by Rosina Lippi
“John!” called a familiar voice. Harriet Darling was waving at him from the far end of the car, an armful of charm bracelets jangling. Across from her Pearl craned her head around and smiled, waving him on. He hesitated, not knowing what to pray for. He wasn’t much in the mood for an hour in the company of Caroline’s sisters, but if all four of them were on this train, he’d have to go find someplace else to sit. In another car. In another state.
He made his way down the aisle saying hello now and then to people he knew, most of them looking as ragged and wet and worn-out as he felt. Then he saw that only one of the four seats in the group was free. The third was occupied by Angeline Mangiamele, her lap full of camera bags.
“Well, my goodness,” said Pearl, getting up to scoot over into the empty seat. She was wearing a patchwork jacket, elaborately beaded and embellished, that jingled as she moved. “Don’t you look a mess. I thought you took your car to the airport?”
“Nice to see you, too,” John said, trying not to look at Angie. “My car is on its way to the dealership,” he said. “Hooked to the back of a tow truck. And no comments about foreign cars. Please.”
“Well, that’s a shame,” said Harriet, but her smile said she was delighted with this turn of events. “You just settle down there, John, and rest yourself. Pearl and I have been shopping, for your wedding, no less.”
“Angie,” said John. “How are you? Did these two drag you along shopping?”
Pearl said, “She’s got more sense than that. Angie there was interviewing Miss Anabel. Imagine.” To Angie she said: “I’ll bet those two old ladies talked your ear off, didn’t they, now? Harriet, do you suppose we’ll get like that in our old age, telling the same story over and over?”
“She didn’t repeat herself to me,” said Angie. John could see that she was irritated, that she had liked Miss Anabel and liked Miss Zula and was impatient with Pearl and Harriet, which was surely understandable; each of them was nice enough on their own, but together they were too much even for Caroline. But Angie was holding back, whether out of courtesy or for his sake, he couldn’t tell.
Harriet was telling Pearl that most certainly they’d live to be as old as Miss Zula and Miss Anabel—hadn’t the woman who read the tarot cards for them last time they were in New Orleans told them so?
“Didn’t that woman have a gift?” Pearl said.
“I swear,” Harriet said, “it was almost like listening to the voice of God talking to me directly.” She placed her hand on her breast.
“I wish God would talk to me directly,” said Pearl. “I’ve got some questions I’d like to ask him.”
If it weren’t for the fact that Angie was sitting across from him, John thought he might have been able to drift off to sleep, so familiar was the cadence of the conversation, Harriet’s voice and Pearl’s moving back and forth, the lilt to the ends of their sentences that turned everything into a question, the way they drew in a sharp breath that meant an emphatic yes. But Angie was right there, and she was listening to them, taking notes in her head, the way she did when her curiosity was aroused.
“God only ever talked to me directly once,” Harriet said, sounding wistful.
“He did?” Angie sat up straight. Her expression was interested, intrigued, totally serious, as she would be with anyone she was interviewing. John had seen her like this before, with Miss Zula most recently but also back in Manhattan, that lost summer, when he had gone with her while she worked on a short film for a homeless shelter that needed promotional material for fund-raising. She talked to drunks and addicts and street vendors, to mounted policemen and sidewalk artists, and every one of them opened up to her, just as Harriet was opening up now, wiggling a little in her seat in anticipation of telling her story. John found that he was vaguely interested himself.
“He surely did,” Harriet said. She put her hand on Angie’s arm. “This was back when I was expecting Joey, my youngest boy? I wasn’t no more than three months pregnant at the time, and I was sitting in the parlor reading the new Cosmo when a voice came right down from the heavens to me. And God said—I remember exactly—he said, ‘He will die in the seventh month.’ ” She paused, her eyes large and round, waiting for Angie to laugh, maybe, or to tell her that such a thing was impossible. It was what people usually did when Harriet told one of her stories, but Angie only nodded.
“Go on,” she said.
“Well,” said Harriet, “at first I was so upset, can you imagine? I thought he meant the baby. But then Joey was born that May without much fuss at all—”
“You had such easy labors,” Pearl said with a sniff.
“—and I got to thinking, and it occurred to me that maybe God was talking about Tab? My husband? So I waited right through to the end of July, but Tab never did die. Now every year when July comes around I get my hopes all up, but come first of August, there’s Tab sitting across from me at the breakfast table pouring skim milk on his Wheaties.” She paused. “I still don’t know what the good Lord was trying to tell me.”
John closed his eyes in the hope that it would keep him from laughing out loud, but curiosity got the better of him, and he opened one of them to see a thoughtful look on Angie’s face.
She said, “Harriet, if you dislike Tab so much, why don’t you divorce him?”
“Why, I’m surprised at you,” Pearl said, drawing back a little. “You know Roman Catholics don’t get divorced. Once the knot is tied, it’s tied good and tight.” She shot John a look that was impossible to misinterpret: it said, Marry my sister and you marry all of us. What it didn’t say, what she didn’t think to say even with Angie Mangiamele sitting right there, was Behave yourself. Because they knew him, reliable and trustworthy and predictable John Grant.
The Rose girls were as sure of him as they were of all the men they had married: Tab Darling and Pete McCarthy and George Shaw and Len Holmes. The Rose boys, as they were called sometimes when none of them was within hearing, not so much out of respect but because George was still built like the quarterback he had been in college, and Pete was a serious weight lifter.
“And anyway,” said Harriet. “Money’s tight, what with Tab Junior at college and all.” She let out a soft sigh, and then she smiled. “But tomorrow is the first of July, and I am ever hopeful.”
TEN
There’s a program on OP-TV you should watch, Neighbors and Friends. Next week, in conjunction with the reunions on campus, we will be interviewing members of the community who are also graduates of Ogilvie College. We do this every year, and almost every time some new story about Miss Zula comes out. Neighbors and Friends, which I produce, comes on right after Financial Planning with Will and before Book Talk with Miss Annie, at 6:00 p.m. on channel twelve.
Your name: T. B. James, retired Postmaster
The way Angie ended giving John a ride home was simple: neither his brother nor Caroline Rose answered when he called, and Pearl’s husband, Pete McCarthy, who had come to pick up the Rose girls with two of his sons in the car, had no more room. And so Angie and John walked through the parking lot toward the Tied to the Tracks van, Angie weighed down with camera equipment and John with his suitcase and briefcase. They said next to nothing, but the early-evening air—cool and clean after the storm—was electric enough to make the hair on the back of her neck stand up.
It wasn’t until she had started the van and pulled out of the parking lot that she realized that he wasn’t embarrassed but angry, which was a rarity; in her experience, John was able to turn off anger as he would a spigot. It was one of the things that she had liked least about him, his ability to shut down in the face of an argument. Except this time she wasn’t sure, exactly, what or who had made him mad.
Two blocks of silence were enough, and so she said it. “They asked me to sit with them, you know. It wasn’t my idea.”
She saw him startle out of his thoughts, and then struggle to gain his composure.
“What?”
“If you’re worried about
me sitting with Caroline’s sisters, it wasn’t my idea.”
“Why would I care?” he said.
“You shouldn’t,” Angie said, biting back the rest of what she might have said. She turned onto Lee Street and stopped the van in front of his house, and then turned to him.
She said, “On a purely professional matter, I need to talk to you about Miss Zula and the documentary.”
John opened the door of the van with a snap and got out, dragging his suitcase behind him.
“Did you hear me?” Angie said.
“I heard you.” He was looking at her with such open hostility that she felt her pulse jump in her throat. But she was Fran Mangiamele’s daughter, and she had never backed down from a surly man in her life, so she leaned toward the open door.
“Wake up, John,” she said. “This is business. I need to talk to you about Miss Zula.”
He blinked at her. “Come into the house if you want to talk.” Then he closed the door with a bang, and walked off.
She sat there for five minutes, debating with herself, watching him move through the house. A window opened, and then another. She imagined him turning on the ceiling fans, looking through the pile of mail, listening to the telephone messages. There would be one from Rob, explaining where he and Kai had gone for the weekend, up to Hilton Head or to one of the lakes. There would be another message from Caroline. She imagined him standing there listening to Caroline talk, her voice a little rough and still lilting, all Georgia. She would be telling him about her drive up to Lake Louise with her mother, how the storm had slowed them down, that she would be back later tonight or tomorrow, that she had missed him and was sorry not to be there to welcome him home.
Angie put the van in drive, and headed for Ivy House.
The phone was ringing when she came in by way of the back porch. The first sign that Rivera was in a difficult mood was the fact that the air was thick with cooking smells: peppers, onions, cilantro, wild oregano, garlic, cumin. Even more alarming: Rivera lay stretched out on the old couch, the ringing phone balanced on her stomach.
“Staring at it won’t make it stop,” Angie said.
“I didn’t know there were any of these old phones left,” Rivera said. “The ones you can’t unplug.”
At that moment the phone went silent.
Rivera said, “Reverend Win called.”
“Reverend Win?”
“Reverend Win Walker,” Rivera assured her. “Patty-Cake’s nephew, you remember. Called to invite you to the Jubilee.”
“Actually I was trying to forget. He called himself Reverend Win?”
“No. But I like the sound of it.”
Angie said, “There were two of them she earmarked for us, weren’t there? One was a cop and the other one was a preacher of some kind.”
“This one sounded like a preacher.”
Angie gave up. “Okay. So what did you tell him?”
“That we’d be working all day.”
“Bless you.” Angie sat down on the floor.
“That’s what he said. Just after he offered to carry around your camera equipment all the livelong day.”
“He did not.”
“A persistent guy, is Reverend Win.”
Angie pushed out a great sigh. “Okay, well. I’ll deal with that when I have to.”
“So talk to me,” Rivera said, stretching so that the phone wobbled. “How’d it go today?”
Angie picked up the glass of wine sitting on the floor next to the couch and drained it in two long gulps.
“That well, huh.” Rivera yawned. “So what’s the big deal? Miss Zula has a lifelong companion. With all the gossip that goes on in the publishing world, I can’t believe it’s much of a secret.”
“You think it wouldn’t be big news down at Mount Olive or the ladies’ auxiliary?” Angie said.
Rivera inclined her head. “Okay, yeah. I see your point.”
“Do you think the board of regents would have wanted a documentary about her life, if they had known?”
“Okay,” Rivera said pointedly. “I got it.”
Angie said, “I tried to talk to John about it.” And then, when Rivera shot her a look, she added: “He was on the train back from Savannah.”
“Why would you want to talk to John Grant about this?” Rivera said, truly mystified. “I’d have a hard time thinking of a man worse at reading women.”
There was little to argue about there, though Angie found herself irritated, whether at Rivera’s casually damning assessment of John Grant’s failings or at John himself, she wasn’t quite sure.
Rivera said, “Miss Zula took you to call on her, didn’t she? Without any prompting, obviously because she wanted you there. The only thing to do is to talk to her about it directly. My guess is that we play the whole thing down, and people will draw their own conclusions. But she’ll have an opinion.”
“Oh, sure,” Angie said. “I’m looking forward to that conversation.”
The phone began to ring again.
“Why not just turn the machine on?” Angie asked, pouring more wine into Rivera’s glass.
“Because,” Rivera said, “when I got home there were thirty-three hang-ups on it.”
“That many. Okay, but maybe they weren’t for you. It could have been DeeDee.”
Rivera turned her head to look at Angie. “You mean Tony actually went home with DeeDee last night?”
Angie sat down on the chair across from the couch and took a swallow of wine. “I don’t know about the ‘home’ part. He’s hiding out in Savannah, which should tell you something. I wouldn’t be surprised if we don’t see him until Monday morning.”
The phone stopped ringing and started again immediately. Rivera put back her head and howled at the ceiling.
“So what is it with Meg?” Angie said.
“She’s a weeper,” Rivera said. “A high-maintenance weeper. I need at least a day to recover before I deal with her.”
“Okay,” said Angie, gritting her teeth against the ringing of the telephone. “But it might not be Meg. Maybe it’s Miss Maddie. Maybe it’s Caroline. Maybe it’s DeeDee, in which case you can have the pleasure of ratting out Tony. That will put you in a better mood.”
For a moment she thought Rivera had gone to sleep, which was actually possible; she had known Rivera to nap while a jackhammer took apart the pavement directly below her window.
“Fuck it.” Rivera picked up the phone and barked a hello. Angie hoped, in that moment, that it wasn’t Weepy Meg.
Rivera’s scowl cleared. She listened, her eyebrows drawn together in a sharp V.
“Okay,” she said, and hung up. “John is on his way over.”
Angie inhaled a mouthful of wine. When she had stopped coughing she wiped the tears from her eyes. “What?”
“You heard. He said, ‘Tell Angie I’m on my way over.’ I said, ‘Okay.’ ” Rivera got up from the couch and shook her head so that her hair flew around her face in a short curtain of inky black satin with a beveled edge.
“Why,” Angie said slowly, “would you do such a thing?”
Rivera rounded her eyes and blinked provocatively. “Because, chicklet, it’s what’s best.”
The phone began to ring again. Angie leaned over and picked it up, her eyes fixed on Rivera.
“Hello.”
“Angie?”
“Caroline.” She tilted the phone for Rivera, who came over to listen.
“I just got back from the lake a little bit ago. I made pasta primavera and I’ve got way too much. Would y’all like to come share it with me?”
Angie was thinking about how best to inoculate herself against the trouble ahead, whether she should say, John is on his way over here and I’ll send him on to you for supper, or Did you know John was back, I saw him on the train talking to your sisters, or Why don’t you bring that pasta over here? Any of those statements might have put a stop to the gathering storm, but before she could open her mouth, Rivera took the phone out of h
er hand.
“Caroline. I haven’t eaten. I’ll be there in ten.” Then she hung up, and in a single, graceful motion she turned and hugged Angie.
“You did too eat. You’ve been cooking all day.”
“When have I ever turned down a free meal?” Rivera picked up the car keys from the table. “Besides, I’ll be in the way here. Talk to John. Get it done, get it over with, once and for all. One way or the other.”
