“What did she want for you?” Words filtering out through a cloud of cigarette smoke.
“I imagine . . .” Regina considered. “I imagine she wanted for me what she had wanted for herself—back before, I mean. Before my father was . . . before he died. Before what happened had happened.”
“And that was?”
Regina shrugged. “What everybody wanted back then, what maybe they still want. She loved my father. She wanted to be with him.”
Ida Jane had said this many times, though Regina had never confided this to a soul before—because no one had ever really asked her. Most people just assumed that Ida Jane had wanted her daughter to be a lawyer, that she had determined to make a lawyer out of her. But here was Mary Pickett, in this dark, quiet room, asking for the truth. For a moment, Regina stopped breathing, surprised herself at what she had just so easily said, and to whom.
M. P. Calhoun didn’t seem to notice. “Regina, you ever been in love yourself?”
Ever been in love?
The question came as a shock to Regina, took her aback. And what could she answer? Naturally, in her life, there had been first boys and then men and the kissing and more—all the pleasant physical sensations that came when you were young and involved with first boys and then men.
But love? Love was something else entirely. She had always known this, and that was why kissing and everything else had never led to more. Love had passion to it. Love was something she felt for her mother and the memory of her dead father. Love was something she felt for the law.
Mary Pickett didn’t wait for an answer.
“Well, I have been. Still am. I’ve, let’s say, only lately rediscovered that fact.” She made a gesture that swept through the room, reached out the window. “This is where I first saw Jackson. Sitting right here, exactly where I’m sitting now. I was exactly eleven years, two months, and four days old, and my mother had been dead all of one day, six hours, and fifteen minutes. I had been looking at my watch, which is why I knew all that. When I picked my head up, looked out the window, there was Jackson. He was standing on that rough patch of pavement beneath the magnolia, just outside the gate. It’s still rough, that sidewalk, tree roots grown up all through it. City hasn’t fixed it in all these years.” She paused for a moment, touched a warm hand onto the windowpane’s cold glass. “Anyway, out I looked, and there he was, looking right straight back at me. Eye to eye. That was when I first saw him, if you catch my meaning. Even though, realistically speaking, he’d probably been there, somewhere within the range of my peripheral vision, every single day of my life.
“People like Jackie Earle Blodgett, like what he was, his family . . .” She paused for a moment, seemed to search for a delicate word. “Your poorer people. Well, they’re just there. You catch a glimpse of them sometimes through a car window, in the halls at school, out of the corner of your eye. All they’re ever doing is passing by.
“But I didn’t notice him, as I said, until Mama passed and left me here all by myself to fend off a whole bunch of other people who weren’t poor people, all Mother’s Revere Garden Club friends, who didn’t know one little thing about me or my mama and could not have cared less. What mattered to them was what mattered. How you looked, what year your people had settled here and where they had come from. How you behaved. All that. The old ways. The Calhoun name. Folks who saved their reverence for what had happened way back in 1861. So they stuffed me into a smocked black velvet dress that made me look like a cased-up sausage, made my bosoms look like something Mae West would have looked on with envy. Then they perched a truly titanic black satin mourning bow on my head. Obscene, that’s the way they had me looking. I do declare, I could have easily posed for one of those indecent Paris picture postcards.
“But then again, they did the same thing with Mama. They dolled her up in a blue-and-white silk print that had been given to her by her own Virginia grandmother and that my mama always swore made her look fat. They put pink lipstick on her. And pink was a color always made her seem dead, even when she was alive. They said to Daddy, ‘Judge, I am truly sorry’ and ‘How tragic, Eulalie passing on like that, and so young.’ ‘Anything I can do to help, you just let me know.’ Especially the young widows and the still-hopeful spinsters said that. Everybody’s always so well bred and nice.” Mary Pickett sighed, shook her head, looked over from the window at Regina. “I never have been able to figure out exactly who it is I can trust.”
“But you still had your daddy,” said Regina, who had never had one, not really, and had to fight a subtle, constant envying of those who did.
Mary Pickett snorted, tossed her head. “Daddy wasn’t one bit of help,” she said, losing her carefully cultivated English. The chintz window-seat cushion shifted beneath her. Her cigarette burnt down to ash, she got busy lighting another. “When I tried talking to Daddy, tried to explain to him how folks were messing things up, all he did was ruffle my hair. Made that bad bow look worse than ever. He said, ‘Well, Baby Girl, these are your mama’s dear friends.’ As though that explained whatever needed explaining, as though it made everything they did all right. The only one I could ever talk to was Willie Willie. He was the one person I thought knew about the crack Mama had fallen into and that I was fast tumbling into right behind her. But Daddy was sending Willie Willie all over the place. Before the funeral, after the funeral—he and Daddy were just gone, mostly every day, mostly into the forest, searching out one thing or another. Deer, possum, squirrel. Aiming at any critter that had the gumption to move. When I asked Daddy about it, he’d only said, ‘We got to eat.’ What on earth did he mean by that? We got to eat, indeed! It wasn’t the Depression yet, for goodness’ sake. That was still coming. Willie Willie, shooting, the forest—all these were just Daddy’s excuses for running away.”
Mary Pickett blew cigarette smoke through her mouth, through her nose, a cloud of it obscuring her face. But just for a moment. “So there I was, looking out my window, and there he was, and you know which way he was facing? Jackson, I mean. The first day I saw him?”
Regina, eyes wide, shook her head.
“North,” said Mary Pickett triumphantly, “toward the big cities. And, just like my mama, I was dying to get away. So I got up, ran down the stairs, on out into the street. Called out, ‘Hey, Jack. Where you heading? Take me with you. I want to go too.’”
She took a deep pull on her cigarette and looked out the window, examined her thumbnail, looked everywhere she could, except at Regina.
Regina couldn’t help herself, she had to know. “What happened next?” Impatient as she would be if she were reading through the first pages of a brand-new book.
“With Jack? Why, everything of course! But first off, he taught me what was real and what wasn’t. The truth. Sometimes it’s a little hard to come by down here. You saw that picture of my mama, the way it rises up out of that gold table? Daddy told me he put it there that way, like it was mounted up on an altar, so it’d always be a memorial to her. Jack told me another reason. The real one, he said.”
They’d gone down to the river together, rolled themselves some cigarettes, had a little talk. After which Mary Pickett had run back into her house, flown up the stairs, hoping to find the words venereal disease linked together in her Webster’s Dictionary. Of course they weren’t there, not together. And clap had been completely shushed out. But Jackson had been there. And when Mary Pickett asked him, as she now told Regina she had, he explained things to her, the source of the venereal disease and the source of the source. Which was, naturally, Mary Pickett’s daddy and his running around. “Up to Memphis. Down to New Orleans. Daddy had it, too, that’s what I imagine. It just couldn’t kill him before the strokes did.”
“Why, Mary Pickett, didn’t you know?” Because, Jackson assured her, everybody else in town did.
“Not that he especially liked being the one to tell me,” Mary Pickett said to Regina. Her face
set stubbornly around her words, daring Regina not to believe them. “There was none of that glee on them that I’d seen on Mother’s friends before she died. They’d show up to visit, they’d sit on the wicker porch chairs or in the front parlor and talk all kindly to Mama and then, soon as her back was turned, they’d start up about how drawn Eulalie was looking, and how thin. They’d shake their heads. They’d say, ‘Now, if Charles Calhoun were my husband . . .’ I heard it all. They didn’t mind I was there. I was a child, and a child didn’t count. They thought I wouldn’t understand exactly what they were talking about, and I didn’t. Not until Jack told me. ‘Got to know the truth,’ he said. ‘Got to know what you’re up against.’”
Right at that moment, Regina could have asked her. You talk about truth, Mary Pickett, and you say Jackson talks about it, too. Well, did Wynne kill Joe Howard? Do you know for a fact that he did, and will you tell? Because if you, Mary Pickett Calhoun of Calhoun Place, Revere, Mississippi, say that he did it, say maybe that you know about the shirt I’m hiding away—why, that would make all the difference. For Willie Willie. For Joe Howard.
Regina opened her mouth. Around her now, once again, she felt a shiver. But this time it wasn’t the house at all, it was Mary Pickett shaking beside her, her face set, angry and mad. It wasn’t the time to ask her anything, not if she wanted the answer, not if she wanted her help.
“But things didn’t last long between Jack and me,” said Mary Pickett. “Even though they lasted years—until we got married—all that time seemed to flit by in a minute. Once Daddy got the annulment, he packed me straight up to Randolph-Macon, where my mama had gone. ‘Don’t know what else to do with her. Can’t let her run wild.’ Why, that Jackie Earle . . . He’s Vardaman Blodgett’s brother, and we all know what a lowlife he was and what happened to him.’ That’s what he said to anyone who would listen. Not the real reason, mind you, not the truth, but understandable, so good enough. By then . . . Well, Daddy, I understood him. It was Willie Willie siding with Daddy that tore out my heart.”
Regina leaned closer. She knew she was hearing something important, and as she looked and she listened, she saw the slow transformation of Mary Pickett into M. P. Calhoun, the great storyteller, putting words together in a special way, careful about her verbs and her nouns, her eyebrows knitting together in concentration. All this happening right before Regina’s eyes.
Mary Pickett’s own eyes narrowed. “Then when Daddy got so sick and I packed it in and came home, everybody acted like they were pleased as punch. And maybe they were. Folks who’ve stayed home have a tendency to like it when somebody who thinks they’ve got away has got to come back. It’s what my mother’s friends say about me. ‘Why, Mary Pickett is such an old-fashioned girl, really, a Calhoun to her core. I do declare I always knew it. Down under all that Magic nonsense. Glad she got it out of her system. Glad she outgrew all that.’”
“But did you? Outgrow it?”
They both looked across the room, out to the hall, to the other small room with the pile of typed pages on its neat desk.
“Too late for all that,” said Mary Pickett briskly. “I had my chance. Once.”
But still, she’d written that first novel, copying it off, as she now told Regina, “word for word,” up at Randolph-Macon when she was supposed to be doing her class work. After it sold, she’d planned to head straight for New York, never see Revere again, never see her father, never see Magnolia Forest or Willie Willie, or Joe Howard or Jack. Then her father had a stroke, which was followed quickly by another and then another, each more devastating than the last. After that—or in the middle of it, Mary Pickett couldn’t rightly remember—came the Depression. Magnolia Forest had to be sold, Calhoun Place bound to be next, even filled up like it was from rafter to furnace with gently destitute Calhouns and Picketts and all other kinds of cousins. But her little book had turned out to be a success, an unexpected sensation.
“And,” said Mary Pickett in a voice wired with irony, “we were saved.
“Back here, the first thing I heard was how Jackson had gone on and married Mae Louise Wynne and they’d had them a son. After that, I started doing things I thought I’d never do, Calhoun things, like calling on Miss Lilla Raymond—my mother’s good friend—to see about taking my mother’s place on the board of the Revere Garden Club.” A pause.
“They neither of them remarried.” Mary Pickett’s voice got softer, got dreamy. Regina must have looked confused, because Mary Pickett waved smoke at her impatiently. “I mean Daddy and Willie Willie. I mean Willie Willie after his wife, Florence, died. Years before I left here, there was talk of him and Peach Mottley. Folks said they were sparking each other, but then her brother, Luther, disappeared. After that, nothing seemed to work out.”
“Is all that in your new book?” Regina knew she was pushing too hard, that she was too eager, but it was dark outside and this little room was snug around them, a place for telling secrets. And there was a chance, a little chance, that Mary Pickett might say something. Something important about the book—the new book—that was lying right down the hall from where they now sat. Regina was sure that’s what she had seen, and she couldn’t understand Mary Pickett. Didn’t she realize how famous she was? That even now, twenty years after Magic had come out, the Herald-Tribune and the Daily News and Look magazine and The Saturday Evening Post would run all over themselves and one another to send reporters and photographers and copyeditors and everything else that was needed down to Revere to interview her if they thought there was a new book? The only reason no one had come before was that Mary Pickett obviously hadn’t wanted to be found, and the people of Revere had backed her up in this. Maybe because she was a Calhoun and they were used to doing what a Calhoun wanted. Maybe because they respected the fact she just wanted to be left alone and forgotten. Maybe because they were just glad she was back. No matter the reason, the silence around the author of The Secret of Magic remained complete.
But there was a world out there that still cared about Peach and Collie and Booker and Jack and shivered when they thought of Luther Mottley crying out, Gotcha! from his hidey-hole grave in the hollow of a dead stink tree. And didn’t Mary Pickett realize how important Booker had been, and Daddy Lemon, to Regina and to thousands of other little Negro children like her, reading for the first time about spunky black heroes in a white book?
“There is no new book,” said Mary Pickett, “nor will there be.”
“But what about . . . ?” Thinking, She told me the first day she was writing a new one. Why, just now, she walked me right past it. She must have known I’d see. Regina persisted. “You told me you worked on it, every morning.”
“No. New. Book.” And that was that.
After a moment, Mary Pickett continued. Her voice changed now, brisk and to the point. “I brought you here to talk about Jackson so you’d understand enough—so I could talk about Wynne. That’s what you want, isn’t it, to hear something real about Wynne?”
“I’d like to learn the truth about him.”
“The truth?” said Mary Pickett, with a lift of her lips. “Oh, that again.”
She waved her hand through the spectral smoke of her cigarette, waving it away—and maybe the truth with it.
“I imagine Wynne’s attractive enough, but . . . he isn’t smart like his daddy, not disciplined, not used to having to work. Nothing like Jackson.” They were sitting so close that Regina could see Mary Pickett’s eyes widen with the wonder of this as she continued. “Wynne didn’t go to the war like Joe Howard, even though they were the same age, or near the same age. I imagine he’s regretting that now. The not-going-to-war part, I mean. Soldiering’s always been an important tradition around here. The honor of it. The medals. And if people thought your mother might have pulled strings, might have been the one . . . Well, you can imagine. Wynne has his failings, his weaknesses. Still, Jackson loves him. How could he not? His own son.” Throu
gh the smoke of one cigarette after another, she said all this to Regina.
“But he—Jackson—was wrong to think that Joe Howard’s death would just go away, that Willie Willie would let it be forgotten and disappear. I must have thought that, too, and I should have known better. It never happens like that.” She lifted her shoulders, let them slump. “Down here, in the South, we tell the same stories over and over again, always hoping things will turn out different and better, with just one more telling, with just one more word said a different way. Can you understand?”
What Regina understood was that Mary Pickett was making excuses for Wynne Blodgett. Which meant she must know perfectly well what he’d done. Everybody must know it, just like Tom Raspberry had told her they did. Regina reminded herself that this was Revere. Who’d stand up against the son of a rich man who probably owned every mortgage in town?
No one, that’s who. She thought of this while Mary Pickett went on talking and talking. Regina waited, not saying a word, as Mary Pickett touched flame to cigarette after cigarette, as she took deep drags on them, as she blew the smoke out. As she told her about all kinds of things that didn’t add up. About the town. About the Negroes. About the whites. Explaining, or trying to, at least, about Jackson Blodgett and how poor he’d once been. About the traditions and how they ruled here. This, at last, was something Regina could understand. She’d felt the force of how-things-are-done emanating even from the otherwise progressive soul of Tom Raspberry, even from Willie Willie himself. What an effort it must take to stand up against it. For the first time, Regina realized what a hornet’s nest Mary Pickett had stirred up bringing her here.
“But why did you do it?” Regina said.
I already told you.
That’s what she thought Mary Pickett would say, and she braced herself for it, not only for the sharpness of the words themselves but for the impatience and the loftiness that always seemed to be the force behind Miss Calhoun speaking her mind.
The Secret of Magic Page 22
