Beside me now, Adia dipped her head and kissed my arm, something she rarely did. I flushed. “I’m going to call you afterward to make sure you do it.”
“You’re crazy.”
“Just think of how good it will feel.” She rolled on to her side and flung one arm across my chest.
We lay like that for a long time, me breathing in the sharp acrid scent of Adia, she breathing into the hollow of my collarbone until I said, heady and overcome, “Okay, all right. I’ll do it.”
She kissed my neck. “I knew you would.”
LATE NOVEMBER WAS when Courtland County became truly beautiful. That busy, condescending green that greeted us a few months before softened and deepened until the whole world, despite the winds, despite our breath hanging frozen in the air, closed in around us and felt warm.
It was so beautiful it hurt. Even Adia felt it. The day before Thanksgiving, dismissed early from school, we walked to her house, both of us gathering up handfuls of red-and-orange ombred leaves and scattering the bouquets across her bedroom floor, until her sheets, her hair, her skin, smelled like seeded earth.
I took the early bus from Adia’s house and made it to the Toneybee just before dark. I pushed through the institute gates, past Lester Potter in his guard hut, and walked up the drive, watching the bricks in front of me turn from red to black.
THANKSGIVING MORNING HAD arrived and our whole family was running late. But Uncle Lyle and Aunt Ginny were early. Lester Potter sent word at noon that they were already coming up the drive.
My mother was struggling to get Charlie into a pair of pants, so it was me and my father and Callie who went to find them in the Toneybee lobby.
Callie walked ahead of me, a sweater tied around her waist, the belly of it trailing down the backs of her knees. She hadn’t been able to get the zipper on her dress closed all the way. She’d given up and let it sigh half open, so that the expanse of her back—from the tops of her white tights, rolling down below her hips, to the chubby wings of her shoulder blades—was exposed.
I caught up with her, reached out to tug on the zipper, but she shrugged off the touch of my hand and scowled at me.
Go away, she signed.
Your dress is open.
She angled her hand behind her, felt her bare skin there.
Leave me alone.
“What’s your problem?” I called after her, but she only walked faster. When she got to the end of the hall, she untied her sweater from her waist and, with a flourish, snapped it over her shoulders.
In the pocket of my own dress was a piece of notebook paper twisted and twirled around a pencil. In Adia’s room, the afternoon before, surrounded by broken leaves and bedsheets, we had written a long screed full of denunciations and pleas for the forgotten. The plan was that right after grace I would stand up. I would turn slowly to Miss Julia Toneybee-Leroy and I would recite the words on the paper. I would hold up my hand and sign out the most important ones so that Charlie could understand. “After all,” Adia reasoned, “he’s oppressed, too. Kind of.”
She underlined those words in red so that I would remember.
Lyle’s Jaguar idled in the Toneybee Institute’s front drive. It was a 1970s model, a discard that always lurked around Lyle’s garage, but Lyle and Ginny had made a point of driving it to Courtland County and showily parking it at the Toneybee’s front steps. When we found them, Ginny was still in the car, peering up at the building from her window, and Lyle was leaning against the hood, smoking.
My father and Uncle Lyle looked nothing alike. My father was better-looking, but Lyle was the sharper dresser. He spent most of the day in coveralls with oil and dirt beneath his nails, so when he was out of the garage, Lyle always dressed up. He wore a heavy gray cable sweater with a white dress shirt buttoned up underneath and discreetly checkered pants. On his feet, penny loafers, two fresh coins winking out of the leather slits. He was shorter than my father, he only came up to the middle of his chest, but that didn’t matter because Lyle’s voice was hoarse and booming.
Callie ran to him, and he pressed his hand to his chest, staggered back. “Cal, what happened to you?”
She wavered.
“Your hair,” he said.
“I like it,” Callie tried.
He reached out and gently crushed a stiff curl between his fingers.
“She likes it, Lyle,” my father said, a little sharper than Callie had.
“Gin, you see this?” Uncle Lyle called to his wife.
Ginny, still in the front seat of the car, let her gaze drift over the top of Callie’s head, then back to her husband. “It’s all right,” she said coolly. Ginny always wore her hair the same way: two heavy braids curled into ram’s horns on either side of her head, one resting above each ear. On her lap was a white casserole dish, the sides crusted over with trails of brown sugar, the whole thing wrapped up in a threadbare tea towel. Ginny seemed undecided on what to do with the dish: whether to stick it, ungracefully, between her two feet on the car floor and force herself out of the seat, or whether to hold on to it and somehow manage her way out of the car without the use of her hands. Unable to make up her mind, she stayed where she was, eyeing me and Callie.
She blinked at Callie’s widened face. She eyed my legs. I had sinned in her eyes and appeared outside without stockings. Ginny’s own skinny legs were wrapped up in white hose, the weave on it so thick I couldn’t even see the brown of her skin.
She raised her eyes from my legs to the front of my blouse, trying to gauge if it was too tight. I passed muster. I think the ruffles confused her. But still, she couldn’t resist saying pointedly, “You’ve grown, Charlotte.”
Inside, Lyle made a big show of inspecting all the brass and chandeliers. He touched the oak paneling and whistled theatrically. “Bet it’s a bitch with the humidity in the summer.”
“That’s the beauty of it,” my father smiled. “Laurel and I are here rent-free. We don’t have to worry about that stuff. Not even utilities.”
Lyle nodded grudgingly. “Good, good.”
In the hall, we stopped in front of Julia Toneybee-Leroy’s portrait. Callie pointed out the baby skeleton in the picture and Uncle Lyle began, with operatic overindulgence, to praise it. “Well, that’s something,” he said, “That’s really, really something. Baby brother, they make portraits of whole monkey skeletons here? They really do?”
My father ignored him. Lyle moved farther down the hall, eager to discover more to flatter into contempt. He was walking so quickly he nearly matched Ginny’s long-legged stride. She pressed her casserole dish close to her chest. She waved off my father and Lyle when each of them offered to carry it.
“What did Laurel make?” she said. “I called her about the sweet potatoes, but she didn’t call back. I guess she was too busy?”
My father let the dig slide.
“I made them anyway,” Ginny continued, “but I don’t know if there’s enough. She didn’t tell us how many guests.”
“That’s our fault.” Then, trying to repair it, “Don’t worry, Gin. The menu is on us.”
Ginny shifted the casserole dish under her arm.
We reached the apartment door. I watched Uncle Lyle’s face as he walked inside. His eyes brightened, his mouth opened slightly wider. All his jealousy left him when he saw Charlie.
There was my mother in a peach chiffon dress, her hair dampened with activator spray and glistening in the overhead light. There was Dr. Paulsen, who’d dispensed with the lab coat for the day, in a tweed skirt and a shirt with a collar.
And there was Charlie, in the green pants my mother had wrestled with. He wasn’t wearing a shirt, but he was so calm, his bare chest and round belly appeared dignified. Charlie’s hands hung in his lap, and when we came through the door, he didn’t screech or grasp at my mother or even grin. He merely tilted his head back and flared his nostrils.
“Ha,” Ginny said behind us, dryly.
Max hustled his way toward us, made for the corner o
f the living room where he’d set out the camcorder. He eased it on to his shoulder and pointed the lens and the mounted dirty, fuzzy mic at us. He said, “Just pretend I’m not here,” but nobody responded.
Lyle moved toward my mother to kiss her on the cheek. Charlie eyed him warily. “Just wave for now, please,” she said.
Uncle Lyle frowned.
“He doesn’t know you all yet. It’s just going to take a while for him to get used to you.”
As she spoke, Charlie got down off the couch. He stood awkwardly, expectantly, arms stretching forward. Then he dropped to his knuckles and loped across the room. He ignored my father. He ignored Callie. He hesitated near the tops of my Mary Janes and I felt certain he was going to spit on them. But he kept going. He made it all the way to Aunt Ginny, who still held the casserole dish in her hand.
He reached out a finger and ran it up against the thick white nylon of her stockings. Ginny shivered. Charlie peered at her knees. Then he reached out his finger and did it again.
“Oh.” My mother was embarrassed. “I’m sorry, Ginny.”
“It’s all right.” Ginny’s voice was strained. She held the casserole dish a little higher.
Charlie touched her leg a few more times. Then he held his fingers to his nose and took a loud sniff.
“Your monkey’s coming on to my wife?” Uncle Lyle said to my father, and this made nearly everyone—Max, Dr. Paulsen, my father—laugh. The only ones who didn’t were my mother and Ginny. My mother said, “He’s just investigating his environment.”
“Is that what they call it?” Uncle Lyle said.
Ginny still hadn’t moved. Charlie touched her legs again, his fingers quick. He swept them as far as the tops of Ginny’s calves. He stopped at the hem of her skirt. He did this until he collected enough of whatever he needed on his fingertips, and then he crammed his fingers into his nose and sniffed them again, hard. Ginny half closed her eyes.
My mother, alarmed, got up and took the casserole dish. “I think it’s your perfume, Gin.”
It was the scent Ginny wore, her one concession to fashion—rose oil that she rubbed on the back of her neck and her bony wrists several times a day, until the very essence of Ginny was the rank breath of dead flowers.
Ginny nodded shyly. “Yes.”
“Gin, I told you you were going a little overboard this morning, didn’t I?” Lyle pinched her elbow, still amused.
Ginny, her hands free now, reached up, uncertain, and rubbed the back of her neck, at the spot where her two heavy braids met. “It’s not bad, is it?”
“It’s fine, Gin, it really is,” my mother answered. “He’s just not used to it. I don’t use any perfume and neither does Dr. Paulsen. I don’t even think Max uses aftershave.”
“I don’t, it’s true.” Max leaned his head back from the viewfinder.
Ginny nodded. Charlie was sitting at her feet now, very gently stroking the fronts of her brown leather pumps. He looked up at her, through his thick lashes. Ginny crooned, “Oh, but he’s beautiful.”
My mother beamed. “I think so, too.”
We were interrupted by a knock at the door. Dr. Paulsen sprang to her feet, dropped her chalk in her pocket. “It’s Miss Toneybee-Leroy,” she said.
Julia Toneybee-Leroy arrived with an attendant, a black nurse nearly as old as she was, who creaked slowly beside her. I could not see Julia Toneybee-Leroy clearly until she sat down, regally, on the couch, and then the room went quiet as we all stared at the woman from the painting, brought to overwhelming life.
She was the oldest person I had ever seen. Her skin lay in great folds over her ropy muscles and tapered bones. Her hair was an ancient blond, colorless until the light hit it a certain way and then it gave off dying blinks of color.
Of course, she was not wearing the gown from the oil portrait. Instead she wore a baggy sweatshirt, slightly stained and printed with apples, and bright blue stirrup pants. The casualness of her outfit was strange, but as she watched each of us it was clear she was not put out by our finery. She did not seem to think it the least bit odd to be wearing leisurewear for a Thanksgiving dinner when everyone else was in hose and dress pants. She took it in as her due.
The nurse was dressed similarly to Julia Toneybee-Leroy: the same cheap cotton pants, the same bilious sweatshirt. Her gray hair was pressed and slicked close to her head.
My father shook the nurse’s hand first. He asked her name and she replied in a gruff voice, avoiding his eye, “Nadine Morton.”
“Nurse Morton has worked with me at the institute for over sixty years.” Julia Toneybee-Leroy interrupted before he could ask the nurse any more questions.
Miss Toneybee-Leroy’s eyes were more unnerving than her hair or her skin. Her eyes flitted between all of us, with the tip of her tongue resting between her half-parted lips, her expression less like an old woman’s and more like a very wrinkled little girl’s. She looked at us all as if she already knew us.
I watched her watching my family and I tried to steel myself, like Adia told me to. “She’s the cause of everything,” Adia had coached the night before. But I could hear the breath leave her lungs from across the room. And it was hard to hate a woman who gazed at my sister with such affection.
I put my hand in my pocket, just to remind myself of the speech there, when Miss Toneybee-Leroy raised her arms above her head and suddenly began to making a harsh, high hiss from the back of her throat.
We all stared at her. Only Nadine Morton was undisturbed—she sat back, arms folded, unimpressed.
Julia Toneybee-Leroy was calling for Charlie. When she started making the noise, he came and stood beside her, almost against his will. She sunk her fingers into his hair, and began to forcefully pet him behind the ears. Charlie closed his eyes.
My mother watched as Charlie caved, until she couldn’t stand it anymore and brusquely turned to Ginny.
“Give me that, Gin,” she said, taking the casserole dish. She retreated to the kitchen, giving up Charlie to Miss Toneybee-Leroy, for now.
When Miss Toneybee-Leroy had petted Charlie into submission, Lyle sidled up to her.
“So, ma’am, such a lovely young ma’am as yourself.” Lyle took her papery hand in his and pressed it.
“Why’ve you got my lovely only nieces in the world, my only flesh and blood, with that there monkey?” He said it to make her laugh, and it worked.
“Your only flesh and blood—they’re going to be famous.” Her eyes flashed. “You should be proud.”
She said it so certainly. She did not seem embarrassed or guilty of any past crime. Adia had said she wouldn’t feel any guilt. “She doesn’t even know she should.” I stopped tearing up the paper.
“Where do you get all these chimps, anyway?” Lyle said, still smiling. “A catalog?”
Miss Toneybee-Leroy’s voice was clear and strong, “Leopoldville, originally. The Belgian Congo. Or just Zaire. I went there and bought our very first chimp in 1929.”
“The bones in the picture,” Callie exclaimed.
Miss Toneybee-Leroy faltered. “Yes,” she said. “The bones in the picture.”
She cleared her throat. “My first time in Leopoldville, I was there on safari. I danced at a rumba club. The Leopoldvilliens, black and white, were crazy for rumba back then.”
“A rumba club, huh?” Lyle was amused. “You cut a rug, did you, ma’am?”
“I did, Mr. Freeman. The Congo was beautiful,” she said very deliberately as if she were relaying a secret message.
Ginny pursed her lips. “Sounds like it.”
“You look lovely today, Callie. I love your dress,” Miss Toneybee-Leroy called.
“Doesn’t she, though?” Dr. Paulsen agreed, relieved at the change of subject. “She really looks fantastic.”
“You look great,” Lyle said, not to be outdone in noticing things about his own family.
Confused by the sudden flurry of attention, Callie stared down at her shoes and mumbled, “Thank you.”
/> My mother returned from the kitchen with a plate of lettuce leaves, each rolled up carefully into a cigar. Charlie’s favorite snack, a blatant play for his affections.
She held out a piece of lettuce to him, but Miss Toneybee-Leroy took it before he could.
“Thank you, my dear,” she said. “I can help him if you’d like. I remember.”
I don’t think she meant to be condescending. But my mother burned with humiliation. She tried to recover. “Of course.” She passed the leafy cigar off to Miss Toneybee-Leroy’s pinched fingers.
“What about the rest of us?” my father tried to help her recover. “Charlie gets some hospitality and we don’t?”
“I thought Lyle and Ginny might like to try it,” my mother said.
Ginny snorted. Lyle put a hand on her knee. He kept his hand there while he leaned over and reached for a lettuce cigar himself.
Charlie studied the hand on Ginny’s knee. He beaded his head down and raised his shoulders. We all recognized that move immediately. It was Miss Toneybee-Leroy who broke the tension.
“I hate to impose,” she said, turning toward my mother, “but really, my dear, don’t you think we should go straight to dinner?”
It took a while for all of us to reassemble in the dining room. Charlie began shouting as soon as he smelled the food, and he got louder the longer he sat with an empty plate in front of him, while the rest of us filed around the table. My mother tried to pass a cloth napkin to Miss Toneybee-Leroy, but Nurse Morton languidly intercepted it. Charlie began rocking back and forth in his chair.
“Should we say grace?” my father asked.
“Yes,” Dr. Paulsen said.
My mother hurried back to her place beside Charlie and grasped his hand in her own. “Make it quick, please, Lyle,” she said.
We Love You, Charlie Freeman Page 16
