Fadeaway Girl (30 page)

I said at least someone else should go along. I was thinking of Will. But she said, no; Jane thought everyone was against her.

I left the back office just in time to see Ree-Jane more or less waltzing down the stairs with a small suitcase. She had dressed up the rhubarb by winding a blue silk scarf around her neck.

Ralph said he'd be back in time for the Baums' party. Easily. It was only a little after five and Cloverly was only twenty-five miles away.

With her suitcase and her merry face and her devil-may-care attitude, you'd have thought they were a happy couple dashing off on their honeymoon, not going to the loony bin.

We stood on the porch, we three, and watched the white convertible bucketing along down the gravel drive, Ree-Jane's sea blue scarf whipping back in the wind, her arm raised and her hand waving, waving like one of the happy, rich women above the beach at Deauville, in one of Aurora's travel posters. Waving whatever was left of the sane world farewell.

 

Ralph Diggs did come back, as he said, inside of two hours. He was there to grace the front steps when the Baums arrived. I did not hear what he told Mrs. Davidow and my mother later, in the kitchen, even though I got my tray as close to their little group as I could where they were gathered by the salad table; or even though I hung around the crock of salad dressing as long as I could. Strangely, I kept reminding myself of the maid in her black uniform, kneeling at the keyhole on the magazine cover, even though Vera was the black-uniformed, white-cuffed one among us.

 

After dinner, I hung around the long hall where Ralph's room was. When I heard someone coming up the stairs that led from the dining room to the second floor, I walked quickly into the hall bathroom, and when I heard the steps in the hall, I came out, casually flicking off the light switch as I left.

“Oh, hi.”

Ralph Diggs nodded, but didn't say anything. Yet he stopped as if inviting conversation.

I accepted. “Well, that must have been pretty hard driving all the way to Cloverly and back in time for dinner, wasn't it?”

He leaned against the wall in that lounging way of his and took the cigarette from behind his ear. It was like the way he'd drawn the coin from behind mine, the magic gesture. He almost always had that cigarette behind his ear. It reminded me of Dwayne with his oily rag. It had never occurred to me before that maybe the rag was a comfort, something you could depend upon, something always by you. So maybe the cigarette was a comfort for Ralph. I wondered if my roundabout ways were like that.

Finally, he answered. “I'm a fast driver.”

“Still, you had to take Ree-Jane, I mean Jane, into the hospital. I mean you didn't just drop her off and say, ‘See you later.'”

“No. I went in with her to the admitting desk.”

“What happened?” I asked directly.

“Someone, a woman, came and got her. She took charge.”

He was still for a moment. Then he said, “She didn't look back. Jane, I mean.”

He said this as if he'd thought about it, as if it were important. I never thought of Ree-Jane as doing anything important in all the time I'd known her.

He said, “I guess you have to feel sorry for her.”

No,
I
didn't have to. I found this annoying, really annoying that he should be telling me how to feel. I'd been doing a perfectly good job of feeling for myself before he came along. I said, in a more irritated way than I actually felt, “You think she's really, you know, mentally ill? I think it's just a big act, all of that dancing and singing, trying to make people believe she's, well, interesting, because she's crazy.”

He was silent for an uncomfortably long moment. The thing was, his silences carried a weight of words I didn't get. It wasn't exactly silence; it was more as if there were another language running beneath his words. It was as if he came from somewhere with a separate language, a language I would never speak and a somewhere I would never see. Finally, he said, “You'd still have to feel sorry for her. I mean, to be so driven you'd have to go that far.”

This was so intensely sad, I would have taken a step back if the wall hadn't been there. I tried to rid myself of the feeling with a little sarcasm: “Well, I'm sure you didn't come here with the idea of having to drive someone to a
mental
hospital.” I also thought this was a way of getting the subject around to why he was here.

He didn't speak. He looked at me as if I were something alien to his world.

I added, “You said you were just passing through. What made you stop here and look for a job?”

“I needed a place to stay and I'm low on cash. A hotel, I thought, would be a place that could use somebody.”

It sounded reasonable. Almost.

“You're not getting paid.”

“No, but I'm getting a room and food. Some food.”

It was the first subject we could talk about without being so guarded. “Yes, it's some food, all right.”

The cigarette was nearly smoked down by now. A long ash hung from it; I wondered why it didn't fall. It seemed to levitate. Another bit of magic.

I was not doing a very good job of extracting information, so I said good night and shrugged myself away from the wall and from him.

 

That night in bed I let my mind drift back over the last few weeks, looking for hints of Ree-Jane's serious craziness. But all I could see seemed to have been there ever since I'd known her: talking to herself, or, more disturbing, to someone else that no one could see; the awful silent laughter that was meant to suggest to me I was an idiot; acting generally like a six-year-old. I had been sure she was just putting on an act, but that night, I was less sure. And after listening to Ralph Diggs, I wondered, Wouldn't putting on an act like that be crazy in itself? Then I thought of the picture of the black-uniformed maid kneeling by a door and wondered if maybe I was looking at Ralph Diggs through a keyhole. I turned on my side and watched a shadow on the wall made by the dim hall light coming in through the transom and wondered if I lived a keyhole kind of life.

“I
t's some mental condition,” said my mother the next morning, lifting my perfectly done eggs over easy with a spatula from an iron skillet.

“We all have
some
mental condition, don't we?”

“Don't be amusing.” She put the cast-iron skillet back on the stove with more force than seemed necessary and took up the flat one with its three pecan pancakes and slid them onto my plate. “I can tell you it's thrown my morning into a cocked hat.”

I assumed she was talking about Lola Davidow's nonstop telephoning, mostly to the Tri-State Hospital outside of Cloverly, before and after her own sturdy breakfast. Ree-Jane's condition hadn't had much effect on her appetite. But then, it was my mother's cooking after all. People would eat it on the way to a hanging.

I ate my eggs and pancakes in the company of Walter, who was drowning a stack of cakes in maple syrup. Walter looked less crazy by the minute.

Following that, I called Axel's Taxis and asked for Axel to pick me up and waited on the porch, rocking away, until Delbert came.

Mr. Gumbrel was reading aloud what I'd written for my next piece in the paper.

Mr. Gumbrel stopped reading, made an “um-hmm” sort of sound, and said, “You mean all of them? All three of them were insane? And drowned that little girl?”

“I wanted to avoid calling attention to any one of them.” No I didn't. I wanted to avoid writing any more than I had to. “According to Isabel, when she was pointing that gun at me, ‘Elizabeth was the first.' Meaning, the first one to hold her under, I guess. The only sister I'm not sure about was Iris. She might have been pretty sane.”

“I'll tell you one thing that's real good about this, Emma: it's leisurely.”

Leisurely. That didn't sound too good to me. “Do you think that's good when I'm telling about three murders and a kidnapping? And an attempted murder?” I kept forgetting my own hairbreadth escape.

“Of course I do. If you've got all that in the story, you wouldn't want the reader to be hurried along, forced along like a train wreck.”

I pursed my lips. I wished there
had
been a train wreck. “Well, okay. I just don't want to get in the habit of being overwordy. Sometimes I'm afraid I go on. . . .”

“No, sir. You're creating context, that's all. And atmosphere. Now, listen, this is really good: Police Pursue the Wrong Person. That grabs you right off. For the reader to find out that baby was a boy, not a girl! My God, you really do have sources, girl!”

Mr. Gumbrel was not reading aloud; I was reading over his shoulder. If I say so myself, I really liked the music-moonlight-dancing-ladder construction. It all sounded dreamy. And sinister. What was that ladder doing there? Well, I know now: nothing.

I had not named Gloria Spiker as the babysitter, thinking she certainly didn't need the bad publicity. Anyway, everyone knew who the babysitter was.

And I did not name Carl Mooma as my source, for the same reason.

S
he was back.

 

Less than twenty-four hours later and here she was.

When I returned around 1 P.M. from my visit to the
Conservative,
Ree-Jane was sitting on the front porch, rocking away, smiling in her huge, vacant way at nothing unless it was me getting out of the cab.

Only now the smile was beating down on me with a kind of victory over anything that stood in her path. If you could put lipstick on a steamroller, that was what it would be like, that smile bearing down.

After I slammed the cab door on Delbert's monologue, I climbed the steps. “You're up early,” I said, flopping down in the chair beside her.

That kind of threw her. “What?”

I yawned as if she'd never been away.

She was wearing a bunch of silver bangles, and she ran them up and down her arm. “It was just temporary.”

“What was?” Her life, I hoped.

She was really frustrated. “My . . . fugue state.”

Whatever “fugue” meant, it wasn't Ree-Jane's state.

She leaned her head back and smiled up at the porch light or at the collection of moths at its bottom, dead or in a fugue state. “Rafe is wonderful, isn't he?”

“No,” I said.

“What? What do you mean, ‘No'?”

“No, he isn't wonderful.”

Now she leaned, as if in confidence sharing, over the arm of her chair, close to me. “We wouldn't be just a teensy bit jealous, would we?” Back on track.

“Why would I be jealous of Ralph?”

“Rafe, not Ralph.”

“Why would I be jealous of Ray?”

“
Rafe,
for God's sake.
Rafe
.”

“Why would I?”

Her flushed face was what Emily Dickinson might have found “hectic.” “I don't mean of him. I mean jealous of
us
!”

I feigned puzzlement. “Why would I be jealous of us?” I could have kept this up all afternoon if I hadn't been due in the kitchen ten minutes before.

Now she brought a fist down on the chair arm. “Not you and me! Me and Ralph.”

“Rafe.”

She flew up, sending her chair back on its rockers. “Oh, you think you're so smart!”

Back on track.

As she slammed the screen door, I set my hand on her vacated chair, rocking crazily—me, the great calmer.

 

I was, of course, avidly interested in what had happened and made a beeline for the kitchen, where my mother used her most guilt-inducing tone.

“I'd think you'd manage to get here on time to serve Mr. Muggs.”

Mr. Muggs was the Poor Soul whom I had glimpsed through the dining room window above the wooden walk that ran from the side door to the kitchen.

“He's been waiting for nearly a quarter of an hour and so have Miss Bertha and Mrs. Fulbright.”

I leaned stiff-armed on the counter. “I was stopped on the porch. Ree-Jane's back.”

My mother tapped her wooden spoon against a double boiler containing what smelled divinely of her creamed chicken. “I know. A nurse at Tri-State called her mother this morning. Ralph went to get her.”

I waited but there was no further comment. Of course not, as there was food to be served. She had split buttermilk biscuits and arranged them on plates, and now was pouring the creamed chicken over one, adorning it with a little pimiento strip and parsley sprig. To the plate she added her vivid green peas and a broiled tomato. Carefully, she wiped a tiny overflow of gravy from the rim of the plate. It looked, as always, artful. Sometimes she sifted a mixture of ground peanuts, paprika, and a mystery spice over the top of this dish, but not today.