Handling Sin

by Malone, Michael

  Eventually, Raleigh was able to escape to the guest cottage he was to share with his brother, since (too depleted to argue) he’d allowed Gates to talk him into staying the night while “the coast cleared.” Weeper Berg had obviously retired to the cabin next door, for Hayes could hear (though not identify) Saint-Saëns’s “The Swan” squeakily bowed on the bass fiddle. Raleigh wanted to call Aura but he didn’t have the strength just yet. There was a phone by the bed, and a television and a few other modern improvements, but otherwise the cabin sustained the slave motif, with patchwork quilts and rough-hewn dressers with clay pitchers on top. Raleigh wrapped himself in his quilt and stared at the iron farm implements nailed to the pine wall. From across the lawn, he could hear what Ashley Wilkes would have called the happy black laughter of the Holcomb family, who were charging Payne Wetherell four thousand dollars for their spare-rib buffet. He could also hear Mingo Sheffield (or should he say, Mr. Mingo?) joking a mile a minute under the tent with the increasingly voluble Lady Wetherell as he advised her on arranging her orange rose centerpieces, her scalloped bunting, and her Dixie Troubadours, who must have finally arrived, for Raleigh now heard someone playing, “My Old Kentucky Home” on an electric guitar.

  Yes, Mingo was laughing his head off out there. The indiscriminate fool could apparently get along with anybody. How odd that Sheffield had sat through twelve years of public school too terrified to open his mouth and now should be incapable of shutting it in the presence of every total stranger who crossed his path. Well, thank God for small favors; he, Raleighkov?, was Hungarian, no, Czechoslovakian, and therefore not obliged to converse with a damn soul. Except Aura. He’d call Aura. At least she knew who he was. Surely, his hosts wouldn’t mind if he made a collect phone call.

  “Such a sob sister, I still can’t believe yet.…Nah.…Trigger’s wife was the skirt. Spilled her guts, that’s what sent poor Trigger to the hot squat.…Yeah.…What can I tell you, she was a bag of cupidity, head to toe. The cross was on.”

  It seemed Weeper Berg was making a collect call of his own, for he was on the other guest phone in the cabin next door. (Actually, it had never occurred to Weeper to reverse the charges on the seven long distance calls he was making to Miami, Florida—as the Wetherells would have discovered had they ever glanced at their phone bills.) Having picked up the receiver, Raleigh shamefully sat on the painted iron bed and listened in. (Despite the fact that he so highly disparaged eavesdropping, as he’d often said to Caroline.) He kept listening because he was fascinated by his inability to understand a word Berg and his acquaintances were saying; it was like listening to his cousin, Jimmy Clay, and therefore not really eavesdropping, since that vice implied comprehension. Berg did most of the talking, and in the following vein:

  “Nah.…Nah.…Stooley Norton never put the snatch on Trigger.…Nah.…Don’t tell me Heinie Hubler! The eyes of a mole he’s got! He never saw such a thing!…So?…So?…Well, let me put you and the Worm wise. Stoolie was in the can, ’forty-eight to ’fiftyone, so how could he finger Trigger?…Yeah. Trigger was a beauty, an angel, we’ll never know another. Well, it’s an amphibolous world. So, tell me, Patty, yah crapehanger, yah’ll get the word to the Cuban? So what’s a measly fifteen thou to him?…Yeah, so then is when you say, ‘Where were you the night of New Year’s Day, ’seventy-nine, when Morris Brownstone took the rap for detonating Willie Codder in his own garage?’ The Cuban will have a clue to my meaning.”

  Raleigh carefully slipped the receiver down. When he picked it back up, Weeper was talking to a woman. “If Benny was alive, he’d drop dead to hear it. Such a phonus bolonus. Art collector! So was Hitler.…Yeah, he dumped the patootie.…Nah, a creep dive stripper.…Ha ha ha.…So, you got a line on this Parisi squirt Calhoun? Who? Nah. She’s a little old lady in Bermuda shorts. She’s a canasta player. We’re not talking Ma Barker. So, Rose, give me a cursory moment here. This is Who Parisi’s widow? Antony? Which one was Antony?…Even so, may he rest in peace.”

  Raleigh hung up. He brushed his hair, his teeth, and his shoes. He tried again.

  “Listen, Mr. Johnny Carson you’re so funny, you should try taking a crap with my bowels!”

  “EXCUSE ME! Mr. Berg, pardon me,” said Raleigh. “Would you mind? I’ve been waiting some time to use this phone.”

  “…Nah, it’s the kid’s brother. So, I’ll call you, Snooper, so, okay.…I should know? See a pederast, podiatrist, whatever.…”

  Past experience led Holly Hayes to accept the collect charges without demur. She even confessed to missing her father, which he found so astonishingly comforting that he had not a critical word to say about her news that Saturday night she and Booger Blair had brought the Triumph in third, in an amateur road rally up Mosby Peak. “So, Dad, how’s it going?”

  “It’s going…okay. Where’s Caroline?”

  “Where else? Mall. You know Car and Kevin’s crowd. Passive consumerism.”

  “But it’s Sunday.”

  “Dad, you have to pull yourself out of the dark ages. Sorry Mom’s not here. She went out to lunch with some guys.”

  “What do you mean, went out to lunch with some guys? What guys?”

  “She said, ‘Democrats.’ The Democratic party, or something, I don’t know. But Grandpa called! He left a message. You want to hear it? Mom wrote it down on a bag here. He wouldn’t tell Mom where he was or anything. She told him he was driving you crazy and she was mad at him.”

  “Tell her thanks.”

  The message was that Earley Hayes now had reason to believe that Jubal Rogers might be living in Charleston—information that Raleigh, of course, already had, and a further, somewhat satisfying, suggestion that he was a few steps ahead of his father. The message was that if Raleigh could, he should go to Charleston, and if possible stay at the Ambrose Inn on the High Battery, where Earley would attempt to call him at eightP.M. Tuesday and again on Wednesday. Earley had also asked whether or not Raleigh had found Gates, and whether he’d been able to persuade him to go visit Roxanne. This was upsetting, not only because it distressed Raleigh to think about Roxanne, and distressed him to remember that all his considerable labor to bring Gates to Midway had been in vain; it distressed him to realize that his father had no idea of the gravity of his third wife’s illness, and certainly no idea of her sudden death. And even if that third marriage had been as unhappy as it had been brief (and costly), still, how was this news going to affect his father?

  “Holly, please tell your mother that Roxanne, ah, died, ah, Friday.”

  “Died?”

  “I’m afraid so.”

  “Gosh, who is this Roxanne anyhow?”

  “She was…ah, in a sense, ah, your uncle Gates’s mother.”

  “Boy, you never told me that! I never even got to meet her!”

  “We weren’t close.”

  “I’ll say. Boy, your generation is weird. I wish you’d come home, Dad, things are popping around here.”

  How could things be popping around there, when things were popping around here, and around Myrtle Beach, and around “Peace and Quiet,” and around all the other places Raleigh had recently found himself? How could things be popping everywhere? What about the law of compensation? Shouldn’t somewhere in the universe be still?

  Salvos of life did however seem to be shooting off back in Starry Haven. Aura had been invited by students at Haver University in Hillston to debate Congressman Lukes on campus Monday night. Mrs. Nemours Kettell had separated from her husband and Mr. Kettell had stormed into the Hayes house and accused Aura of leading his wife astray. “Mom wiped him up,” Holly summarized succinctly. And last but certainly not least, Mrs. Sheffield had told Aura she was going into the porno business.

  “Holly!”

  Well, perhaps not really the porno business. But Vera was thinking of opening a small catalogue store in a Forbes Building office, one floor below Mothers for Peace. A sort of lingerie shop, or as Holly put it, “Hot nightgowns. You know, Dad, like Frederick’s of Hollywo
od. Maybe she’ll call it Vera’s of Thermopylae. Hunh?”

  His daughter laughed. Raleigh laughed, too, and felt himself feeling, for the first time in a long while, how much Holly was his, how much they were alike, and liked being alike, in that pleasurable, comfortable way that somehow they’d lost since, since when? Since she’d started locking the bathroom door, and hanging up the phone whenever he entered a room, and crying at the dinner table for no earthly reason, and preferring the company of strangers to home, and, in general, not being any longer the small thin little girl in unraveling pigtails and unraveling sweater, who sat crosslegged on the rug beside him (her smooth bare knees showing through her jeans), and offered him, as they watched television together, her imitations of his ironic wisecracks on the programs they saw; offered them with his own raised eyebrow and flat sarcastic tone; always listening for his laughter, always proudly repeating her joke, again and again, trying to keep the laughter alive between them.

  “Hey, Dad, I hear Mom. She’s back. MOM, DAD! See yah, we miss you. Vera’s of Thermopylae, hunh? Wild!”

  Raleigh and Aura had only managed to talk long enough to “catch up,” as they called it, with the facts (bizarre enough), but not the feelings of their respective last few days, when Hayes suddenly heard someone approaching the cottage door, someone rattling glass and yodeling “YOOHOO!” He was just saying, “So I’ll call you, Aura, from this Ambrose Inn—” when he heard this someone bang at the door, which, as it was not latched, flew noisily open. He made an abrupt decision and began to babble rapidly into the receiver, “Bitte, ich müss Deutsch sprechen. Wo ist die Toiletten? Das Swine isst grosser als die Auto.”

  “Raleigh, what’s the matter with you? Why are you speaking German in that funny voice?”

  “Wie lange haben Sie im München sind? Wieviel ist ein Zimmer mit Schlag?”

  “Do I have a room with cream? Is that what you said? Honey, have you gone off the deep end again?”

  Raleigh was making a valiant effort to smile at Mrs. Wetherell, who stood there in an evening gown of linked gold squares. She held a silver tray on which jiggled an ice bucket, a bottle of vodka, and a glass, and she smiled back triumphantly at the sound of sophisticated foreign language taking place in her guest cottage. Wait till those stuck-up old double D damn biddies, who had been so condescending about inviting Crystal to join the debutante list, tightening their nostrils as if they were smelling Payne’s fertilizer, just wait till they met Monsieur Jean Claude Claudel and his associates. Wait…well, they didn’t have to wait to hear that “Wild Oaks” was going to be in the movies for Lady Bug had already called a fourth of the guest list to tell them so, and they’d already called the other three-fourths. But just wait till they heard Mr. Raleighkov talk!

  “Da. Ja. Wo ist mein Vater? Aura, ich bin Czechoslavski.” Raleigh faltered on, and deciding that he did not sound sufficiently East European, he recklessly added utter gibberish, “Yosto Gragovitsch zintz Marksi, da, ja, da.” Yes, he’d sunk into Jimmy Clay’s collapsed tower of Babel.

  “Raleigh Hayes! Are you sure you don’t have a drinking problem? I know I hear a glass.”

  “Nein! Ich müss gehen. Ich bin telephonen Tuestag vill. Ein Zwei Drei Vier Fünf. Ich liebe dich. Güten Nichtski.”

  My God, she laughed! “Well, Raleigh, I love you too. Sounds like you’re having a lot of fun. ’Bye.”

  Sheepishly, Hayes hung up and faced his hostess. How was he to explain that he hadn’t been calling Prague at her expense, if he couldn’t speak English? But Mrs. Wetherell was beaming, wrinkling her rich leather face. “Would you like a teeny DRINK? Mr. Claudel said all Czechs love vodka. VODKA.” She was shouting at him, presumably on the premise that to break the sound barrier was to break the language barrier as well. He nodded miserably and she nodded happily back and they nodded at each other for a while until she suddenly grabbed his jacket and yelled, “What SIZE do you wear? SIZE?” She pulled the collar away from his neck and attempted to look at the label. Raleigh twisted backward, spinning under her arm. He thought it safe to risk pretending he could follow some of this pantomime, so he held up four fingers on one hand and two on the other. “Forty-two?” she beamed.

  Nodding, he put his fingers together, then stretched his arms out.

  “FORTY-TWO LONG?…That’s one forty, one forty-two, and, Lord, one fifty-two, plus The Other One.…Oh my, Mr. Raleighkov, if I get through this night without slitting my wrists in the tub, I’ll…” She didn’t say what she would do, but poured herself a shot of vodka and tossed it down. Alcohol had astonishingly little effect on her; she should have been deep into delirium tremens by now. “I swear. I’ve got anywhere from nobody to two hundred and fifty people walking through the gates in an hour and a half, and Payne will NOT stop painting that goddamn outdoor café! My Dixie Troubadour singer is drugged up so bad she can’t even hold her eyes open without using her hands, and if Mr. Mingo, bless his big ole heart, hadn’t talked Crystal, and I don’t know how, into putting on a dress, I swear I’d of canceled this whole thing and moved back to Houston!” Lady Wetherell, pacing the room in her gold gown, kicked the heavy train out of her way at each turn. She appeared not to mind (or perhaps to prefer) venting her troubles to someone who presumably could not offer a reply. She pulled a little gold cigarette case out from between her oversized breasts, and lit up. “Those damn caterers are telling me they are NOT gonna serve noodles almondine with the spare ribs the way I asked them to. They’re gonna serve black-eyed peas and collard greens! Collard greens! Well, if it wasn’t for you and Jean Claude and Mr. Mingo, I’d be in the garage right this minute looking for a rubber pipe. Well, hell, have a drink.”

  He had a drink. He agreed he needed one, especially when the woman flopped down on his bed and told him, “Jean Claude had the cutest idea you ever heard. He’s setting up a little Monte Carlo kind of casino area so people can play games after dinner. I never would have thought of that! And Mr. Mingo! I have GOT to go see some of his movie designs after the way he fixed up my tents! Well, make yourself at home, Mr. Raleighkov. I wonder what size The Other One wears. I hate to bother him. I guess he’s still in the bathroom, poor old blind man. The bowl keeps on flushing to beat the band.”

  The famous Wetherell Barbecue, as it proudly passed into the social memory of the county, was a thoroughly stunning success. Almost everyone who’d been invited came, and everyone who’d declined to come was sorry. Everyone was amazed to see two hundred place settings of real china and real silver—and it was real, for the old biddies had looked at the bottoms of the plates and held the forks up to the candles.

  Almost everybody drank himself silly. So many champagne corks shot off, the guests felt like gay, gallant revelers at the shelling of Fort Sumter.

  The Dixie Troubadour had pulled herself together and was wildly applauded for her spirited medley of “Carry Me Back to Ole Virginie” and “I Found My Thrill on Blueberry Hill.”

  Payne had put down his brushes and put on a tuxedo with a red velvet bow tie, and broadened his repertoire of phrases to include “Welcome to ‘Wild Oaks’ ” and “Let me go get you some more champagne, how ’bout?”

  Crystal had cleaned herself off to a surprisingly nice pinkness, and revealed, in the simple long white dress Mr. Mingo had persuaded her to wear, a surprisingly nice figure. And if her walk still resembled John Wayne in drag, at least she walked among her guests, accompanied by only two of her smaller dogs. And if she had little more conversation than her father, at least she “mingled” the way her mother ordered her to, whenever they passed in the crush.

  Everybody thought it was wonderfully witty to serve perfect reproductions of slave food at this perfect reproduction of a plantation. Everybody thought Lady Bug Wetherell was wearing solid gold. Everybody loved the little Monte Carlo casino, set up on card tables on the portico, and nobody minded losing ten or twenty dollars while having so much fun, especially since all their winnings were to be donated to a fund for filmmakers struggling to sneak t
he horrible truth out of repressive countries like Mr. Raleighkov’s.

  Most of all, the whole crowd of drunk and stuffed smug provincial socialites who had “frozen” Mrs. Wetherell “double D damn long enough,” were stunned with envy when introduced to the celebrity guests, whom Lady Bug moved around the grounds on touring exhibition, as if they were the Treasures of Tutankhamen. They bowed and nodded and purred French and even mumbled a few Czechoslovakian “itzskis” and “itschs” if pressed to do so, and all looked as elegant as the Champs Elysées, for she had them displayed in tuxedos. Not that it had been easy to rent Mr. Mingo a fifty-two long on an hour’s notice. But with limitless wealth, all things except health and happiness are possible. She’d even found a boy’s tuxedo that would have fit The Other One, as she called Simon Berg, but he’d declined to join the fête, having been seized by another fit of inspiration and spirited off somewhere deep by the Muse. That story alone was sufficient to challenge the more literary of her guests (the local Library Club), but when Lady Bug threw into the kitty the suave, handsome, hand-kissing charm of Jean Claude Claudel, and the merry jitterbugging Mr. Mingo, and that brooding Slavic silence of Mr. Raleighkov (so obviously hiding deep passion and dark wisdom), why then everybody folded their cards and declared Mrs. Wetherell, hands down, the victor.

  Yes, the night of the Famous Barbecue at “Wild Oaks,” Lettice Eulonia Lumpkin Wetherell had to admit that her cup had purely and simply run completely over, even though she never once stopped drinking every drop of 200-proof sour mash bourbon in it.

  Chapter 22

  Our Hero Succumbs to a Faded Beauty DESPITE HIS SAVAGE HEADACHE and his dismay at being licked awake by a moil of bassett hounds, including the one called “Jumbo,” Raleigh Hayes determined to press on to Charleston this Monday morning to look for Jubal Rogers. Frankly, he was relieved that Gates did not care to accompany him, after he learned that Cupid Calhoun lived in Charleston (which was where Gates had first met the young mobster, had first—fraudulently—traced his paternal lineage back to Senator John C. Calhoun the secessionist and then sold him Varina Davis’s Inaugural opals). Gates also wanted to help Sara Zane, who was closing his mother’s house, to sort out those leftovers that even the sparest lives leave behind. And, although he didn’t tell Raleigh, he also wanted to persuade Payne Wetherell that he (Payne) had always wanted to invest in the motion picture industry. As Raleigh had to come back by Midway anyhow, in order to drive to New Orleans, and as Gates swore that he was “sticking” until they found “the old man,” Raleigh decided “to keep the faith” as his brother requested, while reserving the doubts of the past. “I promise I’ll keep my promise. Just like you always taught me,” Gates grinned, with a wink of his long-lashed hooded blue eyes, as he stuffed into his leather bag $435 to relieve filmmakers in Eastern Europe.