“Hose water. Hmm. Good idea.”
Hose water was just about the dumbest idea he had ever heard. Who would want to drink the kind of water they sprayed on their lawns? Nicholas nodded anyway, because of Susannah. She liked to think of herself as the wise adult in their relationship. Truth be told, however, without actual adults watching over her she would be lost, and most likely in prison. Following her arrest for robbery, vandalism, and kidnapping, among other charges, Susannah would have surely been convicted, were it not for the help of the rest of her family. They hired Roy Cohn, who promptly discredited the toxicology reports that had come back clean and paid a well-known psychiatrist with a not well-known gambling problem to say Susannah’s IQ had dropped twenty points during her time with the LCM, a common side effect of coercive persuasion. Throughout the entirety of the trial, Susannah maintained she hadn’t done anything wrong, continually saying, “Can nobody take a joke?” The unamused court ordered her into therapy.
Once their plates had been cleared, Nick asked, “Are you coming over tonight?” but Susannah wasn’t paying attention to him. For some reason she kept staring at their waiter. Instead of repeating the question, Nick decided to ask it another way, slipping off his loafer, reaching his foot across the floor, and, obscured from view by the tablecloth, running his toe up Susannah’s calf.
“Niiiiiick.”
“Yes?”
“Quit.”
“Quit what?”
He had almost worked his way to her inner thigh when the waiter suddenly appeared by his side. “Whenever you’re ready!” the guy said, laying the bill on the table as Nick, ruddy-cheeked and half-smiling, tried to maneuver his foot back into his shoe.
Inside the black leather billfold were two items, one that required a mental calculation of the tip and another that brought about a mental groan in Nicholas. Five by three inches was an odd size for a head shot. The waiter must have had a bunch of them printed up specifically for this ploy.
“Looks like our guy is an aspiring actor,” Nicholas said, tossing the photo to Susannah. “Want something to remember him by?”
On their walk out of Lagniappe, having managed to avoid further awkwardness with the waiter by leaving exact change, Nicholas noticed a mild shift in Susannah, how she seemed more at ease than she had been earlier. She briefly put her arm around his lower back and pressed her head to his shoulder, telling him thank you, thank you, thank you for the lovely lunch. She smelled of flowers, but not any known kind. She smelled of her own kind of flower. Susannah Incarnata. Outside, waiting for the valet to bring their cars around, Nick, encouraged by her change in demeanor, pulled Susannah toward him and kissed her.
“Damn it, Susannah. We’re in public,” he said after she playfully batted him away. “How many times do I have to tell you?”
“Smart-ass.”
“We can’t have anybody seeing us.”
“You’re telling me.”
They were too late. Down the street, in a parked car, sat Ramsey Forster. She couldn’t believe what she had just seen. Her eyes hidden behind oversize sunglasses, tufts of hair strewn across the console, she stared at what she knew was her fault. If only she’d told Susannah the whole truth! Once her daughter and nephew were gone—“We’re not actually related, Mother”—Ramsey began to drive, taking mindless turns, a left here and a right there, until she saw, ahead in the distance, the sign for a bar named Summer Solstice.
5.4
Ecclesiastes 1:4—A Sudden Downpour of Men’s Apparel—Rosebud
In high school, Robert had written a terrible short story named “An Autumnal Passage”—about an elderly woman who thinks a stray cat is the reincarnation of her dead husband—and throughout it he had used the word especially nineteen times; he could still remember the exact number because the carelessness of his writing had embarrassed him so much. On the afternoon of May 2, 1986, that story came to mind, not because its plot was especially relevant, nor because he was in such an especially nostalgic mood, but simply because of its title, how it seemed the exact opposite of this bright, warm spring day.
He stood on the front porch of the Panola Cola Historical Museum. Today was the first time he had visited it since his grandfather had passed away three months ago.
The floorboards inside were so scuffed they had the appearance of suede. Shadows from the window grilles created games of tic-tac-toe along the countertop in the front part of the museum. At the foot of the counter lay an eight of clubs. Robert picked it up, stared at it for a moment, and put it in his pocket.
As he walked around the room, going from one wall to the next with the slow, uneven gait of a librarian searching for a title, he saw the history not only of a company but also of his family. Everything was so tangible; he wanted to touch it all. On a wooden shelf, wrapped in plastic sleeves like the kind used for baseball cards, sat two tickets for a one-way trip, New Orleans to Memphis, on the transport steamer Fortune’s Hostage. Next to the tickets, also wrapped in plastic, was one of the hundreds of thousands of coupons for a free sample that the Panola Cola Company, hoping to create lifelong customers, gave away during its first few decades in operation. In the year 1895 alone 130,000 were given out. Under glass in a display case perpendicular to the main counter lay a paper bag from Wadsworth Confections; a specimen of the Erythroxylon coca plant, withered and dead; two dusty bottles of Vin Mariani, a coca wine, the ancestor of PanCola; promotional matchbooks, doilies, pencils, blotters, pocket mirrors, pendants, and baseball score cards; a bowl of Harrington candies in moon-white wrappers; and the rusting license plate from a Whippet Roadster that Robert knew from his research had been nicknamed Volstead. A large bookcase stood in one corner of the room. Among its contents, warped by the heat and discolored by the sun, were copies of the Dickens novels Monty had read as a child, copies of the Austen novels Susannah had read as a child, a first edition of Ms. Panola Cola: Reflections of the Soda Business, Ramsey’s notebook for her apparently unfinished memoir, and a complete set, volumes one through twelve, of The Adventures of Catfish the Dog.
Robert checked his watch. He had to be back by seven o’clock, when Molly’s parents, in town for her graduation, were coming by the apartment for dinner. They wanted to meet the guy they still referred to as just her “roommate,” even though he and Molly had been dating for over a year, minus that one horrible month after their big fight. It was two o’clock. Robert had plenty of time.
Upstairs in the attic, he encountered a hoard of ad materials, from point-of-purchase to “premiums.” PanCola wall hangers and bottle hangers were piled next to fountain festoons, window trims, and seashore cutouts. Branded scales, chairs, serving urns, and cabinets were loaded with soda trays and sheet music for the Panola Cola song. On a far wall, varicolored by the ambient light refracted through a stained-glass chandelier, hung an illustration of the back of a man’s head, an unfinished painting on an easel in front of him, and, just past the painting, the model whose image he was trying to capture on canvas. “One of our artists working on next year’s PanCola Girl,” read the first caption. The girl posing, unlike the version of her in the painting, was a brunette. So the second caption read, “A gentleman, he CLEARLY prefers blondes!” The attic included ads from other companies as well. Between two posters for the movies Catch a Tiger by the Toe and Boogie into the Night was situated a one-sheet for the Folies-Bergère, creating a triptych of musical tastes from the 1920s, 1930s, and 1970s. Against the wall beneath the posters leaned a placard for Moretti Motors’ ADM-9.
On his way back downstairs, Robert passed a rare photograph from 1910’s notorious “PanCola Summit,” a weeklong motivational sales meeting. The photo featured hundreds of Panhandlers crowded in front of a platform. According to the exposé “The Church of Pan, or the Cult of Pan?” written by a British reporter who infiltrated the event, it was less of a pep rally and more of an indoctrination, creating mindless automatons whose only goal in life was to sell sugar water. “This wasn’t the country I�
�d envisioned,” began the exposé, if Robert remembered correctly. “It was the South, a country within a country. But which was more real, the exterior one or the interior, the body or its soul?” Robert tapped the photo with his finger before continuing down the stairs.
“No need for us to go in that room,” Harold had said the one time he’d taken Robert on a brief tour around the PanCola museum. He’d been talking about a room in the back part of the ground floor. “It’s just where I store the records and other leftovers.”
The room was locked. Robert ran his fingers along the top of the door casing but had no luck. He then walked over to the cash register and, while he tried to determine how to open the damn thing, noticed the key sitting on its bottom ledge. A key-shaped clean spot was left in the dust after he picked it up.
Inside the back room he saw his grandfather had told the truth about it being a place for storage. Marble-print boxes were stacked in haphazard columns throughout the room like stalagmites of cardboard. Robert took the lid off one to find it full of registration ledgers. “August 26 1984. 10:37 morning time. Maitland Family,” he read on a page he turned to at random. “Peter, Claire, Jones, Rose, Brooks. Austin Texas.” Such detail! There must have been a record of every single person who had visited the museum. At first, Robert felt proud of Harold, imagining the unwavering, monkish dedication required for him to spend time every day noting dates, hours, minutes, names, and places, but then Robert remembered that, until his grandfather had learned he had a grandson, he thought he was the only Forster left. Harold had spent all that effort taking notes while thinking nobody would ever care enough to read them. Robert, picturing his grandfather hunched over a desk, eyes squinted and pen in hand, the singular embodiment of an institutional memory, promised himself he would read every single page.
Around the rest of the room, he found plastic crates and wicker baskets and even coffee cans full of PanCola memorabilia: Diamond Bert Farwell scowling on the cover of The Shadow Magazine, a Peabody duck in silhouette on an invitation for a New Year’s Eve gala, the No. 2 House catching a light rain in a photograph of Ashley Down. Newspaper clippings were spread everywhere, freezing time via the permanence of linotype. Houghton Forster was forever defeating the federal government in The United States vs. Fifty Barrels of Panola Cola, and Royal Teague was always losing to a poor cotton farmer in an election for the Louisiana House of Representatives. In an ice cream pail overflowing with bottle caps Robert discovered a share certificate for the Panola Cola Company. “Incorporated Under the Laws of the State of Mississippi” printed at the top and scrawled at the bottom the nearly illegible signature of Houghton Forster, the slip of paper reminded Robert of a time he’d only read about, when the origin of many family fortunes in the South could be explained with the remark, whispered over tea, across church pews, or between rounds, “They bought Pan stock early.”
He balled up the certificate and dropped it on the ground before leaving the room and walking out of the museum. Again he checked his watch. He had just enough time to take a look around Eden.
On the fifteen-minute drive there, Robert gripped the door handle in his old navy Buick, his knuckles nearly going numb with the strain, because that morning the latching mechanism had broken. Although he had, over the past few months, convinced himself wealth wasn’t important, not being able to afford a decent car, he had to admit, was a big regret about inheriting nothing but an old museum.
Not that he was destitute. Freelance gigs were working well enough, a book review here, an op-ed there, to the extent that he had looked into building a house in the pecan grove, right where the trailer had been before he’d sold it for scrap. Unfortunately, even a modest house, as little as 1,600 square feet, would cost upward of $70,000. His father had never even had the imagination to consider building a house on the property. Robert had to admit, though, he’d never had the imagination either, not until Molly came along, not until there was someone in his life to build the house for.
He turned onto the long dirt road that led to Eden. A wrought iron swing gate blocked his way. In spite of the posted signs everywhere, Robert hopped out of his car, climbed the gate, and walked up the road, toward the spot where The Sweetest Thing had once stood. On his forehead drops of sweat began to fatten. Dust kicked up by his shoes revealed spiderwebs in a ditch alongside the road. The blowfly wind blew blowflies, and woodpeckers pecked wood.
At the crest of a gently sloping hill, next to a pair of magnolia trees in bloom, Robert located what had to be the former site of the house, a smooth rectangle of grass beneath which, like a wound seen through gauze, the soil was a shade darker than normal because it had been leavened with ash. Four concrete blocks flush with the ground gave the rectangle its shape, yellow ragwort providing the only relief from the overwhelming green. In the middle of what must have been the front lawn, Robert was looking around, at the barn where Rocket the Miracle Horse must have once lived, at the clearing where Lance and Karen had likely gotten married, when, reality giving way to memory, he found himself in a sudden downpour of men’s apparel. Suit jackets and dress shirts and neckties drifted through the air, landing in the grass beside pants and suspenders and undershirts. Crooked pillars of sunlight flashed through armless sleeves flailing in their slow descent.
One Sunday afternoon in the early 1920s, according to the story Robert’s grandfather had told him, Houghton Forster lay on a sofa in the living room, hungover from having spent the previous night at a local juke trying to keep up with Branchwater. Annabelle was cleaning the house and cooking dinner herself because, at that time, they couldn’t afford a full staff and the help they had took off on Sundays. In no mood, her cheeks comically streaked with flour and her hair a caricature of frazzled disarray, she was going to order her husband to give a hand, if only he hadn’t preempted her by saying, oblivious to her condition, “Make sure my blue shirt is pressed. I’m going to need it tomorrow.” That was it for her. Annabelle marched up to their bedroom, retrieved an armful of her husband’s clothes, including his blue shirt, marched out to the second-floor gallery, and proceeded to fling the clothes, one piece at a time, onto the front lawn. The ten-year-old twins stood barefoot and giggling in the middle of the downpour. An hour later, Fiona, having arrived for dinner, gathered up a few items of clothing as she made her way into the house, where Houghton asked if she’d seen what his crazy wife had done. Annabelle then explained her side of the story. So, immediately grasping who was justified in the situation, Fiona walked out to the second-floor gallery and, like flicking cards into an upturned hat, returned the clothes to their rightful place on the lawn.
Robert, picturing a pair of socks caught on a tree branch above his head, chuckled. He decided to add that story to the project he had been working on since dropping out of school—temporary leave of absence, he corrected himself—a project that’d begun with his thesis but, over the past few months, had evolved into something more personal than academic.
He walked along a path extending from the barn, stepping over the occasional terrapin in sluggish, persistent transit between duck ponds. When he looked back up after plucking a cocklebur from his pant cuff a strange thing occurred. Robert found himself caught in a maelstrom of Forsters. Timelines unraveled and so too did sensations. Near a thicket of brambles, the child version of Susannah was picking blackberries, her fingers dyed purple by the juice, while in a stand of slash pines, Cotton barked at a squirrel as it clamored through fragrant needles, some of them falling onto a rusted tin bathtub, inside of which stood Harold at seventeen years old, pretending he was captaining a pirate ship, its prow overlooking a short ridge where Montgomery, dressed in the plug hat of a young man on the make, was going for a morning stroll, Bear-Wolf trotting tongue-out by his side. Suddenly the air shifted, quivered, as if the channel had been flipped, the antenna adjusted. Now Susannah had been joined by Nicholas, who told her he knew a secret trick for picking blackberries, and now Montgomery, much older, marched across the ridge alone,
a shotgun cradled against his shoulder, and now, instead of standing in a tin bathtub, Harold sat on Rocket, whispering in its ear that a horse who could do miracles was its own miracle.
Lost in those impossible memories, each so vivid it felt as though he’d actually been there, Robert came upon a field covered in wild rye. He recognized it not only as the place where his great-grandfather used to harvest drinking straws but also where he had first kissed the girl who would become his wife.
With his hands outstretched, Robert wandered through the field, letting the rye stalks brush against his open palms, all the while trying to conjure what that day almost a hundred years ago must have been like: a breeze evaporating the sweat from his great-grandfather’s collar, a parasol keeping the sun off his great-grandmother’s shoulders. Beside a walnut tree Robert sat down in the grass. He closed his eyes. In the stillness of the afternoon, he allowed his mind to clear for a brief moment, wrapping his arms around his knees, loosening his shoulders, taking a long breath through his nose. The world grew so quiet he could hear the ticking of his watch. That reminded him it was time to head back.
Robert stood to leave Eden, and only then did he notice the smell of honeysuckle flowers.
Acknowledgments
Over the years, the saying “All stories are true, and some actually happened” has been attributed, in various forms, to Thomas Jefferson, Mark Twain, and an anonymous octogenarian quoted in the Washington Post. That nobody knows for certain who coined the saying testifies to its accuracy.
I owe a great deal of thanks for this “true” story.
Thank you, Wendy Flanagan, Tom Treanor, Kimberly King Parsons, C. J. Hauser, Ruth Curry, Nadja Spiegelman, Chandler Klang Smith, Michelle Conroy, Thom Blaylock, Caitlin McNally, Alexandra Rose Chase, and Matt Burgess. Y’all know how to shake the hot sauce into a bowl of gumbo. I’m grateful for the generous support of everyone involved with the Stone Court Writer-in-Residence program in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, where part of this novel was written, and to the students and faculty of the 2012 Summer Literary Seminar in Lithuania, where part of this novel was workshopped. Everyone at William Morris Endeavor (Laura Bonner, Matilda Forbes Watson, and Haley Heidemann) and William Morrow (Ryan Cury, Eliza Rosenberry, Julia Elliott, Lynn Grady, Liate Stehlik, and Ploy Siripant) who worked on this book is, in my unwavering and thankful opinion, the bee’s knees, calves, ankles, and toes. Until the end of my days, I’ll be in spiritual hock to Eve Attermann, literary agent and human being extraordinaire. Thanks especially to Jessica Williams—brilliant editor, honest reader, masterful critic—for never hesitating to say, “It’s almost there, but . . .” and for always having faith when I responded, more or less, “Aye aye, Cap’n.”
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