“Barbie dolls,” Dolly says. “You had dozens of them.”
Billie grins. “I still have them. Saving them for my daughter. So far I have two boys. My husband says I get one more chance. Say you’re feeling puny?”
“To say the least.”
“Well, come on lie down. It’ll be a few minutes before Dr. Horton can see you, but at least you’ll be more comfortable.” She leads Dolly into one of the examining rooms, takes her blood pressure and temperature.
“I was so sorry to hear about your Aunt Artie,” she says. “We got very fond of her in here. She really fought, you know.”
“Thank you.”
“One of her paintings is in the waiting room. I don’t know if you noticed it or not. She gave it to Dr. Horton just a couple of months ago. She kept on with her painting regardless of how bad she felt. We’re gonna miss her.” Billie looks at the thermometer. “You’re running a hotbox, aren’t you?”
“I feel crummy.”
“Well, Dr. Horton will be in in just a few minutes. Just lie back. I’ll turn off the top light for you.”
“Thanks.” Dolly turns on her side. She is still clutching the towel Reese gave her. It smells like almond sachet. She dozes lightly.
“Dolly?” Dave Horton says. “You don’t have to sit up yet, but I’m going to turn on the light.”
“Okay.”
Dave rolls a stool over to the examining table and sits down. “Anything hurting besides your head? Billie says you’re nauseated.”
“All generic symptoms,” Dolly says. “I felt real tired last night and again this morning and my head hurt, but I thought it was from crying.”
“Grief doesn’t cause fever. Why don’t you sit up now and let’s see what’s going on.”
Dolly would have recognized Dave Horton anywhere. A few lines around his eyes are the only traces of the eleven years that have passed. His hair is black and curly, his skin tanned. And she looks such a mess. She groans and puts her face into her hands. Her pale hair hangs forward limply.
Dave feels the glands in her neck, listens to her heart, has her cough. He has Billie come in and take some blood. And all the while he is talking about Artie, about Harlow, about high school in Mobile. Dolly says very little. She’s impressed with Dave’s authority and sense of competence.
“You helped me cut up my pig in biology,” she finally says.
Dave laughs. “You think I should have been a surgeon?”
“No. It’s just that I’ve never been to a doctor before who wasn’t older than me. It’s strange.”
“I’m older than you. Two years. I was a lab assistant my senior year.”
“Doctors should be old, though. You know what I mean.”
“Fortunately everyone doesn’t feel like that.”
Dolly is afraid she has hurt his feelings.
“Before you know it, we’ll be the age of the presidents. How does that strike you?” He’s washing his hands, drying them on a paper towel.
“As scary. I wouldn’t want anyone I know to be president. Just like I don’t want to see the pilot of the plane I’m on. I like to think there are some people who aren’t ordinary human beings.”
Dave laughs again, a deep chuckle. Dolly likes the sound of it. “Remember Sonny Thurman? He’s a commercial pilot now, so I always look to see who’s flying the plane I’m on. I draw the line with Sonny. He used to get lost coming to school.”
“Sounds like my Uncle Hektor,” Dolly says. “He drove right by Mobile on the interstate one time.” Laughing hurts her head. She presses her fingers into her forehead.
“I think what you have here is a rip-roaring sinus infection,” Dave says. “We’ll know more in a minute when Billie gets your white count, but I think it was probably already coming on and the plane trip and the crying aggravated it. You just rest here, and if that’s what it is, Billie will give you a couple of shots. One’s an antibiotic and the other’s an antihistamine. You’re not allergic to anything, are you?”
“No.”
“Good.”
“Dave, Artie’s visitation is tonight.”
“You still nauseated?”
“That’s passed off.”
“Well, I’m going to give you something to take the fever down. You go home and take it easy and then play it by ear. You might feel like going for a little while.” Dave pats her shoulder. “It’s good seeing you, Dolly. We all thought the world of Artie, you know.”
“Thanks. It’s good seeing you, too.” As he turns to leave, she asks, “Dave, why Harlow?”
He grins. “Because they keep their Christmas lights up all year.”
Mariel is looking at a People magazine when Dolly comes into the waiting room. “Elizabeth Taylor is getting fat again,” she says, putting the magazine on the table. “Well?”
“Sinus. I got two shots.”
“Well, we’ll take you right home and put you to bed.” Mariel takes off her glasses and collects her purse. “How did you like Dave Horton? He’s a handsome man, isn’t he?”
“He’s very nice. Too bad he’s getting married next month.” Dolly doesn’t know why she does her mother this way. All the way home, she pretends she is dozing.
Mariel knows Dolly’s not asleep. She also knows Dave Horton isn’t getting married next month. But Dolly’s half Sullivan and, Lord knows, Mariel has never been able to figure the Sullivans out.
“Do you think Artie’s still grieving for Carl?” she asked Donnie once. And he had said, “I doubt it.” But Mariel wasn’t sure. After all, Artie had never remarried. She had never seemed to be seriously interested in any other man, though a lot of them had wandered through her life. Only once had Mariel been suspicious that Artie might be in love and nothing had come of that.
“Maybe she’s subconsciously looking for a father,” Mariel told Donnie after a series of visits to Harlow by several older men from exotic places such as Mexico City and New York. Men who were obviously smitten by Artie and obviously made to feel welcome.
“She knows where our father is if she wants to find him,” Donnie replied. “Right up there in Myrtlewood.”
“But she could still feel an empty psychological space, Donnie. Artie doesn’t think the drowning was an accident and you know it.”
“Shit, Mariel. If Artie told you that, she’s putting you on. She knows good and damn well what happened.”
“I’m just saying what Artie might feel.”
Donnie had put down the ham sandwich he was eating and looked across the kitchen table. He had the two deep lines between his eyebrows that Mariel hated to see appear.
“Mariel, Papa explained manic depression to us as children. Of course, we knew about her bad spells without anyone telling us. We lived with the kindest, most loving woman in the world or with someone we didn’t even recognize as our mother. But she was definitely not a murderer. If anybody was going to do anybody in, it would have been our father going after our mother. Which, of course, didn’t happen, though, God knows, he had enough cause. It was nothing more murderous than a thunderstorm that turned the boat over.”
And Mariel had slipped this conversation into her DONNIE file which went back many years to the Christmas party where she had recognized Donnie immediately and he hadn’t any idea who she was.
She had once read that in every couple’s relationship, one was the lover and one the receiver. She’s always known which she is. Her father, Will Cates, in spite of his alcoholism, had been the lover. Maybe he loved everything too much. Thomas Sullivan was a lover. Carl Jenkins was a lover. Artie would definitely have been a receiver. And what about Dolly? Mariel glances over at her daughter and realizes she doesn’t know. She hopes a receiver. Mariel turns onto the shell road.
Dolly doesn’t stir. How much she looks like Donnie, Mariel thinks. She wonders how he is doing in Birmingham. She wishes he had wanted her to go with him.
Artie’s studio is a large room above the garage. There are windows on three sides as well as a
skylight. Finished and unfinished canvases are propped against the fourth wall. On an easel is the painting Artie was working on, a woman on the beach with her hair blowing. Her back is to the water and she is reaching out her toe to touch a large fish skeleton that has almost a cartoonish grin on its face. The sky above the woman is blue; near the horizon is an ominous cloud with a waterspout twisting from it.
Mariel looks at it carefully. She tries hard to see the way Artie painted the light that is considered so unusual. It looks like all the rest of Artie’s paintings, though, rather ethereal, pretty. She knows this is a damning word, but damn it, it’s pretty, the symbolic dark cloud notwithstanding. She looks around at the other works. They all look similar. What made them worth thousands of dollars?
The smell of turpentine is strong in the room. Brushes are neatly arranged on a worktable. Tubes and cans of paint line shelves under the windows. Mariel picks up one of the brushes and idly brushes it against the tabletop. “Artie,” she says, “you’re really dead.”
Artie laughs and comes from behind the stacked pictures. “Yep. Guess I am. How clever you are, Mariel.”
“Don’t get smart-ass with me, Artie. I always let you get away with too much of that.” Mariel walks around the studio, touching the pictures. Artie perches on a stool.
“Have you seen your mama?” Mariel can’t resist the dig.
“Your child’s grandmother? Watch it, Mariel.”
“You’re not going to make me mad anymore. You can’t. You’re in Birmingham being cremated.”
“And Donnie’s with me. That makes you mad, doesn’t it?”
“Well, the whole thing’s damn inconvenient. I should have expected it, though. You always did like to dramatize things.”
Mariel picks up a picture of a man and woman pushing a sailboat into the water. “These things are worth a lot of money, aren’t they?”
“With a little wise investing, Dolly will never have to work a day in her life.”
“Dolly will work. She’s not lazy.”
“I know. She’s like me.”
“You go to hell!”
“Sure you want that?”
“No,” Mariel admits. She looks at the picture on the easel, an unfinished one that Artie had been working on before she got too weak to paint. She must have felt terrible while she was doing this, but it is as light, as ethereal as the others propped against the walls. It’s the usual beach scene, but there is a single figure on this one, a woman walking toward a setting sun.
Mariel shivers. The woman on the canvas seems so small, lost in a world of sky and water. And she is alone.
Mariel suddenly feels very sad. She sees Artie in her Harlow High cheerleading outfit, the head cheerleader, jumping higher than anyone else, flirting, laughing, throwing kisses from a red convertible, the Homecoming Queen, so cute, so pretty.
“Everybody thought you were wonderful, Artie.”
“No, Mariel. No, they didn’t.”
“I did,” Mariel confesses. She touches two fingers to the lone figure in the painting.
Reese, coming up the steps to tell Mariel Donnie has called, could have sworn he heard Artie’s voice. Downright ghosty. He opens the door and looks in cautiously, is relieved to see only Mariel standing before the easel.
“Donnie called. He said to tell you he’s home and he’ll be out after while.”
“Thanks.” Mariel looks around the studio. “She’s gone, Reese.”
“I know.” He doesn’t tell Mariel that he had seen Artie just this morning sitting under the pecan tree.
“And I’m so tired.” Mariel rubs her neck. “I’m going to go call Father Carroll and the funeral home.”
“What for?”
“She didn’t want a funeral, Reese. Donnie’s done what she wanted.”
“Bless her heart.”
“Yes.” Mariel turns out the lights and follows Reese down the steps.
When he finally answers the phone, Father Carroll is either drunk or asleep. Probably both, Mariel thinks.
“What?” he asks. “What?”
“No funeral, Father. It’s Artie’s request. We were going to go on and do it anyway, but I decided it just wasn’t worth the trouble.”
“What?”
“It’s not what Artie wanted, Father.”
“The funeral?”
“Right.”
“You’re not having a funeral for Artie?”
Mariel speaks slowly. “There is not going to be a funeral, Father. Artie didn’t want one.”
“But why?”
“I have no idea. But I hope you’ll accept our apologies for the trouble we’ve put you to.
“But the rosary is tonight and the funeral in the morning.”
“It was, Father. No more.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Neither do I, but I’ve decided to quit fighting it. If Artie didn’t want a funeral, so be it. If Donnie doesn’t want one, so be it.”
“You don’t even want a prayer at the graveside?”
“No, Father. But thank you.”
“Mariel, are you all right?”
Mariel can imagine the puzzled, worried expression on Father Carroll’s lined face. She feels a twinge of tenderness for the old priest.
“I’m fine, Father. And like I said, we thank you for everything.”
“I’m coming out there.”
“Please don’t, Father.”
“I’ll be there as soon as I can.” The phone goes dead. Mariel stands in the hall and stares at the bay for a few minutes. Then she goes to check on Dolly who is asleep with her mouth open so wide that Mariel can see the silver of fillings. The Sullivan teeth.
TWENTY-TWO
Christmas Lights
DELMORE RICKETTS IS SITTING BETWEEN HEKTOR AND MAY IN Hektor’s truck. His red ’57 Chevy had made it almost to I-10 before it became enveloped in a cloud of smoke that looked terminal. Hektor had jumped from his pickup with a fire extinguisher thinking Father Audubon was about to be as cremated as Artie. The priest, however, had crawled out, coughing, cursing. “Points. Goddamn points.”
Given the amount of smoke, Hektor was highly suspicious of the diagnosis, but he didn’t want to say anything, just stood there with the extinguisher on ready. Father Audubon opened the hood to a cloud of steam. “She’s about shot,” he admitted.
Hektor thought the “about” was putting it mildly. “Junkyard shot” was more like it.
“I keep her for sentimental reasons. She was my first car.” Father Audubon shook his head sadly. “First time I got laid was in this car. In the trunk.”
“The trunk?”
“It’s huge.”
“But the trunk? You couldn’t have been very comfortable.”
“Mr. Sullivan, I ask you, do you remember thinking of comfort?”
“No.”
“Right.” Father Audubon put the hood back down. “First time,” he sighed, “last time.”
“Well, maybe we can get it fixed. There’s a gas station at the Pascagoula exit that has wreckers. We’ll send them to get it.”
Delmore Ricketts brightened. “Do you really think she can be fixed?”
“Most probably. This is a classic, you know. They may have to order some parts, but I’ll bet they can get them. Cars like this are worth saving.”
“Yes, indeed.” Father Delmore Ricketts Audubon fanned smoke away with his fishing hat. “I hate to leave her here, though.”
“I’m sure nobody will bother her. Probably everybody out here knows it’s your car anyway.”
“Of course they do. I hadn’t thought of that.”
At the service station, Hektor explained to the kid leaning against the wrecker where the car was and that they couldn’t miss it, that it was a red ’57 Chevy, tow it in, and do whatever needed to be done to fix it. He also slipped a fifty into the kid’s hand which elicited a promise of immediate action.
“Be gentle with her,” Father Audubon said.
“Yo
u got it.”
Hektor said they would check on it the next day. The grinning boy was already getting into the wrecker as they walked to the pickup.
“Seems like a nice young man,” Father Audubon said.
“Eager,” Hektor agreed. When they got to the truck, he explained about the two seat belts and that Father Audubon would have to ride in the middle. “We’ll grab you if we have a wreck,” he assured the priest.
Fortunately the problem doesn’t come up. May goes to sleep before they reach Pascagoula, leaning awkwardly against Father Audubon’s shoulder.
“Bless her heart,” he says, moving his arm so her head will be cushioned more. And then to Hektor, “Tell me about your sister.”
“She was my older sister. She and my brother Donnie were twins. She’s had lymphoma for almost two years. Her name is Artie. Artemis, really. She’s an artist. Pretty well-known.”
“Artemis Sullivan? She painted those beautiful beach scenes?”
“Yes. You know who she is? How about that.”
“I can’t believe it. I actually met her once in San Francisco. A showing at a gallery. I really believe she was the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen. And that accent! My God! She called me Fahthah Ricketts. Said she was the ahhtist. You wouldn’t believe what a hit she was. I hadn’t heard that many Deep South accents at the time, you understand, but, even so, when she walked into the room, something happened. Something exotic and yet wholesome and sweet. You know?”
“I suppose so.” Hektor does not know. He sees Artie with scraped knees and a runny nose. He sees Artie and his mother fussing, Artie dry-eyed at Carl’s memorial service.
Most of all, he sees Artie on the beach looking first at Donnie and then at him declaring, “Each of us has to do it. We have to do this together.”
“Actually, she was a very complicated woman, Father.”
“Aren’t they all. And just call me Del.”
“Sure, if you’ll drop the Mr. Sullivan. It’s Hektor.”
“Your parents had it in for you, too, didn’t they?”
“Well, it beats Adonis. That’s my brother’s name.”
This One and Magic Life Page 11
