“Now do you have to go say everything you ever heard?” Aunt Catherine affectionately reprimanded him.
The ten or twelve people who came over, fanning themselves, had two things in common: they all were Aunt Catherine’s age or older, and they all remembered her sister, Jen. “Poor Jen,” they echoed Aunt Catherine’s reference to her, and the Jen that appeared to me out of their minds was a girl not much older than me. Only one of Aunt Catherine’s friends, a scrawny, old lady with a frizz of white curls and a perpetual, secretive smile, a Mrs. Dunhamly, speculated as to the Jen of later years who had become my mother.
She gave my arm a startlingly tight squeeze and hissed at me through a wheezing laugh, “Don’t you make no mistake about it, girl—from all their sadness and sighs. That Jen was a right happy Miss. She done just as she pleased, and they aren’t as sorry about her as they let on. They just feel they gotta act sorry about anybody that’s died, ’cause they’re so scared of bein’ dead.” She coughed a giggle.
I glanced around at the other people talking to each other, and back at Mrs. Dunhamly. She was older than all of them. I thought of how old Fred was…and the night he almost died…and how the shock of it obliterated everything else that had happened that night all because of me acting any way I pleased—to the point where the box of time that it all fit in no longer was, which meant it no longer was, which is why I’d never spoken of it.
“But death is a sad thing,” I said.
“To who?” she came back at me, bright and challenging.
“To…everybody, I guess.”
“No t’snot,” she rebutted. “Most folk, like them here, act like they do ’cause they imagine it’s sad for the dying. It may be sad, some of the times, for them that’s left living, but sure t’isn’t sad for them that die. Them living are thinkin’ a lie, a plain lie. Though maybe I’m the only one that knows so.”
She leaned her wrinkly face closer to me. “I know. Y’see, I died once-t.”
“You did?!”
“Ten years ago,” she said matter-of-factly. “One minute my nephew and his silly wife was running around like their heads got cut off, and then I went. The doctor even signed the medical paper. When I come to, they was havin’ the time of their lives grievin’—you know, so happy it wasn’t them.”
She sucked in her breath, holding it in gulps, making her laughter almost soundless. “Girl, you shoulda seen their faces! Right away, they wants to know what it was like. I told them, like nothing, plain, old nothing. Like a piece of ice melts in the sun. But do you think they believe me? No siree.”
She cackled again. “Everybody just wants to go on bein’ scared of something they don’t know for sure about. It makes them feel more important that way.”
“You think so?” I said uncomfortably.
“Sure thing. Why else they go on about heaven and hell, and put on funeral parties—the bigger the better?”
I was giving that thought my most perplexed attention when Aunt Catherine poked her taut, kindly face between us. She moved me into a conversation with a fat woman who kept rearranging her dress over her thick thighs, and she didn’t let me near Mrs. Dunhamly again until the visitors were leaving, en masse.
“I hope to see you again,” I said politely to all as they departed.
“Mine’s the fourth house to the left, with the dead tree in the front,” Mrs. Dunhamly said with a wink. “Come see me any old time.”
“Poor, old soul,” Aunt Catherine sighed as they went out the door. “She’s harmless, but a real embarrassment.”
“Uh-huh,” said Joe. “She always talks like that.”
“You mean something is wrong with her?” I asked.
“Well, not enough to be carted off to Vinita, I don’t guess,” said Aunt Catherine. “Though sometimes I do wonder. She harps on death all the time, and in such a way! Thinks she knows all there is to know about it ’cause she claims she was dead once. And everybody knows, nobody knows about that.”
Joe’s meek face was unresentful, but puzzled. “She’s always going to funerals, and acting like they was celebrations. She goes to everybody’s, whether she knew the body or not. Didn’t she go far as Pawhuska one time if I remember rightly, Catherine?”
“That’s enough of Mrs. Dunhamly,” she cut him short. “She’s just one of those addled souls nice people have to put up with.”
In the next few days, Aunt Catherine kept me busy with the daughters and nieces and sons and nephews and neighbors of the guests who had been over, and Mrs. Dunhamly, not having a young representative, was dismissed. I made mental notes of the differences between my Winding Hill friends and these boys and girls. Those at home, and I—I shamefully had to admit to myself—appeared younger than this collection. In our own minds, we were to remain “kids” until some distant, hardly realized date when we would be released from the final confines of youth—college. Here, though some of the boys were planning to spend time in further education—to become petroleum engineers seemed the most prevalent reason—the girls were already seeing themselves as child-bearing wives. Where my girlfriends’ and my interest in sex was still wondering, theirs seemed built on quiet knowledge. I found the girls’ talk over lunch dull, but at the same time, I got the feeling that I didn’t know much about my world and they knew everything about theirs, and that nothing I was sure about was very important…or even true.
Each time I came back to Aunt Catherine after a session of socializing, she asked if I’d had a good time, and I quickly developed the ability to assume a convincing smile and tell her what she wanted to hear. On my fourth day’s return, my conditioned reaction smile was unwarranted. Aunt Catherine greeted me making sorrowful pigeon noises in her throat.
“You’re to call Ben,” she said.
“Ben?”
“Long distance. Oh, Lucresse. Right away, you poor child. I wrote down the number of the right operator.”
I didn’t dare ask her more.
I had rarely spoken to Ben on the telephone. His voice was different—deeper, older. He didn’t wait for me to say more than hello.
“Lucresse, it’s best for you to come home. Felicity is going to fly to Tulsa and meet you, tomorrow. She’ll come back with you…”
“Ben… Ben? What’s the matter?”
“It’s all over,” he said slowly. “This morning…Daddy was fine…”
It was a long time since he had called my father Daddy.
“…he and I, and Hubert, were lifting off the marble table top…he was going to have it crated for somebody. It was too heavy…too heavy, I guess…I didn’t know it was too heavy…” Ben became fainter, a sing-song monotone.
“Ben, what happened?”
“He’s dead, Lucresse.”
Coming and receding, from a longer distance than there was between us, I heard him say again, “It’s all over. He told me who to call…the men in New York, and Felicity, and you, of course.”
Aunt Catherine was urging a chair under me. I kicked it back. “Ben, I don’t believe you.”
“Yes, you do,” he said without the least argumentativeness. “Stay with Aunt Catherine until she takes you to meet Felicity tomorrow. We’ll talk more tomorrow night.”
“Ben, it’s impossible.”
“I’ll see you tomorrow night. I know how you feel.”
“I don’t feel.”
When I hung up, Aunt Catherine was clutching the chair I’d refused, her head bent over its back, tears falling in rhythmic drops onto her hands. I wanted to say something to relieve her agony. What came out was, “Don’t, please don’t.”
“Oh, Lucresse!” she said through a heaving sob, “I’m so sorry—so real and truly sorry!”
“Don’t,” I said again, and went to a curtained window. “Do you mind if I pull this aside?” I said, yanking the flowered material into a tight cluster of pleats. “I never looked out here.”
She collapsed into the chair, floral patterned too, and rubbed her face into a handkerchief. Her
voice was muffled. “You poor, poor child. First Jen…now this.”
I stared out at the wavering heat waves on the road. I wondered if the asphalt was really hot enough to fry an egg on. I didn’t want to look at Aunt Catherine. Nothing she was saying made any sense, and I was helpless to hush her.
“I’ve got to pack,” I said. “I’m going home tomorrow.”
“I know. I know,” she wept. “I offered to go with you, Lucresse. I want you to know that.” She stopped crying. “I told Ben…but he said no, the arrangements was made. I don’t understand…from what Walter told me…oh, Lucresse, I am sorry.”
She followed me into the bedroom I’d been using. I packed fast. I was anxious to get home. Everything would be all right, if I were home. “I hope the flight back is fast,” I said.
In the middle of folding a sweater, and visualizing myself putting it into my drawer at home, it occurred to me that home wouldn’t be the same. Winding Hill wouldn’t be the same. Nothing in the world would be the same—if the insane words Ben had said were true. I dropped the sweater any which way into the suitcase and turned to Aunt Catherine. “Where’s Joe?” I asked.
“Why…at the store. Oh, Lucresse, forgive him. I called him, and he should of come straight home, but I told him you weren’t here. I didn’t expect you for another while.”
“I hope he comes soon,” I said. “I hate to leave you alone, the way you’re feeling.”
She stared at me as though I’d said it was a freezing day. “But, Lucresse, you’re not going until tomorrow. Joe and I will take you to meet that woman. Tomorrow, dear.”
“I’m going to see Mrs. Dunhamly now.”
“Lucresse, no! Not that crazy old woman, at a time like this?”
“Yes.” I remembered the directions clearly, the fourth house to the left with the dead tree in front. I hoped the old woman would be home. I closed the suitcase and started out of the room.
“I’ll go with you!” Aunt Catherine nearly shrieked, chasing after me. “Have a cup of tea first! Or a Dr Pepper, if you like! I’ll fix you something to eat. You need nourishment…”
“I’m going now, Catherine. Alone.”
• • •
Mrs. Dunhamly’s front room was bare and as bereft looking as the leaning tree trunk outside it. It was smaller and hotter than any room I’d ever been in, but Mrs. Dunhamly’s welcome was heartier than any I’d ever received. My very presence made her tingle with giggly excitement. And I didn’t feel required to tingle back.
“Tell me more about what you were telling me the other night,” I said immediately.
“You was one of the few that showed sense enough to listen,” she said happily. “I hoped you’d come see me while you was hereabouts.”
“My brother, Ben, called me on the telephone today. He said our father died. I know I should believe him. I know he wouldn’t say that unless it was true. But I still don’t believe him. And I know it’s so. I’m going home tomorrow because it’s so. I want you to explain that.”
“You’ll believe it when you can carry on at the funeral,” she said. “That’s what they’re for. To make folks believe what they’re too scared to believe.”
In a mental, reasonable, detached way, I told her, “But he didn’t want a funeral. He wanted to be cremated, immediately. It probably has already been done, knowing my father and Ben.”
“It don’t make no difference, once you understand that death isn’t anything. Nothing a-tall.”
“It means he won’t be there anymore. Not even…his body.”
That was hard to say. I couldn’t think of my father’s body; I could only think of him, the person with a body, alive.
“Long as you don’t get trapped thinkin’ he’s gone here or there, to heaven or t’other place, you don’t need no funeral. It don’t make no difference,” said Mrs. Dunhamly.
“I’m to think, he’s just…gone? Where?”
“Just gone. To no place. And since you know that, it’s not that much different than if he was here. See?”
“No.”
“He’s no place, child. He just ain’t.”
I kept quiet. She sniffed, hesitating, the first smattering of sympathy she indicated. “Since he’s no place else, you could talk to him if you want. Now don’t you go look on me like I was ready for Vinita—that’s where we keep the crazy folk of Oklahoma—I’ll tell you something I haven’t told the others. Knowing what I do, I talk to the Colonel—that’s my husband—all the time. Whenever I feel like it.”
She giggled. “Prob’ly I talk to him more than I talk to the folks still around here. I’ll tell you another thing, girl. Sapulpa ain’t no big town like Kansas City where you can pick and choose the folks you want to know. Here, a sensible soul has a hard time finding another to talk to.”
For a long time I’d suspected that Aunt Catherine, for one, wasn’t as sensible as she claimed to be. Now, with my mind awakened to new thoughts by this unusual woman, I was sure she wasn’t sensible and I was ready to dismiss her. At the same time, while I was persuaded of the old woman’s sense, I wasn’t sure I could make it my own. “I don’t know if I could talk to my father,” I said.
“Do what you like, but I can tell you, it’s worth a try.”
I left, stunned with hope and anticipation. I might say anything I wished to my father, even things I wouldn’t say if he were beside me. I didn’t feel the heat of the air or the sidewalk I walked on. I didn’t see Aunt Catherine’s next-door neighbor standing with a hose at the edge of his neat, little lawn, watering a young tree across the walk on the patch of grass extending to the curb. He may have assumed I would pause, to allow him to redirect his hose, or he may have been, for reasons of his own, in as dense a daze as mine. Whatever the case, he didn’t redirect his spray and I didn’t miss a step. We met at the inevitable second and I was soaking wet from shoulders to knees.
“I’m sorry…I’m so sorry…I certainly am sorry,” the neighbor man said.
What was he so sorry about? floated in my brain as I walked on. Was it what Ben had said and what Aunt Catherine had also said she was sorry about? Or was it the comparatively inconsequential fact that this man had gotten me wet?
“That’s all right,” I said over my shoulder.
I explained my wet clothes to Aunt Catherine.
“But I don’t see how come you didn’t see…” she began. “Never mind. Even in this weather, a person could still catch their death, sopping like that. Better change.”
I went to the room where my suitcase was, closed the door, removed my sticky blouse and skirt, and lay down on the bed, ready to pursue my newfound rites. At first I was snared in self-conscious silence, embarrassed by the first words that came to mind. I auditioned them twice, mouthed them without a voice. Then I whispered them. “Daddy, do you think I’m sexy enough for college next year?”
I shivered in the strange, stifling room. I heard him answer, “Of course I think so. Didn’t I tell you you’d be a beautiful woman?”
“You really think so?” I said aloud.
“Of course,” came the answer, as clear as only a voice in the mind can sound.
“Lucresse?” Aunt Catherine inquired from the other side of the door. “Did you get out of those wet things?”
I didn’t answer, paralyzed momentarily by her rude interruption.
“Lucresse? Did you change?”
There seemed only one answer, one of high drama, that she would never know the true meaning of. “Yes,” I called vigorously, “I changed. I sure have.”
I dressed and, claiming to need a breath of sizzling air, went out and stretched out on the grass as far back in the small backyard as I could get. I told my father about Mrs. Dunhamly and paused, thinking again of all that she’d said. It seemed to me that the world really belonged more to the dead than the living, by virtue of their majority. Death wasn’t the least frightening. It was nothing a-tall. All the people who’d ever lived had died; all who ever would live, would, too. I
told my father I wouldn’t have thought of any of this if it hadn’t been for Mrs. Dunhamly, and that he and I may never have gotten together again, like this. He said we would always be together.
I came back into the house humming the thumping melody of my high-school song, whose words I’d already forgotten… “Al-ways togeth-er, in bad or fair weath-er…”
Aunt Catherine shook her head at me wonderingly. “It’s wonderful to see you so cheerful, Lucresse—in spite of everything. I was afraid that poor, old soul would depress you.”
“She’s the most cheerful person I ever met.”
“You got to remember, she’s a little off.”
“Maybe not as much as a lot of other people.”
Aunt Catherine arranged for a special service at her church for eight p.m. I couldn’t consider thinking about, much less talking to, my father there, in the presence of her well-meaning friends. I refused to go. She and Joe reluctantly left me alone for an hour—time I spent telling my father that I didn’t feel desolate.
• • •
I don’t think Aunt Catherine recognized the woman at the airline’s desk the next morning as the same creature who’d bounced out of our Palm Beach house one early morning years before, swinging a Grecian bell. I almost didn’t know her. Felicity was heavier, squarer, with thick, dark brown hair streaked with threads of gray, and her conservative beige linen dress had a neckline that met the hollow of her throat. Only the eyes were the same: Felicity-round, as deep and brown as ever, now seeming darker, filled as they were with sadness as very slowly her lids lifted until her eyes were looking into mine. It was as though her eyes could see through mine into an area inside that was mysterious even to me.
Her hands on my cheeks were so tender they tickled. “Don’t talk unless you want to,” she said to me as we left Aunt Catherine and Joe. We walked out to the plane, holding hands, mute.
After we were seated and had waved once to Aunt Catherine and Joe, the motors roared and faded to a monotonous hum, and I could keep still no longer. “I do want to talk, Felicity, but I don’t know how to explain this to you. I don’t want to talk about him. I want to talk to him.”
Trouble With the Truth (9781476793498) Page 19
