Blanche Among the Talented Tenth (Blanche White series Book 2)

by Barbara Neely

  “Honey, go find Carol Garrett. Tell her to come here right away, will you? Then go ask Mattie to please come to Carol and Hank’s cottage, that it’s urgent.” She reached out and took Tina’s arm. “You OK?”

  Tina took a deep breath, and nodded.

  “If either of them asks you why, tell them you don’t know. Then stay with the kids, will you? Thanks, honey.”

  The envelope beneath the wallet had “Carol Garrett” written on the front. Blanche put the wallet back and waited in the bright white sunlight for Carol to come and have her life ripped wide open. The sea was calm, as though the early morning human sacrifice had eased some of its restlessness.

  Blanche stood watch over the clothes, remembering the haint she’d seen in Hank’s eyes. Had he been planning this the night they talked? Was he planning then to shed that too big coat? What had made life so unlivable for him? She’d had times when she’d felt it would be a relief to get run over by a truck, but it had never occurred to her to jump in front of one. When had she begun to understand that her pain was at least changing, if not healing, almost as she felt it? “Almost everything can be waited out,” she’d once been told by a man who’d spent thirty years in prison for a crime he didn’t commit. What was it that Hank couldn’t wait out? Or didn’t know he could wait out? She turned her head and watched Carol hurrying toward her. Blanche steeled herself for what she was about to face. She wished she’d thought to send Tina to get Arthur Hill and let him handle this. She went to meet Carol.

  “What is it, Blanche?” She looked down the beach. “I thought Hank might be here. Have you seen him? I haven’t seen him all morning. He went out before I got up. I’d just come from checking to see if he was at the Big House when Tina showed up.” She sounded slightly irritated about having to delay her search for Hank for whatever was bugging Blanche.

  Dear Ancestors! Why me? Blanche stood directly in front of Carol, blocking her view of the clothes and making it impossible for Carol to keep walking. Blanche reached out and took her hand.

  “The kids found some clothes and things folded on the beach. They’re Hank’s. There’s a note.” Blanche stepped aside.

  Carol walked toward the clothes as though the ground between her and the neat stack were mined. Blanche had to fight the urge to grab her and hug her, stop her from learning what she already knew.

  Carol stared down at the things on the beach for a long time before she stooped down and slipped the envelope out from under the wallet. She turned the envelope over and over before opening it. Her head was bowed so Blanche couldn’t see her face clearly. She took a deep breath and quickly ripped open the envelope. She let it flutter to the ground while she unfolded the single sheet inside. When she raised her head she looked dazed and flushed and swollen, as though her face had been slapped repeatedly. She let the note slip from her fingers and knelt beside her husband’s clothes. She ran her hand across the wallet and folded pants. The tenderness in her movements brought tears to Blanche’s eyes. Carol’s body began to jerk in seizure-like spasms. Sobs like dry heaves racked her body. Her outstretched hands trembled as she lifted the wallet and held it to her chest. Her eyes were all tears now. She reached out her left hand for the folded shirt and held it to her face. A high-pitched keen began from behind it. As Blanche knelt beside her, Carol pitched forward so that her forehead lay cradled on Hank’s trousers and sandals. She began banging her head up and down, up and down.

  “No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no,” she chanted without seeming to take a breath. Blanche tried to pull her upright but Carol resisted.

  “I thought you might need some help.” Tina reached down and grasped Carol’s shoulders.

  Blanche scooped up Hank’s note and slipped it into her pocket. She and Tina half-carried/half-walked the now silent and nearly limp Carol back to her cottage.

  Mattie was waiting on Carol’s porch. “What’s happened, what is it?” She attempted to follow Blanche, Tina, and Carol into the cottage. Carol didn’t seem to notice her presence.

  “Wait here.” Blanche told Mattie in a voice that brooked no disagreement, not even from Mattie.

  Mattie looked anxiously after them, but did as she was told.

  Blanche and Tina settled Carol on the sofa. Blanche asked Tina to stay inside with Carol while she went out to talk to Mattie. Before she went out to the porch, Blanche took the note from her pocket and read it.

  Sorry to leave you, old friend, it’s just too much.

  I’m not sorry I killed her. She was a nasty bitch.

  Tell Mattie it wouldn’t have made a difference. I already knew.

  Thank you for the best parts. I will love you always. H.G.

  She put it back in her pocket before she went out on the porch. Mattie’s lips trembled just a bit. She seemed to be holding herself in. When she once again demanded to know what was going on, there was a slight crack at the base of her voice. Blanche told her about the clothes and the note.

  “Where is this note?”

  Just as Carol had done, Mattie took the note from Blanche and stared at it for a long time before she read it. In the few seconds it took for her to read and understand it, Mattie seemed to collapse in on herself. Her mouth worked as if she wanted to speak but couldn’t. Her usually clear, bright eyes turned cloudy. Blanche took a step toward her. Mattie raised her hand to hold Blanche back. Mattie leaned heavily on her walking stick as she opened the screened door and went inside to Carol. Blanche didn’t follow her right away and beckoned for Tina to come out and join her. They stood in silence, listening to the murmur of Mattie’s voice as she attempted to talk to Carol who was apparently unaware of everyone and everything around her.

  Blanche sent Tina off to see to the children. “Tell them I’ll be there soon as I can.”

  Tina gave her a pitying smile. “They already know, you know.”

  Blanche went inside and told Mattie she thought Carol needed a doctor and it was time to call Arthur Hill. Mattie stood up. She still held Hank’s suicide note. She propped her walking stick against the cherry wood desk in the corner, dialed, and demanded to speak to Dr. Sinclair, she didn’t care how many patients he was seeing. When he was on the line, Mattie explained what had happened and Carol’s condition. She listened, then with a firm, “Thank you, Doctor,” dismissed him. She put the phone down and looked at the note still in her left hand as if the paper were a disgusting growth that had attached itself to her. She grasped it with both hands and forcefully ripped the note into smaller and smaller pieces. She gave Blanche a challenging look. Blanche said nothing. Mattie put the scraps in the pocket of her slacks. She flipped open a door that released an electric typewriter supported on a shelf. She threaded paper from the drawer into the machine and typed a few lines. She took the sheet out of the typewriter, found a pen, and initialed the page, Blanche assumed, with Hank’s initials, then folded it before putting it in her pocket. She punched in the number again and told Martin Tatterson to come to the Garretts’ cottage at once.

  Martin knelt before Carol and wrapped his arms around her with tenderness. There were tears on his cheeks when he took Mattie’s trembling hand and leaned close to her. Blanche couldn’t hear his words, but they seemed to strengthen Mattie. She told him Blanche had found Hank’s things.

  He listened closely when Blanche explained what had happened.

  “On behalf of the family and Amber Cove, I’d like to thank you for looking after Dr. Harris and Mrs. Garrett,” he said.

  “May I please see the note?” he added.

  Blanche looked at Mattie. Mattie reached in her pocket and pulled out the piece of folded paper.

  Martin shook his head slowly from side to side as he read it. “Poor man. I’m very sorry, Mattie.”

  Mattie gave him a short nod that reminded Blanche of a judge’s gavel. Case closed. Do not bring it up again. If that was how Mattie planned to handle her grief,
it was going to take her more time to heal than she likely had.

  Martin went to the phone.

  “May I?” Blanche took the note from his hand before he could respond. It said:

  Sorry to leave you, old friend, it’s just too much.

  Thank you for the best parts. H.G.

  She handed the note back to Martin and looked at Mattie, who avoided her eyes.

  Martin called Arthur Hill who arrived breathless, stinking of anxiety, and sucking on his bottom lip as though it was a pacifier. The police and the ambulance arrived next. Blanche stood aside and talked only when she was asked a question. She listened to the talk among the police about how bad it was for tourism to have these people keep killing themselves at Amber Cove Inn just a couple weeks before the village festival.

  When the ambulance had taken Carol away and the officials had gone, Martin suggested he close up the cottage and take Mattie home. Mattie insisted that Blanche, not Martin, walk her to her cottage. Blanche said she would do it, although she hadn’t really been asked. For Mattie’s sake, she held her tongue.

  She settled Mattie in bed with a cognac and a cup of hot tea. “It was wrong to give Martin that phony note,” she said. Mattie gave her such an angry look, Blanche thought she was going to get cussed out.

  “Half of what was in it was a lie. You must know that!”

  “What about Faith’s husband? He has a right to know how his wife died.”

  Mattie clutched Blanche’s arm with a cold and steely grip. “Believe me. If there is anything to tell Al J., I will do so. Until then, I beg you to keep quiet about this. Nothing will bring Faith back. Why ruin the memory of a fine but misguided, young…” Mattie’s voice disappeared down in her throat.

  “All right, all right. We’ll talk about it tomorrow. You rest now. Is there somebody you want me to call?”

  “Don’t you understand?” All the fierceness that had been on Mattie’s face was twisted into pain. “There is no one else. He was my last, my only. My lost.” Her voice dropped so low Blanche could hardly hear her. “The only one left.” Unshed tears made her eyes glisten. She reached down and pulled the sheet more closely around her. “I think I’ll rest now.” She promptly closed her eyes.

  The children had finished eating their sandwiches and were cleaning up their dishes when Blanche got back to the Crowley's cottage.

  “Did they find Mr. Garrett?” Casey asked her. “Maybe my mom and dad could have helped him.”

  Blanche put her hand on Casey’s shoulder. “I don’t think so, honey.”

  How to tell kids about suicide. How to make it make sense to someone who saw each day as a wonderful new adventure to shape to their liking. She looked at the children around the table, all of them watching her. “Sometimes…sometimes a person can get so sad it makes them sick, real sick, so that they always got heartache that makes even the most beautiful day look bad. And even though they may have friends and people who love them, those people can’t cheer them up, because it’s a kind of sickness a person has to cure themselves and sometimes they don’t think they can.”

  “But you said that bad things are going away at the same time they’re happening. That change thing you told us about, remember? Why didn’t he just wait for that, like you told us?” Taifa wanted to know.

  “I don’t know, baby. Maybe he just didn’t think change was happening fast enough.”

  Tina and Blanche stayed in the kitchen after the children had gone out.

  “God! You were just awesome, really great! The way you said just the right things to chill them out.”

  “How are you doing?” Blanche wanted to know.

  “I’m OK. It shook me up at first. I mean, it was so eerie. The clothes and everything. But, it happens, I guess. What was he like? I never met him.”

  “I met him and it doesn’t help. I think the man I met was the man in the corset.”

  Tina gave her a blank stare. Blanche explained:

  “There was a man in my hometown when I was growing up, Mr. Howard, who wore a corset. Everybody liked this man. At least, everybody said how quiet and nice he was, how polite and respectful. Then one day, he drank a bunch of liquor then knocked out all the windows in his house, threw his wife and children into the street and played Little Esther records on his record player as loud as he could for twenty-four hours straight. Like to drove the whole street crazy. To this day, no one knows what really set him off. The next day he went back to being his regular old self. Only person I ever heard say anything that made sense about that day was Miz Minnie, she’s the oldest black woman in Farleigh. She said the Mr. Howard who got drunk and tore up his place wasn’t the same Mr. Howard we saw every day. ‘Didn’t you notice?’ I heard Miz Minnie ask my mama, ‘The Mr. Howard who done all that damage wasn’t wearing no corset.’ ”

  Tina had tears in her eyes. Blanche hugged the young woman to her and got as much comfort as she gave.

  That evening, after the children were in bed and Tina had gone to meet Durant, Blanche walked across the lawn to the water’s edge. This was the first time she’d been near the sea since the kids found Hank’s things. Earlier, there’d been boats out searching for Hank’s body. The children, especially the boys, had been fascinated by them. At first, she’d wouldn’t let them get any closer than the front porch. What if they actually found his body while the children watched? It was Malik who spotted the policeman on the beach keeping back the few onlookers who’d appeared. Blanche had then let the children go out and watched them hurry across the lawn toward the beach. The girls were only gone a few minutes. “It’s too sad,” Deirdre announced, to which Taifa added that the boys were stupid and gross. But the boys had straggled in not much later, more silent than usual, too. They’d all spent the rest of the day around the cottage. The boats wouldn’t be back. Mother Water wasn’t going to give Hank up, and he surely didn’t want her to or he wouldn’t have joined her in the first place. So that was that. It occurred to her that if, as the books said, the sea was where life had begun, it made a kind of sense to end your life here, too, to walk into Mother Water’s arms and be rocked to death. She stared at the shifting, glistening blueness before turning to walk along the water’s edge. But she needed something more.

  She went back to the cottage and reached for the phone.

  “Oh, Ardell,” Blanche said and told her friend about Hank’s suicide.

  “Damn girl! Amber Cove is definitely the resort from hell. Lotta bad, bad vibes at that place. The kids OK? Musta been really scary finding his clothes like that.”

  Blanche told her about the suicide discussion with the children. “They seem to be OK, but who can tell? Casey reacted just like the child of doctors, but the others, who knows?”

  “None of them seem like hiders.” Ardell reminded her. “If stuff comes up, you’ll know about it. Hummm. Young brother like that is bound to leave some broken hearts behind. I wonder if he cared? I know his people must be taking it hard.”

  “Not just hard.” Blanche told her about Carol’s state and then about Mattie tearing up the suicide note.

  “No! She didn’t! But why would he lie in his suicide note?”

  “Exactly my question!” Blanche agreed, but was suddenly too tired to think about it. Even to her own ears, her voice sounded as though she were sinking fast.

  “Hummm. Carol and Mattie ain’t the only ones who had a shock.” Ardell told her. “Get yourself a cup of hot tea with plenty of honey and lemon and a shot of rum. Drink it in bed.”

  “You sound just like Mama.”

  “Good. Pretend that I am and do as I tell you, for a change.”

  SEVEN

  The morning after Hank’s clothes and note were found, Blanche woke with Mattie on her mind. She’d fallen asleep remembering what Mattie had said about Hank being her, “very last one.” The pain those words rode on had penetrated Blanc
he, wrapping around her heart like a stout rope. She was aware of its restriction even after she’d tumbled into the dream that had plagued her every night for months. She was double-minded when she woke—a part of her hurting for Mattie, another part attached to the dream. She still didn’t know what the dream was about but she was now sure that it wasn’t what happened in the dream that frightened and saddened her, it was what didn’t happen in the dream. Even this paltry bit of information was a gift, one she associated with Mattie occupying half of her attention through the night. Orange juice and a small hoe cake—her favorite quick bread baked in a cast iron skillet in the Crowleys’ oven, instead of on a hoe, over an open fire, the way the slaves made it.

  First, she included Mattie, Hank, and Carol in her daily communion with the Ancestors. She told Hank she hoped he was happier where he was than he’d been here. She reminded him that Mattie and Carol still needed him. She asked her Ancestors to help Mattie’s people lay on the balm because the woman was in serious pain. She asked them to see about Carol, too. She did all of this in the shower. She liked the combination of being wrapped in Mother Water, talking to her ancestors, and getting ready for her day. Practical, she thought.

  When the bread was done, she put it in a cloth-covered bowl and carried it and the juice across the still damp grass. She had to knock three times before Mattie opened the door.

  She looked ragged as though parts of her had been torn away, leaving hollows beneath her eyes and under her cheekbones that had not been there yesterday. A sour, musty, funky smell, like a cellar long closed and never cleaned, had replaced Mattie's usual floral perfume. Blanche brushed gently by her and carried her offerings to the kitchen.

  The cottage was full of old oak chairs with wide wooden arms and adjustable backs. The walls were covered with paintings Blanche was sure were Mattie’s on the basis of the piece she’d seen Mattie working on in the lobby. There was a large picture of a gourd that was also a woman rising from a tub of water; in another, multicolored circles in vibrant colors surrounded a small, deep, not quite black, not quite perfect circle. Blanche was sure that if she poked her finger into that darkness, her finger would come out red with blood. She felt herself moving toward the dark space as if it called to her by name. From the corner of her eye she could see that even in her grief, Mattie was smiling. She folded her hands in front of her in a gesture Blanche had often seen proud mothers make when their children were under praise. After a few minutes of staring into the heart of the universe, Blanche turned to Mattie and bowed slightly.