by Janis Owens
“No, Candace,” I said. “Not at all—”
“Yes, Gabriel,” she answered just as evenly, slowly coming to her feet, but before we got into it, Myra came down the stairs, a pair of ragged hightops in her hand, her face blank as she set them on the pile.
“These are his old ones. I can’t find his new Nikes. I just bought them last week. He won’t wear them; they hurt his feet.”
She was speaking in a tired, puzzled voice that Candace answered very pleasantly “They’re on his feet, you idiot. But pack the old ones too; he’ll need them for fishing.”
There was something hideously wrong with all of it, Candace’s forced gaiety, Myra’s blank obliging face, and I waited till she had gone back upstairs before I turned on my sister. “Clayton is not leaving this house. No, not at all. Forget that shit—”
And instead of a reply, Candace stormed past, snatching at the sleeve of my shirt.
“Shut up, Gabriel, just shut up,” she hissed, pulling me through the kitchen to the laundry room and closing the door behind us.
“—no, not at all,” I was still saying. “I don’t know what you and Myra think you’re up to, but no, never, not Clayton—”
Candace, looking not so much like Mama as she used to, but more like Daddy’s people, small and wiry, her hair frosted where the blonde had prematurely grayed, leaned against the door and watched me with a hard, unsmiling face, letting me rage on without a word.
“—I mean what d’you think’ll happen? He’ll figure it out by osmosis?”
“I told him,” she said, and I looked at her.
“You told him? You told him? And how the hell was it any of your business to tell him anything?”
“He asked me and I told him. Everything. Everything, Gabriel.”
Now I don’t know why it made me so mad, hearing she’d spared me this ordeal, but I was mad, I was shouting mad, pacing the room, calling her a wide variety of all the profanities I could conjure, minced with a few deadly observations on her character, but she was unmoved, just standing there against the door, watching me with eyes that were tired and disgusted.
“Are you finished yet?” she finally asked, and it only made me madder.
“Hell, no, I’m not finished. I won’t be finished till I see Clay, find out what kind of lies you been feeding him—”
“Lies?” she repeated, annoyed at last. “Lies? Well, here, Gabe, you don’t have to run to Clay, I’ll be glad to tell you what kind of lies I been feeding him: That his grandfather was a child molester, that his mother is mentally ill, that his uncle he loves more than anyone on earth is really his father, and his father, who he is hanging onto by the skin of his teeth is just his uncle. That’s the kind of lies I been feeding him, Gabrielle, and d’you know, for some reason, he’s just not taking it very well. I mean, God knows it’s simple enough, losing a father to cancer when you’re eleven, then finding out he isn’t your father at all. I don’t know why he isn’t over here apologizing this minute for all the trouble he’s put you through.”
Disgust, anger, even hatred, I could take from my sister, but sarcasm, never. Suddenly, everything was her fault.
“You had no business telling him anything. I was going to tell him. You don’t know—you were in goddamned Germany!”
On this, she finally left the door and approached me quietly. “When were you gone tell him, Gabe? When?”
“Last night—no, Sunday. I had it all planned. I would have told him, made it right—”
“Then, listen,” she said, stopping just short of my nose, “You tell me all about it. You’re right, I wasn’t here. All I know is Myra’s version, and it don’t make a hell of a lot of sense, so come on, let’s have it, brother. How is it you come to have a child by Michael’s wife, I’d love to know.”
For a moment, I just looked at her, then I turned aside. “It’s none of your business,” I whispered, standing beside the washer and pressing my forehead against the edge of the pantry shelf, feeling the sore place where the stitches still stung, but her voice at my back was quietly singsong, reminding me of something, something a long time ago—
“Of course it’s my business,” she said. “Your son’s asked to move in with me. It’s been my business ever since he showed up on my doorstep Sunday night, crying, calling his mother a whore—”
“No,” I cried, suddenly remembering Ira, and turned. “Just shut up, Candace! I don’t have to listen to your shit—”
“Sure you do,” she said. “I heard you, boy. Myra’s heard you, everybody at Welcome’s heard you, so why should we spare your feelings? Whore sound a little hard to you? A little raw? Well listen, bud, it ain’t nothing compared to what he’s calling you, and he’d say it to your face if I let him. He’s just like you, boy: know the truth and the truth shall set you free—”
“It’s not true,” I whispered.
“Well, as far as Clay’s concerned, it is. And until he sees it different, I’m sorry, Gabe, he’s mine.”
She faced me off evenly, and after a moment, I turned away, pressing my forehead against the shelf that smelled of bleach and Downy, finally whispering, “I’ll speak to him, Candace. Tell him how it was, convince him—”
“Convince him?” she breathed. “You mean mow him under, scream and cry and blame it on everyone else, and I’m sorry, Gabe, I can’t let you do that.”
“I love him,” I said, in final, desperate appeal, and Candace laughed, just as Ira and Michael had, and it was so strange. I really did, how could they doubt me?
“You know,” she said, “I’ve been waiting for that. I mean, waiting, and it kills me, Gabe, it really kills me, the things you do in the name of love. Listen, why don’t you ask your wife about Gabriel Catts love? Her father used to tell her he loved her all the time. Called her to his death-bed, crying, asking her why she never called, never came to visit, when God in heaven knew he loved her more than anyone on earth—”
I felt a wave of the nausea that always hit when I heard the more putrid details of my wife’s torment, but I knew better than to mention it; Candace would probably tell me to go ahead and puke, that it was all private here, she’d seen men puke before, use to run them till they puked, tell them it was good for them. So I just pressed my twelve new stitches hard against the shelf and let her finish.
“—and you will not do that to Clayton. No, not at all. I promised Michael I’d be there for his children, and I’ll be there all right. I’ll raise him till he’s grown if that’s what it takes, and you, Gabriel Catts, will stay clear. Do you hear me? Stay clear.”
“You don’t know what you’re asking,” I whispered. “I lost him ten years already.”
‘And you had him one, which is more’n you deserve, and if he never comes back, you’ll have Myra and Sim and Missy and it’ll have to do. It’s nobody’s fault but your own.” She stopped to wipe a tear, and for the first time, I realized she was crying. “Nobody put a gun to your head.”
My forehead was still pressed to the shelf, pressed so hard I could feel the tiny, stiff ends where the ER doctor had tied off the sutures, and with a sudden flash of anger, I drew back and struck the sharp edge of the shelf, exploding those neat little puckers of skin and spraying the washer with drops of blood, while Candace pulled me back, screaming, ‘And you will not do this to yourself, Gabriel Catts. You will live through this and you will see it out, d’you hear me? Do you hear me?”
I didn’t care. I was shaking the blood off my face, trying to shake off her words, but she had the front of my shirt in her fists, and was screaming in my face. ‘And you will not drink and you will not leave because I love you and Mama loves you and Myra and Sim and Missy and Clay love you, and you will be there for them.” She shook me the way she must have seen Ed shake raw recruits. “Do you hear me?”
At that point I wasn’t hearing much of anything. Stimulation overload, I guess you’d call it, and to this day, I have no other memory of that afternoon, how I cared for my stitches, whether I helped pack the truck or
lay on the couch and cried. Nothing but a blank. And for the first time in my life, I realized how her childhood must seem to Myra: bits and pieces of vivid memory and a few scars like the one on my forehead that I will wear till I die.
I do know that I went back to work the next day, where my Frankenstein-like forehead elicited a great deal more interest from my students than the exploration of the New World. After fielding an hour’s worth of questions and speculation first period, I assigned library passes and started them on their first oral reports, and when they’d left, I found a ream of legal pads in my file cabinet and sat down at my desk and began to write, not another historical revision or a character assassination, but the explanation I could not give Clayton because the words were so hard to put into motion.
First, I wrote of Michael’s funeral, then, for some reason, I found myself writing of my childhood on Magnolia Hill, with Benny and Daddy and Cassie Scales, and my good friend Ira and his little sister, who was not so remarkable at all till I saw her with her hair unbraided in the sun and fell in love.
It was so sweet, bringing them back to life under my hand, the smell of mimosa, the crack of the screen door, the rise and fall of voices on the porch at midnight, and when the final bell rang at three, I went straight home to my desk in the servant’s quarters and continued to write the long, spiraling sentences that flew off my pen like magic. On and on, they came, and as the night passed and dawn was upon me, I thought how convenient it would be if this were mere fiction. Then I could delete the closets and the cruelty, I could make Cassie kiss me, I could kill off Old Man Sims the night Myra was conceived and have her come to Magnolia Hill by a kinder route—the niece of a preacher, the cousin of a friend of a friend. And when she came knocking when she was grown and asked for me, Mama would give her my address, and we’d marry the week after I finished FSU and move to Durham and conceive our children—
I stopped in mid-fantasy for where would that leave Sim and Missy? In the realm of the unborn? Or would they have been born to Michael and another woman, some woman who might not read books and tell him of other worlds outside the pounding walls of Sanger Manufacturing so that he would die at forty-three with nothing to show for it: No Sam, no broken Klan, no Simon or Missy or Clayton to grieve him.
So perhaps the truth suited me better after all, and I couldn’t have changed it if I tried, and I found myself smiling when I thought that maybe we had won, despite everything—the closets and the cruelty. Won by virtue of something, I couldn’t say what. Then I remembered Myra’s words at the grave that day, on innocence and insanity and the paths to salvation.
I was still pondering it, yawning, when she came upstairs in her gown, and I noted with relief that her eyes were no longer blank, but merely worried, squinting in the new sun.
“Where’ve you been all night?” she asked irritably, kissing me lightly on the mouth, not a good-morning kiss, but a have-you-been-drinking kiss.
“Here,” I said. “Working on a new book.” I hesitated to go any further, and she didn’t look too interested anyway, only relaxing when she tasted my breath and found it sober and going over to the bed and lying down.
“This Pamalor,” she yawned. “A hundred milligrams is too strong. I’m gonna have to call Dr. Williams. I can’t live like this—”
She was asleep before the words were fairly out of her mouth, and I went over and kissed her forehead, blessing the pharmaceutical industry, for despite her great distrust of their intentions (bloodsuckers, she called them) I couldn’t see her standing the loss of a child without a little numbing.
My watch said seven, so I went downstairs to make some coffee and found Missy pouring orange juice at the refrigerator, her face relieved when she saw me.
“Well, thank God,” she said. “We thought you’d hit the road, too.”
Her blunt honesty was so much like Mama, so damn much, that I found myself laughing and laughing, for the first time in days, and she started in, too, then hugged me, and we got a little teary there for a moment, which she sidetracked by filling me in on all the juicy tidbits of gossip she’d picked up by keeping her ear to the ground.
“I’m gonna have to drive him to school every day. He ’s too stinking lazy to walk three blocks from Candace’s, and I’m gone ask him just what the heck he thinks he’s pulling here. It’s just like him to show himself to get a little attention.”
“No,” I told her, relieved, painfully relieved, the whole nightmare was finally resurfacing in the light of routine breakfast conversation. “Let him alone. He’ll come around.”
“Oh, sure he will. After he’s been a pain in the tail long enough. I mean Mama told me, and I didn’t get in such a snit.”
“Did she?” I murmured politely.
Missy was her usual imperturbable self, buttering a waffle, saying, “Sure. Told me right after Daddy died ‘cause I kept bugging her to call you. Told me about good sex and bad sex and about her father and Ira and why he was in Raiford.” She made a face. ‘And she told me Clay was my half-brother because she’d had sex with you and got pregnant the summer you stayed here.”
This was a bit strong for my stomach, and I could feel my face suddenly growing very hot, but Missy only chewed her waffle. “I guess she thought she’d better get it out in one shot, but it worked out all right. I just kinda figured everybody’s mother sat them down like that.” She started laughing. “But I was a little bit curious, you know, wondering if everybody had this kind of stuff in their families, so the next time I was over at Grannie’s I asked her if we—you know, the Catts—were pretty normal, and she said yes, but that we were better Christians than most people.”
She laughed long and hard, but I was a little sad, knowing it was my fault we’d joined the Sims as moral underachievers.
“But Clayton now,” she continued, “he’s just such a twit. I mean, I saw him in the library yesterday and I said, ‘Clay, are you really moving in with Candace? Uncle Ed’ll make you mow the yard and you know you hate that.’ And you know what he said? He said he’d work a saw at Sanger before he’d live in a house with that man.” She rolled her eyes, “I mean, he has to be so melodramatic about it.”
She went back to her waffle. “Candace’s right. I think we should just ignore him. Listen, Saturday morning rolls around, he’ll be talking out the other side of his mouth.”
But he didn’t. Not through the red flush of a lovely autumn, not in the brittle ice of a raw, Gulf-blown winter, nor any of the December anniversaries—the funeral or the wedding—or his birthday in March. From Missy and Sim we followed his year: the Latin he was failing, the ankle he sprained in gym (faked, Missy surmised, to get out of the six-hundred yard dash), the new haircut Sim described as spiked, the girl in algebra he loved, who wouldn’t so much as look his way. At Christmas, Myra and I huddled back at the kitchen table like a meeting of the general staff and selected his gifts with many disagreements.
“Nothing on Vietnam—no, Gabriel, I’m sick of it. . . . Chess? Why does everything have to do with war? Listen, I bought his presents twelve years with no complaints. You do Missy’s. You’re good with her.”
So I chose Missy’s presents and left Clayton to Myra, but whether he opened the carefully discussed, artfully wrapped gifts was open to speculation, for Missy and Sim were very quiet about it, so quiet I had a feeling he’d left them under the tree, untouched. Candace never said during her weekly Sunday afternoon calls, made on the sly while Clayton was at Mama’s, and Myra and I couldn’t stand to ask, only listening on the upstairs and downstairs extensions while she caught us up on his life. Sometimes Myra would stop her to clarify something or give a little advice, but apparently she and my sister were close enough not to have to bother with details, and as for me, I had nothing to say but that I loved him—a little phrase I was learning to keep to myself for fear of being likened to a child molester, or worse.
The only concession I made was going out a little more, occasionally attending freshman football games or s
lowly circling the high school at lunchtime (à la child molester, now that I think of it—) in hopes of seeing a glimpse of a blond spiked head somewhere in the crowd. But I had no luck, none at all, and had no choice but to go home and scribble out more of my apology, and it was on a clear spring night, a year almost to the day from the evening I’d sat out by the pool and conjured Michael for Clay ’s project, that Myra suddenly became curious about my nocturnal activities upstairs in the servant’s quarters, and found me painstakingly typing my little work, producing, at best, one page a night.
The first draft was all written, so I was no longer worried about hiding my intent, but when I proudly showed her my stack of legal pads, she was far from enthusiastic.
“Not my life, you’re not,” she said, “nor Michael’s either.”
It was hardly the response I’d expected from a woman who’d been open enough to discuss adultery with an eleven-year-old girl, and with no argument strong enough to plead my case, I handed the typed pages over with one request: “Don’t decide till you read it. At least read it.”
She took the typed first quarter, spotted with wite-Out and editorial scrawls, and I tried to give her time, plenty of time, to make up her mind, but after only an hour went upstairs and found her sitting up in bed, most of the pages face down beside her, staring into the air with a look of calm bemusement.
When I sat on the edge of the bed, her face reclaimed a little life, but was still a little puzzled as she looked at me. “Gabriel, Gabriel,” she said, “you almost make me miss Magnolia Hill. Lord, I never thought anyone could do that.”
It was such a sweet reaction, such a Myra-like acceptance of dreams and ideas and hopeless stabs at reconciliation that for the first time in a long time I remembered why I’d loved her in the first place, not for her hair or her lingerie or even her Mercedes, but for her kindness.
“I love you,” I told her, thinking to hell with Candace, it was true.
She smiled a small, sad smile. “Poor Ira,” she said, tapping the paper in her lap, “he never had a chance, Gabriel, never—”
