Swan, page 10
“WELL, LILY, I SWAN, come in out of the heat.” Agnes flung open the double door. Lily entered Agnes’s airless hall fanning herself with a newspaper. This was the house children avoided at Halloween because of Agnes’s sister, Evelyn, who hung her hair over the upstairs balcony. Children thought roaches fell from it. Actually, she was only drying it in the sun. Once the sister had called to a child, “step on a crack break your mother’s back,” and since then children crossed the street and walked on Lard Bascom’s side, even though he had a biting dog. Well-dressed women never had compunctions about crossing the broken sidewalk, bringing Agnes a handful of daylilies and plopping down a piece of material bought in Macon. Agnes sewed like an angel.
In what could have been Agnes’s living room, Lily found the one chair not covered with clothes and bolts of cloth. Agnes took a seat behind her sewing machine, as though she were about to press the pedal and run the needle down a seam. Lily wondered where Evelyn might be. She used to give foot treatments, trimming yellow corns and scrolling off waxy crescents from calluses. Many times Lily had watched her massage customers’ bunions. She worked with a tub of scalding water in the kitchen while Agnes held forth in the living room. It was said that she had her own coffin ready in her bedroom, but who’d ever seen upstairs? The two maiden sisters had lived together their whole lives, inheriting the two-story house, the only stone one in Swan, and so very damp inside. Their father, an electrician, a native of Germany, could not pronounce his w’s and th’s. Evelyn, who never had cut her hair, was subject to fits, and Agnes often had to rush to her with a spoon so that she did not bite her tongue in two.
Agnes no longer copied dresses. The most anyone could get her to do was a hem or a tuck in a jacket. Her hair, harshly cut like a monk’s, shone white under the bare bulb dangling over her machine, and her plucked-to-nothing eyebrows gave her a look of permanent foreignness. In the center of the room stood a worktable stacked with thousands of patterns, spools, pinking shears, scissors, pincushions, and bobbins.
The place was a veritable archive of the dress habits of Swan ladies, if anyone were interested, which, of course, no one ever would be. There was a peculiar, heavy odor. Had a mouse died among the folded tissue-paper coats and prom dresses?
Agnes had not heard about Catherine. She made a little whickering cry and balled her fists to rub her eyes. “My dear, you poor thing. Sometimes I think we are in our last days. These beasts among us . . .” While she recovered from the shock, Lily waited. She cast a glance at the window to see if the jar of Agnes’s gallstones still rested on the sill. It did.
“Agnes, I thought of you later yesterday when I kept seeing that blue silk dress,” Lily began. “I just wanted to talk to you. I’ve had quite a setback from all this. You can’t imagine. You must have made that dress for Catherine? Doesn’t that seem so strange, the dress . . .” Lily couldn’t quite articulate what she felt, “that the dress was made for an occasion, no doubt,” she continued, “but it played a part in something unbearable later . . .” She shivered.
“Rabbit jump over your grave? I know what you mean.” Agnes thoughtfully rubbed the small hump emerging just below her neck. “Catherine’s favorite color was blue. Of course, with those eyes. What a shame.” She scraped back her chair and turned to take down a ragbag sewn from a U.S. Navy bedspread. “My brother Hugo brought this back from the war. I’ve kept it for scraps, in case I ever got the desire to make a quilt. I kept a piece of everything pretty.” She emptied the contents on the floor. “Hugo’s been gone almost as long as Catherine. What shade of blue?”
“Bright blue, marine—with a dollop of turquoise.”
Agnes picked through the remnants, passing each one to Lily for the pleasure of the textures. “Here’s a burgundy mohair. Little Sarah George wore that suit for seven winters straight.” Little Sarah George Godwin, named for her mother’s father, was at seventy-something still called Little Sarah George. Agnes stuffed plaid wool and printed cottons back in the bag, then found a scarf of tangerine silk. “This was the prettiest material, so soft it’d tear if you looked at it.”
Lily remembered Catherine rising from a table, a sparkling swish of sound like tissue paper crumpling. She’d held a drawstring evening bag in both hands. “Wasn’t that Catherine’s?”
“Yes, went over one shoulder, cut on the bias, and not everybody can carry that off, believe you me. Catherine out of all the people I ever sewed for had a style—she just knew how cloth would drape.”
“You know she studied design those two years she went to college.”
“Yes, she could draw just what she wanted. All those notebooks she kept were full of pictures. Not just clothes, which she brought over to me, but I’d see columns drawn out, and notes on how the shadows angled off them, and all that. She drew floor plans like an architect, gates and porches, that sort of thing.”
Lily didn’t want to discuss Catherine’s notebooks. The last thing on earth she wanted to hear about was Catherine’s notebooks. A crash—a bed collapsing?—came from upstairs but Agnes ignored it. She fingered dimity stripes of watermelon and sage, rough cotton scrim, and ebony velvet. She rubbed a Scottish tweed between her fingers. “Tsshhh, Libby looked like a strutting peahen in that tweed getup, don’t tell her I said so. That was a crying shame about Catherine. I never would have thought she’d do anything like that. After all these years, here’s a piece of her pedal pushers, navy denim laced up the side. She wore them with red shoes and a white blouse. I remember as though it were yesterday.”
Lily suddenly pictured Catherine on the side of the grave, her face the shade of tea. She buried her own face in the tangerine silk. “I’m sorry, Agnes. I’m upset.”
“Of course you are.” She brought Lily a cup of coffee with a lot of sugar, the way she knew Lily liked it. “This is good and hot.” Agnes sifted through balls of lace the color of clotted cream, a swatch of green-and-yellow-checked taffeta, russet flannel, then she jerked up a piece of blue silk in the shape of a short sleeve. She nodded. “That’s from the dress she’s buried in.”
Lily recognized the intense blue immediately.
“She changed her mind and wanted three-quarter-length sleeves.” Agnes held it up to the lightbulb. “She wore a ring of lapis lazuli in those days. Said it was to go with that.”
“Remember the funeral, that tragic day?” Lily suddenly realized why she’d come to Agnes. It was to ask that question.
“Yes, who could forget. Ah! I remember her crossed hands. She was not wearing the ring but she was holding an envelope. I wondered if it were her suicide note—you know they say there’s always a note left behind. That’s how they get back at the living.”
So others had noticed it. “No, that was a personal good-bye.” Lily did not explain.
In the car Lily saw that the raincoat was still folded on the front seat; she’d forgotten to take it in. CoCo imitated the sound of the car engine. Lily laughed for the first time since her sight had been seared by the vision of Catherine. As she left Agnes’s driveway, she scraped her fender against the crape myrtle. She did not see Evelyn on the upstairs porch, hair down and one breast hanging out of her robe. CoCo squawked his best hundred-crashing-hubcaps song.
A MANIACAL ANTLIKE HURRY STARTED at the end of the skyway. The strap of Ginger’s carry-on bag dug into her shoulder until she thought her collarbone would snap. Flights delayed by thunderstorms in the Midwest had left hundreds of people lounging in the waiting areas and foraging the bars and food stands.
The arc from Europe to America always disrupted what Ginger thought of as long time. To fly across the Atlantic, she felt, was more drastic than simply crossing over miles of ocean. She came down into a present tense where she stepped lightly on the surface, while in the other world, she felt the strata of time below her feet. Even the light came from a more ancient, softened sun.
Outside, the sky looked hazy, whether from pollution or from temperature and humidity, she didn’t know. As she headed the rented Pontiac out on I-75 South, she immediately saw the familiar watery, wavering heat lines rising from the highway, just at the far point of her vision. As she came closer, they receded so that where she was going appeared in an agitated state of semi-mirage. The cancerous odor of melting tar flowed up through the vents. She snapped on the air.
Noon, one hour late because of head winds. She’d slept badly in Rome and not at all on the flight. She’d forgotten to bring anything to read and had been able to find only the in-flight magazine and a golf club newsletter someone left in the seat pocket. She’d stared at pictures of an up-and-coming woman golfer for several minutes until the submerged knowledge that her mother had at some point become interested in golf slowly rose in her mind. Ginger remembered red and white socks that fitted over the clubs. She’d wanted them for hats for her dolls. In the returned memory, she saw her mother tee off. Her mother leaned down and pushed the yellow tee in the ground, balancing the shiny ball on top. She hunched forward, poised, and the cutting swoosh of her swing startled Ginger. The ball did not come down on the fairway but hooked in midair and landed in or near a dank little swamp. Then Ginger saw only herself, legs pumping as she ran down the slope to the water, where mud turtles plopped off their logs as she scanned the perimeter for the ball, spotting it, not in the water, but too far out in slimy ooze. Who else was there? Memory shaded a part of the scene. A long-legged crane stepped warily, as though despising to get its feet wet, but did not fly. A man appeared but far away, and by the time Ginger reached her mother again, he was gone. Ginger stared at the beautiful bird, then looked back toward her mother waving to her as she pulled her cart along the grass.
End of glimpse, but Ginger felt a rush of exhilaration. Her mother was young, younger than Ginger now, playing golf alone in her brown tweeds and neat brown and white cleated shoes. The memory widened: Ginger turning flips, sometimes landing wrong and skidding her knees on the frost-burned grass. Frost-burned grass—it must have been late fall.
She was glad to have recaptured this memory and lingered on her mother striding toward the next hole.
GINGER FLIPPED THE AIR DIAL up another notch and stepped on the accelerator, passing three and four straining trucks at a time. The fumes, stale air, and crush of the airport fell away. She felt herself unfurl after the cramped last-row seat on the plane. I-75 cut through the heart of Georgia, running by towns which prospered by its proximity. Millions of transport trucks, plus carloads of Yankees heading for Florida, tanked up at gas stations, pecan candy stores, and Wagon Wheel restaurants, or paused to shop at the cotton mills’ outlet stores. The towns I-75 missed languished, their formerly tortured two-lane state roads reverted to country lanes, and most of their downtown Purple Duck and Blue Willow cafés had been boarded up. Who went that way, unless they had to?
At Perry, she turned off and took the slow road through orchards and small towns spared the ugliness of haphazard development. Kudzu-covered tenant farms bordered fields abandoned in the sixties. She slowed, let down the window for the scent of peach and the dusty smell of the pecan groves and corn rows breaking into tassel. One night she’d told Marco the names of towns she liked: Unadilla, Hahira, Osierfield, Lax, Omega, Mystic, Enigma, Headlight, Friendship, Calvary, Lordamercy Cave, Milksick Cove, a litany he countered with Italian places.
Marco always maintained that America must constantly reinvent itself, and she supposed that was true, but maybe not here. The straight road turned dreamy blue in the early afternoon heat. If no oblivious farmer or pulpwood truck pulled out of a side road, she could safely exceed the speed limit, go faster than on I-75, whizzing through rising and falling land soon to be dotted white with cotton bolls, and across all the creeks named by the Indians. The Pontiac moved so quietly on the surface of the road that she might be sailing.
Her earlier thought about the ancient sun in Italy and the present-tenseness of America felt wrong, she realized. She was tunneling through luxuriant blue air in a place profoundly old because it was empty. This low dip, this slow hill, were formed by the tides and currents in the warm shallow sea that once rolled over these fields. I’ll have to talk about this with J. J., she thought. He’ll understand geological time. She and J. J. loved the white sand beaches they found near the cabin. Since a sea flowed, she mused, those who were born here must have a knowledge, a subaqueous, preliterate intelligence. Or maybe it is just the damn heat that makes people look as though they’re walking underwater, dreaming with their eyes open. On the windowsill of her room at the cabin, she’d kept her proof of the sea, a line of bleached seashells she and J. J. had found in dried creekbeds, lying there for eons until she’d scooped them up and crammed them in her shorts pockets.
From the crests of the rises, she looked down as she drove into a green sea of expansive longleaf-pine forests. As far as the eye, as if she did not exist. The smell blew through her hair, deeply fresh, one of the scents most basic to her memory. Even public bathrooms scrubbed with harsh, pine-scented disinfectant could make her stop and inhale. The wind in pines, the sound of the human soul, J. J. once said, if the human soul had a sound. No one would say that but J. J. No one has his hot brightness.
Where there’s such emptiness, Ginger thought, I feel my mind expand. Italy is everywhere shaped by the human touch—that’s why I feel warmed there. But those who worked this land left almost nothing. Unpainted board houses lean for a few decades, turn silvery, then collapse into heaps quickly covered by vines. Even graves with their crude crosses are swallowed by the land itself, which resumes its own contours. All because they built with wood, she thought, like the Etruscans, whose towns have been completely erased by time, except for graves, stone foundations, and mammoth walls.
She stopped to eat at a diner in Hakinston and decided to have coffee with a piece of the lemon pie, even though a fly was trapped under the plastic dome. It seemed more intent on getting out than on burrowing into the meringue. The waitress called her “honey,” and Ginger smiled to remember her struggles with the Italian formal “you.” In Italy, never in a thousand years would someone address a stranger familiarly. She had heard “Buon giorno, Contessa” to a slow old remnant of the nobility making her way to the piazza, and in the bread store, “Buon giorno, architetto,” an impossible-in-America greeting—“good morning, architect”—that happened every day in Italy. Life is untranslatable, she thought; suddenly I’m “honey,” but why not, I’m almost home.
Forty miles down the road, she passed the turnoff to the cabin but kept going—J. J. better not be off on some fishing trip. When the profile of Swan appeared in the distance, she finally began to think of what, exactly, she faced. She dreaded, more than the stupid crime and its stupid solution, the fight to keep memories away. She already had felt the thrill of imagining her mother swinging a golf club. The sorrow of her father’s life, harder to ignore than her mother’s because he still lived, lodged against this hideous event. A push of memories seemed to be pressing somewhere between her shoulder blades, between her breasts. Just in the exact place, she realized, where her mother shot herself.
Glancing east, across the knee-high cotton, she saw slats of gray rain in the distance, moving toward her, racing the car toward some intersection up ahead. Her father used to call it the walking rain and she loved the figure of speech. Rain walking across the ground, a change in the weather visible and stalking. Around Swan you always must be alert to nature. Porous limestone suddenly can collapse in a perfect circle, leaving a green sinkhole pond of infinite depth. A tornado can appear on the horizon, a clear conical image imprinted against the vast sky. Or a hurricane, with a secret eye trained on who knows what or where.
After hurtling herself across the ocean, she suddenly was in no hurry to get to Swan. She drummed the steering wheel with her fingers. Let the GBI settle this before I get there, she thought. I can have a quick visit with J. J., cheer up Lily, who must be devastated, and check on Daddy. J. J. and I can go out to the cabin; I’ll lie on the dock and listen to the river. She would not get to see Caroline Culpepper, her best friend since nursery school. She’d be at the beach with her children and her sister’s family all of July. A wave of affection for Caroline rolled over her. Growing up, they’d played bridge thousands of afternoons. All through high school Ginger slept over at Caroline’s on Saturday nights. If only J. J. had married her! Caroline finally gave up on that idea and married Peter Banks, balding even in his late teens, but sweet and number four in his law school class at Florida. During the chaos of Ginger’s life the past few years, she always looked forward to seeing Caroline and Peter when she limped back to Swan. Her other close friend from childhood, Braxton Riddell, now bored her. Once she’d thought his azure-blue eyes looked like a Greek statue’s. Now he just looked preternaturally blank. I’ll see no one, she thought. Only J. J. and Lily and Tessie. I can go back to Rome early next week.
On impulse, she turned toward Magnolia Cemetery. The gates were open. She turned left, then right at the Bryon plot and down the grassy road to her family’s graves. The roses, she saw, were innocently abundant, as though nothing had happened. She had expected someone standing guard, but there was only Cass Deal in the distance, working on a new grave. She got out of the car and stepped cautiously toward the gate. The hole in the ground looked newly dug. The broken stones were stacked in a corner and the clay-stained gravel had been hosed clean. Her mother’s body and the coffin had been removed. Ginger rubbed her stiff neck. “Once again we failed her,” she said out loud. Great-grandparents, Daddy’s Uncle Calhoun, Big Jim, and Mama Fan all remained in their appointed places, their Georgia granite markers leached to white by the strong sun, except for Big Jim’s, which was smeared black.
