The Keepers of the House

by Shirley Ann Grau

  Margaret’s cousin screamed and ran, her son right behind her. The others, grown men and women that they were, murmured a little rush of words and hurried after them. Even the preacher ran, though he wasn’t supposed to be afraid. (His name was Boyd Stokes and his father and his grandfather had preached in New Church in their time.) They all waited an hour or more, standing in the bare empty field, stamping their feet on the frozen ground, and watching toward the wall of trees, as if they were waiting for someone to tell them what to do. After a bit they sent for whiskey. The sun warmed their backs; the shadows shortened, the trees didn’t look quite so dark any more; and the likker warmed their souls. Boyd Stokes said a quick prayer and they did what decent people had to do: went back and gathered up the muddy, bruised, leaf-plastered body and brought it into the house.

  That was all. That was the end of the girl my grandfather had met on a cool morning washing clothes in a little creek that didn’t have a name. When she died, she was an old woman—though she wasn’t all that along in years—tired and sick, and there wasn’t any part of the world that looked familiar or comforting to her. I wonder now what it was like living for four years, not wanting to, only waiting for your hold to weaken so you could finish up and leave.

  John was surprised that I didn’t cry at the news. I couldn’t explain to him, but it wasn’t like that. This was the order re-establishing itself. This was the way I’d known all along it would be, without realizing it. It wasn’t something you cried over. You didn’t even grieve in the ordinary sense of the term. You just curled up where you were, curled up in pain and fear, and you stayed shriveled and shivering.

  John didn’t say anything, he was only a little more solicitous. He called me twice a day now, when he was away. And he made special plans to be home when the baby was born—I was pregnant again. It was a horrible time. I never knew whether it was the baby moving or my own fear shaking me inside. I didn’t sleep, because Margaret lurked around the corners and the dark spots of all my dreams. She even called to me out of the color-streaked ether-filled cold when the child was born.

  It was a girl and I called her Margaret. I expected John to object, but he didn’t. “Lay her ghost?” he said.

  And that was the thing with him. Just when you thought he was stupid and dense, he would come up with the answer, and he would put it in its bare true terms, the way you hadn’t been able to phrase it yourself.

  Margaret had not kept the addresses of her children. Her cousin (I found out finally that her name was Hilda Stokes; she was the widow of the youngest of the seven Stokes boys) did not know them. I had a couple of old ones from my grandfather’s records and I tried them, but the telegrams and the letters came back, unopened.

  They—Robert, Nina, and Crissy—got the news some way. I’ve never known how. In the year that followed Margaret’s death, they appeared, one by one, drifted back into my life. First, a letter from Nina, its only address a post-office box in Philadelphia. It was a single line on heavy white formal paper: “How is my mother?”

  She had heard then. So I wrote across the bottom of the letter, not even bothering with a sheet of my own: “She killed herself January 30 last year.” I didn’t sign it; she would know. Also, I didn’t tell her that it might have been an accident after all. A stumble on ice-slick rock. I didn’t like Nina and I wasn’t going to give her a shred of comfort. Even a tiny shred.

  When I dropped it into the mailbox, I thought: Carry that now, and see how strong you are. Carry that behind your arrogant handsome face. Guilt for being a Negro, guilt for having a suicide for a mother. …

  Nina’d come back to flaunt her marriage, to hurt Margaret. But Margaret was even, in their war of hurt and be hurt. I nodded to her wherever she was, and I almost found myself saying out loud to her: You’ve won one round. …

  When the florist in town got a telegraphed order for fifty dollars’ worth of flowers for Margaret’s grave, I knew I had been right. Nina would ache with guilt the rest of her life, wondering how much she had done in her mother’s death.

  The florist sent the flowers, of course he did. He didn’t want to, but he couldn’t think of a reason, and he didn’t dare not. He finally came out and asked me openly, nervously. “The telegram came from Philadelphia,” he said. “I thought you might know if it’s one of her children,” and then because he felt he had gone too far, he added: “I been remembering that Margaret worked for your grandfather for years on.”

  “I don’t know,” I said, “but have you ever had a single fifty-dollar order before?”

  He clucked with confusion, that funny little wispy man who had been florist in the shop just across the street from the county jail for as long as I could remember. People in little towns seem to live forever, drying up like crickets, chirping all the time. …

  As I left him, I couldn’t help smiling at Nina, egotistical self-centered Nina. She thought she had killed her mother. … And who could tell her otherwise? Who could tell her that my grandfather’s dying had killed Margaret. That after his death, she found an earth of brass, and she hadn’t been able to stand it. Who could tell Nina that it wasn’t any of the children, that they weren’t that important to Margaret, who had known from the moment they were born that she would send them away. No, Nina wouldn’t be the sort to believe that people died for love, for weariness.

  As I walked over to meet John at his office, I wondered: If he died, what then? But I knew he wasn’t all I had. There were the children, and a house and land that had been in my family for a hundred and fifty years, and a round of duties, dull and familiar, but saving, if it ever came to that.

  I might miss him, but I wouldn’t die of him. That was the difference. Neither Nina nor I was like Margaret. Neither of us was as good.

  A while after—a few months—Robert called. I was getting ready for bed—John was out again. The state legislature was in session and he had gone to the capital. I had a nasty cold—I was fixing a hot toddy when the phone rang. “Spokane calling Mrs. John Tolliver.” I agreed mechanically, wondering who I knew in Spokane. I did not recognize the voice—how should I? “This is Robert Howland.” For a moment that did not register either. He got impatient with my heavy breathing silence. “Margaret’s son.”

  “Oh,” I said, “for heaven’s sake.” Here he had always been called Robert Carmichael.

  “Can you hear me?” He had a crisp midwestern voice. It came through the line as sharp and clear as a radio announcer’s.

  “Of course I can. I was just surprised. After all these years, both of you turn up.”

  “Who else?”

  “Nina.”

  “What did she want?”

  “Don’t you know? Don’t you see her?”

  “I don’t even know where she’s living.” I did not believe him, even when he added: “I don’t think much of her husband.”

  “Neither did Margaret.”

  “I want to ask you about her. Is it all right or would you rather go to another phone?”

  “Why?”

  He sounded impatient again. “Is your line tapped?”

  “Now who would tap my line?”

  “Your husband’s in politics. I’ve been seeing his name around one place or the other. His line might be.”

  I sneezed and my sinuses began a steady aching. “Oh for God’s sake, Robert, everybody for miles around knows about Margaret and her children. What is there to hide?”

  He hesitated for a moment, not saying something. Then he asked abruptly: “How is she? I heard she died.”

  “Who told you?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “It was Nina,” I said flatly, and he didn’t contradict me. “I thought you’d keep in touch with her whether or not you liked her husband.”

  “Well, answer me,” he said.

  “She drowned herself on January 30th.”

  “Last year?”

  “Yes.”

  “Where?”

  “The creek by her house—they te
ll me. I didn’t go over to see.”

  “Of course you couldn’t go over.“

  “I can go wherever I please, and don’t be such a fool.”

  The operator cut in. “Your three minutes are up. Please deposit …”

  “Okay,” he said, cutting across her voice. “I’ve got the change here.” And there was the dull muffled clang of silver dropping into a pay box.

  So he hadn’t called from his home or his office, or even his hotel, if he was away traveling. He didn’t want anyone to know.

  In the renewed silence, he asked: “Did she leave a note?”

  “Fixing the blame? No,” I said. “You’ll have to do that yourself.”

  “Did she leave anything for me?”

  “If you mean money”—he didn’t of course, but I wanted to be nasty—“she left the house and the land to the cousin who lived with her, and about a quarter of the money too, whatever she had from my grandfather. The other three-quarters she left to me.”

  “A will?”

  Why did Margaret’s children make me so angry? “How else could she leave it?”

  “Nothing in it about me?” He hesitated, hating to lump himself with the others: “About us?”

  “No. Of course not.”

  “I wondered.”

  “Don’t you remember even that much about her? When you all left here, you were gone forever. She didn’t have children any more.”

  “It’s been a long time,” he said slowly, “but I can remember that.”

  “She did it for you.” That sounded so silly, but it was true.

  “It might have been better if she’d kept us there.”

  His voice was as bitter as mine when I answered him. “Then you’d be a Negro in the South, grubbing in the mud.”

  “A quadroon.”

  “You’ve been reading books,” I told him. “I never did hear anybody use that word here. You’d be a nigger to the white people, and you’d be a nigger to the blacks.”

  “I’ve thought of that,” he said quietly.

  “She did what she could,” I told him, “and you wouldn’t have the sense nor the courage to do the same.” I slammed down the phone, ending his furtive call, and put my head down on the receiver and cried with fury.

  I asked John when he came home the following evening: “Do you think our phone is tapped?”

  “You’ve been hearing clicks?”

  “I wondered.”

  He was going through the stack of mail that had collected for him over the past two days. “I wouldn’t be surprised.”

  “You wouldn’t?”

  He shrugged and kept slitting the tops of letters, methodically. “Politics, honey.”

  “You mean it’s usual?”

  He looked up suddenly and grinned, a bright boyish grin that clashed with the streaks of grey at his temples. “Sometimes the people listening on my office phones can’t help commenting on what we say. Now that we know they get angry, we always try something to see if we can’t get them to join it.”

  I didn’t say anything; I couldn’t think of anything to say.

  “After a while you get used to three-way conversations, honey.”

  “You didn’t tell me.”

  He grinned again. “If you’re having long passionate love calls, I thought I’d let the opposition gather my divorce evidence for me.”

  “Oh John, you should have. I might have said something.”

  “You couldn’t, honey.”

  And I stopped. I couldn’t indeed. I didn’t know anything.

  “After all,” John said, “what does it matter if they know who we’re going to have dinner with—they could get that much out of the servants for a few bucks. Or what you’re going to send to the church fair, or if Mr. Shaughnessy sent you a lousy roast.”

  “You’re right,” I said slowly. “But I don’t think I like that.”

  My grandfather had treated me the same way; but then I was a child.

  John shrugged. “Why tell you things I know will upset you? Look right now … a little thing like a wire tap and you flip.” He stood up and went to the bar, kissing me lightly on the ear as he passed. “A drink for you, Mrs. Tolliver.”

  The girls came home from dancing school. We could hear them tramp in, teasing Johnny and the baby until they roared with frustration.

  “To them!” John lifted his glass toward the noise. “Is Miss Greer going to make dancers out of them?”

  “No,” I said. “She’s trying, but they just don’t have any sense of rhythm.”

  And then he asked what he had been wanting to ask: “Why are you worried about wire tapping all of a sudden?”

  I sighed and tried to fish the cherry out of my old-fashioned. I kept getting the orange slice instead. “Margaret’s son called today to ask about her, and he wanted to know if it was all right to talk.”

  John gave a short low whistle and relaxed. I wondered what he thought it might have been. “Everybody knows about your grandfather’s woods colts.”

  “I told him that.”

  Finally I heard from Crissy. This time I wasn’t surprised. I knew by now that those three kept in touch, in a manner of speaking. This was a postcard—Bois de Boulogne in spring—and a couple of lines in clear stiff board-like handwriting. (That writing reminded me that Crissy was left-handed.) “I have heard about my mother” (From Robert or Nina? I wondered), “and I wish to send my thanks for your trouble. I now live in Paris, the haven of American Negroes.” She had not signed it, and she had started to fill in my address on the right side. When she was half through, she changed her mind, and put the postcard in an envelope. Careful and discreet. She wanted to avoid trouble for me. But then she had always been the gentlest and the nicest of Margaret’s children.

  There were a few more months, quiet baby-filled months. I could feel myself sinking into the deceptive softness of early middle age, the comforting round of house and four children, the sentimental wifely role in state politics. Sherries in the morning (little giggles because liquor was still illegal in most counties), coffees in the afternoon, weekends with the proper people. Baby showers, wedding showers. I drove up to the capital every week now, had tea with Mrs. Dade, lunch with three or four other women, and then did my hospital calls. It was the biggest hospital in the state and I always went by, always the same routine—John had told me precisely how to do it. A few chatty words with the grey ladies at the reception desk, a quick pass through the director’s office, then the visits to the floors. There was even a special order for that: third floor, second floor, fourth floor, fifth and sixth, then the Negro wing. Third floor was surgical, the dramatic cases, they came first and nobody would object; second was the ordinary jumble of illnesses; fourth was obstetrics (“They won’t mind being last of the paying group,” John said, “because they’ll be so delighted with the child”). Fifth and sixth were the ward floors, the charity floors. Finally the Negro wing, all floors. The first time I did it, I felt silly. I held my breath against the odor of sickness, and the look of pain. Finally I began to realize that these people were glad to see me. That my visits, however obvious their purpose, broke the monotony of hospital routine. John was delighted with my success. “What a campaigner you’ll make,” he said. I didn’t like it. No, I never did, but I was able to do it.

  I never drove back home the same day. It was too long and too hard; anyway John didn’t like me driving alone at night. I stayed in the apartment he kept at the Piedmont Hotel. In the morning I stopped at one of the big department stores (finer than anything in our town) to bring the children something: clothes or new toys. Then I tossed everything in the car and drove home. I suppose I’ve made the trip two hundred times, but now that it is all over, I find that I only remember one. Out of all that, only one.

  I woke up very early that morning, and the hotel bedroom was cheerless and drab. I hadn’t slept at all well—I had been dreaming of my mother. I hadn’t even thought of her for years and now all of a sudden there she wa
s. It’s funny how those things come back. And it’s disturbing too. I couldn’t remember what the dream was exactly, but it had something to do with her, and something to do with high grass and fireflies in the trees. It was a summer dream and it had some of that oppressive brooding quality summer nights have. Only in a dream it’s worse.

  Anyhow, I was awake, and I clearly wasn’t going back to sleep, so I decided to go home. I woke the desk clerk and the one bellboy to get the car; I was in a hurry and nervous about it. I didn’t really feel good until I was behind the wheel and on the way out of town, ignoring traffic lights because it was so early. The car was chilly, and I turned on the heater. Its little monotonous hum made me worry about falling asleep, as I always do when I am alone. So I turned on the radio. I got the usual early-morning program of hymns and yesterday’s quotations from various markets. Soon I was out of the city and there wasn’t anything but empty road unrolling in front of my headlights. It was still dark. I had no idea of time—I hadn’t looked before I left. The dashboard clock never worked. My own wrist watch was stopped; I had forgotten to wind it. It must have been about four o’clock; since it was still early spring, dawn was fairly late. Some of the farmhouses I passed had lights in them, one or two sleepy lights; now and then, if the house was very close to the road, I could catch a whiff of frying through the small crack of my open window. Then those houses ended, and the road swung directly south through empty lumbering country. There was no traffic, no house lights; there wasn’t anything except a stretch of concrete and stands of timber. There was just a black pre-dawn sky and two jabs of my headlights, the friendly glow of the dashboard, and the vibration of the heavy engine, straining slightly as I climbed hills without lessening speed.