Denise Cahoon jumped from the chair, her face flushed beet red. In her early fifties, she was a good-looking woman by James’s standards; nice trim figure, sleek dark hair pushed back behind her ears, soulful gray eyes. Why she wanted to cling to some beer-soaked lout like Inky Cahoon was a mystery.
“That’s not true!” she said in a piercing voice. “Our vows are sacred. I don’t want a new life. I want my old one back. You make Inky do the right thing. Call his boss down at the newspaper and tell him Inky’s spending his paycheck on whores and liquor. Tell him they’re to send that check right to the house instead of letting Inky spend it all.”
James looked back up at the ceiling fan. Sometimes he swore he could see patterns in the dust motes as the blades cut through them. Running horses, majestic oak trees. Today, as Denise Cahoon implored him to salvage the unsalvageable, he swore the dust swirls looked exactly like the holy card of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, the one that was pierced by a flaming sword and bound in chains. He shook his head and looked back at Denise Cahoon.
“Mrs. Cahoon,” he said, his voice taking on the gentle note of the confessor he’d been for twenty-four years (one year shy of his silver jubilee, he’d up and quit, turned in his cassock, surplice, scapular, and holy-water font), “Inky moved out five years ago. You told my secretary he’s been living with a girl from the composing room. They have a four-year-old child and another on the way. That doesn’t sound like a good sign for your marriage.”
“It’s probably not his kid,” Denise said belligerently. “That girl sleeps with anything in pants. I’ve seen her, the slut. Inky just wants to think it’s his. He always wanted kids.”
James reached into a tray on his desk, got out the divorce forms, handed them across the desk to Denise Cahoon.
“It’s probably for the best,” he said. “No children involved. Look over those papers, call me, and we’ll get them all filled out. We can file for the divorce; everything could be taken care of in six weeks.”
She stared at James as though he were an alien, beamed down there to that dusty little office on Factors Walk by whatever unholy forces had already been at work destroying her life for the past five years.
“That’s it? That’s all you can tell me? No counseling, no family therapy? Just boom, sign here, it’s over? Twenty-two years and now I’m no longer Mrs. Bradley R. Cahoon Junior?”
Her voice rose a little with every syllable she spoke, and her face got pinker, and she loomed higher and higher over James’s desk. It occurred to James that Inky had possibly been wise to get out while the getting was good.
“You can call yourself whatever name you like,” James pointed out. “But I’m afraid divorce is probably your only option now. If you drag things out, it’ll just cost you more money in legal fees. After five years and two children, it’s doubtful to me that Inky is going to have a change of heart.”
Mrs. Bradley R. Cahoon Jr. reached across the desk and snatched the papers out of his hand. “Never mind. I came here because your mother and my mother were friends. My mother was at your ordination, you know. Right there at the cathedral. I thought a priest would see the right thing to do. Ha! Bernadette Foley would roll over in her grave if she could see you right now, James Foley. Divorce! Shame on you.” She wagged her finger at his face. “Shame.”
James pushed his chair backward, away from that thin, fleshy finger. “Good-bye, Mrs. Cahoon,” he said.
He swiveled the chair around and looked out the dirt-streaked window at the muddy brown Savannah River.
A sleek black tanker glided by, its bulk seeming to dwarf the people and cars on River Street. Japanese registry. The name Shinmoru Sunbeam was painted on the ship’s bow.
He heard the door to his office slam. Good.
He’d had lots of clients like Denise Cahoon since he’d moved back to Savannah from his last church in Naples, Florida. People just wanted to hear what they wanted to hear. And he wasn’t in the penance business anymore.
The door opened again, and he smelled perfume—gardenias this month—and cigarettes.
“Christ!” Janet drawled. “That woman doesn’t get it, does she?”
James swiveled the chair around so that it faced the door again. The river mesmerized him. It always had. He couldn’t get any work done if he could see the river from where he sat. And there was work to be done. Thank God.
Janet had a stack of files in her arms. She piled them on top of the wing chair, then put a pink message slip in front of him on the desk. She ran her fingers through her short, wiry, gray hair, and the cigarette she’d tucked behind her ear fell to the floor. She tried to kick it out of the way, so he wouldn’t see it.
“I thought you were going to quit smoking,” James said, trying to look stern.
“Don’t start,” she warned.
Janet Shinholster was his secretary, oldest friend, and business manager. They’d dated all those years ago, back when he was a cadet at Benedictine and she was at St. Vincent’s. After he’d entered the priesthood, he’d seen her only occasionally until he returned to Savannah from Florida.
They’d had a tentative date or two right after he came back two years ago. There was even some fumbling around on the sofa in Janet’s apartment, until James reluctantly confided his suspicions that he probably wasn’t terribly interested in sex.
“You’re gay,” Janet had said, not acting the least bit surprised. “I understand, James. Totally.”
Her reaction annoyed him, actually. He’d never thought of himself as swishy, not in any way. At all.
“What makes you think that?” he’d demanded.
“You’ve been shut up in a seminary or a rectory your whole life,” Janet said. “Since you were eighteen. And then you quit the priesthood. Just like that. I figured, you know, finally. He’s ready to cut loose. Explore the alternatives.”
“Do I act queer to you?” he’d wanted to know. “Interested in boys? Is that what you thought? That I was one of those priests? A pedophile?”
“Never mind,” Janet had said, turning on the lights and straightening her blouse. “Let’s forget it ever happened.”
What annoyed him even more was that Janet was right. He’d started seeing someone, a year later. Not some faggy little boy-toy. Jonathan was a successful lawyer, chief assistant district attorney. It was all very discreet, except that Janet knew, the first time Jonathan came by the office to take him to lunch. Damned Janet knew everything.
“Weezie called,” Janet said. “She wanted to know if you were busy this afternoon.”
James smiled. His niece was the real reason he’d come back to Savannah. They’d always been close. “You’re the father I never had,” she liked to tease. “The mother too.”
“What’s Weezie up to?” he asked.
Janet shrugged. “She said she was going out to Beaulieu for a memorial service for Anna Ruby Mullinax. Wants you to meet her there, if you don’t have anything better to do.”
“Do I?” James asked, looking meaningfully at the stack of files on the wing chair.
“I think you should go,” Janet said. “Anna Ruby Mullinax knew a lot of people in this town. Influential people. People who need legal work.”
Janet took his blue blazer off the brass coat hook on the back of the door and held it out to him. “You’ll have to wear a necktie, you know.”
He shuddered. It was ninety-six degrees outside, the humidity at 100 percent, as usual.
“And don’t forget to take some business cards with you,” she added. “This is called networking, James.”
Chapter 4
I turned up the air conditioner on the pickup truck and glanced anxiously at the temperature gauge. The needle hovered below “simmer.”
“Just let me get to Beaulieu and then you can go on the fritz again,” I said, giving the dashboard a pat for encouragement.
Before I was divorced, I never talked to inanimate objects. Not out loud. Now I talk to my truck, the toaster, and my bank statement, an
ything that promises not to talk back or to act snotty. I’ve had a lifetime of snotty.
Jethro’s tail thumped on the vinyl seat. One thing about Jethro, he loves the sound of my voice. “Good boy,” I told him. Thump. Thump. “Sweet, precious boy,” I said. Thump, thump, thump. He was really getting hot and bothered now.
One of Jethro’s best qualities is that he is the least critical dog I have ever known. He loves everybody, hasn’t got a mean bone in his body. I found him one morning right after Tal left, when I was taking my usual predawn curb cruise.
There was a huge mountain of junk in front of a stick-style Victorian somebody was renovating on Habersham. I was poking around, pulling out bits of wooden porch rails, chunks of wrought-iron fencing, even a gorgeous stained-glass window transom, when I heard a faint squeal. I backed away from the pile fast. The squealing continued, too loud even for Savannah’s brashest wharf rats.
I edged closer, kicked aside a length of rusted-out gutter, and saw a little black-and-white wriggling hairball. He had a pink nose with black spots and he was no bigger than a one-pound sack of flour. At first he looked like he was covered with flour. It turned out it was just plaster dust from the junk pile. It was also instant love. I left the stained glass, tucked the puppy and the porch rails under each arm, and ran like a thief back to my carriage house.
As for the puppy, the vet said he was part beagle, part German shepherd, and mostly mutt. It cost me two hundred dollars for all the shots and the deworming medicine. He’s the only dog I’ve ever owned. Daddy would never hear of a dog, him being a mailman and everything. I named him Jethro, for Jethro Tull, the rock group, and Jethro Bodine, the Beverly Hillbillies hunk.
Tal called his lawyer and then my lawyer the first time he glanced out the back window and saw Jethro lift a leg on a camellia bush in his half of the walled garden.
“That crazy bitch is keeping animals,” Tal yelled. (James played the message-machine tape for me.)
“Weezie’s not a tenant,” James reminded him when he returned Tal’s call. I was sitting right there listening in, of course.
“Look at the property settlement papers,” James told Tal. “The judge awarded Weezie the carriage house. She can keep elephants and giraffes if she wants to. So if I were you, I’d keep quiet about the dog. No telling what she’ll come home with otherwise.”
We were almost at the gates to Beaulieu. I could feel my dress wilting like week-old lettuce. The temperature inside the truck was at least ninety. I pulled the truck off right where the crushed-oyster-shell driveway began, directly under the open Beaulieu gate, leaned over, and rolled the window down. Jethro is just tall enough to see out the passenger-side window. He stuck his head out, sniffed, and gave one short, appreciative bark. I believe that dog can smell an antique.
I gave myself a quick glance in the truck’s rearview mirror. My short, dark red hair was plastered to my head and my face was almost as red as my hair from the heat. My brown eyeliner had started to run in the corners, like Pagliacci.
I was dabbing at my melted makeup when a white Mercedes pulled up beside me and tooted the horn.
James. The electric window on the passenger side glided down. “You better ride the rest of the way with me,” he called.
“Jethro too?” I asked.
He looked over at Jethro, who had jumped into my lap and was trying to stick his head out my window to say hello to his old buddy James.
“Will he stay in the car and not chew up the upholstery?” The Mercedes had been a retirement gift from James’s parish in Florida. I call it the pimpmobile, but James says he gave up his vow of poverty and intends to start making up for all those years of driving Chevys.
“He’ll be good,” I promised.
James’s car was divinely cool. It smelled like new leather and Beech-Nut chewing gum. I held my damp head in front of the air-conditioning vent and pulled my fingers through my hair to try to get it dry.
“I didn’t know you knew Anna Ruby Mullinax,” James said, one eyebrow raised, the way he does.
“I didn’t,” I said. “But this may be the only chance I ever get to go inside Beaulieu. Mama says that’s sacrilege.”
“Your mother’s an expert on sacrilege,” James said.
“But you knew Miss Anna Ruby,” I said. “Janet told me.”
“Did she tell you how we met?”
“Don’t think so,” I said.
“It was a long time ago,” James recalled. “The year I helped start that little church in Metter, Christ Our Hope. Must have been 1978, something like that. Miss Mullinax called me, said she’d heard through some of ‘her people’ that we were building a new church.”
“I thought the Mullinaxes were Episcopalian,” I said, interrupting.
“They were. By ‘her people’ she meant the black folks who’d been family servants. Slaves, originally. But people like the Mullinaxes didn’t like to call it slavery after civil rights got fashionable. A whole crowd of those black folks were living up there in Metter. Most of them Catholic, most of them in my new parish.”
“What did she want?” I asked.
James smiled. He has the Foley family jaw, long and squared off, and when he smiles, which is frequently, it makes creases all the way up to his eye sockets.
“She wanted to give us something for the new church. In memory of a woman named Clydie. Clydie Jeffers. She’d been Miss Anna Ruby’s housekeeper until she died at the age of eighty-eight. So I came out here, to Beaulieu, and we talked, and Miss Anna Ruby ended up donating the pews for Christ Our Hope. Had them made out of cypress trees they cut out here on the property. And a little brass plaque said they were placed there ‘In loving memory of Clydie Jeffers.’ No mention of the donor. Miss Anna Ruby strictly required anonymity.”
A slight breeze stirred the moss from the trees overhanging the shell drive. The live oaks were spaced sentinel style, ten yards apart on both sides, their bases covered with a creeping carpet of ivy, their canopy nearly blotting out the blazing blue sky overhead.
I squinted, and up ahead, at the end of the tree tunnel, I could see the shape of the house, rising over the treetops. I sat up and waited for the house to come fully into view. I’d waited a long time to see Beaulieu.
“She was nice?” I murmured, keeping my eyes on the house.
“Different,” James said. “She was dressed in pants, I remember that. I’d never seen such an old lady wearing pants. And barefoot! Your grandmother Foley never went barefoot outside her own bedroom, let alone walked around in front of a stranger, and a priest, at that. Miss Anna Ruby was her own person, and careful with her money.”
By then I wasn’t listening. We were there.
Three-story-tall Doric columns, twelve in all, stretched across the front of the house, supporting a carved balustrade, and above that were three gables, and beside that, there was a one-story wing on each side. The house was raised up, on a foundation made of tabby, the crushed-oyster-shell masonry you find on old houses along the coast in South Carolina and Georgia.
There was a double stairway winding from the entry porch to the portico. Not white, like the Hollywood version of a Southern plantation house, Beaulieu was painted a pale golden pink, with black-green shutters on the wide six-over-six windows. It was imposing and breathtaking—and it was crumbling.
Paint hung in shreds from the columns, whose bases were chipped and rotted, like a bag lady’s teeth. A fine sheen of green mold had worked its way from the foundations up the front of the house, and the wooden slats of the window shutters had rotted and fallen away. One of the gable roofs had collapsed, the portico sagged, and the only windows not gray and cobweb-streaked had missing panes of glass.
“Oh,” I said, feeling the wind go out of my sails. I blinked. “How sad.”
“Yes,” James said quietly. “Very sad.”
Jethro pressed his nose against the window, and I gently pushed it aside.
“It wasn’t this decrepit when I came out here in the sev
enties,” James said.
He followed the driveway around the side of the house, to an unpaved area used as the car park. There were ten or twelve other cars parked around. One of them was a buttercup yellow Triumph Spitfire that was carefully parked in the shade of a sweet gum tree.
My stomach lurched, as it does every time I see the Spitfire.
“What’s she doing here?” I said, grabbing James’s arm. “She doesn’t even like old stuff.”
He’d left the air-conditioning on, but he was fumbling with his necktie.
“She who?”
I pointed at the Triumph. I knew the car well. After all, it was parked under the carport beside the carriage house in the space that used to be mine. James had won me the carriage house and half the walled garden behind the big house on Troup Square, but the judge, inexplicably, had given Tal my parking slot.
Every night I heard the vroom of the Triumph as it jetted up the alley and slid neatly into the slot—my slot—while I now had to take my chances parking the truck out in front on Charlton Street—if I could find a space at all.
“Caroline,” I said. “She’s here.”
James shot me a look of concern. “Do you want to leave?”
“I’ll be fine,” I assured him. “As long as she doesn’t start anything.”
James got a little pale. I patted his hand reassuringly, then turned around and scratched Jethro’s muzzle.
“Be a good boy and don’t eat Uncle James’s nice pimpmobile.” I rolled down the windows and gathered my resolve. “Let’s go,” I said.
The front door had been covered with an ugly 1950s aluminum screen door. Attached to it was a wilted wreath of ferns and daisies. Beneath it was a small handwritten card. “Please come in,” it said.
We stepped across the rotted threshold and into another era. Not the antebellum South, unfortunately. More like the late years of the Eisenhower administration.
Savannah Blues Page 3
