Swan, page 29
“I think so. Lacking anyone else. He wouldn’t have, not for the world.” The GBI would check on Austin if J. J. mentioned the notebook, which he would not. Austin was running bookstores, raising a family, when Catherine died. He had nothing in his eyes but honesty. J. J. could understand easily his mother’s attraction to Austin. And back when they all were in college he must have been what Charlotte called him—a dreamboat. “They’ve got to be suspicious but the likelihood is nil.”
“I’d doubt their suspicion with all my heart, son. Innocent or guilty, he’s serving a life sentence, from what you’ve told me.” J. J. felt a prick of pain. Second time Austin had said son. A word he hadn’t heard in a long time.
“Austin, your daughter seems to me like Mother seemed to you in the Greek play. I’m hoping to see her again. Now, that’s an understatement.” J. J. laughed at himself.
Austin laughed, too. “Another spoke in the wheel that seems bent on turning. If Georgia has any imperfections, I don’t know them. She’s true blue. In my experience, you only get that kind of emotion once. Or twice if you’re luckier than hell. I was one of those. Now I’m seeing someone pleasant, nice, companionable. Attractive, you know. I think I’ll leave it as it is, although she’s ready to move in and rearrange the furniture. I’m not sure I want to give up my privacy unless I’m convinced it’s for a great piece of happiness.”
“I wouldn’t consider it, if that’s the situation. ’Course I’m the great loner.” To his surprise, Austin hugged him.
J. J. had plenty of time to get to his flight. Rush-hour traffic moved along at a clip, without tractors or yokels in pickups to slow the flow. J. J. kept right, not in his usual hurry. He’d seen Georgia on the coastal trail touch the tip of her tongue to a wave-wet shrub, something he and Ginger did. He wondered if Catherine had long ago picked it up from Austin and passed it on to them. He wondered if she’d become interested in stones through him and bequeathed that, too.
What he wanted was to turn back, drive a hundred miles an hour to that stable where he last saw Georgia sitting on the fence calling out “Post” to the girls, where sunlight, sifting through the oaks and kicked-up dust, held the covered ring in sepia light, a light from the previous century.
July 14
J. J. ARRIVED IN SWAN thirty minutes before they were scheduled to meet the Ireland’s hearse at Magnolia Cemetery. Ginger had told Father Tyson that there was to be no ceremony. The less focus, the better. They would witness the burial, stop to see Wills, go to the Sisters for late breakfast, then resume their lives.
With Marco here, she felt more decisive. He had made the long journey to a troubled place for her. Only for her. That he deeply cared, even she could no longer doubt. “This is a great place,” he kept saying as she’d driven him around yesterday before dark. “Like a place in a dream. Everything anchored in blue air.” She could tell that he liked Lily and Tessie. He’d immediately invited both of them to Italy. She and Marco had stayed up late, talking on the porch. Ginger shivered in the hot night as she told him about the day she came home from school and found her mother. She told him about Wills, his grief, stroke, and unendurable aftermath, and about her survival with J. J. “Later, we’ll go out to the cabin. That’s where J. J. and I could connect with a source. Here, in the House, we were at home, too, but this is always Big Jim’s house. The cabin belonged to my family. We kept it as a touchstone. And will.”
Motionless in the rocking chair, Marco just listened. Behind her voice, he’d never heard a night so alive. He stared into the dark yard, where for all he knew crocodiles were crawling. Now and then CoCo imitated a hammer knocking off a tailpipe or a drill gun unscrewing lug nuts. Marco had kept his hand over Ginger’s on the arm of her chair and she talked and talked.
J. J. CAME UP THE PORCH STEPS with his arms full of gifts. Ginger introduced Marco quickly. “Hey, buddy, I’d have brought you one if I’d known in time that you were here. Welcome to paradise.” He clapped Marco on the shoulder and nodded to Ginger, a “not bad” nod she recognized. While they opened his gifts, J. J. regarded Marco. He looks okay, he thought. Solid citizen. Of Italy, of course. Lily and Ginger were shocked at the expensive sweaters. Tessie pressed the soft cotton robe to her face.
“Go change. We’ll talk on the way. We can all go in one car.” Ginger wanted to get this over with.
“Tessie, are you coming?” Lily asked.
“Nome. I done told Ginger I’m going to get dinner together.”
Lily went back for her handbag.
Cass Deal had cleaned the plot, even deadheaded all the spent roses. The coffin already sat next to the hole, now neat and raked smooth. Two hours of scouring had returned Big Jim’s grave to pristine white granite. Against the Mason headstone leaned a spray of red roses. Below, someone had left a vase of summer garden flowers. The four of them stood to the side while the men slowly cranked the coffin down into the ground. Could anyone ever believe the pumping red heart just stops; we go in a box and are buried, while those who love us are left to figure out how to endure this brutal subtraction from life? Ginger stooped for a handful of dirt and threw it in, then J. J. did the same.
He brushed off his hand on his trousers and said in a low voice to Ginger, “Are we the only ones to bury our mother twice, both times after fucking disasters?”
“I’d like to say something,” Lily said in a quaky voice. She stepped forward, turned around, and looked at them. J. J. saw her swallow twice as she unfolded a piece of paper. Slowly she spoke.
Beauty is a thing beyond the grave.
That perfect bright experience
Will never fall to nothing
And time will dim the moon sooner
Than our full consummation here
In this brief life will tarnish or pass away.
They stood in silence. J. J. clenched his fists hard to keep tears from his eyes. “That’s perfect, Lily, thank you.”
Ginger put her arm around her, and she and Marco walked her back to the car. Lily started to weep a little. J. J. stood a moment, with his eyes closed and head down, wondering how Lily had happened on a poem by D. H. Lawrence. J. J. suspected there was something more behind it, something she might never tell, or something that would float to the surface in time. Odd, since Ralph had told them that their mother did not kill herself, J. J. had experienced a surge of affection for Lily, as though a stone had been shoved off a spring, allowing water to flow.
While the men shoveled dirt in a mound over the coffin, J. J. read the card on the vase of flowers. Rest forever in peace, Eleanor Whitefield. J. J. bent to the red roses and took off the florist’s card. With love from Austin and Georgia. He thought of Austin flying low, the roses falling on the campus for Catherine. He pocketed the cards. So much to tell Ginger.
GINGER KEPT IT BRIEF in Wills’s room. They did not mention Catherine or what had just happened. “Daddy, this is Marco, the man I work with in Italy.”
Wills proffered his hand but didn’t speak.
“I’ve heard about you from Ginger, and it is pleasing to me to meet you,” Marco said. Lily went down the hall and brought back a Coke for Wills. Marco tried again to get a response. “Ginger tells me you are a doctor. My father is, too. He delivers all the babies in Monte Sant’Egidio.”
Wills reached for the Coke, as though he were constantly deprived. Ginger told him about Marco’s project, but Wills threw up both hands and said, “Okay, okay.”
Abruptly, Ginger said, “We’re going now, Daddy. We’ll see you tomorrow.” Marco extended his hand but Wills ignored him.
J. J. stayed behind. “I’ll be right with you.” He swung a chair around and straddled it. “Dad, listen. I want to ask you a question. Does the word Dachau mean anything to you?”
Wills pulled the straw from his mouth. “Dachau,” he repeated. “Terrible, terrible.”
“Were you there?”
Wills nodded. “Terrible.”
“I heard you were there. You never told us. You were brave.”
Wills wiped the sweat from his upper lip on his sleeve. “I was brave,” he repeated.
AFTER BREAKFAST AT THE SISTERS, Lily was exhausted. Marco said he, too, wanted to sleep because he was in confused hours. “You can’t,” Ginger protested. “We’re all going to the cabin. And it’s called jet lag.”
“Va bene, va bene. Let me sleep on the way.”
“Take me to the House. I want to go visit Eleanor.” And after that, Lily thought, I want to stay in bed until dinner.
At the cabin, Marco immediately spotted the arrowhead collection around the fireplace. “Did you find all these? A natural history museum would be proud to have such a display.” He admired J. J.’s new fishing spear, then turned to look at the shelves of history and anthropology books.
“We were raised in the boonies, but we did read,” Ginger said. She gave Marco a tour of the rest of the cabin, then, after she took him down to the river, she let him sleep in her room. At first she lay down beside him, but she was about to fall off the narrow bed and he fell soundly asleep within seconds. She opened the window, turned the fan on him, and slipped outside, where J. J. sat at his table under the scuppernong vine, looking through a stack of new books.
“I brought you these novels. Good for the long plane trip.”
“I can’t get over you going shopping. I love the sweater. Sweet J. J.” She kissed the top of his head. “Want a dip?”
“Sounds good. Wash away the cares of the world.” As they walked down to the dock, Ginger started to sing, as she always had, Shall we gather at the river, the beautiful, the beautiful rivvvv—eerrr. She boomed on every stress.
“Was it a week ago that I found Scott sitting here with the news that tilted our little universe? Seems like a year. What do you think Ralph has found out?”
“He was mum. He did say this news might break everything open.”
“Christ, good old Sherlock. Go, Ginger.” He gave her a push and she jumped in holding her nose.
GINGER, STRETCHED OUT on a decrepit aluminum chaise, spread her hair to dry. J. J. told her about his two days in Palo Alto. “What if Mother had left and taken us to California and we’d been raised there with Austin?” Ginger wondered.
“Then Georgia would not have been born. That would have been a fatal error.” J. J. leaned back on his elbows. He told her everything Austin had said about the affair. “We have to ask Lily if you arrived early or late. It could matter, but it looks like you’re stuck with Daddyo.” He tried to describe Georgia, their glass house with lemon trees, and the big surf spuming from the rocks when he walked the coastal trail with her. He talked about the light at the stable as he drove away. Finally, he told her what Austin said about Wills. “I thought the surprises from Austin, if there were any, would be about Mother. Instead, I walked out staggering over what he said about Dad. This morning when we were at the Columns, I asked him about it. I could tell he remembered something horrific.”
“He hardly recalls anything specific. That must have colored every corpuscle in his body.” Already she was thinking of ransacking the barn and the stuffed closet in the back room for any record of this, any old Brownie photo or letter. “So he had other sorrows. Unspeakable. I wonder if Lily knows. Probably not. Surely she would have said something, as much as she poor-Wills.” She remembered her father sitting alone on the dock at night.
Ginger told J. J. about seeing Mitchell in Athens, then checking with Dr. Schmitt about finishing her degree. “I just may do it! I’ve gone from thinking I might to thinking how could I not? I remembered so many things about Mitchell when Lily and I were driving home, after barely thinking of him in the past couple of years. Do you know once he brought me an enormous armful of Casablanca lilies? They tinged the whole house with their white perfume. I felt so good to find out he’s just fine.”
They heard the screen door bang and saw Marco emerge with a large book. He waved and sat down on the porch. “Ginger, Marco seems extra-primo excellent.” J. J. turned his thumbs up.
“Maybe our luck has changed. No more turning into pillars of salt. No more seasons in Hades.”
“Don’t think it. The gods might be huddling right now, preparing the next bolt. They’re still standing, those Masons. Hey, I want to go back to California for a while,” J. J. said. “I liked it there.”
“Georgia on your mind? Is she pretty?”
“Flawless. Something about her.”
“Marco, get down here! You’ve got to swim in the spring,” Ginger called. “I think we might drive over to the island tomorrow so I can introduce Marco to Caroline. Want to go? Marco, come on. Dinner’s at seven and you don’t want to miss Tessie’s cooking.”
J. J. stood up and stretched. “No, I want some time. Take Marco. I’m going up to my room for a while. I need to write down a few notes before they evaporate.”
Marco stepped warily down the path, moving through troughs of heat. Ginger had told him about rattlesnakes and water moccasins the size of her thigh. The palmettos, moss-dripping oaks, and the river looked like the Amazon jungle to him. The serene piazza in Monte Sant’Egidio flashed through his mind. He couldn’t imagine that he was going to jump into that swirling green water and swim, but he did.
J. J. FILLED HIS PEN with black ink. He found his new notebook in his suitcase and sat down at the window. He reached for a book from his shelves and opened it at random. His finger fell on here where the moonflowers. And yes, he’d seen the new curling vine of the moonflowers starting up the porch rail only today. “Marco. Polo. Marco. Polo,” he heard Ginger calling. She echoed the hiding game they used to play in the river. But this time she was with a real Marco. He could see them swimming fast toward the bend, where they would get out and climb over the rise to the spring. The late sunlight flashed on their arms arrowing in and out of the water. When J. J. and Ginger were small, they used to seal notes in mayonnaise jars and fling them out as far as they could, hoping the current would sweep them to the ocean. J. J. could still feel the strain in his muscle as he tried to catapult a jar into the current. “Go,” Ginger had shouted as the jar flew through the air. They stood on the dock, following each glinting glass until it bobbed under and disappeared. He thought he remembered a voice beside them, Catherine saying What a good idea. Someone on a beach in another country would find a jar and twist it open. We live in Swan, Georgia. If you find this, please write to us. Love, Ginger and J. J. Mason.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
During the writing of this book, I received generous help from Toni Mirosevich, Shotsy Faust, and Josephine Carson. My editor, Charlie Conrad, and the entire staff at Broadway Books are an exemplary publishing team. My luck with being a part of Broadway is due to Peter Ginsberg, my agent and friend. I would like to thank Dr. Robert Mayes Jackson and Dr. Bruce Bonger for their counsel.
I am more than grateful to Edward, my husband, for ten thousand acts of kindness, and to Ashley and Stuart, my daughter and her husband.
My last thanks begin a long way back and go to my family in the South, to my sisters Barbara Mayes Jackson and Nancy Mayes Willcoxon.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Author of the international and New York Times bestsellers Under the Tuscan Sun, Bella Tuscany, and In Tuscany, Frances Mayes has also written five books of poetry and a reader’s guide, The Discovery of Poetry. She edited Best American Travel Writing, 2002. A native of Georgia, she now lives in California and Italy with her husband, the poet Edward Mayes.
ALSO BY FRANCES MAYES
Under the Tuscan Sun
In Tuscany
Bella Tuscany
The Discovery of Poetry
Ex Voto
Read on for an excerpt from New York Times bestselling author Frances Mayes’s latest memoir,
Under Magnolia
Crown Publishers
Available wherever books are sold
A SILVER GLOBE IN THE GARDEN
As I open a book that I once pulled from the ashes of my grandparents’ house, the dusty, mildewed scent catapults me to their back hallway.
Through the double door, made of tiny mullioned panes, I see the entrance hall waver, a quivering of claret and sunlight from the front door. Wafting from the kitchen, the smell of chicken smothered in cream and pepper until it’s falling off the bone. I’m playing an ancient wind-up record left over from when my father was a boy; “K-K-K-Katy” crackles in my ear. Through my grandmother’s open bedroom door, I glimpse chintz dust ruffles, hatboxes, the slender oval mirror over the dressing table, where she leans, and I see her dab the fluffy puff between her legs.
That’s it: brief cloud of bath powder, grinding consonant K-K-K-Katy (I’ll be waiting at the k-k-k-kitchen door), warped light throwing rainbows back through the door. And I wonder, always, why do such fragments remain forever engraved, when, surely, significant ones are lost? The kitchen fragrance, no mystery. For who, ever, could forget Fanny’s smothered chicken?
An early memory of my father: He opens his buff hunting coat, and in all the small interior pockets, doves’ heads droop. He and his friends Bascom and Royce break out the bourbon. From my room in the back of the house, right off the kitchen, I see through the keyhole (keyholes are a large part of childhood) the doves he’s killed piled on the counter, and someone’s hand cleaning a shotgun barrel with a dishrag. The terrible plop-ploop sound of feathers being plucked makes me bury my face under the pillow. When his friends go, my father stays at the table with his tumbler of bourbon. I’m reading with a flashlight under the covers. My specialty is orphans on islands where houses have trapdoors into secret passageways that lead to the sea. Rowboats, menace, treasure, and no parents in the story. As the water darkens and danger grows, I hear my father talking to himself. When I quietly crack the door, I see his head in his hands, his bloodstained coat hung on a hook. Very late, he hits the wall with his fist, and says over and over, “Beastly, Christly, beastly, Christly.” I put the palm of my hand over the spot where he is pounding with his fist and feel the vibration all the way up my arm. I press my nose to the window screen and look out at the still backyard.
