The Keepers of the House

by Shirley Ann Grau

  Of course, he was away more than ever. And once again, the year after my grandfather’s death, I found myself suspecting, checking on him. I couldn’t help it. I had to. Sometimes I fought with myself for hours. I would work frantically on the napkins I was monogramming and I would try not to look at the telephone, so squat and round and white there on the table. But the end was always the same. Biting my lip and shivering with disgust, I would call long distance and nervously tell them the number he’d left with me. The girls in the telephone office soon got to recognize my voice: “How you, Mrs. Tolliver? This is Jenny Martin.” I knew them, of course I did. I knew all the girls—operators, secretaries, clerks—who worked in the white-shingled building across the square from the courthouse. I could see them gossiping between calls: “She keeps up with him, for sure. You suppose she’s got reason?” I hated that. Hated to set them talking about me, to give them grounds for suspicion. But I couldn’t help it. My arm always went weak, and my will betrayed me.

  John didn’t say anything for months. Finally, late one night, I reached him at his hotel in New Orleans. I had less to say than usual, even, and he was very tired and you could hear the rasp of irritation in his voice. “Honey, why’d you call?”

  You could hear the annoyance and the nervousness and the waspishness in mine too. “Because I get lonesome and afraid when I’m pregnant.”

  In the silence my thoughts ran around my head, rattling like marbles: You’re not sure, you’re not sure. …

  “I’ll be damned,” he said.

  When he came home, he brought me a pearl necklace. “It’s not the best,” he said, “but it’ll do for a while.”

  I needn’t have worried. Soon there was the soft bland feeling of gestation, as my body and I settled down to the comfortable work of building another shape, bone by bone, little flecks of calcium forming, tissue growing, cell by cell, life pouring in through the cord.

  I was placid and lazy, and John took charge of the remodeling of my grandfather’s house. He brought an architect from New Orleans and the two of them worked for months over the plans. There was plenty of money now, and John used it well. I’d never known it was such an imposing house. John had been clever enough to go back to the original style, the massive solid farmhouse—of the sort that preceded the rage for Greek Revival. It was heavy and rather African, but it was beautiful. They’d also taken off most of the wings and sheds that had grown on it like mushrooms or barnacles over the generations. And they had cleared away the woods that pressed on it and crept up to it. You could see the river now, you could see the outline and the shape of the crest the house stood on.

  Before we moved there, our son was born, and his name was John Howland Tolliver. He was a dark ugly baby, jolly and healthy. John sent me a diamond broach from Cartier. “A wonderful wife,” the card said.

  I was happy; I’d had a son at last. There seemed to be no more problems. Just a happy procession of days leading straight to the capital and that hideous governor’s mansion with its ugly red brick walls, and its squat white columns.

  I didn’t tell John—I didn’t want to bother him—when I had a message from Margaret saying Nina was dead. And I didn’t tell him when I found out—later—that the news was wrong. I didn’t understand what had begun to happen. That Margaret’s children had finally grown up and were beginning to have a force and an effect of their own.

  One afternoon—we were still living in town then—I took Johnny into the side yard. He was waving his absurdly thin arms and legs in the sun and giggling at the lights and shadows. I was twisting his thick black hair around my finger and making faces at him when I heard heels on the stepping stones behind me. I saw a tall, very tall, red-haired woman, well-dressed, as a northerner is well-dressed. She seemed familiar—yes, very—but I did not know her. So I handed the baby a rattle and went to meet her, wondering who she was. She stopped, waiting for me; she expected me to recognize her. “Yes,” I said, “can I …” And I recognized her at the very time she said softly: “I’m Nina.”

  The girl I had played with, who’d run the pasture and chased the cattle, had hunted lamb’s-tongue lettuce and pulled dandelion greens for supper, found thickets where deer had lain, sniffed the musky odor of snakes—the girl came back a woman. She stood smiling at me eagerly; she was very beautiful. She looked—somehow—Greek. I blurted the first thing I thought: “Your mother said you were dead.”

  Her face emptied out, like a glass, quickly and smoothly. “I know she did.”

  “Who could have told her that? … Who’d be so mean? … But come inside. I’ll take the baby.”

  Nina shook her head. “We’ve just come from New Church, and we’ll go along. My husband’s never seen the South and we thought he should.”

  I said apologetically: “Margaret didn’t mention your marriage. She really didn’t.”

  “I sent her a wedding picture—when we were married a few months ago.” She started to say something more. But she shrugged and let the words flutter off her tongue unsaid.

  “When I was in New Church—I brought the baby to see her—she seemed fine.”

  “Did you see her?” Nina asked politely. “The door was locked and the shades were pulled the very minute we came in sight.”

  In his stroller the baby chirped and waved his fist at a beam of light. And what was wrong? … “I can’t imagine why,” I said truthfully.

  “Come to the car, and meet my husband,” Nina said.

  We walked on the carefully placed stepping stones through the side yard, past the thick hydrangeas with their heavy sagging blue flowerheads. We came around the house and cut across the front lawn. Nina’s husband saw us coming and he opened the door and stepped out to meet us.

  And then I saw what had happened, then I knew why Margaret called Nina dead.

  Nina’s husband was a Negro. Tall, strikingly handsome, but very dark and unmistakably a Negro.

  It made sense, then, it all made sense. I shook hands with him mechanically, not even hearing his name.

  Nina said with a harsh laugh: “You look just the way my mother must have looked when she got our wedding picture.”

  “Really,” I tried not to show that I was annoyed by the sharp edge in her voice, “I am dumbfounded. How could I know? I heard you were dead, and now it seems you’re alive and married too.”

  “And you think she might as well be dead as married to me,” he added quickly.

  I looked at that handsome dark face and I thought: I don’t like him, I should pity him, but I don’t even like him. “Well,” I told him evenly, “you said it, I didn’t.”

  They both got into the car. Nina leaned across her husband: “Tell my mother you saw us.”

  “No,” I said. “I won’t. I won’t do that.”

  She lifted her carefully shaped eyebrows.

  “I never could stand self-pity.” I was furious now; my voice was shaking and that made me even more angry. I did not want them to know that they had the power to make me that upset, to disturb me that much. “And I’m not going to pester an old lady just to give you a thrill.”

  Nina’s pecan-colored eyes flickered a moment. “We shouldn’t have come.”

  “Margaret didn’t ask you to come. Nobody sent for you.”

  They would call me a white bigot. Let them, I thought. To hell with them and all their problems. I marched back into the yard. I yanked the baby out of his stroller and stomped into the house. I went straight to the bar in the corner of the living room. I plunked the baby down on the rug without a word and poured myself a stiff drink. He watched me, too amazed even to cry.

  I soon forgot about Nina. I had my own life, my own excitements. We moved to the Howland place that summer when the house was finally finished. It was so elegant now, quiet and dignified and obviously very expensive. It was a magnificent house for entertaining, the house of a man who knows what his future is. I worked hard on the decorating, and John was pleased. “Looks great, old girl,” he said lightly. “You
’ve got good taste.”

  He so seldom complimented me that I felt myself blushing.

  “You look prettier when you do that,” he joked. “You should always be doing a house. Agrees with you.”

  My grandfather wouldn’t have recognized his place and he wouldn’t have recognized the life that went on inside it. He’d never kept any servants to speak of. He didn’t like people around his house, so he didn’t have them—though everyone in town was shocked. The matter of servants is so very important around this county, this state—kind of like stripes on a uniform sleeve. When John and I were living in town, we kept two, a cook and a nurse for the children—and people clucked and thought that awfully stingy of us. Out at the Howland place, we had a proper staff, and people were finally content. My Aunt Annie, who was now a very very old woman, her fat jolly flesh all melted away with age, paid one duty visit to us and nodded her pleasure. “First time this house has looked like anything since your great-grandmother’s time. Where’d you find a trained butler out in this wilderness?”

  “John hired him in Atlanta.”

  “Stole him from one of my friends?” she wheezed with amusement. “He’s a love.”

  She could have meant John and she could have meant the butler. I didn’t ask.

  She sat on the front porch and had bourbon and three lumps of sugar in an old-fashioned glass. She was at it steadily all day, so she was quite drunk by the time we put her on the plane home. Her great-grandson, who was with her, steered her to the steps very carefully, winking at me as he went. Aunt Annie looked at me too, her thin emaciated face still holding something of the Howland look. And she stopped with one foot on the ramp, puffing, and said loudly: “This boy’s something of a prick, but he’s the only one I got home now. He still winking over my shoulder?” She didn’t expect an answer. “Of course he is.”

  She heaved herself up the steps and disappeared into the plane. She died a month later and that was the last of my close family.

  Even John’s parents, dour and silent, visited us for two days. “They don’t like it,” he reported. “Smells too lush to be godly. Anything nice got to be sinful.” He chuckled and kissed me. “Leastways they still think you’re a good wife.”

  “It doesn’t look like I’ll be bothered with visiting in-law trouble.”

  “It’s a long way to Tolliver Nation,” he said. “And they don’t take to traveling.”

  We were peaceful and smug and contented. Things went on smoothly, with only minor changes. Take John, for example. His plan was to run for governor when old Herbert Dade finished his term, and then go for the Senate. It didn’t work quite like that. Things weren’t changed, but they were delayed. Herbert Dade, who was a political power the like of which people had never seen and whom most people compared to Huey Long in Louisiana, got the state constitution changed, so he could—and he intended to—succeed himself. I thought John would be annoyed, but he only laughed. “Honey baby, the old boy has ulcers and high blood pressure and he’s started having strokes already. He can get himself this new term but he sure as hell can’t get himself to finish it.”

  And there was another reason that he didn’t mention. Dade was naming John his political heir. Day after day in the papers you saw pictures of them together. I can even remember Governor Dade’s flat drawling old man’s voice saying: “This young fellow here thinks more like me than I do myself.”

  John changed his plans slightly. He ran for the state senate and old Dade campaigned for him. That fall, Dade was re-elected by something like three to one. John was elected by something like eight to one.

  About a week after the elections, late one night, after all the fuss had died down, I found John working at his desk. He had made one wing of the house into an office. In those four rooms, he kept two clerks and four secretaries. Officially his office was in town, but most of the work was done here. He wanted to keep the business and the clatter out of sight—to keep his official office carefully sparse and simple. Country fashion, he would say. He had even found a beat-up desk that belonged to his grandfather and moved it in. It brooded over the office, a hideous carved yellow oak thing. …

  On this particular night, the children were asleep, and I was reading. All of a sudden the house seemed so empty and so lonesome that I went looking for John. I found him studying a breakdown of the election returns. He was doing it very carefully, polling place by polling place. He took off his glasses, and rubbed at his eyes. They were red with strain. “I was just coming in, honey.”

  “How does it look?”

  He grinned, and it was the good, slightly lopsided real grin that he gave to the children and not to the photographers. “They came through fine all right, white and black together.”

  “You did as well in the Negro precincts?”

  “You shouldn’t sound so surprised, honey, it isn’t flattering.”

  “But the Citizens Council and that sort of thing.”

  He chuckled again, the wise and knowing chuckle of a politician. “I’m just behaving the way a white man is supposed to behave. White and black both know it.”

  “Did they count the votes? Really count them honestly?”

  “Mostly, I think; they’re machines, honey child.” He turned serious. “Long as you’ve been in this state, you haven’t figured it out, have you?” He folded his glasses and put them in the leather case he always carried in his breast pocket. “The Negroes figure I’m not old Judge Lynch himself—and I’ve tried my damndest to see that they get that message straight. And everybody in the district pretty much knows about your grandpa’s bastards. That counts for something, I guess. As for the white people, well, they think I’m for just about whatever they’re for. And I’ve told ’em that myself.”

  He popped up from his chair, grinning happily, and he looked an awful lot like the man I married fourteen years before. “Woman,” he said, “let’s go to bed.”

  He was still the most attractive man I’d ever known. I remember that night, even now. I always think of it as the end of the happy times. And in a way it was—though there were some quiet months left to us.

  Once I saw the boy who had brought me the first message from Margaret. He was standing outside the Woolworth store on Main Street. He had bought a couple of things, neckties and a baseball cap, and he was checking their colors in the daylight. He didn’t see me, he was so busy, and he jumped when I spoke to him. “How’s Margaret?” I asked.

  He looked so very surprised that I wondered if I had the wrong boy. But I couldn’t have.

  “You’re the boy she sent,” I told him. “Aren’t you living with her anymore?”

  “Yes’m.”

  “How is she?”

  “She didn’t give me no message this time.”

  His dark eyes had gone opaque like mirrors. “Don’t be the impenetrable African,” I said. “I just asked you how she is. … Do you know what impenetrable is?”

  He shook his head, and I felt silly for snapping at him. He was only a boy after all, and I had pretty much jumped on him. “I didn’t mean to startle you. I just want to know if she’s well.”

  The eyes didn’t change character at all. “She’s an old lady, Miss Margaret is, and they got their aches and pains.”

  “You mean she’s sick.”

  “No’m.” I could almost feel the evasion, his mind rolling away like a drop of water on oil.

  “What do you mean?”

  “She been low in her mind, you might say.”

  “Well,” I said, “it can’t be easy for her.” And then I saw my two daughters running across the town square. They had been to the dentist and they each had a huge yellow balloon with the black lettering: “Dr. Marks Happy Friends.”

  “Tell Margaret hello for me,” I said, and walked toward my own children, who were waiting impatiently at the corner for the light to change. It was the only traffic light in the whole town, and they always went to cross at that corner. They enjoyed it more.

  Half an ho
ur later as we walked toward the car to drive home, me holding the balloons and feeling the queer live tug of their strings in my hand, Abby asked: “Who was the boy you were talking to?”

  “I don’t know, honey. I didn’t ask him.”

  I had done what most white people around here did—knew a Negro and dealt with him for years, and never found out his name. Never got curious about who he was, and that he was called. As if Negroes didn’t need identities. …

  Margaret died. Four years after my grandfather, on the very day when he had collapsed over the wheel of his truck and died in the woods. The anniversary of that day was bleak and cold and wintry, with everyone huddled inside by their fires. Margaret had not gone out all day. She never did any more, not even into the yard; she didn’t seem to care. In the late afternoon, just after the watery winter sun slipped behind the southwest ridge, she put aside her tatting and got up from her rocker. “Somebody calling outside,” she said. And she went, without a coat or a shawl, though the ground was already lightly frozen and crackled under her heavy steps.

  Her cousin and the boy waited patiently. At midnight, the boy bundled up and took a flashlight and looked for footprints in the frosty ground. He found them at once. They led straight down the slope toward the trees and the winter-slowed creek. He followed them across the open places, but he hesitated at the dark of the trees—the beam of his flash seemed too small. He turned and scurried back to the house, his hands shaking and his face grey. He refused to go back again. He smelled death, he said.

  He and his mother together—because neither of them would stay alone in the house—got into Margaret’s car and drove down the road to their family. They spent the night there, and in the morning, they got seven or eight people together and came back to hunt for her. It did not take long. Her steps were plain for everybody to see. They followed them through the trees to the creek and down the creek to the crumbling old brick baptistry. In the morning light the pool had the leaden look of water about to freeze. There, in the leaf-littered, twig-crusted, leaden-green depths they found her. She was bobbing gently to the flow a couple of inches below the surface. She was face down and her arms were spread as if she were flying. Since the baptistry was so deep and they didn’t know how to swim very well, any of them, they poked and dragged at her body until they maneuvered it close to shore. Then they lifted her out. She was a big heavy-boned woman and even heavier in the stiffness of frozen death—and the ground was uneven and broken with chunks of rock and bits of branches, and covered and slippery with ice—so they stumbled and dropped her. It seemed to them at that moment she was twisting away from them, was twisting back toward the pool.