Savannah Blues

by Mary Kay Andrews

  “Good Christ,” James said. He took a second look at Mrs. Rucker. She was so lovely, so harmless-looking.

  “You had to get permission to do work on your own house?” James still could not believe it. He’d been a part of the most hidebound, tradition-worshipping bureaucracy in the history of the world, the Catholic Church, and still he had never heard of such a thing.

  “The house is in the historic district. It’s listed on the National Register of Historic Places. We got a tax break on the renovation work for restoring it to their specifications,” Weezie explained. “So now the SPL is running the show. And Merijoy Rucker personally runs the SPL. She’s a Nazi in Ferragamo pumps.”

  Weezie took a delicate sip of her sherry. “You know, I haven’t talked to Merijoy in months. I’ll bet she doesn’t know Tal and I are divorced.”

  James laughed. “In this town? Everybody knows you’re divorced. I had Denise Cahoon in my office today, crying and carrying on about how Inky won’t come back to her. Denise Cahoon barely knows what day it is, but even she asked me how my niece was doing after the big split-up.”

  “Denise Cahoon,” Weezie said. “Now there’s a pathetic story. Is she finally gonna make an honest man out of Inky and let him marry the mother of his children before they go off to college?”

  James sighed. “She just wants Inky back. Well, Inky and his paycheck and retirement benefits.”

  Weezie set her empty sherry glass on the sideboard and brushed her fingers through her hair.

  “I’ll be back in a little bit, Uncle James. I think I’ll just go over there and have a word with my old classmate Merijoy. See what she knows about this business of tearing down Beaulieu.”

  James nodded. “Janet says I’m to walk around and give out business cards for my law practice. Don’t you think that’s crass at a memorial service?”

  “Be discreet,” Weezie said. “Look at that couple over there.” James looked where she was pointing, at a couple, both in their nineties, so frail they looked as though a good gust might blow them away. One of the waiters had made the mistake of leaving a silver tray of appetizers untended on the sideboard. The woman was scooping up cheese straws and stashing them in a cracked black leather pocketbook.

  “That’s Spencer and Lorena Loudermilk. I heard Spencer had gall bladder surgery over at Candler Hospital six weeks ago, and he’s had a fever and a bellyache ever since. He went to a doctor up in Atlanta who says the surgeon must have left a clamp inside Spencer. All their grandchildren have been after Spencer to sue Candler, but Spencer says he doesn’t trust lawyers any more than he trusts doctors.”

  She nudged James. “Why don’t you go over there and chat?”

  “Ambulance chasing!” James said quickly. “It would be totally unethical.”

  “Tell Mr. Loudermilk your niece is best friends with their granddaughter, BeBe,” Weezie suggested. “Just inquire about his health. And don’t forget to let him know you’re an attorney.”

  James fingered the stack of business cards Janet had tucked in his pocket. He hated this part of his new life. He just wanted to help people. But, as Janet liked to remind him, his landlord couldn’t cash a check for good intentions, and that gleaming white Mercedes parked out in the yard wouldn’t run on noble deeds.

  The office on Factors Walk was his biggest expense, a luxury, really, to have the river to watch whenever he liked. He lived simply, in the two-bedroom wood-frame cottage on Washington Avenue Bernadette had left him in her will.

  James straightened the knot on his tie. It wouldn’t hurt just to introduce himself to the Loudermilks. They seemed like a lovely couple. He only hoped Weezie wouldn’t get into a brawl while he was rustling up some new billings.

  Chapter 6

  “Eloise Foley!” Merijoy Rucker’s eyes went all crinkly with delight at the sight of me. I guess she’d forgotten the incident with the balcony. “How in the world are you?” she asked, giving me a big hug. She stepped back and looked me over. “And where on earth did you get this darling dress?”

  Merijoy Rucker liked my Zelda dress. I was a success. “You really like the dress?” I said shyly. “It’s Hattie Carnegie. From the late twenties, I think.”

  “It’s adorable,” Merijoy assured me. “Vintage clothing is one of my favorite things. Nobody but you could pull off a look like that, Eloise. After all the weight I’ve put on having babies, if I put on something like that, I’d look like Omar the Tentmaker.”

  “Oh no,” I protested. “You’re so thin, Merijoy. Thinner than high school, even.”

  Merijoy glanced around the room. People were saying their good-byes, moving toward the door. She was watching Caroline and Gerry Blankenship, who were across the room, their heads bent in earnest discussion, with particular interest.

  “So sad about Miss Mullinax, isn’t it? Did you know her well?”

  It was the question I’d been dreading. I looked around for Uncle James, hoping he’d come over, strike up a conversation, and save the day. No good. James was schmoozing BeBe’s grandparents.

  “I didn’t know her well,” I said, trying to sound cool. “She was more a friend of my Uncle James. I just tagged along as company.” I lowered my voice. “To tell you the truth, Merijoy, the real reason I came was out of concern for Beaulieu. Such a historic landmark. Losing it would be a blow.”

  “Lose Beaulieu? What do you mean? Do you know something I don’t?”

  Caroline had zeroed in on me now. Her eyes were shooting off hateful little sparks from across the room. She said something to Gerry Blankenship. Now both of them were staring at me. Caroline could probably read lips. She did everything else. Easy, girl, I told myself. Be sweet.

  “You know Savannah. I’ve just been hearing rumors, that’s all.” I did a little sidestep to put my back to Caroline, so she couldn’t read my brain waves.

  I leaned in toward Merijoy.

  “Paper mill.” I breathed the words, hardly moving my lips at all.

  “No,” Merijoy said. She clutched at her scrawny chest and rolled her big dark eyes as though she might have a cardiac infarction. “There is no way in this wide world that could happen. Do you hear me?”

  I’d really pushed a button.

  “I talked to Miss Mullinax,” Merijoy explained. “For months and months now. We had dinner at Elizabeth’s on Thirty-seventh back in February. She showed me some of the original land grant documents for Beaulieu. She as much as promised Beaulieu would be left to the preservation league. We talked about a living museum. I’ve already started inquiring about grant money for the restoration. The place needs a massive infusion of cash. There are several foundations that’ve expressed interest. The plantation outbuildings would be restored, a small-scale rice-growing operation. She would never…”

  “Maybe there’s been a misunderstanding,” I said hastily. “Please forget I said anything, Merijoy. If you say Beaulieu is safe, I’m sure that’s right.”

  Merijoy pursed her lips thoughtfully. “Gerry Blankenship is Miss Anna Ruby’s attorney. I thought it would be sort of, well, grasping, to call on him any earlier. Out of respect for Miss Anna Ruby. But I’ve been phoning his office, leaving messages, to find out about the will. And today, I’ve tried to get a moment with him ever since he got here. He won’t look me in the eye. Do you know that woman he’s been talking to? I’ve seen her around town, I believe.”

  “I know her,” I said, my stomach twisting into knots. “Her name is Caroline DeSantos. She’s an architect in Tal’s firm. She’s his new fiancée.”

  Merijoy winced. “Then it is true. I’d heard things weren’t going well between you two. I’m sorry, Eloise.”

  “I like to be called Weezie,” I said, lifting my chin. “The divorce was final last month.”

  “What about your house?” Merijoy asked, her inner alarm going off.

  Merijoy knew every inch of every house in the historic district. She was always peeping in at people’s windows and sneaking around in lanes.

&nb
sp; “Your house,” Merijoy said mournfully. “All your hard work. That place was a ruin before you bought it. I used to ride by there all the time and I’d say to Randy Rucker, ‘That place is a disgrace. Somebody needs to buy it and rescue it before there’s nothing left but a pile of brick dust.’ You’re not going to sell the house, are you? Because Adelaide and Malcolm Osborne have been looking for something around Troup Square for months….”

  “The carriage house isn’t for sale,” I said, from between gritted teeth.

  Really. Some people are such vultures. Ever since word of our divorce had gotten out, people had been stopping me on the street. “So sorry about the breakup—does that house have a full bath on the ground floor, or is it just a powder room?”

  “Tal got the big house in the divorce settlement,” I explained. “But I got the carriage house. That’s where I’m living. It’s actually ideal for me. Two bedrooms, two baths, a study, and I got half the garden too.”

  “And that adorable little kitchen. I hope you didn’t do anything to cover up those exposed brick walls.” Merijoy cocked one eyebrow. “So you’re living on the same property as Tal and his fiancée. How unusual. I’ve got to give you credit, Weezie; you’re much more open-minded than I would be if my husband left me for another woman. Why, if Randy Rucker so much as looked at somebody else, I swear, Weezie, I’d have to take the law into my own hands.”

  Caroline and Gerry Blankenship were walking toward the front door. Caroline stopped once, looked over her shoulder at me, trying to figure out what I was doing.

  Merijoy saw where I was looking. “I swear, Weezie, don’t you want to just kill her?”

  Chapter 7

  Right after Tal announced he was in love with somebody else and wanted a divorce, I was so depressed, all my friends were afraid I was suicidal.

  I ran around and did all the things women do when their lives are shattered into little pieces.

  I talked for hours on the telephone to all my girlfriends. We speculated on who the other woman might be. BeBe offered to pay to have Tal followed by a private detective. When I wouldn’t let her, she offered to do it herself, for free. BeBe loves intrigue.

  I couldn’t afford a therapist. Instead, I started reading a lot of self-help articles. The best ones are in the magazines they have at my hairdressers’.

  “Picking Up the Pieces after Your Divorce” was the article I was reading in Women’s World magazine during the time Tal had moved out of the house and was supposedly living with his college roommate. I didn’t find out until much later where he was really staying.

  The beauty-shop article said women going through a divorce should undertake something they called a “life skills inventory” so that they could snap out of any self-destructive postdivorce patterns.

  Life skills. Like what? Accounting? Taxidermy? Automotive repairs?

  For a few years, while Tal was clawing his way to the top of the firm his grandfather owned anyway, I’d worked in the usual assortment of jobs I’d gotten through relatives, friends, and friends of friends. In Savannah, that’s how everybody I know had always gotten jobs. You didn’t need a resume, certainly you didn’t need any “life skills inventory.” You just needed to know somebody.

  I was a file clerk at my neighbor’s uncle’s insurance office, a data entry operator at the bank where Mr. Tal had always done business, medical records clerk at the dentist’s office where I’d gotten my teeth straightened when I was twelve. The only job I’d ever gotten on my own was as a clerk at the public library. I’d passed the spelling test with flying colors.

  I’m a great speller. Blessed Sacrament School fourth-, fifth-, and sixth-grade spelling bee champ.

  But championship spelling probably wasn’t one of the life skills Women’s World was talking about in their article about picking up the pieces.

  BeBe still can’t believe I never suspected anything was up between Tal and Caroline. But why would I have? He didn’t work any later hours, our love life didn’t change (sex on Saturday mornings and Thursday nights), he never tried to hide his fondness for her—in fact, he was insistent that she and I should become new best buddies. The friendship thing didn’t take, of course. We gave dinner parties together, went sailing, and played golf, the whole deal. Now that I look back at it, I realize I did the cooking for the dinner parties and Caroline bought the wine. Tal and Caroline crewed the boat; I packed the picnic lunch.

  My resentment simmered, then festered, until late one Sunday, after a whole weekend of forced buddying up with Caroline, I let Tal know how I really felt.

  “I’m sick of her,” I told him. “We have nothing in common. She hates all my friends. She’s always saying what a flake BeBe is. Whenever we have these stupid get-togethers, I do all the work and she sits back and looks fabulous all the time. The woman has no sweat glands. She’s great at everything and she deliberately tries to make me feel inadequate.”

  Tal just laughed. “You’re jealous!” he said. “It’s natural.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “You know exactly what I mean,” Tal said. “If Caroline makes you feel inadequate, it’s probably because you’re so, well, unfocused. Face it, Weezie, you go off in a million different directions. You piddle with this and that, but you’re never serious about anything. Not anything I care about, anyway. You’re…”—he took a deep breath—“You’re a dabbler, Weezie.”

  If he’d picked up the fillet knife off the counter and plunged it between my ribs, Tal couldn’t have wounded me any deeper.

  Unfocused. Twist the knife; see if you can hit an artery.

  A piddler. How about a major organ?

  A dabbler. Rip out my heart and stomp it on the heart-pine kitchen floors I’d stripped and hand-waxed all by myself.

  Coming from him, I thought, it must have been true. After all, everybody was always saying how Talmadge Evans III was so accomplished at everything. Architecture. Classical guitar. Golf. Fly-fishing. Sailing. And now adultery.

  I’d stayed in the house until the last possible moment. The judge had given me a month to remove my stuff.

  At 6 P.M. on a Friday, exactly thirty days from the day the property settlement was final, I finished moving out of the big house. The moving van with Caroline’s furniture had made two passes by the front door already. To be perfectly honest, I cried more over leaving the house than I’d ever cried over the loss of Talmadge Evans III.

  That day, I rolled up my threadbare oriental carpets, packed up every stick of blue-and-white porcelain I’d scrounged for the past ten years, boxed up all my antique reference books, including every Kovels’ price guide issued for the past fifteen years, and then, sobbing, I hand-carried the pieces of furniture Tal had never liked over to the carriage house, my new home.

  I didn’t trust movers with my treasure, so I loaded up the little blue milk-paint goat cart I’d converted to a coffee table, and wheeled it back and forth until I was done.

  The judge gave Tal the four-poster mahogany Charleston bed we’d bought for our fifth anniversary, all the silver flatware his mother and her friends had given us as wedding gifts, the eighteenth-century drop-leaf cherry table in the foyer, and all the living-room furniture.

  After I’d made the last load I went back to the big house one last time. It was dusk. I unscrewed every lightbulb in every fixture in the house. I crawled up under the kitchen sink, and with a pipe wrench, I removed the grease trap from the sink. I put a crimp in the copper pipe leading from the hot-water heater. After some consideration, I opened up the refrigerator—the three-thousand-dollar Sub-Zero I’d gotten for half price from an appliance distributor I know, and I removed the little wire do-jiggey that tells the ice maker it’s time to make more ice cubes.

  An hour without ice in Savannah is like a lifetime in hell.

  There was more I could have done, but I couldn’t bear to inflict any really lasting wounds on my house. It didn’t matter what the judge said; it was my house. I had found it, br
eathed life into it, made it my own. The paint on the walls were colors I’d hand-mixed, the old gas-light chandeliers were ones I’d taken apart, piece by piece, polishing the brass, washing the crystals, and rethreading the arms with new wiring. Since I’d rescued the house I’d taught myself to reglaze windows, strip woodwork, lay tile, repair plaster, do simple wiring, paint, and garden. Dabbling, Tal would call it.

  Of course, there were things I’d learned I couldn’t do. I’d burned my hand badly with a blowtorch the one time I’d attempted plumbing. I couldn’t hang wallpaper straight, nor did I have any particular affinity for carpentry.

  That afternoon I wandered aimlessly about the darkening rooms, my footsteps echoing in the half-empty high-ceilinged rooms. “It’s time to go,” I said sternly, after I caught myself looking around for a broom to sweep one last cobweb from one last bit of cove molding in the living room. “They’re his spiders now.”

  The last box of my clothes was upstairs in our bedroom. His bedroom, now. I picked up the cardboard box and lifted the flap to see what was in this one. It was full of cheesy lacy lingerie; teddies, bustiers, French-cut and thong bikini panties; all gifts from Tal, who never seemed to notice that none of it was my taste.

  I glanced in the bathroom, caught a glimpse of myself in the gold-leafed mirror over the vanity.

  There were dark circles under my eyes from not sleeping. I’d lost weight, and my clothes hung from my hunched-looking shoulders. Two tiny earrings shone from my right earlobe. My fear of needles borders on the pathological, but BeBe had talked me into the second set of ear piercings. I’d gone for the idea because I’ve always loved earrings and have boxes and boxes of unusual vintage ones I’ve picked up over the years at estate sales and junk stores.