The Levee: A Novel of Baton Rouge
Page 18
The door opens again.
“You can come in now,” he announces, his voice slightly off-key.
I walk into the room. There is a bed, a television that is off, and a middle-aged woman in white, standing beside a window that frames a vast field with trees and a lake. So still is the figure in the wheelchair, facing the window, that at first I don’t see her at all. Then Blaize walks over to the window.
“Mother,” he says. “You have a visitor.”
The old head shifts slightly and I walk over to the window so she can see me.
“Mrs. St. Martin,” I say. “Do you remember me? Colin Douglas?”
It takes a while for me to see in the withered features a semblance of the face I hold in memory. The hair is white and the skin is a net of wrinkles but the eyes are the same and when she looks up there is no mistaking. She is dressed like a store manikin, in a suit that I know I saw on her forty years ago, and her skeletal body is bedecked with jewelry, as if at any moment she expects the Queen to enter the room so that she will have to rise from the wheelchair and curtsy.
She reaches out a fragile hand and I take it, careful not to crush the brittle fingers.
“Why, Colin, it was so nice of you to come. Where are you now?”
“Colorado, just outside Boulder.”
“Colorado. Imagine that. Are you married?”
I tell her about my family and she beams, still holding my hand.
“That’s wonderful. You know, Blaize has a son.”
“He told me.”
“He comes to visit sometimes.”
“I’m glad.”
“What do you do these days?”
“I write books.”
“Imagine. What kind of books?”
I try to laugh it off. “True crime. Bloody stuff.”
Her brows arch. “You surprise me. I always worried when Blaize was with those other boys but never when he was with you. You were always such a good boy. And how is your father?”
“He passed away some time ago.”
She frowns. “I wonder why I didn’t hear? I’m so sorry.” She squeezes my hand, the pressure little more than a twitch of her fingers. “He was a fine man. I knew your mother, too. I knew her family.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“And that other boy, what was his name? Stanley? Where is he now?”
“I don’t know.”
“He was such a polite child. But there was something about his family … I can’t remember what it was, something that happened …” She turns her face up to her son. “What was it about them, Blaize?”
“It wasn’t anything, Mother.”
“Oh.” She slips her hand from mine. “I get confused sometimes. I have trouble remembering some things.”
“It’s all right, Mother,” Blaize says.
“Blaize is so fragile.” Blanche St. Martin looks up at me. “You will be careful with him, won’t you? You won’t stay out in the night air? It’s his asthma, you know. His health is delicate …”
But I’ve long since stopped hearing her because I am frozen in place, staring at the old woman, staring at her powdered face, the garish red lips, the gold necklace with the little sapphire pendant, staring at the diamonds and emeralds on her fingers, staring at the gold earrings with dangling five pointed stars …
Staring until all the sounds of their talking recede to a low buzz and I feel Blaize’s hand on my arm, moving me out of the room and into the light of day.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
“I’m sorry,” he says as we stand there on the sidewalk. “I guess it was cowardly of me. Phillip said I should just tell you. I said I couldn’t. Then I decided I’d just take my chances, see if you noticed. See if it was meant to be.”
“The earrings …”
“I lied when I told you I threw that earring away. I took it home and hid it because I knew as soon as you showed it to me it was hers. I was scared somebody would find it. I thought so long as I knew where it was hidden nobody would ever find it. I took the other one and the little box they were in and buried them in the backyard, and when we moved years later I dug it up and took it with me.” He rubs a hand across his face, as if testing that this is real and not a dream. “I brought them with me just now. I didn’t know until I went into the room whether I’d have the nerve to put them on her. I guess I surprised myself after all.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Sure you do, Colin.”
“But your mother … why?”
“Think back, Colin. Try to remember how I was back then. Skinny, unsure of myself, kids like Toby making fun of me, calling me queer, and me not even knowing they were right …” He smiles sadly. “She felt sorry for me. She thought she could make me something I wasn’t. Call it whatever you want. Child molesting, exploitation, or maybe just an act of charity. It ended up getting her killed.”
And suddenly I do understand and it is like I am back there again, only now I’m seeing everything in different colors, with different proportions, as if my glasses have been yanked away and the crazy images in front of me are real.
“Gloria,” I breathe.
He nods.
“That’s right. She thought she could teach me about life. Initiate me. She saw what the others were doing and she felt bad for me. She offered to tutor me and I went to study at her house. Only that isn’t all we did.”
“Jesus. I never thought …”
“I wanted to tell you. I felt badly about it, but I didn’t know what to do. I mean, isn’t it what all the guys were talking about all the time? What they did with girls? Or what they wanted to do with girls, because back then it was mostly talk. And yet here I was, the ugliest kid in the class and I was doing things they only talked about with a woman ten years older than I was, and she was telling me I wasn’t ugly, I wasn’t skinny, that everything would be all right.”
“How long did it go on?” I ask.
“A couple of months. Until my mother found out.”
“How?”
He shakes his head. “Sometimes I used to think she had a sixth sense. Really it was just that she focused on me so hard she could tell when I started acting differently. She pried, she questioned, she even checked my underwear, and I’m sure she followed and watched, because once, when Gloria was supposed to bring me home I thought I saw our car parked in the next block. Once Gloria sent me a note. Just once, and I left it in my top drawer overnight before I burned it. But I had the impression it had been moved. Opened and then refolded and put in a slightly different place. I think that’s how she finally got proof.”
Blanche St. Martin, the domineering mother, the woman who couldn’t bake cookies without burning them, but could hover over her only son like a harpie.
“I felt like hell holding it back from you and Stan,” he says. “But how do you admit to something like that? I hated it and yet at the same time I enjoyed it, the physical part. It’s not that I can’t enjoy sex with a woman.”
I nod, not knowing what else to do.
“It’s more an emotional thing. I mean, with my wife, it was all right. For the little time it lasted. But it was like we were never really, well, meshing.”
“You don’t have to explain anything to me.”
“But I do, Colin. You’re the only one who’s left. I can’t explain to Stan. It’s too late. I don’t know where he is and even if I did, his father’s probably dead and what could I change?”
“You did the best you could.”
“Did I? That’s what I’ve told myself all these years. But I keep thinking about Stan and what he went through. Did he think his father did it finally? Sure, they dropped the charges, but wouldn’t there have always been that doubt? Isn’t that human nature? How would it have been living like that? Wondering if his father really did do it? Or maybe his mother or his brother?”
I remember my own father, whispering on the telephone from his office, and then going to see Stan’s mother. I remember him staying up
late the night before, the worried look on his face and all at once I understand, because I’ve had doubts, too, all these years, and now, too late, they are gone.
“Your mother went to her house.”
He nods again. “That’s what I figure. She caught her late at night, when Gloria was getting ready for bed. You see, that explains why the cops didn’t follow up on the earring: Gloria was getting ready for bed and hadn’t been wearing any. If she had, there’d still have been one earring on her when she was found. They probably just figured some coed out screwing with her date dropped it in the bushes, so they didn’t check any further.”
But my father had seen the earrings before, he just couldn’t remember where and on whom, and it never occurred to him that Blanche St. Martin could have been the killer. So he’d gone to the most likely person, Mrs. Chandler, to see if she reacted when he mentioned my finding it.
“I’m sure she took Gloria by surprise. Gloria would have recognized her, let her in, because she was the mother of a student. Then my mother hit her in the head or drugged her. I’m not sure just how because I never asked her.”
And wrestled her into the yellow Olds …
“She drove out to the cemetery. She probably didn’t know you and Stan were camped there that night. But she’d heard me talk about the place and knew it was a lonely location. She pulled Gloria out, but Gloria broke loose.”
His voice cracks and his hands start to tremble. I put a hand on his shoulder.
“It’s okay. You don’t have to say any more.”
Because I can see now how it happened, the panicked Gloria fleeing into the forest of tombstones, being caught, the knife rising and falling, the blood spurting, Gloria reaching out in desperation, grabbing for her attacker and managing to wrench off an earring, the knife stabbing down again, the dying woman flinging out her hand, the earring sailing away into the briars …
“It must have been about the only time she didn’t take a sleeping pill,” Blaize says.
And the car Stan and I had seen, the one I thought was white and he thought was a light brown, had really been pale yellow, easily mistaken in the dark …
“Oh, Jesus,” I blurt.
“What?”
“Michelle.” Then I start to laugh and try to stop, embarrassed by the inappropriateness of it, and yet I don’t know how to quit.
“Colin?”
“I’m sorry. It’s just that now I understand. It wasn’t us, it was the car.”
“What about the car?”
“When we met Michelle at the cemetery and she ran away. All these years I thought it was because she suddenly had second thoughts, was chicken.”
“And?”
“She’d been willing up to then. It was like she’d seen something but she’d seen you and she’d seen me, in the light of day, so what could have scared her? And now I know what it had to be: the car.”
“You mean …”
“I mean I’ll bet she was up that night, too. I’ll bet she was waiting for some guy to sneak her out. I’ll bet she saw the car go past in a hurry, after Gloria was killed. But being Michelle, she didn’t say anything. It wasn’t until she saw us pull up that night and saw the same car again that she panicked. Maybe she figured one of us did it after all.”
“I never thought about that. But if she hadn’t …”
“Yeah.”
“I wish I knew where Stan was now.” He starts toward his car, then stops. “No, I don’t. How do you explain about ruining somebody’s life?”
“You didn’t kill anybody.”
“Not physically. But it happened because of me. Because I let it happen.”
“You were fifteen, for God’s sake.”
“Yeah.”
“Besides, the only proof is the earring. That wouldn’t work in a court of law.”
“No. That’s what Phillip keeps saying. But we’re not talking about a court of law. We’re talking about my mother, Blanche St. Martin, and I know what she’s capable of. Or what she was capable of then.”
“So you protected your mother,” I say. “Nobody could blame you for that.”
“Nobody but me.”
He opens his car door, then turns back to me.
“So there you’ve got it, Colin. You can do whatever you want with it now. It would make a pretty good book, I guess: Nympho Teacher Killed by Overbearing Mother Protecting Sissy Son, Who Turns Out Gay Anyway.”
“I don’t plan to write anything,” I tell him.
“I’m glad. Not that they could do anything to her now.”
“I still wouldn’t. It’s over. I just had to assure myself that it had happened. I had to be sure of the memories.”
“Well, you can be sure now.”
“Yeah.” I stick out my hand.
“You want to come back to the house?”
“Thanks but I think I still have time to catch a late flight home.”
“Good luck, then.”
“You, too, buddy.” I hold his hand in my grip for a long time, knowing we will probably never meet again, and then, as if by mutual consent, I release it and watch him drive away.
Back at the hotel I call Colorado. Carolyn answers on the first ring.
“I’m done here,” I tell her. “I’m going to put some flowers on my parents’ graves and then I’m coming home.”
“Everything came out okay?”
I think of the old woman in the rest home, whose mind fades in and out of the present.
“It came out okay.”
“I love you,” she says and it sounds better than it ever has before.
Three hours later I am looking out of the airplane window as we make a slow circle over the northern part of the city and then nose west. Ten thousand feet below I can see the gleaming silver ribbon of the river, bordered on each side by the green willows that stud the batture.
I am still looking down when a white layer of cloud intervenes, blotting the levee from view.
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2008 by Malcolm K. Shuman
Cover design by Michel Vrana
ISBN: 978-1-4976-5023-7
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