Visible Empire, page 19
Fondly,
I am,
Rita
6.2.62
For a long time after finishing the letter, Lily stayed seated on the edge of the sofa, staring out into the great wide nothing of the room. What she wanted was to feel a deep and satisfying hatred for this woman, this “Rita” who’d so maligned her marriage and compromised Robert’s affection. Instead, with no small amount of horror and confusion, she understood that what she was feeling was sympathy, even gratitude for the letter’s words. She found she was in mourning for the girl—yes: stupid, young, naïve—who had fallen just as she once had for Robert of all men. In another world, they might—and at this thought she shuddered physically, her shoulders contracting and tightening upward—dear god, they might have been friends.
Lily sat up. She took a few deep breaths. Life was funny, yes? It really was. If she’d opened this letter a month ago, she would have had a completely different reaction. The timing of a revelation changed everything, didn’t it? This wasn’t a profound thought, not a serious or important epiphany, but to Lily it offered a moment of unexpected lucidity and perspective. To Lily, it began to open up the world. She thought of Robert. Her pulse quickened. She thought of Piedmont. Her pulse quickened all the more. The human heart, she understood at long last, was nothing if not confused and confusing.
Oh, Rita, she thought. Oh, Rita.
Ivan & Lulu
“Robby’s left his wife.”
“I know, Lulu.”
“It’s an affront.”
“To whom, dear?”
“To everyone.”
“Why don’t we stay out of it?”
“But she’s pregnant. She’s due any minute. She’s large as can be.”
“Raif says to leave her alone.”
“Raif says that?”
“Yes. He asked specifically that we leave her alone. He’s taken care of things.”
“Is he in love? Oh, I do hope he isn’t in love.”
“What if he is? She’d make a wonderful mother to the boys.”
“But the boys and a newborn?”
“It isn’t our place to judge. People will have to start over at some point.”
“But it’s too soon for anybody to be thinking about starting over. What about Nance?”
“Don’t make me say it again.”
“What about poor Nance? She’d be mortified.”
“Firstly, we don’t even know if Raif is in love. Secondly—and you put me in the position of having to say this—Nance is dead. He hasn’t abandoned her.”
“I think we should send someone to look after her. That’s all.”
“Raif has expressly forbidden it.”
“And what Raif says goes?”
“You know he’s been instrumental in my career, Lulu.”
“But this is personal. We could send Alma’s sister.”
“Alma’s sister has her own life, Lulu. Think about what you’re saying.”
“But maybe she needs the work.”
“Does she? Has Alma allowed as much?”
“—”
“Then why don’t we hold off on being busybodies for a minute. Can you promise me that?”
“Is it true about Candy and George?”
“What did we just agree upon?”
“I didn’t agree to anything.”
“Are you planning on staying in your dressing gown all day?”
“Is there another memorial I don’t know about? Is there a luncheon?”
“There is neither.”
“Is it true?”
“It’s true.”
“Penniless?”
“Yes.”
“But how were they living?”
“Credit. Scams. There’s a suggestion afoot that they meant not to come back to Atlanta.”
“They were absconding?”
“Well, that’s a funny word because they had nothing to abscond with other than their credit, which was dried up.”
“But then—Is it possible? Are they alive? Are they over there in Europe pretending to be dead?”
“No. Who knows why they got on that plane, in the end. Maybe they wanted to meet their grandchild.”
“But how do you know they aren’t in Europe?”
“I just do.”
“But how?”
“Don’t make me say it again, Lulu.”
“But how on earth could you know for sure? Perhaps they’re still alive! Imagine!”
“I’ve seen their bodies, Lulu.”
“Impossible. You said there was nothing to see.”
“I said there were remains.”
“Remains? Remains? What kind of word is that?”
“There are certain things you’ve forced me to say in order to protect you. If we’re done here, I have work to do.”
“Are we done? It seems you’re the one who makes that decision.”
Piedmont
He hadn’t been sleeping easily for the last several nights, not since Robert and Coleman had appeared out of nowhere in the wee hours of the morning. He wasn’t convinced that they wouldn’t come back for him. He was troubled that they now possessed the knowledge that he, Piedmont, the Negro boy to whom they’d given five twenty-dollar bills in order to return their car safely to Atlanta and who’d failed at his mission, was living (was that the right word? surely not . . .) on a white man’s compound, spending his nights not twenty yards from where a white woman slept.
He turned onto his side. As he’d been doing since their visit, tonight he killed the lamplight immediately upon walking inside the guesthouse. He wanted to be able to see out into the night, to take in the backyard and the possible return of those men. He’d liked them well enough on the drive to Athens and the airplane. But he wasn’t so foolish as to think these particular circumstances weren’t extenuating. The Liberal White Man wasn’t something he completely understood or trusted. But his guess was that, like all men, like the men he knew, nobody was one way all the time. Everyone slipped up. Inconsistencies were part of human nature. He’d read that in high school or maybe it was his own idea. All he knew was that Robert Tucker and P. T. Coleman had appeared in the middle of the night, highly intoxicated, it seemed to Piedmont. They’d been expecting one thing, and they’d gotten something else entirely.
It was impossible for Piedmont not to think again of Emmett Till. His mother had once called his obsession unhealthy, but there’d been as much fear in her eyes as in his own on the day they saw the newspaper and those photos of the boy’s body. Emmett would have been Piedmont’s age if he’d lived, if he’d never left Chicago to visit family in Mississippi when he was fourteen. But what sort of half-baked logic was that? If he hadn’t gone to Mississippi when he was fourteen, then he’d have gone when he was fifteen or sixteen or seventeen. And if it hadn’t been a boy named Emmett Till, then it would have been a different boy named Somebody Else. He winced. Robert and Coleman didn’t seem capable of killing Piedmont; there was something lazy in their aspect. But there was also something unpredictable.
Now he lay on his side, eyes open, and thought about Emmett. He thought about his mother. And he thought about Lily. At dinner she’d been funny. She was agitated, it seemed to him, by his presence. He told her, though the thought was as new to him as it was to her, that he was planning to leave.
“Oh,” she’d said. “Well, jeez.” She stood up when he said this, though they’d only just sat down to dinner. She took two more beers from the icebox. She handed them both to Piedmont, along with the can opener. He pressed two triangular openings into the lids of each and handed one back to Lily. She accepted it and sat.
“Jeez, well,” she said. She couldn’t stop fidgeting. He thought she’d be pleased by his announcement. He’d said he was leaving in order to alleviate her nervousness. Now she only fidgeted twice as fast.
“Don’t you think it’s time?” he asked. They hadn’t talked once about the way she sometimes threaded her fingers so slowly between his. They hadn’t discussed it, but it was all he’d been able to think about until Robert showed up out of the blue.
She stood up again, but then she sat immediately back down.
“Gosh,” she said. “I feel like I might cry. Is it something I did? Jeez. Is it my husband? He hasn’t come back. He won’t. They took the car. But of course, you do what you want. You can do anything you want. You don’t need my permission. I don’t mean it that way. Of course you have to leave. Gosh. What was I thinking? I must not have been thinking, Piedmont. I’m so sorry.” As she talked, her fingers tapped about the table. She picked up her fork a half dozen times without taking a bite of food. Mercifully, she put the can of beer to her lips and took a sip. Piedmont had hoped this might calm her down.
“Play me something?” she asked. “Before you go? Or don’t. Is it cold in here? I don’t feel well, Piedmont. I think the day is catching up to me. And the beer. Ouch. It’s kicking. Hold out your hand. Do you want to feel? You don’t want to feel? I think I need to lie down. Don’t worry about the dishes. Please. Don’t leave without telling me? Do you promise? Don’t leave tonight. Promise you’ll stay. Thank you. I don’t mean to tell you what to do. Yes, of course you understand. Of course. I have to lie down now. I’ll see you in the morning. I’m sorry we won’t watch the fireworks as I said. But you’ll watch them for me. Don’t worry. I’ll be able to sleep. Tomorrow is the real show in the sky. Tonight is just a preamble. I’m suddenly so tired. I haven’t been so tired in who knows how long.”
During her monologue, she pushed back her chair and stood, using the table as a sort of stabilizer for her weight. She’d said much of her speech while facing the door. He couldn’t see her expression; he couldn’t tell if there was color in her face or not. When she walked out of the kitchen, he stood. He wouldn’t follow her—that would be too much. But he moved to where he could watch her as she made her way through the rooms of the first floor. At the office she paused, turned, held up a hand, offered a wan smile, then walked inside and closed the door behind her.
He disobeyed her request regarding the dishes. It took him only fifteen minutes. Then he dried off his hands and went outside. There hadn’t been a firework in the past hour. Lily was right: tomorrow was when the real show would happen. He walked straight across the yard, into his room, turned off the light, and got in bed.
He’d been like that—curled up but not sleeping, listening to the sounds of the frogs, the lone hoot owl, the crickets’ incessant timpani—for several hours when he heard it.
It was a rustling not of leaves—there were no leaves—but of fallen magnolia petals, thick water-heavy petals that had fallen and then dried in the sun and now were being snapped into pieces by—by what? Something heavier than a raccoon. As much as he didn’t want to, he closed his eyes. Since boyhood he’d known how to isolate and accentuate a particular sense by turning off another, like listening to his mother in the choir, quarantining and appreciating her voice alone. He dared not move. With his eyes gritted shut, he opened his ears as wide as they’d go. Yes, footsteps. But only one set.
Outside the window to the left of the front door, which was to say the window farthest from where he was still lying down, a final magnolia spine snapped. Then there was silence. Piedmont’s heart raced. His thoughts now were not of Emmett Till but of his mother. Would they find his body? When they did, would it be recognizable? There were creek beds all over this city where Negro bodies could be and had been discarded. Sweet Lord, he thought. Sweet Lord. In Chattanooga, a hundred or so miles north of where Piedmont lay at that very moment, a fifteen-year-old called Larry Bolden was shot by a white policeman who wasn’t then arrested. Michael and Jeremy had told him all about it. In 1958, in Dawson, Georgia, a couple hundred miles south of Piedmont, a man by the name of James Brazier was beaten to death by two police officers. His wife and children witnessed the killing. Of the incident, the county sheriff had merely said, “There’s nothing like fear to keep niggers in line.” In Water Valley, Mississippi—why had Jeremy and Michael given him these awful facts?—roughly 350 miles west of Piedmont, that very same year, a sheriff by the name of Buster Treloar beat to death a man called Woodrow Wilson Daniels. The killing took place in a prison. There were four witnesses, all of whom identified Treloar as the murderer. After only twenty-three minutes of deliberation, the jury, which was entirely white, freed the sheriff, who’d then said, “By God. Now I can get back to rounding up bootleggers and damn niggers.” These and other wicked stories now roared in Piedmont’s mind. Dear Lord. Oh Lord, oh Lord.
The knob on the door jiggled.
He sat up. He knew better than to be lying down when they—it, whoever it was—finally came for him. In the dark, he searched frantically for some sort of weapon—an umbrella, anything—there was nothing. And besides, to fight back would only ensure death. As it was, he might escape with disfigurement and a warning never to venture out of the dark side of town again. He’d heed the warning too. He’d crawl home if he had to. He’d beg his mother on all fours to take him back, to forgive him. He’d tell the whole truth, apologize on the spot. If he was lucky, she’d nurse whatever wounds he brought home with him. He would never, never again, abandon her. He would never fall for the generosity of another race mixer again, regardless of intention.
There was a soft rapping on the door.
It was fiendish. It was repugnant—the way he was being toyed with, being asked to open a door for an unknown enemy. This, he understood, was their true power: they could afford to enjoy it. They weren’t scared of anything or anyone.
Again there was a light rapping, and then, something Piedmont had not been expecting, not in a million years, he heard the unmistakable sound of Lily’s voice quietly saying his name.
His muscles—his bowels—experienced the briefest moment of relief before panic—intense, sweat-inducing panic—took over.
He opened the door only a crack. He didn’t—wouldn’t!—turn on a light.
There she was wearing a robe so white, it, like the magnolia blossoms, seemed to glow in the dark as if begging for undesired attention. She was gripping the doorknob. She said his name again, half whisper, half screech.
“You can’t be here,” he said, his voice in the same register as hers. “I’m a dead man,” he said. “You’re murdering me.” The words spilled out of their own accord.
“Please,” she said. And now he realized two things. The first was that she was crying. The second was that with the hand not grasped tightly around the knob, she was clutching at her belly.
“No,” he said. He didn’t mean to say it. He stepped backward into his room, just one step. His foot landed funny. He was shaking his head. But even as he was declining, even as he was aggressively fighting the urge to vomit, he knew he would consent to anything she asked.
“Something is wrong,” she said. She fumbled with the light switch just inside the door. Somehow, as he’d retreated, she’d advanced. The output from the overhead was weak, but even in the muted light, he could see that beneath the place where her hand held her stomach—seemed to be holding it up, in fact—there was blood.
She stumbled a bit as she tried to move toward him. “Please,” she said.
And now his body did what his brain already knew it would do. It moved toward her; it took hold of her. He put an arm around her back and another under her elbow. Her whole body seemed to push into his at that moment, as though she’d been doing all she could to maintain her upright position, but now that there was something, someone to do the work for her, she completely relinquished control and effort. As he turned toward the door, he looked down. More blood was on the back of her nightgown. Again he wanted to vomit. Instead he kept guiding her—first out the door, then across the backyard, then to the stoop that led to the kitchen. The door was open.
“Where should I take you?” he asked. He meant, of course, within the house. He meant: Where in this home of yours would you like to be delicately placed while I ring whoever it is you tell me to ring—the doctor, the police, the ambulance . . .
Instead she pointed to the sink. He took her there. She pointed to a narrow drawer next to it. He opened it. “The keys,” she said.
He truly did not understand.
