by Holly LeCraw
“Yes.”
“ ‘And now good-morrow to our waking souls.’ They’re”—she blushed, but forged on—“they’re waking up together. So they’re, um, lovers. But they’re also awakening—their souls. The explorers are going far away, but he’s going inward, they’re going inward—and outward to each other at the same time …?” Her voice trailed away.
“Yes. Excellent.” Easy now. “Donne loves these paradoxes. It’s the essence of his thought, in a way.” I wrote paradox on the board, and under it in-out, small-large. “And if you think this stuff is sexy, you’re right.” I said this in my ironical voice, but I came down, perhaps, a little too hard on sexy. “Donne was a very sensual writer.” There was widespread skepticism. May’s hand waved again. “Miss Bankhead?”
She had that hyperalert look kids have when they’re getting it, in real time, right in front of you. “And the ‘hemispheres’ are their eyes,” she said. “Like the globe, the explorers, only they’re seeing each other. In the globes of their eyes. The small is enormous. Infinite. Like you said.”
And makes one little room an everywhere. I could have stood up, left the board, the fire, Preston, gone into that kitchen. Sat down with her under the white globe of the hanging light. Her long brown hands stroking the nicks and grooves in the pine table. The house quiet around us. Only her voice. I’m lost for a moment, I can see it, hear it, think it happened.
“They’ve transformed,” she’s saying. “They’ve”—she grins a little, showboating now—“they’ve landed on the shores of their new selves.”
“Yes, May-May. Exactly.”
The silence was like a door slamming. Everyone froze, and I realized what I’d done.
Of course I couldn’t look at her but at the edge of my vision she was motionless too, sitting very tall but with the triumph gone out of her. I had betrayed her utterly. I saw glances exchanged, hidden grins. Everyone was certainly awake now. Catharine Kellar looked like she’d just been given a present. The patter welled out of me, pure autopilot: “Landed on the shores. The exploration of the self. What are some other oppositions here? What is this ‘mix’d equally,’ what about ‘true north’? What do you think Donne means?” I turned to the board again, felt the eyes on my back.
And now good-morrow to our waking souls.
I wanted to sing it. Instead I wrote it down. “So scan this. What’s the meter? Easy one.” I marked the feet with the chalk, ba-DUM ba-DUM ba-DUM ba-DUM ba-DUM.
May-May, May-May, May-May.
“It’s like music,” May said. Her voice was frightened and determined. I could not turn around. Yes, that line has sung in my brain ever since I first read it and you knew that. She was saying It’s all right I know and I was shouting I am blameless, I have done nothing. The chalk clicked. I took a dramatic step back, examining the words.
“What we need to think about,” I said, without turning, because I could not turn—because I do not hope to turn—no, because I had to protect her from myself, “is how the Renaissance idea of individual consciousness was very different—how groundbreaking Donne was—Eliot said, ‘A thought to Donne was an experience; it modified his sensibility’—do you remember that? From the reading? I knew you would …”
By the time the bell rang, the charge had dissipated. I made a point of looking several kids directly in the eye. Nothing seemed amiss. Still, as everyone was leaving, instead of standing next to my desk as usual, I sat down behind it. I hardly ever sat at my desk. It was good thick oak, solid as a ship, and I shuffled my knees under its bulk. “Bye. Next is George Herbert. The pages are up on the board. More God. Up on the board. ’Cause we’re all guilty of dust and sin, that’s why. Bye now. Papers next Monday. Bye.”
Everyone was clattering past and then she was there. I couldn’t look up. But I knew they were her hands in front of me, those long fingers twisting together. Stopping here was a huge risk to her. Miss Kellar would say something, for instance, or file it away; Miss Kellar let nothing slide. And then May would have to answer. To laugh at herself, or me. I hoped she would laugh at me.
But instead of her protector I felt younger than she was, a schoolboy with wet-combed hair. She was still there. I was going to look up. Her eyes would be dark blue and I looked up and they were dark blue, hemispheres of ocean and sky, and I was sailing over them using only the old knowledge of the stars.
YEARS LATER, MAY SAYS, “Do you remember that?”
“Of course I do,” I say.
“I thought I was going to die.”
“It was a mistake. I wasn’t trying to send some signal,” I say.
“I know.”
“I wouldn’t do that.”
“I know.”
“Not on purpose.”
She smiles. “I know.”
Five
When I was born, my mother brought me home to a small apartment in a complex near the public city hospital, where she worked as a nurse. She’d come up to Atlanta, already pregnant, from her hometown, deep in south Georgia. The apartment was a run-down place in a run-down neighborhood, and I remember it only because we drove by it once, years later, and she pointed it out to me. “I didn’t know any better,” she said, half to herself, and shook her head. “I was lucky to get any job at all.”
I usually understood her non sequiturs. In this case she meant that the luck of a job, in her condition, had made this place near the hospital both inevitable and an afterthought.
But then she found the “good” side of Atlanta—the north side, the white side—got a job at a different hospital, and found the first home I truly remember. Technically, it was a guesthouse, although its parent wasn’t a mansion, or at least what would have been thought of as a mansion in Buckhead. It was, instead, a comfortable colonial, gracefully ordinary, owned by the McClatcheys, a nice family with a mother and a father and a son and a daughter. The guesthouse, which my mother rented, was down at the end of the steep driveway, cantilevered over a little ravine—suspended in the trees, a dream of green. Two tiny bedrooms, a kitchen, a living room. It was a womb, a cradle, out of time.
From my earliest memory I felt layers to life that I didn’t understand. Atlanta seemed to me a place that had recently been a small town; a miasma of familiarity was in the air. The ghosts were thick. We lived in an established, old-Atlanta neighborhood, but the lots were large and nature barely held at bay, and in the trees around our house I could feel many eyes, benign mostly, layer upon layer of creatures who knew the land as though their own bones were the limbs of the tulip poplar trees, their fingers redbud branches, their blood made from red clay, creatures at home.
There were other houses visible through the trees but the little valley behind us was a serene and quiet bowl. The area was dotted with historical markers documenting every move of the troops during the Battle of Atlanta, on that very soil; there was one at the corner of our street. It was easy to picture blue and gray flung down behind the ridges and hillocks, easy to hear in my mind the contrast of birdsong and gunfire, and even to go farther back and imagine the Creeks and Cherokees before they’d been hounded away. But now the land felt so gentle. The tree canopy was high, and little creeks, and big ones, ran everywhere, and it wasn’t hard to find a waterfall or a fallen log crossing a stream.
Up the hill the McClatchey kids were teenagers, and I could see the son playing basketball with his friends in the driveway, and the daughter having car doors opened for her by her dates. The McClatcheys had a patio in the back and we could hear their dinner parties and barbeques and laughter when it was warm out. Down the hill, my mother and I never had parties, but I think we both drew some kind of vicarious satisfaction from all the activity and jollity.
Hugh—Hugh Satterthwaite, Mrs. McClatchey’s brother—went to our Episcopal church (or we went to his), and starting when I was eight or nine he often dropped by on weekends to say hello to my mother and me. He wasn’t married, although he was the same age as Mr. McClatchey; they had all grown up together in this ve
ry neighborhood. He was tall and thin and balding, courtly and a bit stooped, with sadness ringing his eyes.
At some point I said the magic combination of words to Mr. Satterthwaite: “father,” and “soldier,” and “dead.” He had always been kind, but after that was even kinder. Whenever we crossed paths he did little-kid things that I loved for their predictability. He’d pretend to steal my nose. He always had gum in his pocket. Even at my age I thought these seemed like carefully learned tricks, but that made them, and him, only more endearing.
He told me that, as a boy, he used to find minié balls and arrowheads in these same woods. I was susceptible to the romance of history, more of Mr. Satterthwaite’s imagined childhood than of the war, and so several times I dutifully went looking, but I never found any.
Long before he became Hugh to me, I viewed him, and his family, as the real article. When he told me about the minié balls it was like he was giving me his own memories, his rootedness. For a long time, I thought the McClatcheys were letting us live in their extra house just because they were nice. Perhaps there’s an element of truth to that. And when Hugh finally became my stepfather, I discovered that my other suspicions had been true: that there did exist people who had grandmamas and granddaddies and great-granddaddies who lived down the street, whose names were on road signs or buildings or both; who had cousins; who had a great web of people spread wide and sticky over Atlanta; and they did the things they did and had the jobs they had and went to the schools they went to and married the people they did because all that great web had figured out the best way to live and showed them how. These people were supremely, effortlessly legible to themselves, and I waited, in vain, for the effect to spread to me.
Years later, when I met Preston and Florence Bankhead, of New Orleans and Savannah, I knew immediately they were of the same ilk as the McClatcheys and the Satterthwaites. I believed I could tell them their own history. I could see Preston gripping a log bridge with his bare toes, and scuffing through the sweet funk of fallen, decaying leaves, and braiding sharp, sun-hot pine needles, and running home to a white house full of family when he heard the dinner bell ringing, and sitting at a table set with mellowed family silver, and getting treats in the kitchen from the maid, whose favorite he was. Even after I knew his father had abandoned them, I was sure he’d emerged unscathed, materially and in every other way. I thought I knew Preston right off the bat, and I hoped, and feared, he would know me too.
ONE DAY I SAW a small blue velvet box on my mother’s dresser. It held a ring. We contemplated it together. “Why aren’t you wearing it?” I said.
“Well. Mr. Satterthwaite thought maybe I should let you get used to the idea.”
I could imagine him saying that, and realized how implicitly I trusted him. “That’s okay,” I said. “You should put it on.”
A faint smile crossed her face and I thought about how she was good-looking. I suppose I had always thought her pretty the way little boys think their mommies are pretty, but now I felt a new, adult, not unfriendly distance, and I looked at her dark-red hair and the rise of her cheekbones and the arch of her brows and approved. She put the ring on and then held her hand out for us to look at, but not in a showy way. My mother hardly ever wore jewelry.
Then I realized. “Where’s your other ring?” I said. “From my dad?”
Her eyes were fastened on the diamond. Then she abruptly closed her hand and looked up. “I put it away, Charlie,” she said. “A while ago. I guess you just didn’t notice.”
After that, the changes came thick and fast. We moved into Hugh’s big, underfurnished Tudor house around the corner, on Peachtree Battle Avenue. I went to a new school. My mother quit working. We had a maid, named Rosetta. And I suddenly had grandparents (Big Hugh and Bobo) and aunts and uncles and cousins, or at least I was assured they were mine. I was even now related to the McClatcheys.
The Satterthwaites had nearly despaired of Hugh getting married, of finding happiness, and so their gratitude to Anita and me was outsized, even embarrassing. They acted as though all the benefit had been to Hugh and treated us not like interlopers but royalty, which perversely made me feel even more like a fake. And then Nicky came along. He was born in the trough between the clump of first cousins and their offspring, the only baby in sight. He was the dauphin, the tsarevitch in his sailor suit.
I think Hugh and my mother were happy for a little while; I do. I know Hugh was. Beautiful wife, baby son, and he made me feel like I was a bonus.
Hugh was an unabashedly devout Anglican. He loved the smells and bells, the Midnight Mass, and every now and then at dinner would announce it was the feast day of Saint This or That, but the thing he seemed to like best was the long stretch after Easter, Ordinary Time—no events, no drama, redemption accomplished. I remember him saying it at the beach, where we now went for regular vacations, his paler-than-pale self parked under the umbrella, his white feet, skinny as rulers, digging into the sand: “Ordinary time. Isn’t it wonderful?”
That’s all he wanted, St. Hugh. The ordinary. He’d never expected to have this life. Perhaps he thought he didn’t have a talent for it, or didn’t deserve it. And then he lost it. A chicken-and-egg proposition.
Even so, it was Hugh who kept me in the orbit of the family, at least for a while, Hugh’s manly, leathery, book-lined study where I felt the most at home—maybe because there I was an acknowledged guest, it was out in the open. In the rest of the house I was supposed to feel like an average citizen, with equal rights. No one seemed to notice that I tried to be as neat and unassuming as a maiden aunt grateful for a bed. I was a pimply teenager; I was the son of a vanished man named Jimmie Garrett. The deal had been struck with Anita long before that I would not ask too many questions, and in return she, hunter-gatherer style, had procured Hugh, and this house, and my new school, the tennis court in the backyard, the new books that lined my shelves—and now a brother. Still, I felt that anytime this Buckhead caravansary could collapse.
AN AFTERNOON AT A MYSTERY HOUSE. That is, I don’t remember whose. Gracious people, maybe from church, friends of Hugh’s, probably—people he’d grown up with; there were a lot of those, a lot of friends who wanted to get to know my mother and me, who were full of goodwill. Bobo and Big Hugh were there too. Someone said it had been such a nice summer, but there was still August to go. So it’s July.
I’m the only teenager there. The adults take an inordinate interest in every aspect of my life. They ask questions, seem fascinated. This attention never used to happen. I don’t understand such an anxiety to be polite. What I absorb is that I am difficult to like. That my attractions are sparse.
Nicky, on the other hand, is the star, the only baby as I am the only teenager. There are toddlers there, the children who will become his friends, the ones he’ll grow up with, but he’s the only one still crawling, cherubic. And there’s something else: I don’t know if all babies have this light, or if it’s only Nicky. His red-gold curls draw the sun. When my mother holds him in her lap, her arms curl around him. When she looks at him, her hand goes to his cheek. Everyone calls to him, everyone wants to hold him. He’s oblivious, of course. He doesn’t know he’s Abel, Jacob, Joseph.
Meanwhile Hugh has a glass of bourbon in his hand and I know it’s not his first, and that I’m supposed to watch him; my mother has already given me a look, enlisting me. But he seems so relaxed, in his element, here on this green lawn beneath old trees, that I don’t want the job.
Instead I excuse myself and go inside and after a perfunctory use of the facilities I linger, drifting from room to room, watching the afternoon light playing on the smooth worn banister, on the creamy heavy paint on door frames, on the antique rugs thin at the edges. But then I hear the voice of the hostess and another woman as they enter the kitchen. If I could stand here long enough, maybe a layer of the mystery on the surfaces of these lives would be peeled away, but if they find me I certainly won’t be able to say that, and so I slip out through a French door t
o the side yard.
As I walk back around I hear cheering, and when I round the corner to the wide circle of chairs in the green grass I see Nicky, in the middle of the circle—walking. They’re his first steps. He’s stiff kneed, a miniature lumbering giant. His face is full of surprise and he stops, swaying, and laughs. Laughs! And everyone around him laughs too. And he looks all around him and takes in all the adoration, swallows it whole, as is his due.
And then sees me. And makes a beeline for me. His face is clean with joy and I crouch down and he lurches into me, his fat hands splayed on my knees with unthinking ownership. Everyone else loves him but he’s chosen me, and I feel myself giving in, as helpless as the rest.
THE DECLINE WAS GRADUAL. Nicky was at least three before I noticed how I’d quit relying on Hugh—that he was often literally unavailable, in his study with the door closed. Sometimes he even slept there. He was such a gentle drunk, never ugly or belligerent; he would just gradually disappear, over the course of an evening, the smile on his face delicate as paper, and half an hour, an hour after he slid away you’d finally notice he was gone.
But it turned out he was still paying a little bit of attention, and there was still something he wanted to do for me.
He asked me to meet him at his town club for lunch, which I’d never done before. It was hushed and male and famous for, of all things, hot buttered homemade saltines, which were absurdly good. The waiter knew him and seemed uncommonly fond of him. “We haven’t seen you for a while, Mr. Hugh,” he said. He brought Hugh a double old-fashioned without asking. Every black person there called him Mr. Hugh. The white men at the front desk called him Mr. Satterthwaite.
As Hugh gestured with his glass, he explained that the men in his family had always gone to Harvard, “and I want to do that for you, Charlie.” I didn’t ask how. The Satterthwaites were humble, affable, down-to-earth, but things often got done with undue ease, bypassing the usual channels; it was a different time. Calls could be placed. Cousins turned up in useful positions. Someone had been someone else’s best man and I remember your sister so fondly, and don’t say another word.
