Gilda Joyce: The Bones of the Holy (17 page)

Mr. Furbo turned to an antique side table, opened a drawer, and pulled out a leather photograph album. “I believe the last picture we have of Charlotte was her engagement photo,” he said, flipping through the pages. “But I don't look at these anymore.”

Mr. Furbo thrust the photo album across the table toward Gilda. “There she is,” he said.

Gilda looked at the black-and-white photograph of a pretty young woman with dark, wavy hair that tumbled over her shoulders.
He's right,
she thought.
She does resemble Mom, even though Mom looks much older.
Something about the girl's hazel eyes and tentative smile looked very much like the pictures Gilda had seen from her mother's youth. On the other hand, Gilda thought that Charlotte's look was dreamier—more romantic and feminine than the old photos of Patty Joyce that usually featured bad hairstyles, blue jeans, and cheap platform shoes.

“She's cute,” said Mrs. Joyce, a hint of jealousy in her voice.

“Stop complimenting yourself,” Mr. Furbo joked.

Mrs. Furbo emerged from the kitchen with bowls of chowder balanced on a silver tray. “I made your favorite, Eugene!” Mrs. Furbo announced.

Maybe she's in a better mood now that she's done cooking,
Gilda thought.

“Patty and Gilda, you're in for a treat,” said Eugene. “Traditional Minorcan clam chowder!”

“It's not as traditional as we'd
like
it to be,” said Mrs. Furbo.

“Right. The old favorite was actually the gopher stew,” Eugene explained.

“Gophers?!”
Mrs. Joyce froze, peering down at her bowl of soup as if it might contain snakes.

“Mom, he means the gopher
tortoise
,” said Gilda, proud that she had already learned this bit of local history from Captain Jack.

“Oh,” said Mrs. Joyce, who clearly didn't feel much better about the idea of gopher tortoises. “Well. I don't believe we have gopher tortoises in Michigan.”

“You didn't tell me they were from
Michigan
!” Mr. Furbo put down his spoon and fixed Eugene with an accusing stare.

“What's wrong with Michigan?” Gilda asked.

“What's
not
wrong with Michigan?”

Gilda sensed that he was only teasing, but she restrained an impulse to get into an argument in defense of her home state.
I need to stay on his good side if I'm going to learn any top secret information about Charlotte,
she reminded herself.

“We always had the gopher tortoise stew at holidays and family reunions,” Mrs. Furbo lamented. “Then they went and made it illegal to eat it.”

So these are the people who might eat a gopher tortoise if they got a chance,
Gilda thought. She remembered how Captain Jack had looked at her suspiciously.
“You'd be surprised at how many folks would eat one of these,”
he had said.

“The gopher tortoise is an endangered species,” Eugene explained. “Or close to endangered, anyway.”

“Oh, there's plenty of 'em!” Mrs. Furbo flicked her hand with a dismissive wave. “I've seen 'em, anyway. You just have to know where to look.”

Gilda wondered what Captain Jack would say if he were here at the table. She guessed he would explain how the gopher tortoise habitat had been broken up by parking lots and highways. She also sensed that there would be no end to the argument if she attempted to stick up for the rights of gopher tortoises—or for that matter, anything else that threatened to change some of the old family traditions.

“Go on—dig in!” said Mr. Furbo.

Eugene slurped some clam chowder, leaving a milky stain on his mustache. “This is mighty good, Theresa!”

Mrs. Furbo shook her head. “It's not near as good as the gopher stew would have been.”

“Now, let me tell you something about gopher tortoises,” said Mr. Furbo, addressing Gilda as if he were about to begin an educational lecture. “Back when my daughter, Charlotte, was little, whenever I found a gopher burrow on our property, I'd dig a hole about four feet down to wherever it was hiding in the burrow. Then I'd grab little Charlotte by the legs, pick her up, and lower her headfirst down into the gopher burrow. From a young age, she was a natural. In a minute she'd grab that big ole tortoise and pull it out for me. Then we'd go prepare the gopher stew together. . . .” His voice trailed off, and he looked suddenly stricken with the weight of a terrible memory.

Is he nostalgic for the old days when Charlotte was around? Or is he just sad about not being able to eat gopher tortoises?
Gilda wondered. To the Furbos, the animal seemed to represent a lost history—perhaps a simpler life that had disappeared.

“It sounds like you miss seeing your daughter,” said Mrs. Joyce, gently.

Mr. Furbo shook his head, as if trying to physically shake off the sad feelings. “No,” he said with surprising emphasis. “
She
made her choice.”

Mrs. Furbo looked grim.

“What
choice
?” Gilda asked, now feeling as if she was going to die of curiosity if someone didn't tell her the whole story about Charlotte soon.
Whatever the choice was,
she thought,
it seemed to have had the effect of ending her relationship with her entire family.

“Bob,” said Eugene, obviously hoping to change the topic of conversation, “why don't you tell Patty and Gilda how you used to make the gopher stew?”

“But—” Gilda was still desperate to talk about Charlotte. She was sure that Mr. Furbo had been on the verge of revealing some juicy piece of information.

“Well, after you manage to catch the gopher,” said Mr. Furbo, “you whack it real hard on the back of the shell so the legs come out. Then you grab a hatchet and cut down each side, take off the toenails, cut out the guts, and don't forget to eat the eggs—that's the best part. Then just cook it up with some datil pepper, onions, bacon fat, garlic, potatoes, and whatever else you want to throw in there. Charlotte just loved it when she was a kid.”

“Until she became one of those animal rights people and wouldn't help you do that no more,” said Mrs. Furbo angrily. She regarded Gilda and Mrs. Joyce with a deadpan expression. “
You
aren't vegetarians, are you?”

“If it walks, I eat it,” Gilda quipped, half wondering if they might have some poor gopher tortoise hiding in the kitchen that she would be forced to kill to prove herself.

“Because we don't allow vegetarians in our house.”

I think she might actually be serious,
Gilda thought. “Is Charlotte still a vegetarian?” Gilda had struck a nerve; there was a silence before anyone answered.

“We don't know,” said Mrs. Furbo. She stood up abruptly and began to gather empty soup bowls. She paused and stared at Mrs. Joyce's virtually untouched soup. “What's the matter? You're not hungry?”

“Don't worry; there's no gopher tortoises in there,” Mr. Furbo joked.

“It's delicious,” said Mrs. Joyce, who was suddenly fighting a queasy stomach that had more to do with nerves than the clam chowder.

“Small appetite, huh?” Mr. Furbo chuckled. “Sounds like Patty here is like Charlotte in more ways than just looks!”

“I'll leave that chowder there for you to
finish
,” said Mrs. Furbo, still frowning at Mrs. Joyce as if she were a petulant child. “It's perfectly good chowder, and I don't want it to go to waste!”

“Thank you, Theresa, but I'm not your child,” Mrs. Joyce blurted, shocking everyone at the table.

Even Gilda was surprised. Her mother normally reserved her most direct, critical statements for her children.
Uh-oh,
Gilda thought
. Sounds like the wedding stress is starting to get to Mom
.

“Oh ho! You'd better watch this one, Eugene,” Mr. Furbo joked, pointing an accusing finger at Mrs. Joyce. “Next thing you know, she'll up and leave you for a colored man just like Charlotte did!”

The atmosphere in the room turned brittle. Gilda's jaw dropped with surprise at the revelation of this detail about Charlotte's past, not to mention the reality of lingering racist views in the Furbo family. Mrs. Joyce lowered her eyes as if she were a teenager who had just been reprimanded by an authoritarian father. Eugene seemed to concentrate very hard on the process of buttering his dinner roll.

Gilda was torn between an intense desire to escape the room and never return and a wish that her mother would say something—anything—to let both Mr. Furbo and Eugene know what she thought of the tactless comment.

Taking a deep breath, Gilda resolved to turn her attention back to the task of finding out more about Charlotte. She had to make sure she had this story straight. “Mr. Furbo,” she said, cautiously, “are you saying that Charlotte left Eugene to move to Europe with an African-American man?”

Mr. Furbo regarded Gilda with suspicion. “You can call it whatever you want, but the fact is that Charlotte ran off with a Black man, and I personally couldn't stand for that.”

So it wasn't just a bad breakup that happened between Eugene and Charlotte,
Gilda thought.
Charlotte had a total falling-out with her entire family!
Gilda looked at Mrs. Furbo to gauge whether she shared her husband's views, but her face was inscrutable.

“I couldn't forgive Charlotte for what she did,” said Mr. Furbo. “She knew how I felt about
that
. I told her; ‘You come home when you're done with this nonsense.'” He shook his head and tossed a napkin on the table with a violent gesture of disgust. “Well. She never did come home. She made her choice.”

Gilda felt a wave of sadness and something close to nausea.
It must have been hard for Charlotte to have Mr. and Mrs. Furbo as her parents when she was a kid,
Gilda thought.
I mean, what if my parents had said that Wendy's family should “move back to China” or that I shouldn't spend so much time with her?
Gilda tried to imagine what it would feel like to have parents who would make her choose between her relationship with a boyfriend—or any friend—and her family.
My family would never do that,
she realized. They might be mad at me, but they'd never tell me, “Don't come home.”

Maybe I'm lucky,
Gilda thought
. I mean, my family definitely isn't perfect—Stephen is a little selfish and Mom doesn't always believe my stories and Dad is dead and gone—but at least we're all free to be ourselves.

One thing was certain: The situation with Charlotte was far more complicated than Gilda had imagined. She hadn't expected the ghosts of a racially segregated past to play a role in this family drama.

“She made her choice,” Mrs. Furbo repeated. “She wanted nothing to do with us anymore.”

But you forced her to choose,
Gilda thought.
And now she's gone
.

Gilda now understood the hidden sadness that pervaded the Furbos' environment: Even as Mrs. Furbo served traditional favorites like shrimp with datil-pepper sauce and Mr. Furbo and Eugene spoke of favorite hunting trips, beautifully carved antique rifles, and the heroic survival stories of the Minorcan community in Florida, Gilda sensed that the reminiscences were not enough to overcome a missing piece.
They won't admit it,
Gilda thought,
but they miss Charlotte.

Without warning, the room went dark and something crashed to the floor. “Oh!” Mrs. Joyce cried out in surprise.

“What the blazes—” Mr. Furbo muttered.

“Must be a blown fuse,” Mrs. Furbo suggested.

“It's the wiring in these old houses,” Eugene suggested. “I have the same problem at my place lately.”

“Well, let's not just sit here like bumps on a log,” said Theresa. “I'll get a flashlight.”

Then, just as suddenly, all the lights came back on.

“That was strange,” said Mr. Furbo, gazing up at the overhead light fixture.

“Oh, I'm sorry!” Mrs. Joyce had just realized that her bowl of clam chowder had crashed to the floor after the lights went out, shattering and splattering soup everywhere. “That bowl just seemed to jump off the table!”

“I'll get some paper towels.” Theresa sounded annoyed; she clearly didn't believe that Mrs. Joyce's bowl had “jumped off the table.”

“Looks like you might have a poltergeist here, Mr. Furbo,” Gilda ventured, partly to gauge his reaction. “Does this sort of thing happen often?”

“There ain't no ghost but the Holy Ghost,” was Mr. Furbo's terse reply.

So that's where Eugene learned that phrase,
Gilda thought. But before she could ask any more questions, they were interrupted by the horribly loud metallic clatter of a large pot toppling from the kitchen stove onto the floor.

“Good night! Are you okay in there, Theresa?” Mr. Furbo called.

A moment later, a grim-looking Mrs. Furbo emerged from the kitchen, her apron completely soaked with clam chowder.

“Don't you say anything,” she snapped at Mr. Furbo.

“You're supposed to put it in your mouth, not take a bath in it!”

Gilda suppressed a sudden urge to giggle; Mrs. Furbo clearly didn't see any humor in the situation.

With everyone's help, Mrs. Furbo focused on cleaning up the spilled soup, refusing to speculate about the possible causes of the strange series of events. “I don't buy into that ghost-tour trash that goes on in the city these days,” was her snappish reply to Gilda's query about a possible ghost in the house.

Nevertheless, Gilda noticed that something about Mrs. Furbo's demeanor had changed following the poltergeist activity: Her hands now shook slightly as she cleared away dishes and served a peach pie for dessert. At the end of the meal, she joined her guests for pie and coffee, but her eyes darted strangely, as if scanning the room for the presence of some predator who might be lurking in the shadows.