by Bob Bickford
“Serious?” I asked.
“Yes, underground stream, or some such. Water table on that end rose up. I looked into fixing it, but it would cost more than building a new house. It’ll need tearing down someday, but that will be after I’m gone. I waited a lot of years to get this place, and it will see me through the time I have left.”
“It’s wonderful, it really is,” Molly said. “It’s an absolutely charming house.”
We followed him up the front steps. Once we were inside, the effect was immediately unsettling. Wood gleamed, the light was diffused and lovely, and a clean cool breeze moved the air gently, but there was a just enough slant to distort perception.
“You can’t close the doors anymore. A while back the doors that were shut, closets and such, stayed shut. Couldn’t get’m open anymore. Open stays open and shut stays shut. So I opened the ones I use and left them that way.”
He gestured off to his left. “In through there is my office, consulting room, waiting rooms. There’s been medicine practiced in this house for almost a hundred years now, and it ends with me. Shame. The doctor who built this house even did minor surgeries here. His son grew up and followed him into medicine and carried it on. Then it passed to me.”
He was still talking when the ghost walked in. At first I waited to be introduced to her, but the old man ignored her completely, and then a sense of her oddness crept into the room. Molly gripped my arm.
The spirit was a black woman in her forties, in flat shoes and a shapeless cotton shift. She was tall, and the ripe curves of breast and hip under light fabric were at odds with her worn face, which was nearly masculine in its angularity. She stopped at the entrance to the waiting room, apparently blocking us from going in. Crossing her arms, she leaned against the door jamb and looked steadily at us.
“This was your family you’re talking about?” Molly asked. “Your father and his father?”
Roy Tull laughed. “Not hardly. Not in this neighborhood. This was a white practice. The old doctor took me under his wing when I came back here, fresh out of medical school. Looking over my shoulder, teaching me, was charity at first, his gift to the poor blacks in town, but over the years it got to be something more. I lost my own father when I was young, and the doc never had a child. He never married, had no one else at the end. So he mentored me, and when he died in 1969, he left his practice and his property to me. It’s funny, we talk about the ‘bad old days,’ but I don’t think you’d see a gesture like that today. There was more bravery then.”
The woman in the door stood still, her gaze switching from Molly to the doctor as they spoke. She didn’t look at me.
“I went from poor to rich, just like that. Of course the practice he left me evaporated. No white folks were coming to see me, and I didn’t want or need to see them. Not too many of my own patients were going to come into this neighborhood, so mostly I got in my car every day and practiced my medicine across town.”
“It’s good you kept the place, though,” Molly said.
“Oh, I kept it all right. I opened regular office hours here every day for forty years, even if no one came in here until the ’80s. Eventually, my mother looked after the front when she moved in with me, watched the phone and rode herd on the magazines in the waiting room. She unlocked the door at eight sharp every day. Times changed, and eventually I started doing most of my practice from here, black and white. This was her domain, though, right up until she died.”
He smiled, remembering. “Talk too loud in the waiting room or come in with no shoes and my mamma sat right there behind the counter, glaring at you. I never could get a secretary in here. No one would put up with her.”
“How long ago did she die?” I asked.
I felt the ghost’s attention shift to me. I didn’t look over, but her stare felt unhealthy on my skin. All at once there was a retinal image behind my eyes that popped brightly and then slowly faded.
I saw the branches of a tree with no leaves, a hanging tree, against a purple sky.
“Couple years ago,” he said. “Ninety four years-old and she was doing for herself right up ’til the end. She thought she was doing for me, too. Maybe she was. Oh, well--c’mon in. I promised you coffee, and you should have something to eat, too.”
We followed him deeper into the house. I looked over my shoulder. The ghost hadn’t moved. Her dull eyes stared. She stood and watched us go.
CHAPTER 15
Louise Latta,
Marietta, Georgia, Thursday, June 24, 1948:
The array of bottles on the dressing table was large and varied, with tiny bows around necks, etched letters and cut-glass stoppers. There were small vials in ivory and mint green, clear flasks tinted in sapphires and yellows, crystal flutes full of white creams and amber oils. The boy’s mother sat on her wicker stool and looked at them.
She held an addition to her collection, a squat transparent bottle full of a pale liquid that claimed it was “The Royalty of Perfumes.” She didn’t uncap it. It was enough to hold the thing, come by mail order all the way from Los Angeles, California. The label on the box said it had been sent from an address on Fillmore Street. She wondered if you could see the ocean from Fillmore Street, and if there were, right now, glamorous women going into and out of the door, while men in dark glasses watched and waited for them at the wheels of bright convertibles. People were going places and doing things that hadn’t seemed possible before the war. The country was opening up.
She looked into the mirror behind the dressing table. The solemn woman who looked back at her was never going to go to California, she knew that. She was dark haired and pretty, in a serious way, but at age thirty-three, middle age was encroaching hard, and the possibility of a movie star waiting for her at a curb lined with palm trees was probably gone. She had seen the ocean once, in Savannah, but it was a different ocean, dirty and brown, not the blue of the Pacific. She wished that things had been different for her.
She thought that she had loved her husband, and for the first years of her marriage, everything had been as she expected it should be. It was only in the last while that some sort of longing and regret had settled over her days. It was perhaps the fact of her inability to have a second child that had planted the seed of sadness. Samuel’s birth had been difficult. He was the only one that God was going to allow her.
Now there was trouble, and although her husband refused to talk about it and said that it would pass, she saw in her boy’s eyes that it would never leave him, or them. Trouble was here for good, and so the nature of her own small secret had changed. It was beginning to flex its muscles, and she didn’t resist.
She sat perfectly still for a moment. It was just after nine o’clock in the morning. Although she knew that Sam was out hitting a raggedy baseball with his friends, and Nathan was at work, she checked that the bedroom door behind her was closed. Then she looked at the sidewalk outside the open window, making sure the street was empty, although she was on the second floor and not really visible. The air that came in over the sill was humid and guaranteed the day’s heat. It would rain in the afternoon as sure as two came after one.
She wondered what the air in California felt like. Different than this air, she was sure, soft and warm and dry, scented with the ocean and desert flowers.
She set the bottle of perfume carefully in line with its companions, and then she pulled open the dressing table drawer and retrieved a small brown paper bag. The top of it was neatly folded. She set it in her lap and unfolded it, relishing the formality. The bottle that came out of the bag was dark green, and the liquid inside was more precious than any of her other salves and scents. She unscrewed the metal cap. The scraping sound it made as it was twisted free of the glass neck was part of the ritual, and her insides fluttered with excitement.
She never used a glass to drink from. To do so would separate this bottle from the others, and they were all of a kind. All the pretty bottles made her pretty too. The gin smelled feminine to her, and it al
ways tasted like she imagined that her perfumes would taste if she sampled them.
She checked the level of liquid inside against the light. It was more than half full. Good. She tilted the bottle to her lips. The burn in her throat and then her stomach promised that everything would soon be just as it should always have been.
“Everything is fine,” she murmured softly to herself. “It will all be fine.”
She thought about orange groves, the wind from the sea, neon lights, movie theaters, restaurants with valets in front, and a highway winding its way down the sunny coast.
She was getting deliciously sleepy, and she checked the level again. The liquor was nearly gone, but she had another bottle in the drawer. Until Sam’s trouble, a bottle of gin had sometimes lasted about a week, but now she finished one almost every day. She would have to go out soon for more, maybe tomorrow, and there was always a risk of embarrassment or discovery when she did, but that wasn’t a worry for now. She had enough to last through the nap she would take until Nathan came home from work, and then the interminable hours of making dinner and washing up and listening to the radio until bedtime. She would slip in here from time to time, but her takings from the bottle would be harsh and hurried, not at all like the lovely ceremony of the morning.
There was enough left in the next bottle to start the next day, and anyway, tomorrow was another day and no concern of this one. She looked in the mirror, smiled slightly, and returned her thoughts to California.
***
Present Day:
We were ushered into a sitting area. The furniture was old. Everything in the room was tidy, comfortable, and cared for. Tall mullioned windows looked out into a shady garden. Roy left us there and headed for the kitchen. I had no doubt that it was bright and clean, and that all the cabinet doors hung slightly ajar. Molly sat on a sofa with me, her shoulder touching mine. The contact felt good.
“You saw her?” she asked.
I nodded. “She looked mad as hell.”
“You think so? I thought she looked scared, not mad.”
“Scared of us?”
“Scared of something. She absolutely doesn’t want us here, though.”
She broke off as Roy came back in, carrying a tray. He dealt out cups and plates and put a coffee pot and a tray of sandwiches on a sideboard. When we were served, he sat down with us.
“I have a question, Mike,” he said. “Do you mind if I ask what your dad died of?”
“They just said natural causes, probably heart. I didn’t ask for an autopsy. Do you think I should have?”
He sat back and crossed his legs. “Not necessarily, no. I just wondered if you knew.”
“Do you know anything from his medical history? Any ideas?”
“Maybe,” he said. “It’s pretty non-specific, and it might be a little hard to explain. I never saw your dad as an alcoholic, but there was a history of heavy drinking there, and at seventy-four years old that’ll start to catch up. He had a bout of pneumonia a month or two ago, and he didn’t respond to antibiotics as fast as I would’ve liked, but it wasn’t enough to hospitalize him. He was still fighting it a little bit.”
“So not in great shape to start with?” Molly asked.
“Exactly. Not in great shape to start with. He had a history of urinary tract infections going back five years or so, and he had one the last time I saw him. If you’re looking for a medical cause of death, that’s my strong suspicion.”
I was baffled. “He died of a urinary infection? How is that possible?”
“It’s more common in the elderly than you think. It can creep up. Sepsis, infection crossing the blood-brain barrier, et cetera. You don’t feel that well, and then you’re gone. Bear in mind, I’m saying that if you’re just looking for a medical cause to pin it on. I think it’s more complicated than that.”
“Complicated how?” I asked.
“Complicated or simpler, depending on how you look at it. I can tell you that death is still a mystery to medical science. I’m not talking the obvious, like when someone is decapitated in a car crash. I’m speaking in a general way. We don’t fully understand the mechanism in our bodies, or in our brains, that triggers death. We don’t know why it happens when it happens, what causes the brain to begin the shut-down procedure. It’s all carefully orchestrated. The organs fail one by one as they’re turned off, the lungs fill with fluid--the process is inexorable once it’s started.”
He stood up, walked to the window and looked out. “Sometimes a person’s brain starts that process, and it doesn’t matter much if we know why or not. Our clumsy attempts to save patients cause them more discomfort than anything else.”
Looking out at the garden, he fell silent and seemed to have forgotten us.
“Cause discomfort?” Molly prompted.
“Oh--yes. Well, dying people get thirsty. They need fluids as much as they ever did. But the kidneys are the first things to quit, and that glass of water, or the intravenous fluid we know they need, cause bloating and misery when they can’t void it. Lack of fluids accelerates the process as poisons build up, so it’s damned if you do and damned if you don’t. Sometimes the best that medicine can do is get out of the way. We try to make sure they stay comfortable, or unconscious.”
“He didn’t go that way, though,” I said. “He was sudden.”
He looked over at me, eyebrows raised. “Yes, I know that. The trigger, the process, can also be quick, but the principle is the same.” He walked across the room and put his hand on my shoulder. “Truth is, Mike, I think he was just done. He didn’t want to go back home, and he made up his mind not to. He died instead. Simple as that.”
“Something was bothering him,” I said. “Something terrible that happened to him when he was a kid.”
He raised his eyebrows. “Really? I wouldn’t mind hearing about it.”
“You already know at least some of the story. It involved your brother. There are pieces I don’t have.”
“I was afraid of that,” he said. “Poor Eli just can’t rest.”
“You and Wanda, the woman at the church, knew my father when he was young. It still seems funny to me, I don’t remember either of you, or even hearing about you. Seems odd for life-long friends.”
“We crossed paths as kids, but we’ve been more in touch with each other as we’ve gotten old. I never had kids, and that put me in a different circle than your dad. Wanda Sutton lived her life in a different circle too, mostly in the city. High school teachers don’t socialize with prostitutes and keep their jobs. And she only came back with her son a few years ago, poor woman. Hard life.”
“You seemed pretty definite she wouldn’t come here for coffee,” Molly said, and then glanced over at me. “I gave her your number, Mike, in case she changes her mind.”
“Wanda Sutton is the most bigoted woman I know,” Roy answered. “Without doubt. She would no more be seen in a Negro household than--”
“But her son?” Molly interrupted. “Her son? He’s not white!”
“People punish themselves all kind of ways. Arthur is her punishment. She reminds herself of how much she hates herself every day with that poor man. Whatever he’s turned out to be, he never had a chance in this world.”
“His father--was he ever around? Were his parents together?”
The doctor looked at her blankly. “No. His last name is Sutton. He took her name. I’d be shocked if she claimed to know who his father is.” He shook his head sadly. “She was a prostitute for years and years, all over the place, but at least some of that time in downtown Atlanta. I’m not gossiping here. Most people know it, and Wanda could care less who knows. I’ve heard tell she never had a white customer. She catered to black men with a preference for white whores.”
“And she’s prejudiced?” Molly asked. “That’s absolutely crazy.”
“You think so?” He laughed. “The power of self-hatred--wallow in what you hate the most. Believe it or not, there aren’t that many black families arou
nd here that want to associate with an old white street-walker, so it works out. And Arthur came back to live with her, even though he knows she hates what he is. Imagine living like that.”
“He looks dangerous,” I said.
“Oh, he’s dangerous, all right, in a petty chicken-shit way. He’s been a small time criminal his whole life, and I imagine he’s hurt more than a few people. He’s most dangerous to women, children, and old people, though. His kind don’t mess with anyone that might mess back, as a rule.”
“And he’s never been married?” Molly asked. “Never had any kind of normal relationship?”
He thought about it. “He was married for a little while, come to think of it. Tell you a story. The police got called to their trailer one time for a disturbance. In the morning, mind you. Not even lunch time. They both got taken in.”
“How long ago was this?” I interrupted.
“Oh, maybe ten years now,” he said. “Anyway, Florence, her name was, got down to women’s detention and got processed. They both would have been out by the end of the day, but there was a little problem. I guess what with smoking smokes, and smoking dope, and smoking crack, there wasn’t a damn thing Florence wouldn’t smoke and not a time in the day she wasn’t smoking something. Her lighter was pretty important to her.” He suppressed a smile, remembering. “So she had the presence of mind to hide it before they cuffed her. Just in case she ran across something she could smoke, you understand. Hide it where no one would look. Now if she was going into county jail, they would have found it, mind you, but not city lockup for a couple hours on a domestic cool-down. She got the lighter inside the jail. So then--”
“Wait,” Molly blurted. “She hid it where?”
Almost immediately she blushed and waved her hands in a never mind gesture. The old man regarded her gravely.
