Hayes took off his shirt, squeezed what water he could from his pants, shook his feet, jogged rapidly home, rang the doorbell.
His wife appeared, disguised as Holly in jeans and sweatshirt, and smiled. “Yes, can I help you?”
He snarled sarcastically. “Who am I, Aura?”
She leaned in contemplation against the fluted column. “Lately, you’ve gotten in the habit, you know, of asking a lot of strange and obvious questions. I wonder why.”
“Please don’t. Would you excuse me?” Raleigh squished past her, marking his path to the upstairs bath with puddles. He was naked, wringing out his socks in the tub, when she stuck her head in the door, which he had not taken the time to close.
“Was that sweat? Because it’s not raining. Raleigh, I’ve read you can overdo this exercise business. Especially on top of so much alcohol.” She was looking him over with an appraising gaze. Hayes blushed and, holding the socks in front of him, sucked in his stomach surreptitiously. He doubted he had ever stood before her naked, under a bright light, in casual conversation. She nodded. “You look pretty good. You’ve got a nice body.”
He heard himself reply, “Thank you,” and blushed.
They stood there, both pink-faced, then she went on her tiptoes to whisper in his ear, “Say, how about a roll in the hay?”
“What?” Roll in the hay? Hit the bottle? What kind of magazines was she reading? “Good Lord, Aura, it’s eight fifteen.”
“Is that too early? Or too late?” She began pulling bobby pins from her hair. “You’re not leaving for New Orleans tonight, are you?”
“Oh. You read Daddy’s note. Did you listen to the tape?”
“Your daddy!” She laughed. Why had she always found his father so amusing?
Hayes thought he had an explanation for what was now happening. “Okay, I see. His note. That’s where you got this idea.”
She shook her hair loose. “Listen, Adam and Eve had this idea.”
Raleigh was letting her lead him out of the bathroom. “That’s right. Look what happened to them.”
“Oh, they had this idea before the snake even spotted the tree. Besides, your father was a minister.” Meaning what? That Earley Hayes, who had been fired by his church for betraying Raleigh’s mother with Roxanne Digges, was an authority on the chronology of the Fall? “I hope he’s okay, you know how much I love him,” Aura added.
“Who doesn’t, except anybody that has to live in the world.”
“What? Oh, don’t change the subject.” She prodded him down the hall.
“From what?”
“Aren’t you going to jump my bones?”
She must have heard that on cable television. “Aura, I don’t even know what you’re talking about.”
She was closing the bedroom door. “Come on, I bet it’s just like riding a bicycle. It’ll all come back.” Now she was pulling off her clothes.
“Aura, let’s be serious for a second. This isn’t like us. You’re acting like you used to back in Germany when we first met.”
“What do you mean? We didn’t sleep together in Germany. Or did we?”
“Of course we didn’t. You were only there two weeks. Jesus!”
She lay rosy on the bed, stretching. “Ah, two wonderful weeks. Remember?”
It was true that the Hayeses had first met in a bierhaus, in Freiburg, where Raleigh was stationed, and where Aura, abroad seeking an Existential Life with the two other bohemians in her class at Mary Baldwin College for Women, was sightseeing, after they’d gotten off the train there to take a shower. At that bierhaus, Aura had told Raleigh that she’d agreed to date him because he was the only GI she’d met in Freiburg who had asked her an interesting question about herself. Three years later, back in North Carolina, where Aura was enrolled in nursing school, they’d become engaged on a chartered bus going to Robert Kennedy’s funeral.
“What I mean,” Hayes explained, “is you were kind of crazy. You know, with your sandals and your mandolin and Simone de Beauvoir.”
She rubbed against his side. “You sure know a lot of crazy people.”
Vanquished, Raleigh Hayes shook his head. “Well, it’s true. Something funny’s happening here.”
Aura rolled him over against her. She said, “So I see.”
Chapter 4
How Raleigh Received His Name AT THE TIME when Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin were doing what they could to stop Hitler from doing what he wanted, our hero, innocent of the strength of these world shakers to rattle his own minuscule life, was, by his father, splashed in the face with cold water, told he’d just been made an inheritor of the Kingdom of Heaven, and christened by oil in the arms of his sponsors (who were recklessly making all sorts of promises in his new name): RALEIGH WHITTIER HAYES. This shocking and undignified assault the infant Raleigh greeted with the same roving malevolent silent glare with which, throughout his life, he habitually was to look at all this world’s irrational affronts. Aghast to hear his blithe sponsors vow to send him immediately off to war against Sin and the Devil, the swaddled Raleigh did emit one squeal of indignation, but he did not cry, and for his stoicism was praised by the smiling looming face of his mother, who’d stood at the ready with a pacifier.
At the baptism party, in the rectory of Thermopylae’s tiny Episcopal church, his father gave him a small sip of muscatel wine, and his seventeen-year-old godfather, his uncle Whittier Hayes, gave him a small copy of The Poetry of John Keats, which he didn’t want either. Both Raleigh’s father and his godfather were in uniform, having been commissioned by Franklin Roosevelt to fly overseas to keep Hitler from taking countries that didn’t belong to him. Thus our hero, Raleigh Whittier Hayes, bore the names of two soldiers who wrote poetry and died violently, for like Sir Walter Raleigh, Whittier Hayes—blown up in a tank near Bizerte, North Africa, shortly before his twenty-second birthday—had been a poet. He had written not only “Valedictory Ode” (“Ring out the old! We go to climb the sky!/So, Thermopylae High, good-bye. Good-bye.”), which was still recited at commencements, but he was the author as well of six love sonnets mailed from Africa to, and until this day cherished by, Betty Morrow (now the widowed Mrs. Perry Hemans) and SueAnn McClung (now Mrs. William Swain), neither of whom suspected the other possessed six identical thin worn sheets of fading ink, both beginning
When I have fears that death may capture me Before my eyes once more have seen your face, That face that means my home, safe, lost, and free, Soft summer love far from this hard hot place…
And both ending with proposals of marriage.
Raleigh could not remember his uncle Whittier except as a photograph on his grandmother’s dresser; it sat on a white doily before a small jelly jar in which there was always a dahlia or narcissus or ivy sprig, at which the thin soldier was always smiling.
Of the other warrior poet whose name he carried, Raleigh could recall no more from an oral report he’d been forced to present in the seventh grade than that the glamorous Sir Walter, spending every shilling he possessed on a suit of silver clothes, had come to London to fling his cloak down over a mud puddle for Queen Elizabeth I to walk across; that, in thanks for this (as it seemed to Raleigh Hayes even at twelve) profligate swaggering, the Virgin Queen had given Sir Walter the ships to defeat the Spanish Armada and to send the Lost Colony to North Carolina—which he had called Virginia, in honor of his monarch’s chastity. Someone had chopped off the first Raleigh’s head; who, or with what justice, Hayes could not now resurrect; possibly he’d lost his head for losing the Lost Colony, or possibly it was for flirting, or atheism. What Hayes recalled most about this oral report was his embarrassment at the sniggering response of his pubescent classmates to his mention of the word virginity. He could still hear those sniggers, and the moronic joke devised on the spot by his cousin Jimmy Clay, and repeated by him, with accompanying shoves, in the halls, cafeteria, and playground, whenever he saw Raleigh. “How long was Queen Elizabeth’s period? About as long as all the other girls’. Hotch
a, hotcha, haw, haw, haw.”
Hayes’s memories of his nominal ancestor were therefore not very pleasant ones. In later years he felt no impulse to learn more about the old extravagant Elizabethan; certainly he had no more urge to read the man’s poems than he’d had at his baptism to thumb through Keats (although, in fact, he would have discovered, in Sir Walter’s cynical contempt for the folly and rot of the world, a concise echo of his own views). Instead, Hayes resented the imposition of so flamboyant a past on his identity, just as he felt burdened by the inheritance of his father’s cavalier good looks; and he didn’t correct people who assumed (however ridiculously) that he’d been named for the capital of the state in which he lived.
And in which state (sometimes in the city, Raleigh, and occasionally named Whittier), the Hayes family had lived for several centuries. Of his heritage, our hero was largely and unreluctantly ignorant. He had no time for all the living Hayeses—and rarely saw them except at funerals—much less leisure to get to know the longexpired. Raleigh had no idea who this Goodrich Hale Hayes (whose wife’s descendants he was now instructed to trace) might have been. He was a dead Hayes, that’s all. North Carolina was filled with them. As might be expected of a man in the business of insuring the future, Raleigh had primarily a predictive interest in the past. It was, for example, important to remember that five years ago when his father had begun playing bingo with a self-described cocktail waitress he’d met at a church social, it had been possible (if time-consuming) to discover that this woman had deserted, but not divorced, her husband in Greensboro, had served time for forging a check and was still on parole, had lost her job at the I-85 Lounge for lewd solicitation, and had cheated nightly at bingo. It had been possible for his aunt Victoria to persuade this woman (in the church’s ladies room) to stay away from Earley Hayes. It was important to remember that similar vulnerabilities could doubtless be unearthed about the young black woman off in that yellow Cadillac now, and similar pressures brought to bear.
The past was to Raleigh this kind of warning device, easily read by anyone with eyes. Anyone knowing the diet of his aunt Big Em Hayes Leacock (so designated not so much for her obesity—which was manifest—but to distinguish her from her brother Furbus’s wife, Little Emily Shay, a petite woman who had to buy her shoes in the children’s department, and could never find the styles she wanted: “Ho, ho,” laughed Furbus, year after year. “It had been Big Em fell on me in the bleachers, she’d of squashed more’n my collarbone, right, Big Em?” “That’s right, you’d of been pancakes!” laughed Big Em, year after year)—anyone knowing that this 260-pound diabetic could not or would not deny herself pecan pies and semisolid pitchers of iced tea containing three cups of sugar might have easily predicted that what happened to Big Em (death) was going to happen. That, furthermore, the same fate was soon likely to overtake more of her younger sister Reba than simply her legs.
Such statistical records of the past were worth keeping. But for the past as past, Hayes harbored no nostalgia. Perhaps by a trait inherited from his Philadelphia mother, he was immune to the Southern homesickness for yesterday. Raleigh didn’t know that Henry Ford had said, “History is bunk,” but he wouldn’t have argued with so successful a man. With America, he was willing to encapsulate decades and forget them, willing to leave behind. Of course, he still lived in Thermopylae, but his presence there, initially accidental, was ultimately irrelevant. Thermopylae would do. Of course, he could have migrated, and so escaped all his relatives, but he had never required space in order to lose touch.
No, Raleigh made no claims on the past. Of his maternal ancestry, he’d heard not a single story: Sarah Ainsworth had appeared in Thermopylae one summer day to visit a friend. Unprecedented and unencumbered, the only child of a deceased, kinless, well-off widower, she’d promptly given herself away to Earley Hayes. She’d mentioned no relationships but one to her bank trustee in Philadelphia, and before Raleigh had thought to press her for details, she had suddenly died. On his paternal side, he’d heard nothing but details. Whole lives lost to chatter. He’d forgotten most of these stories, and could scarcely remember the old storytellers, including his great-grandmother (nicknamed Tiny), who’d often tried to bribe him to go buy her peppermint sticks at Woolworth’s by promising to betray family secrets. He didn’t recall the secrets. He didn’t know, and suspected he wouldn’t enjoy learning, who all his predecessors were.
This indifference distinguished Raleigh from most of his Thermopylean neighbors, who would tell him with straight faces that their forebears had invented Coca-Cola, written “White Christmas,” set fire to a million dollars in Confederate money to boil turnips by, stopped a bullet destined for Andrew Jackson, and slept with Mary Queen of Scots. Nemours Kettell had wasted God knows how large a fortune trying to prove himself illegitimately descended from Napoleon’s emigrating general, Marshal Ney, Duc d’Elchingen. Hayes had only taken off his glasses and rubbed his eyes when obliged to listen to Kettell at Civitan luncheons attempt to persuade him to hire a genealogist who might be able to trace him back to Sir Walter Raleigh, or at least to the poet John Greenleaf Whittier (part of whose interminable poem “Snowbound” Hayes had been forced to memorize and recite in that same seventh-grade class). The subject of genealogies was made more distressing to our hero by the fact that his half-brother Gates had been arrested for selling fake family trees and forged Confederate holographs to unsuspecting women passionate for antebellum glamour. No, Hayes saw no cause to claim the past.
Until today. On this awful Ides of March, as he had jogged home sopping wet from his immersion in Starry Haven Community Pool, it had occurred to Raleigh Whittier Hayes that perhaps his perspective on his injuries had been insufficiently far-reaching. To blame the imbecilic Ned Ware, the infantile Mingo Sheffield, the gibblegabbling Jimmy Clay, and boorish Booger, or even to blame his impossible father, was not only somehow unsatisfying, it was intellectually puny. As he ran, it had occurred to Hayes to stretch indignation back to the very headspring of his genesis; not, that is, as far as Adam, but all the way back to the original Raleigh, whose name now entered his mind for the first time in many years. Yes, he would blame the fact that he was jogging home soaked from a near drowning at the hands of a fat naked deviant…on Sir Walter! He would lay it all at the no doubt jeweled feet of that roving, vaulting, sleek and spangled, open-handed, bee-headed, moon-mad, lecherous clotheshorse, Walter Raleigh! Had this grabby fool never shipped hapless Englishmen over to Roanoke to slap sweaty-palmed at mosquitoes, dodge arrows, and poke grit-grimed in the sand for gold, until they managed to get themselves lost, or eaten, maybe the long string of simpletons who’d followed them over the ocean, in a line that led straight to the first Carolina Hayes, never would have gotten the idea that they could skip off to a New World every time the Old one rubbed them wrong. Maybe they would have stuck with their sheep back in Sussex, as Raleigh Hayes himself would sensibly have done. (Wasn’t he still in Thermopylae where fate had randomly dropped him?) If Sir Walter had kept his cloak on his back where it belonged, Raleigh Hayes could have grown up in England, where people’s cousins didn’t sell people’s fathers yellow Cadillacs, and people’s neighbors didn’t wear spiked collars or go skinny-dipping an hour after failing to commit suicide. Hayeses wouldn’t have trooped to America in that stream of harebrained optimists leading to his cousin Kenny Leacock (son of Big Em), who’d moved his wife in a Winnebago to Los Angeles, where they’d spent years trying to get on Let’s Make a Deal, disguised as papier-mâché salt and pepper shakers.
It’s unfortunate our hero was so in the dark. He would have derived a wry satisfaction from the knowledge that the first American Hayes (baptized Obed in 1632 by a Cheapside evangelical Separatist who was subsequently hanged for his violent views on altar cloths) had been just such a harebrained optimist. Duped by a ship company’s placard posted on Bishopsgate Street, London (having failed to read the fine print), Obed Hayes had discovered only in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean that in exchange fo
r his free passage to Cape Fear, he had bound himself to five years’ indentured servitude bent over a fermenting vat on a Carolina indigo plantation. Once there, Obed had learned that he’d been duped by the Cape Fear ship company’s large print, for it had outrageously vouched for “The Healthfulness of the Air” in that Indian-infested swamp, and for “The Fertility of the Earth and Waters, and the great Pleasure and Profit to accrue to those that shall go thither to enjoy the Same.” Raleigh’s first native forefather had lost his hair to scarlet fever and his arm to a tomahawk and, after five years stirring blue dye, for the rest of his life would never own anything blue (in fact, could scarcely bear to look at the sky). But somehow, Obed had survived to begin, with a New Bern printer’s daughter, a Hayes family tree, whose newest branch, our hero Raleigh, had never traced himself back to a bough, much less the trunk called HAYES; who had no idea he actually was—by a tenuous collateral limb—remotely related to John Greenleaf Whittier, from whom, perhaps, his soldier-uncle Whittier had inherited the gene of his poetic nature. Who hadn’t a clue that his great-great-grandfather, Major General Goodrich Hale Hayes, C.S.A., had been in charge of a mule-drawn, false-bottomed wagon retreating from Sherman’s relentless advance through North Carolina, and that this wagon had gotten itself as lost as Sir Walter’s colony, and that the mules had balked at every red muddy hill on the Piedmont road to Thermopylae, because the false bottom was lined with gold bars, and—as Raleigh Whittier Hayes did know—gold is heavy.
Handling Sin Page 6
