“He never taught any of us how to throw a baseball, how to bat. By the time I arrived, when he wasn’t working, he was in his office studying for his doctorate,” Harper says matter-of-factly. “He—”
“His father was never around.” Cage looks at Harper with haunted eyes. “Dad took us backpacking every chance he got. He gave us the mountains.”
Frank listens calmly, his face neutral like he’s counseling a couple. Mother stares at Harper and says, “Your father worked hard and provided—”
“I’m not complaining, Nanny. You asked and I want to toast the women in our clan.” Harper raises his wineglass.
“To the Cage women.” Frank laughs. “God bless them.”
Cage is the last to lift his glass. With his voice wavering he says, “The paradigm, Nanny, is your grandmother. I thought about her in—when things were tough. I thought about her being eighteen, alone on their farm at the end of the war. Her own mother dead, her father still gone, no one left but her.” Cage’s voice becomes steadier. “I imagined her waking at first light to see Yankee soldiers rounding up the cattle and tying the mules together and her running out into the field and calling her mare and climbing up on it bareback and refusing to come down, sitting straight and tall all day long while the soldiers ransacked the house, just sitting there until the soldiers moved on. She must have been something.”
“Why she wasn’t shot or raped is a mystery,” Mother says. “She was a little slip of a girl.”
“Her slaves had run off?” Harper asks. “That’s why she was alone?”
“They didn’t have slaves,” Mother says. “Not in the mountains of East Tennessee. They were too poor.”
“She passed on the expression ‘to take hold,’” I say. “I remember my grandmother—her daughter—telling me. When times were rough, you just have to take hold.”
“She never let go, once she took hold,” Cage says.
But how do you take hold of your son’s illness? A boy with such promise, now a man who can’t bring himself to walk to the front gate. I see the sadness in Frank’s eyes and know that he is thinking the same thing. What do we do now? Why has God wasted such a bright mind? When and how will it end? If we cannot somehow provide for him after we die, will he end up an old crazy man on the streets? Harper wouldn’t necessarily take care of him, not if Cage repeatedly stole from him in his manic episodes and wrecked everything he touched. Harper might be forced to cut him off. Tough love. Looking at Cage now, it is impossible to conceive that he could lie, manipulate, and steal. Just as impossible to imagine that he could hold down a job and manage independence.
“To Great-Great-Grandmother Madeline.” Harper raises his glass. “And all her female descendants.”
Frank reaches over and taps his glass against mine, saying, “And to Mars, who carries those tenacious genes.” He leans back and smiles. “She’s the power behind the throne. Only the secret is out. In half the churches in the diocese they don’t even call me the bishop anymore. They refer to me as the husband of the bishop’s wife.”
Mother and Frank laugh genuinely as Cage looks on like a smiling ghost and Harper has an amused, slightly superior look. When he smiles now, Frank’s eyes are simply slits, little crescents. Frank turns the glass in his hand by the stem and takes a sip.
Harper says, “The ultimate in henpecked.”
Laughing, Frank almost coughs up wine, then clears his throat. “That’s your mother. Domineering. Controlling.”
“I am not!” I protest, my eyes wide in disbelief. It’s true that when the boys were young and misbehaved, I always won the arguments over what was just punishment. I put my foot down because Frank, taking a self-serving position, always wanted to let them off too easy. Of course our biggest quarrels were over money. Frank always insisted that we tithe, even when it was so hard just to pay bills. That’s one contention I never won. It infuriated me that he would not ask the vestries for bigger raises, that I had to run the household finances like a draconian efficiency expert. But that’s all long ago.
“They call Margaret the bishop’s wife because she’s so active,” Mother says. “You boys ought to admire her. She’s a wonderful woman. She works so hard.”
“We know that, Nanny,” Cage says.
“Nanny, I admire you both.” Harper smiles. “I just toasted you.”
“After we moved to Memphis I became more involved in the church as a way of helping Frank,” I say. “Perhaps at first it was to fill up the hole from Nick’s death.”
Mother looks at me with a sad, sweet smile, then says, “Well, the food’s getting cold.”
“It looks delicious, Mary Lee,” Frank says. “I don’t know how you do it.”
I lean over and give Frank a kiss, thinking how neither of us has raised a voice in anger at the other for years, how we’ve grown with each other. If I could assemble anyone who ever lived around this big table, it would be Carl Jung, Louisa May Alcott, C. S. Lewis, Emily Dickinson, who’d be too shy to come, Walker Percy, and Franklin Rutledge. I wouldn’t get to say a word! I whisper to Frank, “I’m most thankful for you.”
Harper
In the back of a cab from the Village to Chelsea I wait for Betsy to complain about why I canceled the trip to Cozumel on the weekend. I’ll apologize fifty times, remind her that I’m eating the tickets and hotel, suggest that she take someone else. Maybe I should tell her that I’ve gone off sex, that I think I’ve had sex with too many women. Dooner told me today, “You’re always down on yourself when you’re getting too much pussy.” As the taxi slows to the curb outside Bungalow Eight, I see about twenty people waiting in the cold and tell Betsy, “Forget it. I’m not standing around freezing my ass to be blackballed by those punks corrupted absolutely by their tiny bit of power.”
“Gripe, complain, whine.” Betsy climbs out onto the sidewalk. “Like Oscar the Grouch. Once upon a time you were a lot of fun.”
“Reminds me of the velvet ropes they sometimes use for altar railings.” I pay the driver. “We come humbly beseeching to enter the kingdom of your bar.”
“Ronnie!” Betsy yells, pushing through the crowd and dragging me by the arm.
“Betsy, darling!” the smaller of the two doormen squeals, unhooking the rope. “You look divine. Love the shoes.”
“Ronnie, this is my ex-boyfriend, Harper.”
I give her a quizzical look.
Clutching a clipboard to his chest, Ronnie winks at me. “Pass him my way.” He turns to the big Latino bouncer in a long leather jacket and says, “Elisabeth Sloan is royalty. Don’t you ever forget.”
The muscleman nods seriously and opens the heavy metal door.
“See you, sweetie.” Betsy kisses Ronnie, then tugs me. “Come on, grumpy.”
A bass beat pulsates through a dark corridor. I push open the next door into a dim pond of noise, hip-hop and the roar of young New Yorkers making themselves heard over the music. What’s Isabella Ballou doing right now? Thursday night in Memphis is show-and-tell at Incognito, a black gay bar, where she is occasionally one of the few white clientele watching big black men impersonate Tina Turner and Diana Ross. A heroin-thin hostess comes up and talks to Betsy, touching her lightly on the shoulder. Betsy turns back to me and shouts something about a table upstairs. I smile and nod. The girl then leads us away from the stairs to two seats at the bar, says something to Betsy, and walks off.
“Two greyhounds,” I shout at the bartender, then to Betsy, “Perfect place for quiet conversation.”
“What?” Betsy raises her eyebrows, then she smiles and yells, “Maybe this was a bad idea.” When the bartender delivers the drinks, Betsy throws down a hundred before I can reach my wallet, then she holds up two fingers. The barman smiles and turns away and Betsy shouts, “Immediate resupply!”
Drinking with Betsy is very much like drinking with a guy, only she drinks faster and holds her liquor better than most traders I know. After knocking back half the first drink I decide that it’s not so bad to be in
a noisy club with my buxom friend. I rub her neck and put my lips to her ear. “You are a great American. And a beautiful woman.”
“I want to explain something to you,” Betsy shouts.
Here it comes. Cupping my hand to my ear, I lean toward her face.
“I feel like when we first got together. It was exciting. But something has happened between us. You’re ambivalent about seeing me. It breaks my heart—I’ve had more fun with you. I feel so comfortable around you.” Betsy drains her first drink, sets it down.
Shaking my head slightly, I’m confused. Did she think we were in a monogamous relationship? I had assumed that she was fucking other guys on occasion, but was I leading her on, letting her think that we were a unit?
When I don’t say anything, Betsy takes a sip from a full glass. “I can’t make all the effort. I want to be courted. What woman doesn’t? There are so many men out there and I don’t want to be with one who makes me feel bad about myself.”
“I make you feel bad about yourself?”
“Duh. You can’t even tell.” Betsy narrows her eyes. “Is that all you can say?”
“Do you have any blow?”
Betsy’s eyes widen into an insane glare.
“I was just joking, Bat Girl.” I put my arm around her shoulders. “I’m sorry, really. I love you. I think you’re great. Look—”
“You don’t love anyone but yourself.”
“That could be true.” I take a gulp from the backup greyhound. “You’re better off with one of the high rollers who’re always chasing you with limos and roses. I’m a lost boy.”
“Hey, Harper.”
I turn and see Caitlin with a couple of girls I vaguely recognize and my stomach falls and I try to smile. The first night we met, after I got her number, lit on blow like a lightning bug, I called Cait about two a.m. and told her that it was love at first sight and I couldn’t sleep until I came over and ravished her until dawn, which I did that night and many more, but lately I’ve been dodging her calls. “Hey, Caitlin.”
“Get back early from Hong Kong?” she shouts.
Betsy is craning around me with a who-the-fuck-are-you? face.
“Caitlin, may I present Betsy. Betsy, Caitlin.”
“I’ve seen you on TV,” Caitlin says.
Betsy smiles benignly.
“Is that why you wear so much makeup?” Caitlin asks.
“What?” Betsy looks fierce, the old attack forward on the champion lacrosse team ready to slam into a defender.
Caitlin ignores her. “So you never went to Hong Kong?”
“Hong Kong?” Betsy shouts.
“So you were just blowing me off.” Caitlin drops her sarcastic expression, suddenly looks hurt.
I puff my cheeks like a blowfish. “No, no. I—”
The bartender shouts something at Caitlin and her friends.
Someone taps me on the shoulder and I spin around and nearly fall off the barstool at the sight of Camille, a young lawyer from Baton Rouge, a very close friend and rare lover. She’s seen me evolve from Cub Scout to playboy, and when she’s between boyfriends, we sometimes get roaring drunk and practice the Kama Sutra. As it happens, she just dumped a guy at Goldman a few days ago.
“Harper. I thought it was you, surrounded by beautiful women.”
“Hey, Camille.” I stand up long enough to kiss her on the cheek. “This is Betsy. And Caitlin.” Betsy and Caitlin’s mutual hostility is suspended for a moment by mutual suspicion of Camille’s open, disarming smile. Caitlin’s friends look on impassively like animals grazing in a field.
“I’ve known Harper since kindergarten,” Camille shouts. “He was an ancient third-grader.”
“Camille had the curliest hair I’d ever seen,” I yell. “I can still picture her back then.”
“So you straighten your hair?” Caitlin shouts.
Camille doesn’t hear or ignores her. “I used to think Harper’s daddy was God. He was so handsome and so kind.”
“How could God sire such a devil for a son?” Betsy asks.
Camille yells, “A difficult theological question.”
“He deserves the Inquisition,” Betsy shouts.
Caitlin looks like she’s trying to think of something to say. She turns to grab her drink. I slap a couple of twenties down on the bar, spin back around on the chair, and ask Camille, “What are you drinking?”
“I’m at a table with some friends. You think I cruise these places by myself? See you tomorrow night. Pick me up?” She kisses me hard on my lips, then smiles at Betsy and Caitlin. “Nice meeting y’all!”
As Camille turns away, Caitlin pours a tall glass of tomato juice in my crotch and walks off. I’m too tired and ashamed to feel any anger. I say softly, “So long, Cait.”
Betsy and the bartender are laughing. I ask him for a towel and he hands me a bunch of napkins. Betsy shouts, “The chicks came home to roost.”
“I imagine you have a few”—I’m tempted to say cocks—“roosters out there.”
Betsy forces a smirk into her anchorwoman look of deadly seriousness. “I thought we had something more.”
Are you crazy or kidding? I almost ask.
Betsy suddenly looks very sad.
“I love you, Betsy.” I hug her and say, hoarse from shouting, “I’m there if you need me. I’m there if you’re blue. But it’s not love with a capital L. It’s not the union of souls, caring more about the other than yourself. We’re just two people who are very fond of each other, who both love sex. That’s why we’re so comfortable together. That’s it.”
Betsy pulls loose and looks at me with tears in her eyes, then glances away. The bartender sets two more greyhounds on the counter and says they’re on him. Betsy picks hers up and turns the glass in her hand. I drape my arm around her shoulder and she shrugs it off. I tell her, “My mama used to say, ‘All good games end in tears.’”
Cage
The ceiling is white, blank, big as a cinema screen waiting for light to throw images upon it in a pantomime of life. Lying on my back in the middle of the old king-size bed where my mother was born, I can almost project the picture of Nanny, half my age, bringing her into the world, or fast-forward some twenty years to the scene of Mama arriving here from the hospital in Thebes with me, a child who smiled long before most, as if my happiness which began prematurely would spend itself prematurely and plunge the family into more sadness than anyone had ever dreamed, bearing the legacy of violence which the Cages brought to Tennessee, a curse of blood which would reach forward through time and seven generations to haunt the innocent soul of the firstborn and the last to carry the family name. Will the curse die with me, die with the name? I will not procreate, not I, a half man, hobbled back from the West to hide in the home of an old woman, nor will Harper, a serial lover whose mildly unhappy childhood left him with no desire to perpetuate the absence of the fathers. Is it evolution taking its course, the weeding out of bad genes? Was I simply hastening the natural process when I loaded the shotgun next door in Granddad’s study? The screen of the ceiling replays the scene—the twin black caves of the barrels enclosed by my trembling hand—the end of one act in a lifelong play of flops, theater of the absurd, for even then I failed to achieve the goal.
“Cage!” Nanny sounds like some rare tropical bird. “Coffee’s on!”
“Coming!” I pull on yesterday’s khakis and plaid wool shirt, then go into the bathroom. “Hello, Mr. Bipolar. How are you today?” the face in the mirror says. “Got any big plans? Going to the office? Just going to cower and skulk?” I don’t answer. I brush my teeth, throw some water on my face, and walk down the wide staircase, then pass through the dining room into the thin winter light spilling through the kitchen windows.
Nanny, small and pear-shaped in a blue winter jogging suit, is breaking eggs on the side of a big iron skillet. Nanny’s lived through the First World War, the Great Depression, the Second World War, the cold war, an alcoholic husband, the deaths of her grandparents, pare
nts, husband, one grandchild, and nearly all her contemporaries, and now, a ninety-something in the new world order, she is as peaceful and content as any Buddhist monk. She believes in Jesus, forgiveness. She is not afraid to die. Appalled by the relentless cascade of violence and crime on the news, she mourns the days when you never locked the doors, has no illusions about the human capacity for weakness, addiction, excess, pure incomprehensible evil, and she always sounds like a sweet, cheerful child. Turning at my footsteps, she smiles and says, “Good morning. It’s a beautiful day. They predicted rain but I don’t think it’s going to rain.”
“Morning, Nanny.” I come into the circle of brighter light around the stove. “Let me do that.”
“No, no, I’m almost finished.” Her hands, gnarled like old roots, stir the skillet rapidly with a spatula that I seem to remember from my childhood. “Pour us some juice, please.”
In the breakfast room, set through double lattice doors off the kitchen in the back corner of the house, filling the juice glasses from a carton of Tropicana, I see a crow fly through the mist and land on a bare branch close to the window. Nanny glides to the table in slow motion with her slippers never leaving the floor, carrying the skillet. She peers through a dead stranger’s transplanted corneas out the window at the crow and says, “Good morning, Sam.”
Caw, caw, caw, Sam calls.
“Here, Nanny,” I say, taking the skillet.
“Thank you, son.” Nanny sits down by her bowl of Grape-Nuts and a slice of grapefruit.
“Granddad would have liked Sam.” I carry the skillet back to the sink. “I remember how he put suet out for the woodpeckers.”
“Morgan loved wildlife. One cold fall Sunday he found a little hummingbird just lying on the back steps, alive but half frozen. I went off to church and he took it up to your room, where the sun was streaming in through the windows, and revived it with a mixture of sugar water and whiskey from an eyedropper. When I got back, it was flying around in the bright light. The day had warmed up and Morgan opened the window and out it flew. We hoped that it would catch up with its kin migrating south. Morgan was a kind, gentle man.”
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