obstacle to her leaving.

  Mavis was in her Oldsmobile Cutlass, cruising by Mary Paige’s house. She looked at the upstairs window each time she passed, hoping for a glimpse of her new friend. But the curtains were pulled and there wasn’t even any smoke coming from the chimney. Mavis figured this was due to two women living there alone.

  Then she went home and stood in her nightgown, staring out her own kitchen window. Unbelievably, it had started to snow again. This was more snow than she could remember ever coming before Christmas. She was thinking what it might be like to get out in this weather and build another person with your own child. And then come in and read that child a book by the fire. Mavis wondered if Mary Paige Kenyon might also be wondering whether she, like Mavis, was foolish to try and hold on to an old dream. She had not been able to get Mary Paige out of her mind. How simple and sweet she was—so good in her heart that she didn’t even seem to hate the people who wanted to deny her most noble aspiration. This girl, who had risked being killed by guerrilla soldiers in order to spread the word of the very church that was now working against her. Mavis had known Mary Paige for such a short time and yet already she couldn’t think of anyone who she admired more. And if Harlan B. Pillow Jr. wasn’t going to do right by her, then Mavis was thinking that somehow she would. Exactly what that meant, she didn’t know. But she had a feeling that it was going to involve more than denying a man his turkey sandwich.

  Sidney Garfinkel’s car was parked in front of Slim’s house. Inside, she attempted to stir a pitiful fire with a bent wrought-iron poker, before Sidney gently took it from her. “Here. Let me do that.”

  Slim fell back in the easy chair in her den, while Sidney added several more logs to the flame. Wood had stacked these logs on the porch for her, not even a week ago. And she had gone out in the snow and brought several in before Sidney arrived. In spite of the warmth of the fire, she was still wearing her coat over a long silk nightgown with Dr. Mac’s old fly-fishing boots. Slim made no effort to remove her gear. Maybe she was tired. Or maybe she still had on her winter coat because she was in a Mama-leaving-this-world kind of mood tonight. She wasn’t sure.

  Now Sidney was saying something about how perhaps he should not have parked where people could see his car from the road. Slim cut him off. “Sidney, I truly do not care what people think about you being in my house. Now, I want to know these secrets of yours.”

  She suddenly noticed what an incredibly appealing and impeccable human being he was, in his soft brown pullover sweater, starched blue shirt, and gabardine pants. And his smell was sublime, too. Of course, Slim couldn’t have cared one whit about any of it. It was just a clinical observation, with no investment in it.

  Sidney cleared his throat, then, “All right. You know my job, in the camp?”

  “No.”

  “All right. Well, what I did…my job was transporting bodies from the gas chambers to the burial site.” He cleared his throat again. “So, anyway, I started counting my steps. For example, it was 660 steps to the, uh, first mass grave. To go there once and back, was 1,320 steps. To go there and back four times was a mile. And so on. Then I found a foldout map of the world in the back of a passport. Ironically, it belonged to a gypsy. It even had a mileage scale. So I stole it. Each night I would mark on the map with a pencil that a friend and I shared a tiny, infinitesimal mark of how far I’d gone—until one day I was no longer in Germany, I had crossed into Austria and was staring into the face of the Alps. In eight months, I was completely out of Europe. By the time the Allies came, I was in India.”

  Slim searched for something to say. “How did you cross the ocean?”

  “I walked. That is the power of the mind, Evangeline. It travels, just like the feet. That is what saved me.”

  She regarded him, unimpressed. He continued on. “Keep moving. Have a goal. One day you will arrive at a place that is better than the place where you were, even if it is only in your head.”

  After a while, Slim said without any respect for the idea, “So, you think I should walk?”

  “Yes. With me. Every day. We can go anywhere in the world. But I would love to show you Morocco. Have you been?”

  She lied. “Yes.”

  “Wonderful. We can compare notes.” He stood up. “Well, I’ll be back tomorrow.”

  Slim stood up, too. Sidney asked, “What time shall we start?”

  She decided to name one just to get rid of him. “Seven.”

  “Perfect. Not early enough to gloat, but still entitles us to a certain smugness.”

  She sensed that he might be flirting with her. As she handed him his coat, she said, “Sidney, I have to say something. I’m an old woman. If I were going to have a romantic liaison with any man in this town, it would probably be you. But my husband’s gone and I’m done with that part of my life. I just thought you should know that, before we start walking around the world together.”

  Sidney looked at her, bemused. “I’m sorry. I should’ve known better than to try and use the Holocaust as a tool of seduction.”

  Now, in addition to feeling hopeless, Slim was embarrassed. “No. I’m the one who’s sorry. Please forgive me.”

  He smiled. “How can I not, when you’re standing there in those boots?”

  She saw the humor dancing in his eyes, but she wasn’t up to meeting it. So instead, she merely shook his hand, said goodnight, and closed the door. Then she crossed to
the sofa and lay down and fell asleep, just as she was.

  Milan was sitting on the floor of the McIlmore great room, in the process of unpacking several dozen boxes of decorations and ornaments. This was her annual pre-Christmas inventory, the one she always did right after Thanksgiving, in order to determine what lights were working and what ornaments she wanted to use. Usually by now, she had a theme in mind like “A Nutcracker Christmas” or “An Old-Fashioned Christmas,” but this year she wasn’t feeling very theme-ish.

  Right now she was putting aside all the large boxes of roses made of ribbon. Milan had taken a class in rose-making and for years these rose-shaped bows, which came in every color, size, and stage of bloom, were her trademark signature on all packages. Each petal had been gathered and folded and cut in a precise fashion. The work was painstaking, but Milan reveled in it, even covering the powder room lampshade and an entire twenty-foot Christmas tree until Wood had finally said, “Don’t we have enough of these damn roses around here?” But still, she didn’t have the heart to throw them away.

  Now she was removing a set of three hand-carved wise men, each the height of a small child. With their muted pastel-colored coats and realistic beards, they were probably the best-looking wise men in all of Paris—at least, that’s what she had been thinking when she ordered them from a high-priced mail-order catalog. Milan loved catalogs. She stayed up half the night thumbing through all the exquisite merchandise that she could hardly believe could actually be delivered to your house. But now these wise men seemed dull and predictable. Not that she wanted to change the Christmas story or anything. She was just sort of wishing she could add to it, without offending people. For some reason, she was picturing ballerinas in blue netting. But that would be absurd. Who ever heard of ballerinas in a manger? Maybe she would just cover a Styrofoam star in pale blue netting embedded with rhinestones. Milan normally had excellent taste, if not style, but she felt Christmas was the one time of year when she could let herself go.

  She looked at the clock now and saw that it was almost midnight. Wood had been in bed for hours, which was good, because he had looked so tired when he came home. She had drawn him a bath, but he took a shower instead. She really didn’t know how he did it. Being in surgery all morning and seeing patients at the hospital till as late as nine o’clock at night. She needed to go check on Charlie, too. She and her son had fallen asleep together on the chaise lounge, watching an old movie. That’s what woke Milan up, when she realized that her arms were empty, and that Charlie had slipped out of them. Why couldn’t the people she loved just stay the way she wanted them to? Why does happiness never sit still?

  She settled back into the chaise again and pulled several garlands of tinsel up in her lap, in hopes of untangling them. Lots of people had turned their backs on tinsel, but Milan still liked it, because it was happy and shiny and reminded her of some of the old store windows on Main Street. In a little while, she lifted her knees toward her chin, just as she had once done to make room for her brothers and sisters in bed, and finally fell asleep, with some of the silver strands draped across her.

  Upstairs, Wood had fallen asleep, too, exhausted from his feeble attempt at infidelity. And unaware that the old woman across town, the one who gave him life, was now sleeping by a fire that had gone out. And that the one downstairs, who married him and who still loved him with all her might, was lying pitifully wrapped in her own Christmas tinsel. He slept like men who are good at it—not knowing that his mother would get up in the morning and start walking across Morocco in some crazy last-ditch effort to save her own life. And without understanding that his wife’s effort would be equally valiant, when she arose and sought, like an old prospector, the ordinariness of another day.

  CHAPTER 16

  It was twenty degrees and the wind was whipping through the barren oak and sycamore trees all across Hillcrest Park. Just as Slim was thinking that she was cold and wanted to go home, Sidney informed her that they were now strolling along the beach between Cap Spartel and the Grottes d’Hercule, north of Tangier. It had taken them a week to get here, and although she didn’t feel any less depressed, she had to admit that his descriptions of the Moroccan countryside were lovely—the whitewashed houses stacked like sugar cubes all the way to the Mediterranean—the only vibrant colors were on the clotheslines—and an impossibly blue Moroccan sky stretched across all of it.

  Sidney told Slim he has not found this shade of blue anywhere else in the world, but that her hydrangea plants in spring have often put him in mind of it. Then, she confessed her secret—coffee grounds and orange peels. He was shocked.

  Now they were passing the Paris County municipal swimming pool, which had been drained for the winter and was full of sticks and debris. Sidney was telling her about the Coves Malabata. And how, if you go out of tourist season, you can miss the European crowd and see nothing but lovely brown people for miles. He knows that it is wrong to single out an entire country for the physical characteristics of its people, but one cannot avoid noting that the Moroccans are staggeringly beautiful.

  But Slim was no longer listening. She was thinking of the large square hole with the sticks in it and remembering the day when it, too, was filled with blue water and brown children—a day when she had decided to add three white ones to the mix—Carl Jeter, Earl Brundidge, and her own son.

  It all started because Slim disagreed with something called “Colored Day.” Tuesday was the only time that blacks were allowed to use the city pool. Afterward, the water would be drained overnight before white children could swim again on Wednesday. Slim had a plan to do something about this and got permission from the other boys’ parents to implement it. The Brundidges gave a reluctant yes out of respect for Slim and Dr. Mac. But Hank Jeter had no such reticence. He said, “I don’t know why in the world they won’t let them kids swim together. It don’t change the water none.”

  The next Tuesday rolled around and Slim drove the three boys to Hillcrest and tried to buy passes. When the girl in the ticket booth told her that the boys couldn’t swim because it was Colored Day, Slim was ready. Yes, there was a rule that blacks could not swim with whites, but there was no rule that whites could not swim with blacks. It seemed no one had ever thought of this before. The girl finally let them in because she didn’t know what else to do. Slim watched through the wire fence as Woodrow, Carl, and Earl emerged from the locker room wearing their Pierre Cardin swim trunks and state-of-the-art flippers and goggles. She was thinking that they looked more like midget astronauts than civil rights warriors. As they waded into the water, the crowd of astonished black faces parted, letting them through. The lifeguards stood up. No one knew what would happen next. Then someone reached out and stole Earl Brundidge’s goggles. He hollered so loud that it made everyone laugh. Then the goggles were tossed from person to person. Earl dunked somebody and got dunked back. Pretty soon everybody was playing so hard, no one even noticed that something important had happened. Or even that the water in the Paris County municipal pool was the same clear bright blue it had been when the sun came up that morning, just like Hank Jeter said it would be.

  It would be several more summers before the municipal pool was officially integrated. But it was Slim and her boys who had started it all. Suddenly Slim realized that Sidney had stopped talking and was now staring at her, as though he could read her mind. He motioned in the direction of the pool they had just passed. “I don’t know if I ever told you, but I liked what you did back there. I liked it a lot.”

  She smiled for the first time since the day she bought poison.

  Brundidge was sitting in his office when one of his secretaries carried in a large bouquet of red peonies. Denny, from Dwight & Denny’s Secret Garden, had said in a state of high agitation that these had to be special ordered because the caller insisted that only red peonies would do. Brundidge opened the card, which read, “I was wrong. But you’re still an asshole. Charlotte Rampling.”

  Brundidge smiled. So few things
in life surprised him anymore. You could’ve knocked him over with an eyelash. He picked up the phone and called her.

  “I give. How did you get our local florist to print the word asshole?”

  “I handwrote it. And mailed it.”

  Brundidge was still nervously fingering the card. “Oh, yeah, right. At first, I thought, by your large sweeping ‘A’ that you were a highly neurotic homosexual man. But I can see now that this is from a highly neurotic yuppie female, who is alternately attracted to and repelled by the populist themes in country music.” This was going good. Sometimes Brundidge could think just that fast on his feet and it had thankfully happened when he needed it. He waited. Charlotte didn’t say anything. Now he was worried. He had tried to sound hip and cavalier, but not smart-alecky. Then she said, “I’m coming to Little Rock on the fourteenth for a story we’re doing about Central High. I thought it might be an opportunity to see if you’re as offensive in person as you are on the phone.”

  His heart leapt and he didn’t know why. He didn’t even like her, really.

  “Sure. What about dinner? I could drive over.”

  “Perfect. Pick me up at the Sam Peck Hotel. Seven-ish.”

  “Right.” He hung up. Seven-ish. That’s what she said. He’d heard people in Paris say it, mimicking people in old movies. But Charlotte Rampling had said it sincerely. Seven-ish.

  Word had spread faster than Cherry Smoke’s legs that Mavis Pinkerton had refused to serve Harlan B. Pillow Jr. And Harlan, knowing that people would be watching, had given considerable deliberation to his response. In the end, he chose to ask his parishioners to boycott Doe’s. He did this during a Sunday morning service, saying that Mavis’s attack was not directed at just one member of their flock, but rather at the church itself and its beliefs. And that such overt meddling and defiance must be met with similar strength. Therefore, he was beseeching his followers to give up their cinnamon rolls and butterhorns and pain au chocolat. It was a lot to ask and he knew it. But he had been devoted to their congregation and because of his winning manner and good looks, they knew he could do better than the First Baptist Church of Paris. And now, many felt it was time to repay that loyalty.