Belle City

by Penny Mickelbury

  Nellie was a magnificent woman. She'd been pretty as a girl and glamorous as a young woman, and she'd matured into an elegant and stunning grown woman. Now, approaching seventy, she was nothing short of magnificent. She'd inherited height from her father and a lithe, lean quality from her mother. Her mahogany skin was as flawless as a baby's, and her hair was silver and so perfectly cut as to appear designed rather than styled. She sat effortlessly straight in the high-backed Empire chair, her legs crossed at the knee, ankles together, her black crepe suit haute couture, her diamonds real, and her smile fading. Nellie had been polite long enough, duty notwithstanding.

  Sissy studied her mother from across the wide expanse of the drawing room. Only someone as close to Nellie as her only daughter would be able to discern the grief beneath the highly polished veneer of Nellie Nelson's public persona, and Nellie was grieving. She had adored her mother, and had been adored by her. The youngest of five children and the only girl, beautiful and smart and talented and chock-full of personality, Nellie McGinnis was born to be adored. By her doting parents, by her rambunctious brothers, by her husband, and, finally, by three of her four children. Sissy was among the adorers even if she sometimes found her mother hard to like. This was not one of those times. Right now, she liked her mother very much.

  Nellie and Sissy exchanged glances across the room, and Nellie's smile regained its luster. As her mother had adored her, Nellie worshiped her only daughter. Sissy crossed to her mother and waited while she finished making small-talk with two white women who looked to be as old as Grandma, though with white people it was hard to tell, so easily and early did their skin wrinkle and sag, especially those who lived with and on the land.

  "Thank you for coming," Nellie said, the words rote by now. "Mama would have appreciated your kindness."

  When the two women turned to depart, Sissy saw tears in their eyes and sadness etched into the deep folds of their skin. Their grief, too, was genuine. "Who are they?" she asked, bending down into her mother's embrace.

  "I don't know." Nellie's fatigue was becoming exasperation. "They mentioned anti-lynching work in the 1920's."

  "The Ida Wells Barnett Anti-Lynching Society?" Sissy exclaimed, her excitement lost on her mother. Grandma had talked to Sissy and the video recorder about the daring organization made up of Colored and white people, mostly women, at a time when such fraternizing was outlawed, especially since they were trying to put a stop to the widespread and random stringing up of Negro men.

  "Certainly not. I'd have paid careful attention to any reference to Ida Wells Barnett, as you very well know." Nellie's exasperation was becoming irritability, but before it could become full-blown, Dorothy, the housekeeper, approached.

  "'Scuse me, m'am, Sissy. There's about thirty people still in the house, but no more comin', and Douglass said to lock the front door. You want me to?"

  "As quickly as you can, Dorothy," Nellie said, and Sissy had to laugh. Nellie and her eldest son were so much alike: They'd both had more than enough egalitarianism for one week, and the sooner it came to an end, the better, though Dorothy couldn't do much of anything quickly these days. She was almost as old as Nellie, her body weakened by half a century of domestic servitude and a propensity for "eating anything that didn't bite back," Sissy's father always said. Still, she made it across the room and out into the foyer at a pretty good clip, and Sissy could only imagine the woman's own gratitude at bringing an end to the week-long celebration of Ruthie McGinnis's life. Even though hired staff had done all the cooking, serving and cleaning, it was Dorothy's house and therefore her responsibility, and she took it seriously, had always taken seriously the job of caring for her friend and savior, Ruthie McGinnis' only daughter and that daughter's home and family.

  The hired caterer's servers still passed back and forth with trays of hors d'oeuvres and white wine, and the serving table in the dining room would be replenished until Nellie put a stop to it, but whoever was left could help themselves to as much food as they wanted and could entertain themselves, too, as far as Nellie was concerned. She and her family were now officially done with the public display of reverence for the memory of her mother and would, from now on, mourn privately.

  Douglass and DuBois came in, drawing the doors closed behind them, and Nellie stood up, stretched, and re-seated herself in the corner of the sofa. She sighed deeply, closed her eyes, and raised her legs, just as Douglass slid an ottoman beneath them. She kicked off her shoes and allowed herself to fully relax. Sissy and her brothers removed their jackets and Sissy her shoes, and they all sat near their mother—Sissy on the floor next to the ottoman, Douglass on the sofa next to Nellie, and DuBois in an adjacent wing chair. They enjoyed several seconds of silence that was broken by the distant peal of the doorbell. Nellie sat up.

  "Relax, Mama," DuBois said, "Monty and Gabe have everything under control."

  Nellie nodded and leaned back. One thing she and her boys knew how to do was attend to death. When she married Theodore Nelson fifty-two years earlier, his family owned one of the more prosperous Negro funeral homes in town. Since then, it had become a massive enterprise, operating in South Carolina and Tennessee as well as Georgia, burying as many well-heeled whites as Blacks, testament to the elevated level of service provided. True, it cost a small fortune to be laid to one's final earthly rest by the Nelson Mortuary, but it was worth every penny. Nellie had spent the better part of her life seeing to that; and after the death of her husband two years earlier, her two sons and two of her nephews—Montgomery and Gabriel, the sons of her husband's sisters—had assumed the responsibility for management of the enterprise. Nellie now merely provided presence, and some thought that, in and of itself, was worth the price of a Nelson Mortuary funeral.

  "Where's Teddy?" she asked, her eyes still closed, preventing her from witnessing the look that passed between Doug and DuBois.

  "Where Teddy always is," Douglass said. "Following the wine and the women and occasionally breaking into song."

  "Off key," DuBois added.

  "Grandma wanted us to enjoy ourselves," Sissy said.

  "You always defend him," Doug said.

  Sissy knew that irritated him, but she also knew how excruciating it had been for Teddy to follow the path laid by Douglass and Dubois, not to mention impossible. So, as family babies often did, Teddy had carved his own path, and walked it on his own terms, often unsteadily.

  "He's a grown man," Doug said, "and it's time he started acting like one. And it's time you and Mama stopped defending him."

  "He's grieving, Doug."

  "We're all grieving, but he's the only one who's drunk and acting like a jackass. You think that's what Grandma wanted?" DuBois gave Sissy a long, steady look, over the tops of his glasses and down his nose at the same time.

  She wanted to tell him that he was the one behaving like a jackass but stopped herself, as she usually did, in order to keep the peace. Her mother didn't like dissension and as the only girl among the boys, it usually fell to Sissy to ensure Nellie's comfort level. In truth, Sissy didn't mind. It was better for everyone when Nellie was calm and composed, though Sissy wasn't always sure that what was better was necessarily the best.

  She'd like nothing better than to tell DuBois that he, not Teddy, was the jackass, but she knew it would be wasted breath because he'd never understand why she thought so, to say nothing of ever agreeing with any negative assessment of himself. Sissy had done her family dynamics homework and knew that DuBois personified the cursed middle child, if being the third of four could be considered the middle. Doug was the first born and therefore special. She was the only girl and therefore special. Teddy was the baby and therefore the most special. That left DuBois the middle child, and he lived up—or down—to every expectation. The fact that he was the only one of the boys not to achieve six foot status didn't help matters.

  "Well, do you?" DuBois demanded with a practiced sneer.

  "Do I what?" She'd left the genesis of the conversation and
was deep into her analysis of her brother—and her mother's foot massage—and had no idea why he was sneering at her.

  "You're as bad as Teddy. You can't focus on anything that doesn't relate to you." Now he really was pissed, and Sissy felt something close to a guilt pang.

  "I'm sorry, Du. I guess my mind was wandering."

  "Like I said, Big Sister and Baby Brother, patches of the same quilt."

  "Enough," Nellie said, lifting a hand in admonition. It had the same effect as always. Nobody said anything else, and the relief was palpable when the door opened and Dorothy entered, carrying a bottle of Veuve Clicquot in one hand and four flutes in the other, and followed by one of the caterers pushing a food-laden cart. Nellie opened her eyes and sat up at the sound, her smile warm and genuine. "Bless you, Dorothy."

  "It's time you ate something, Miz Nelson, and a taste of champagne ain't never hurt nobody."

  "I'll second that!" Teddy bounded into the room, hoisting his own bottle of champagne, electrifying the room with his presence if not with the pattern of his tie. "You guys are missing a hell of a party out there," he said, dropping down on the sofa between Nellie and Doug. "Grandma knew some interesting people."

  "Did you meet the two little old ladies from the anti-lynching society?" Sissy asked.

  "Yeah. Sarah Jane Somebody and Martha Ann The Same Somebody. They're sisters, as if you couldn't tell, and I honest to God think they're older than Grandma."

  "Kind of them to travel so far," Nellie murmured.

  "Carrie's Crossing isn't that far," Teddy said. "And it's where that old white dude lived, too," Teddy refilled his flute and downed it in one noisy gulp.

  "What old white dude?" Sissy asked.

  "The one who died the same day as Grandma. It was in the newspaper. He was a hundred, too, and his name was Thatcher, which made me wonder..."

  "Wonder what?" DuBois snapped.

  "What do you think, Du? Him and Grandma had the same name and came from the same place—the same place as Miss Martha Ann and Miss Sarah Jane, for that matter. Does your pea brain have any cells that it uses for imagination?"

  "That will be enough," Nellie said, and this time there was flint in the voice.

  Doug pushed up from the sofa with a grunt and walked wide-legged toward the food cart, trying discreetly to unwedge his pants from his butt crack. Doug these days was, to put it kindly, portly, and he didn't buy suits as often as he bought groceries. Some men wore the increased bulk of their middle age handsomely. Doug did not. He'd always had a big butt, but years earlier, when it had topped off long legs in a pair of tight Levis, it had been a sight worthy of appreciation by Sissy's friends, male and female. Today, with butt and gut protruding in opposite directions, appreciation wasn't the first reaction.

  "You better start coming to the gym with me, Doug," DuBois said, giving voice to Sissy's thoughts.

  "Or to the construction site with me," Teddy chimed in. "Nothing like manual labor to keep a man fit," he said, slapping his solid abdomen with the palm of his hand.

  Douglass perused the food cart as if he'd heard neither of them, and perhaps he hadn't; he was mesmerized by the food, as he'd always been, and cared nothing for anyone else's opinion of what he did, as he never had. "Fix you a plate, Mother?"

  "Please, Doug. And don't skimp. I didn't realize how hungry I was until Dorothy reminded me I hadn't eaten today." None of them tried to conceal their grins, and Nellie enjoyed the joke at her expense. Her appetite was legendary. Nellie could outeat anybody, male or female, at any meal, and she weighed exactly eleven pounds more today than she had on her wedding day. She always claimed it was in the genes. Her husband claimed that Nellie's metabolism was in overdrive, even when she slept. Teddy, on the other hand, said Nellie ate to feed her voracious mean streak, though he never said it out loud.

  "Where's JoAnne?" Sissy asked, suddenly aware that she hadn't seen Doug's wife in the last hour.

  "Upstairs looking after Uncle Mack and Auntie Eula," he answered.

  Nellie sat up quickly. "Looking after Mack and Eula? Why?" Nellie's children quickly waved off her concern, calming her, and DuBois answered her.

  "Because she weighs too much and he smokes and drinks too much, they both have blood pressure readings off the chart, and they're both pushing eighty. We'll be lucky if they don't stroke out and die on us before the week is over," Du said dryly. Teddy laughed and Nellie gave him a look.

  JoAnne was a physician, and she took care of the entire family, not because she'd married into it, but because she was good and kind and gentle–and a damn good doctor. Sissy had been aware that her Uncle Mack, the oldest of her mother's four brothers, was distraught and grieving, and that his wife could go to pieces at the drop of a hat. It had not occurred to her that their ages, coupled with their general ill health, would require medical attention. Leave it to Jo to recognize what needed doing and to do it.

  "How long are they planning to stay?" Teddy asked as he refilled his champagne flute.

  "Why?" his mother asked, giving him another look.

  "They're very needy, and I don't want to have to sit around talking to them all day and half the night."

  "He's my brother, and he can stay as long as he likes," Nellie said, "and you don't have to sit and talk to them at all." And the look she gave Teddy this time caused him to change the topic of discussion.

  "These shrimp are scrumptious. New caterer, Ma?"

  "Umhum," Nellie murmured, accepting an overflowing plate from Doug and scrutinizing the food. "Mr. Flowers was already booked, but I'm glad. I like this woman. Gertrude Something-or-Other. Her people are quite professional. And this food looks and smells wonderful."

  "It's marvelous," Doug said, talking with his mouth full. His plate was piled higher than Nellie's. He sat in one of the wing chairs and spread a napkin across his lap. "You think we should use her for the anniversary party?"

  "What anniversary party?" Teddy asked, piling turkey, ham, roast beef and shrimp on a plate.

  "Don't eat all the shrimp," Doug said.

  "Dorothy'll bring more, and what anniversary party?"

  "Doug and JoAnne celebrate their twenty-fifth in June," Nellie said.

  "No better reason to join me at the gym, Doug. What man wouldn't want to look like his groom self on his twenty-fifth?" Easy for DuBois to say, Sissy thought. He looked better. He'd compensated for his lack of height with physical prowess. His five feet seven inches frame was lithe and muscular, honed and shaped by years of weight lifting and quasi-competitive boxing in the bantam weight category. DuBois could go ten rounds with any man half his age in his boxing club. "Whaddaya say, Doug?"

  "I say mind your own business," Doug snapped.

  DuBois shrugged. "Suit yourself. If your wife doesn't care that you look like the Goodyear blimp, I certainly don't."

  "At least my wife spends enough time with me to know what I look like. Do you even know where your wife is?"

  The silence was long and uncomfortable. Nobody said a word because there was nothing to say. DuBois had brought the bear to his own door. He was mired in an unfortunate marriage with an unpleasant woman who wasted not an ounce of effort trying to disguise her antipathy for DuBois and his family. She would, however, remain married to him as long he belonged to one of the wealthiest Black families in Georgia. And he would remain married to her–Carolyn was her name–because, God help him, he loved her.

  So they all ate their way through the silence, and Sissy was surprised to find herself with an empty plate. She was contemplating seconds when Nellie stood and cleared her throat.

  "Shall we toast now?"

  They stood, filled and raised their flutes, and waited for the familiar words: May you live a long time, and your heart remain mine. May your body be strong, may your Spirit be free, and may all your good deeds be seen as the seeds that grow to fullness in your eternity. Since I love you, all that's left is for God to bless you.

  Nellie's tears flowed as she drank the toast to her mot
her. Sissy held hers in check, Doug cleared his throat a few times too many, and DuBois sniffled. Teddy refilled his glass and drank it empty.

  "What year did Grandpa write that? I always forget," he said, saving the moment from turning maudlin and completing the move away from thoughts of DuBois and his marriage.

  Nellie forced a smile through her tears. "Papa recited that toast for the first time on their first wedding anniversary in 1922, and on her birthday and anniversary thereafter, until he died in 1986."

  "Which is when Uncle Mack took over," Teddy said.

  Nellie shook her head. "Si did it first, then Thatch, and then Mack. And I've got to go check on Thatch before it gets too late. Maybe Mack'll feel like going with me."

  "You don't really have to do that today, Mama. You can go tomorrow. He'll never know the difference."

  "But I'll know, Doug. He's my brother, and his mother is dead and buried, and somebody needs to be with him. Besides, he has moments."

  "Uncle Thatch hasn't had a "moment" in over a year, Mama."

  Doug's words were wasted. Nellie's shoes were on her feet, and she was headed for the door. Teddy caught up with her.

  "Can I get the keys to Grandma's before you go?"

  Nellie turned to face him, and some shift in her gaze, some tightening in her body, alerted Sissy, and she stood up and crossed to her mother as Nellie asked, "The keys to Mama's? Why?"

  "I'm going to stay there."

  Nellie didn't move or speak, but Teddy backed up half a step and the others, unwittingly, eased closer to their mother. Sissy wasn't the only to sense a shift in the climate.

  "Since it's going to be my house..."

  "Since what?" Doug bore down on Teddy faster than his girth should have allowed.

  Teddy ignored him and kept his focus on Nellie. "Grandma's leaving me the house. I want to start living in it."

  Nellie, without speaking, stepped around him, opened the door, and left them standing there. Her uncharacteristic dismissal of her favorite child stilled them all. They watched her back until she was out of sight, then the three eldest turned their gazes on their youngest sibling who, had he been sober and focused, would have mocked their incredulity.