Malcolm took a big gulp of his first drink.
“Have you told Miriam?” he asked apprehensively.
“Nobody knows except you.”
“Listen, honey,” said Malcolm. “Everybody in Per-dido is gone be real upset when you don’t come back with us. Have you thought of that?”
“I don’t have time to go back to Perdido, Malcolm. I told you, freshman orientation is on Monday.”
“Hey, I guess you knew about this when you came up here.”
“Of course I did. I’ve known about this for months. I was going to have to come up here this weekend anyway. It was just luck that you and Miriam had to go at the same time.”
“But why didn’t you say goodbye to everybody when you went away?”
“Because I didn’t want everybody slobbering over me,” said Lilah. “So don’t you start either, Malcolm. Here comes your other drink.”
It was Malcolm who told Miriam of Lilah’s plans that evening when Miriam got back to the hotel.
Lilah sat on the edge of the bed in the next room waiting to be called in. She was, quickly enough.
“Well,” Miriam said curtly, “have you seen your dorm room?”
“No, ma’am,” said Lilah. “They don’t open until Monday.”
“I bet it’s a two-by-four. Mine was. Don’t you want an apartment?”
“Let me stay in the dorm for a while, then I’ll see,” said Lilah.
“Are there sororities at Barnard?” Miriam asked.
“No, ma’am. And I don’t care. I’m too old for that kind of nonsense.”
“Do you want Malcolm and me to wait until Monday and make sure you get in all right?”
“Great God, no!” cried Lilah, who shuddered at the thought of her adoptive parents appearing with her at her first day at college. Then she relented, “Well, stay until Sunday night, and then fly back. Pay the bill here so I can stay until Monday morning, and I’ll be fine.”
And so it was done. Only Tommy Lee was surprised when Miriam and Malcolm returned from New York without Lilah. It was just about the kind of thing the family expected from the girl. Elinor’s dinner table, scarcely recovered from the absence of Queenie, seemed abysmally shrunken.
“Did you ask her,” said Oscar at dinner, “if she is ever gone let us see her again?”
“She said we could go up and see her in New York,” said Malcolm, “as long as we didn’t go to the school. She said she didn’t want to introduce us.” Malcolm shrugged as if to say, Isn’t that just the way you’d think she’d be? And everyone at the table nodded, as if he had spoken those words aloud.
“She’s going to be homesick way up there,” predicted Billy Bronze.
“Lilah?” exclaimed Miriam.
“You were,” said Elinor quickly, “when you went away to school, and you were only fifty miles away in Mobile. Grace said that when she went down there to see you, you had been crying yourself to sleep every night.”
“I don’t remember that,” said Miriam.
“Yes, you do,” said Oscar. “I never saw anybody so glad to get home that first Thanksgiving.”
“You’d better keep an eye on Lilah,” suggested Billy. “You’d better make sure she’s happy up there.”
“I don’t want to always be on her back,” said Miriam, shaking her head. “She’d think I was trying to interfere.”
“Just make sure you go up to New York as often as you can,” said Elinor, ignoring her daughter’s reasoning. “Keep an eye on her. Malcolm, you can go up there sometimes on your own. Don’t make it seem as if you’re going to see her, pretend you’re delivering papers or something. Buy her some new clothes.”
“She’ll like that,” Malcolm said nodding.
The Caskeys needn’t have worried. Lilah got along quite well on her own. She was happy to see Miriam or Malcolm or Billy when any of them was in New York, and once she even went so far as to introduce Miriam to her roommate. She came home at Thanksgiving and Christmas and spring holidays that first year, but spent the summer traveling in Europe. She studiously avoided seeing Danjo, even though his son was a graf.
Her second year at Barnard, she moved into an apartment on the East Side, and thereafter Miriam and Malcolm stayed at the Carlysle, only three blocks from Lilah’s flat. Her second year she returned to Perdido only for Christmas, and her third year she came home only once—for a weekend in April—and that was because it was Miriam’s forty-fifth birthday and Miriam bribed her to come with a double strand of pearls—a sort of birthday present in reverse.
After finishing Auburn, Tommy Lee had returned to Perdido. Miriam had offered him a job at the mill, but instead he went back to Grace and Lucille on Gavin Pond Farm. Grace and Lucille were happy to have him, though rather surprised that he chose to stay with them. “It’s so pokey out here,” said Lucille. “There’s nothing to do. Grace and I thought maybe you’d move up to New York to be around Lilah.”
“Lilah doesn’t want me,” Tommy Lee sighed.
“Some other girl might,” said Grace tentatively.
Tommy Lee shook his head.
“Good,” said Grace decisively. “Men have no business getting married. Men just cause women trouble, that’s all they’re good for. I love you, Tommy Lee, but you probably wouldn’t be any better than most of them.”
“No,” agreed Tommy Lee, “I probably wouldn’t.”
Tommy Lee hunted and fished and did what he had done seven years earlier, before he had gone off to live with Queenie in Perdido. He seemed genuinely happy, and to wish for no other sort of life than the one he led, so quietly, so lazily. Once, for lack of anything better to do, he plied one of Grace’s boats down into the swamp south of the farm and, losing himself in the maze of waterways and hummocks there, eventually came upon one of the oil rigs. This interested him, and he asked questions of the men working there. When they learned that he was a member of the family who owned this land, the men were quite disposed to humor him. He returned to the swamp the next day and the day after that, and soon he had learned all that there was to know. He was able, eventually, to bring Miriam information that proved of considerable value—information that the oil companies had hoped to keep secret from the Caskeys. Miriam realized then that Tommy Lee might prove an asset to her and to the family after all. She talked to him at some length about the oil business that existed on paper, in ledger books, and in contracts, and Tommy Lee picked this up too without much difficulty. He had, for the reason that nothing better presented itself, majored in business in Auburn.
After this, when Malcolm was indisposed or otherwise occupied, Miriam took Tommy Lee with her to Houston or New Orleans or New York. Grace didn’t need any prodding at all to add a wing of offices onto the house for Tommy Lee, and she hired Tommy Lee a couple of Babylon high school girls to help with his increasing paperwork.
Tommy Lee made friends with many of the men who worked the oil rigs, and often in the evenings any number of these men would come up to the house and drink beer, tell stories, and chaff Tommy Lee for having so much money and still wanting to make more. Grace and Lucille wandered in and out of these conclaves with huge pots of boiled shrimp, bowls of potato chips, and cases of cold beer. These were good men, Grace maintained, because they worked hard and had no interest in getting married.
But if Gavin Pond Farm often seemed crowded these days, what with Tommy Lee’s new friends and all the various workers on the farm, the Caskey compound in Perdido seemed particularly forlorn. Elinor and Oscar and Billy remained alone in the great house, all three growing old together; next door, Malcolm watched television in the evening, while Miriam sat with her papers all spread out on a wide coffee table before the couch.
Queenie’s house remained empty. Gradually, it was being filled with the detritus of the wealthy Caskey existence. Old clothes were packed in boxes and stacked in the rooms. Furniture that was no longer wanted was squeezed into rooms that were already filled. Rolled-up fraying carpets were piled up along the walls. Billy kept all the
oldest family records there, in neatly stacked and labeled boxes. The kitchen was crammed with old porch furniture. Queenie’s bedroom had more than twenty standing lamps in one corner, each of which was forlornly slated for a repair that would never come. Toys of tiie few Caskey children were all carefully preserved in Tommy Lee’s old room. James’s precious gim-cracks, which had never been properly stored after his death, slid from their shelves and smashed, one by one. Nobody saw them fall, nobody heard them, but each time anyone went into the house, there was another pile of porcelain, glass, or crockery on the floor. Everything was covered with dust, and rats gnawed away at the corners of closed doors. Not only squirrels, but an entire family of raccoons got into the attic. One of the Sapp girls employed by Miriam wouldn’t go near the place because she declared that rattlesi i s bred under the back steps.
One sfr rmy night in 1965, lightning struck one of the water oaks in back of the house, and the top third of the tree broke off and crashed through into what had been James’s bedroom. The resulting hole was unsightly, but since it was on the side of the house away from Miriam’s, it was just patched over with sheets of steel.
In the winter of 1966, while the Caskeys were all at dinner, James’s house caught fire. All Perdido’s fire-fighting resources were called out, but the house burned to the ground in less than half an hour. The Caskeys watched it, with the appearance of complete impassivity, from the side porch of Miriam’s house as Zaddie passed around dessert and Elinor poured coffee from one of James’s best silver urns.
CHAPTER 79
Oscar and Elinor
Oscar was suddenly an old man. The burning of Queenie’s house made him so, even though he had thought little of it at the time. He had sat on Miriam’s porch, drinking his coffee and calling out hellos to the firemen when Elinor told him which men were there. His only regret had been that so many of the things that had been stored in the house might have done somebody some good if they had only given them away.
“Poor old Queenie!” he sighed. “Poor old James, and Genevieve, and Mama.”
Yet he declared that he wasn’t sorry to see the house go. It was old, and it was impossible to keep up a house that wasn’t lived in. It was a firetrap, and you couldn’t walk in the door, Sammy Sapp had told him, without a hundred thousand fleas leaping up out of the carpet onto your clothing. Miriam could hire her a colored man to put in a garden there if she wanted, or they could build a big garage for all their cars. The house wasn’t needed, it was bound to have burned down sometime anyway.
After that night, the loneliness of survival seemed to oppress Oscar. He began to miss James, and his mother, and Queenie, with a frequency and intensity that surprised and alarmed him. His sight grew dimmer by the day, and as the real light of the outer world was blocked out, old shadows became visible to him. In moments of stillness in the house, when he was thinking of something else, he heard their voices calling to him. He’d turn off the radio at the end of the ball game, and hear Genevieve Caskey— of all people—calling his name in a distant room. “Come in here!” he’d hear her cry, and he’d almost start out of the chair.
Or he’d dream of his mother, lying motionless in the front-room bed. She’d open her eyes and call to him weakly. And just as he’d get up from the rocker at the foot of that bed, he’d wake up—but still hear Mary-Love’s voice, muffled, as from behind the closed door of the front room.
Early every morning Sammy Sapp drove him out to the Lake Pinchona Country Club for a round or two of golf, but Oscar could not see the ball after it left the tee and had but a dim sense of the location of the green. “Where’d it go, Sammy?” he’d ask after every stroke. Regardless of where the ball went, Sammy guided Mr. Oscar nearer to the green, and at an appropriate spot he would drop a golf ball out of his pocket. Oscar vaguely suspected this subterfuge, but knew he could not play the game any other way. When, by ten o’clock, other players started to arrive, Oscar declared that he was tired and asked Sammy to drive him home.
He had a powerful radio in the sitting room upstairs, and sat beside it all afternoon, listening to whatever ball games happened to be on, squinting at the Mobile papers held carefully up to the afternoon sunlight through the western windows. When there was no ball game, he read the papers in silence. He had tried to reconvene his domino group, but his remaining cronies were as blind as he, and they found that at night they often miscounted the spots on the old yellowed ivories.
Billy and Miriam kept him up on the news of the mill and of the oil business, but Oscar listened with only half an ear. He had little interest in that anymore. His only real concern was for Tommy Lee and Lilah: he wanted to know when they were going to find mates. “We need us some great-grandchildren, Elinor,” he made no scruples about saying. “We need Tommy Lee and Lilah both to find somebody and settle down. And give us some more babies.”
“So we can steal them, you mean,” Elinor laughed.
“It’s been so long since we had babies around here,” said Oscar. “This old house is so dead, and Miriam’s isn’t any better. Too late for Miriam to have children, I suppose.”
“Yes,” said Elinor.
“And I don’t suppose Billy is ever gone get married again.”
“No,” said Elinor.
“We’re gone be awful lonesome here,” said Oscar, “if Tommy Lee and Lilah don’t get on with it.”
“They’re still young, both of them,” Elinor pointed out.
“I know, I know, but if they don’t hurry up, it’s not gone do us any good when they do.”
He wouldn’t have anything to do with people he hadn’t known for many, many years. He knew people only by their voices, and those new voices were unfamiliar and discomforting. He declared that the Sapp girl who did the cleaning for them had no idea in the world how to make up a feather bed, so thereafter linor and Zaddie made up Oscar’s bed for him, plumping his four feather mattresses in a fashion that was satisfactory to him. In the late afternoon, Sammy would drive Oscar around town in the back of the Continental. Sammy described what he saw on both sides of the street. “Here’s Mr. Cailleteau coming out of the drugstore, Mr. Oscar, wave out the left window. And Miz Gully is coming out of the Piggly Wiggly parking lot in their new car, it’s a red Chevy. She didn’t see us so you don’t have to wave…”
Oscar wouldn’t come down for guests, and when there was a stranger at the table he always excused himself as soon as possible. Sometimes, declaring himself unfit company, he simply had Zaddie bring his dinner upstairs, and he ate it while listening to the television news. Zaddie sat by him at these times and talked with him so that he’d have company—
and so that if he upset his food or needed something she could take care of it without a fuss.
It was a good thing that Zaddie had so many of the younger Sapp girls under her, for increasingly her time was taken up with Oscar. He wanted her during the day to keep him company, and talk to him. They watched As the World Turns together, and made predictions as to what would happen next, and expressed nearly constant disapproval of the evil characters’ actions. When the Mobile Press-Register arrived about three o’clock, Zaddie read it aloud to him. He still made a pretense of trying to read it himself, but Zaddie invariably snatched it out of his hands, saying, “Mr. Oscar, I’m not gone let you sit there and hog that paper. I want to see what’s in it, too. So you just sit back and let me read it out loud. You want the front page or the obituaries first today?”
Together, Oscar and Zaddie followed the whole Alabama civil rights business with all the intensity and interest with which they followed the twelve-thirty soap opera.
“Mr. Wallace,” Oscar declared, “is coming down hard on your people. Don’t you think you and I better send Sammy up there with a letter or something and ask him to ease up a little bit?”
“You write the letter,” said Zaddie, “and I will pay for Sammy’s gas.”
“Are you looking for equality, Zaddie?” Oscar asked, with a little of his old high-flown co
urtliness.
“Equality with what, Mr. Oscar? Equality with who?”
“Don’t you want to be better paid? Don’t you want not to have to pay your poll tax? If all your people voted, Zaddie—if they didn’t do anything but register all the Sapps in this town—why you could take over. You could have a colored mayor, and a colored sheriff, and a colored I-don’t-know-what-all.”
“I guess we could,” said Zaddie.
“Then do it. If you did it, you could be the mayor, Zaddie. I’d vote for you. So would Elinor. And Miriam and Malcolm, too. You’d be the first colored female mayor in Alabama, I bet.”
“I bet I would,” said Zaddie. “But who’d read the paper to you every day?”
“I don’t know, Zaddie, I don’t know. Maybe you ought not run for office after all. I wouldn’t feel right if I didn’t hear the obituaries every afternoon. Maybe you ought to give up this idea of politics. But I tell you what: in my will, I’ll leave you enough money to start up a campaign and beat Mr. Wallace out of office. I bet you could turn Selma and Sylacauga right-side up again.”
In the evenings after supper, Oscar went upstairs to his sitting room, closed the door, and turned on his radio. He listened to ball games in far-off places. Billy and Malcolm would often be next door, watching television together. Miriam and Elinor would be downstairs, lingering at the table. Oscar’s relish for company was weakening. There wasn’t anyone his own age, of his own generation, except for Elinor. James and Mary-Love were long dead, and he thought of them as dead. That is, he never expected either of those two to walk in the door and demand something of him. But Sister and Queenie were another matter. He frequently found himself straining to catch Queenie’s shrill laugh from the screened-in porch, or Sister’s loud complaints from next door. He turned up the radio louder at his side, as if its volume—rather than death—prevented him from hearing them when they called.
It was only late at night, when the lights had been turned off and the room lay shrouded in real darkness, not just the darkness of his own dim vision, that Oscar became somewhat his old self again. Only Elinor was happy witness to this small, nightly transformation. Oscar and Elinor talked long into the night, of their family, what Lilah must be doing in New York, how Miriam and Malcolm were getting along, the next round of improvements at Gavin Pond Farm. They talked about the town, how the Piggly Wiggly parking lot was to be enlarged, how a fourth third-grade teacher was going to be needed soon, how they ought perhaps to donate some money to have the town hall clock and bells repaired. They traded gossip. Elinor got hers from all over the white community. The black community news was filtered into Oscar’s ear through the willing agency of Zaddie Sapp, mostly during the commercials of As the World Turns.
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