As soon as Hal came home, they went up to his parents’ attic to retrieve his stored guns. Legally, he was not supposed to have them any longer, but typical Southern lawmen here told him to go on hunting, just not to make no show about it. Up in the attic here, she saw things Mama had discarded—a kiln, palettes and easels, antiques from when she’d tried to run a shop, little desks from when she’d tried to hold art classes for black children on Matagorda, her heart always in the right place—and a woman’s whole life seemed stored away in the attic. Laurel feared for her own life in this place.
After William had been in the house for months, Hal started ranting about that, when supposedly he and Laurel were getting a divorce. He told her it was damned embarrassing for him in front of his family, and they could not understand what was going on. Instantly, she went to Mr. Cohen saying to stop his gentlemanly, leisurely divorce or she was getting the most disreputable lawyer in Fairfield County to have a messy one, using evidence Mr. Cohen so far had held back. Soon William moved to the city; she felt a kind of lonesomeness about his absence, after all her complaints. The night before the divorce, William stayed in the house again, not to have to commute out. She came downstairs in the morning to fix coffee. She looked at William sitting on the side of the bed in a bedroom off the kitchen. He looked out the window with his hands in his lap. He had the air of a small, wondering boy; she thought of his mother, who had never quite wanted to bother with him. And what were they doing that morning getting a divorce? She had thought, This is crazy. “William,” she had said, “I don’t want to think I’m never going to see you again.” She embraced him and could recall now the familiarity of the tall, hard frame. William had said nothing. In this year and a half since, she had continued to wonder what William was thinking and why she did not ask him.
At the lawyer’s bargaining table, she was told William wanted first refusal when she sold the house. Everyone knew her plan; Mr. Cohen had said it sounded like a bad novel. She agreed to the request and, glancing at William, saw his eyes filled with tears; they pleaded. She looked off miserably, thinking, It’s too late. We should have shed our tears before now. She knew it was easier for her getting the divorce because she was going on to someone else. Her mother was waiting to be her witness. At the moment Laurel came up to her, the lawyers pushed open double doors into the courtroom, and she faced it. “Why do you have on that shade of lipstick?” her mother said, squinting up close. She wanted to scream at her. Didn’t she understand what was happening in her life? She had stepped forward, her mother’s voice close to her ear. “You could wear a shade so much more becoming,” she said. Laurel had never felt so alone in the universe.
Out on the courthouse steps again, she had blinked in sunlight: I’m divorced, she had thought. It’s a very strange feeling. She was something of a pariah, and had felt odd about going home to Rick no longer married to his father. After they got into her car her mother closed the door. “Well, now you’ve ruined your life,” she said.
Laurel had wanted to hit her. She told her to get out of the car. Her mother refused. Not knowing anything else to do, she drove them on to Bloomingdale’s as planned. Hal, I shake all the time but I’ve gone ahead and done what I said I’d do, and knowing it means belonging to you eventually is what has made me able to do it at last.
November sunlight in the orchard was like a silver cloth, without shine or luster. Daddy with his usual attendant expression waited for Mama: frail, aged beyond their years by what they could never have imagined, much less been expected to endure. She could not further burden them and cross the orchard tattling on Hal’s return to his old patterns. Just then, with Mama’s shadowy approach and Daddy’s quiet, waiting manner, Laurel knew, with certainty, they had never said one thing to Hal about William living in the house.
Who was she to emulate here, Mama? Mama even tried Catholicism and, attending a Sodality of Mary meeting, viewing what were supposedly dried tears of the Virgin Mary, not understanding, she thought what was passed beneath her nose were mints, and she ate one. The stalwart, devout ladies screamed! The incident was retold these years later with laughter, but Mama had never lived it down. Back then, the rural South was considered missionary country; a bishop was sent down from the East to speak. Mama invited him to hold a service for the blacks on Matagorda in their own church. The farmhands were not at all impressed by the solemn mute ceremony, mumbo-jumbo and lighting of candles, or even by what seemed the costume the man wore. However, when the bishop showed them wood from the Holy Land that came from Christ’s cross, there was a stir in the congregation that became a commotion. An elderly black man jumped up, crying, “You say that’s wood from the cross my Savior died on? Hallelujah!’ and that shout was taken up. Soon there was foot patting, hand clapping, a rollicking hymn from the pianist who’d only sat in boredom waiting, and they had a good Baptist service going shortly. The bishop lost his miter on the way down the aisle and never went back for it. So the story went. People looked around often for it on the head of some darky in the fields, but no one ever saw it. Mama kept trying to help the blacks. She was either an innovator or a damn fool, Laurel was told. When she sent round toilet seats for all the hands’ outhouses, these ended up on the walls of their cabins as picture frames. Laurel supposed that one day Mama just gave up. When might that day come for her? Would she go on here measuring time by Rick’s next appearance?
She had started going to doctors like Mama. A rash, a sinus headache. “Have you been around any pecan trees?’ the sinus doctor asked. “I live in an orchard of five hundred of them.” Then he told her, “I believe you’re allergic to pecan trees bearing.”
“Great,” Laurel said.
She casually met women at first when she and Hal might be shopping. “Do you play bridge?” they asked right off. She felt handicapped when she answered, “No.” Later she knew invitations might not have been forthcoming if she’d answered in the affirmative.
In an old portrait in the hallway, Hal peered down with a look of petulance or resentment, possibly a boy’s at being captured in a green velveteen suit; but an old look by now, she thought. A lock of hair fell over his forehead in the picture, as one fell forward now in person. He wore his hair longer since prison. Often he blew the lock upward and smiled into the eyes of whatever women were present. The act made her heart jerk, it caused movement in her crotch. In her tennis shorts, she had what she considered to be a perpetual hard-on for Hal; it had been there from the beginning. He himself had written, In the foyer of the administration building when I saw you, that was the moment it all started. Almost as if I had willed falling in love. They had both been ripe for that happening. Often she had seen similar expensive portraits in fine houses in Delton she came latterly to know. She compared this one to the childhood picture of herself over her mother’s bed in Connecticut, a tinted photographer’s studio portrait.
She thought that Hal’s neediness and his dependency on her was heavy stuff. They gave her a sense of pride and worth as a woman. Her bosoms had even swelled with TLC. There were moments, as now, waiting for Mama, when Hal hovered, touching elbows, being near, that she never had with William and which made darker times with Hal more able to be endured.
Mama passed the beveled window and came around the curvature in the stairs. Her eyes were vanilla. Today they were neither crazed, dazed, nor glazed. She had been talking on the phone to her brother in Delton and gave the news. “Betsey’s getting married,” she said about her niece. “At last! We’re all so happy.” She took another step down. “And nobody cares he’s a Jew,” she bawled.
“Now, now,” said Daddy.
Hal and Laurel smiled.
By day, Mama wore crepe dresses, smart pumps, and jewelry from matching sets according to some plan of her own. Soon after moving here, Laurel was invited to a party to meet Mama’s friends. “Hal,” she reported back, “she scared the fire out of me. She drove straight through a four-way intersection without stopping while telling me how dangero
us that corner was. When she couldn’t maneuver into a parking space in front of the woman’s house, she parked up on the sidewalk!”
Hal said one of the Negroes still left on the place was always supposed to drive her, Pepper. “Then why doesn’t Daddy do something?” Laurel said. “He’s never been able to control Mama,” Hal said. His own friends had told him while he was married to Sallie, he should have kept her pregnant all the time. What outrageous male thinking, Laurel thought, wondering if it was confined to the South. A man needed to be able to control something and preferably his wife, she knew that much. But Daddy had his son. Without even a job, living in a house his father owned, Hal had nothing in the world to control now but her, and helping him out, Laurel was quiet, dutiful and obedient, but these things naturally fit her nature.
She was still guilty about the day she drove to the party with Mama. She had looked over at her jewelry, and particularly at her necklace, saying, “That’s beautiful. Is it jade?” Being bombed, and having a generous nature, maybe Mama would take it off and say, Yes, and you have it. But Mama only forded the curb, leaving her guilty about her ploy but peeved that it had failed. Already Mama had given her a string of polished pearls, just as Mrs. Perry gave her two strings from her family when she became her daughter-in-law. She wore the three strings together these days, asking her bedroom mirror, “How many strings of pearls from the families of other people will I have?”
Her parents individually had said they inherited not a damn thing. But her mother owned now an exquisite diamond ring and a fine diamond watch. “I never expected to have anything like these,” she had said humbly. Had she ever told that to the roughneck salesman who got them for her? In being the first to inherit these things, Laurel would start a new family line, and that seemed wondrous.
Out through the screen door stepped Hal and Daddy. Father and son, they went out. What a family group they seemed on this old and dreaming land. No matter that every decade or so Hal brought a different partner into the picture. When he confessed he could never go to a prostitute even with his buddies on hunting trips, she had said, “You don’t stay married to anybody long enough to get bored.” Though she had thought, too, his refusal had something to do with his sincere, sweet nature.
In Connecticut, when Rick finally realized what was taking place in his household—that his mother was divorcing his father and marrying a prisoner who’d shot a boy to death and was moving to Mississippi—he had suddenly understood that Hal had been married twice. “Suppose he leaves you, Mom?” he had said. She had replied confidently Hal would never do that. If nothing else, he would have to have loyalty after her loyalty to him. Hal and Rick began finally to correspond: I may have a difficult time, Hal, adapting to my new situation next fall, with my mother moving off. I often wonder why my family situation can’t be a normal one, but maybe it makes me a more complete person.
Living alone with Rick, she one day found a strange substance when she was straightening his drawers. She sent a mite to Hal wrapped in aluminum foil. Be careful opening this, she wrote. Is it what I think it is?
Great God, Laurel, he replied through Buddy. Yes. It’s marijuana. Don’t mail any more to me in this prison! About smoking pot, though, I don’t know a damn thing. It was considered so terrible when I was coming along, I never saw any. Now marijuana seems as common as—well—as grass. She was struck then by his humor, and her own naïveté. Divorced from William, she depended on Hal, locked up. She had not thought through a lot of things back then, and people had tried to tell her so.
Jubal in those days knocked a bottle of Beefeater’s out of his doghouse. Rick’s progress reports showed him to have a bad attitude in class. She had told him he had no right to act up because his parents were divorced. “Dad and I both had more screwed-up backgrounds than you’ve had,” she said. But there then stood the question between them: Is that why you’re both so screwed up? After Rick skipped school one day, he charmed her out of punishment. He got up and sang and acted out all the Ray Bolger, Judy Garland, and Toto parts from The Wizard of Oz. He affects me like you do, Hal, she had said. I can’t get mad at him.
Savano got down off his tractor and started toward Daddy and Hal. Thinking about Rick, there was not a moment’s cessation to the pain she felt about leaving him. Nothing here turned out to be worth it. Days were long. She could hardly bear the yellow school bus dropping off black children on the highway fronting Matagorda, or being at a new friend’s house when her children came home. She thought back to that psychologist’s advice: “Think of numero uno,” he had said. And he had been wrong.
Mama said softly beside her, “Laurel, the sky seems more blue when you and Hal are about.” How could she not love Mama? When her novel came out, Mama said it was the most touching love story she had ever read. Her own mother wanted to know why they had such a large, glaring picture of her on the back. Mama went on. “I hardly saw my son when he was married to Sallie. I hope out of all that’s happened, Tina can know right from wrong and grow into a fine woman.”
“She’s a sweet girl,” Laurel said. How could she have known it would be Tina who would tell her the truth: out of the mouths of babes? Hal had always written about her as his “toy child.” She had been in love back then with his use of diminutives. He wrote how he saved the “tiny plants” on Matagorda once, on a Saturday when there was no Negro help available and a storm was coming up. How could Daddy have said Hal didn’t like farming? she thought back then. She started toward the porch too. On a hallway table sat a silver bowl brimming with Halloween candy. Mama had known no children would come out to Matagorda. She used to embarrass Tina, she had so much candy for just her and her friends, Hal said.
Laurel looked into the sunlight. Did the leaves here never change colors? Her last Halloween with Rick, a policeman brought him home merely because Rick was walking along a road alone. The young policeman said, “I recognize this house. It’s where you’ve got a table made from a ONE WAY DON’T ENTER sign.”
“I bought that at the Fantasy Shop downtown,” Rick said.
“Not with SOUNDPORT POLICE DEPARTMENT on it, you didn’t,” the young man said.
A man from Juvenile Court came and said Rick was in danger of being sent away to a detention home. She had jumped up, not afraid to be defensive for once. “Are you crazy? A boy like him doesn’t go such places. You’d ruin him for life.” She said to Rick afterward, If they take you, there might be nothing Dad or I can do about it. She had been driving him to counseling sessions at Juvenile Court for years. “All those trips to South Norwalk. Aren’t you getting anything out of them?” They drove there another day and stopped to buy a male mouse. “If you won’t listen to me, listen to Dad.”
“Dad doesn’t make decisions about me anymore.”
“Oh. Who does?”
“You do. I live with you now. Mom, sometimes will you talk baby talk to me so I will know I’m loved?”
She had been able only to nod her head. And to accept the task of being responsible for Rick, more than William was, for the first time. They had lived with other revealing moments. By her last fall in Connecticut an ordinance was passed against burning leaves. Rick stared at the piles they had raked and at the large green plastic bags. “What do we do now?” he said. “Get a teaspoon?”
“You’re funny,” she had said. She bent her head toward the rake’s end. “As funny as Dad,” she finished in a muffled voice.
“You hardly ever talk,” Rick said. “The house is so quiet. It’s so quiet without Dad.”
“I never did talk,” she said. “You just never realized.”
Mama spoke in her gentle way. “I think Hal was an instrument of God’s peace used for the good of his fellow men—through Prison World—to glue those broken lives together.”
She might have laughed, but she could not.
Mama said, “I had begun to look forward to those visiting Sundays as the highlights of my life.”
Laurel opened the screen door. What’s
it going to be like, Hal once asked, when we don’t talk anymore about escapes and chases and people hurting one another, of fear and frustration and longing and despair? How could she have told him then, It will be boring. She missed the excitement they had lived through too; she had further dread of becoming like Mama in this place. She agreed. “Those were heady days.”
She had longed so always to be at that prison. She sat so wearily by herself in Connecticut. Hal had covered a Halloween party in First Offenders—costumes and all, he said. I think there are so many queers in that camp they use any excuse to impersonate females, even witches. He had more fun than she did, she complained. William was dating someone his own age, she had said.
He says he can’t make it with the twenty-year-old set. He says something called singles bars have sprung up in New York; two of his married friends went and got VD. Sad they would go, I thought. Or was William speaking of himself? Living your prison experience vicariously, I find myself becoming streetwise, the way you say, against your will, you’re learning in prison how to scheme.
She wondered if reality ever matched dreams. It was not a question to turn and ask Mama. They were here on this place serving their own sentences. She could hear Savano’s pants legs go whiff against each other. Daddy had spoken admiringly about him: “Once he didn’t own anything but forty acres from one bayou to another one.” Now Savano owned a chunk of the Delta and rented out most of Matagorda. His own father was first-generation Italian here, a string bean farmer. He came to Matagorda bringing Mama young fig trees and planted them. He took off his hat and said, “Thank you for the opportunity you give my son.” Laurel had whistled “God Bless America” beneath her breath.
Pay the Piper Page 19
