Homeplace (13 page)

So by default, the Winship house had become Lytton’s unofficial “great house,” and though Fletcher Grubbs and his followers had meant only to wound Mike with their taunts of “Winship Mansion,” she secretly relished the name, and felt, sailing into each defensive fistfight, that she was protecting the escutcheon of a grand and honored family seat. Privately, she came to love being Princess Chickenhead of the Winship Mansion. It gave her the only distinction she knew for a long time, until Bayard Sewell arrived and bestowed upon her the status of his girl, and indirectly, John Winship’s daughter.

The house did not look grand now. It looked, flattened under the hammer of the midafternoon sun, totally unremarkable and, simply, small. The vast green lawn had somehow, in these ensuing years, shrunk to ordinary proportions, and the great hydrangeas were pruned stumps now, so that the pitted brick and lattice foundation of the house showed through on either side of the steps. All the shrubbery had been cut back to nearly ground level, in fact, and the lawn, though freshly cut, was the whitened green of summer-scorched Bermuda grass. The old oaks still spread protective arms over the gabled and mansarded roof, and the side porches were again purple with wisteria, but the concrete front walk was cracked in several places and the sun had burnt the smart whiteness out of the paint, so that the house seemed to bleed into the milky no-color of the blinding sky. Doors and windows were closed, and several upstairs and one downstairs window had laboring air conditioners churning in them. Mike could hear them through the closed windows of
the Pontiac, and the stuttering drone of a power mower somewhere out of sight.

Duck Wingo got out of the car and came around to her side, and simultaneously J.W. Cromie came around the side of the house, pushing the power mower, and stopped, mower still running, and stood still, looking at her.

Mike felt a powerful jolt somewhere in the core of her, a jolt, then a stopping, and then a forward lurching, as if some interior motor had stalled and then regained itself. For a moment she felt very dizzy. Impressions flooded her; not memories, nothing so concrete, but visual images and a kaleidoscope of sensations, none of which she could seem to sort out or name. She sat on the edge of the car’s front seat, one foot on the curb beside the old, softly hollowed carriage block that had always stood there, and looked back at J.W. She had no idea he was still in Lytton. Priss Comfort had written her, soon after she had married Richard Singer and begun college at Radcliffe, that J.W. had moved to Atlanta and started a little lawn service business. Mike had been glad to hear the news, had felt, somehow, faintly vindicated.

She got out of the car stiffly, very conscious of her thinness, her pallor, the oversized black sunglasses and huge, battered Gucci tote that had been everywhere with her during the past ten years of assignments, her soft, slender Italian shoes. All spoke of citiness; seemed suddenly effete, alien. In the shadowless light J.W. seemed to have been untouched by the years. His yellowish, Indian-cast face was unmarked and his tall body lounged over the mower with a deceptive indolence that came sharply back to her. His mouth still had its sweet, adenoidal looseness, which sometimes had made him appear simpleminded to people who did not know him. His eyes were not the same, though. Once they had been deep, liquid with a kind of extra light, rich
like wet black winter leaves. They were flat and opaque now, like dried river pebbles. He stood beside the stilled mower and looked at them, not moving forward. Mike felt a smile of involuntary pleasure curving her mouth. She started toward him, arms outstretched.

He stepped back slightly from her arms.

“Hey, Miss Mike,” he said.

She faltered and stared. “Good God, J.W., what’s this Miss business? This is me. I’m glad to see you; I didn’t know you were in Lytton. You look good. You look fine, J.W., just like you always did. Tell me what’s been happening with you …”

Aware that she was chattering, she stopped.

“Nothin’ much be happenin’ in Lytton, look like,” J.W. said, looking thoughtfully at something in the distance, and then up at the sun. He squinted.

“You lookin’ good too, Miss Mike. We hears about you down here …”

DeeDee cut in brightly, “J.W. helps us and Daddy in the yard and around the house, and drives for Daddy sometimes, and I don’t know what on earth we’d do without him. He works down at the cemetery in the mornings, too. Come on, you all can catch up later. It’s almost time for Daddy’s nap, and he gets sort of confused if he misses it.”

She took Mike’s arm and steered her up the crazed front walk. J.W. touched the bill of his Atlanta Braves baseball cap and turned away. He did not smile, and had not, and something akin to sullenness washed his mustardy face. Mike knew that J.W. had no sullenness in him. She felt like an actor in a play for which she had no script. What was the sense of that Negro dialect? She had not heard it from a black in years, only from the sort of whites she refused to know. J.W. had always spoken fairly precisely. Rusky, who had not, had insisted that he do so. She stopped on the walkway and pulled her arm out of DeeDee’s grasp.

“How long has J.W. been doing yard work for you and Daddy?” she asked.

“Oh, ever since right after you left,” DeeDee said. “Priss set him up in a little lawn business here, but nothing would do but Atlanta, so he went up there to make his fortune. It lasted about six months. What does J.W. know about running a business? He came dragging back here, but nobody in Lytton would hire him after … well, you know. Daddy took him in and gave him that room over the garage free and paid him a little something to keep the place up, and he’s been here ever since. He has a hot plate and a shower, and Daddy gave him some old furniture and a bed, and he has the job at the cemetery. Daddy got him that, too. He gets by real nicely. He’s real comfortable.”

Mike’s face burned. John Winship had obviously felt obligated to help the badly used J.W. back onto the path from which she had so disastrously led him, and in doing so had cast around J.W. bars as real as those in the Fulton County Jail. For a moment she felt hot anger at both of them. Why on earth had J.W. accepted such an ignominous patronage? Surely there were other towns, other jobs.

She looked over her shoulder at J.W., who was retreating around the side of the house, the mower grumbling once again. He wore what might have been the same faded overalls and work shirt that he had worn the day the two of them took the bus to Atlanta to join the protesters at Jojo’s. It struck Mike that they would be considered chic now in the circles in which she moved in New York. Derek Blessing sometimes affected the identical costume, especially if photographers were going to be present.

“Come on,” DeeDee said again, and Mike took a deep breath that whistled a little in her dry nostrils, and went into the house to meet her father.

At first she could see nothing; the gloom in the foyer
was so intense, and the sunlight she had just left so bright. The Xanax calm cracked and broke. She felt the sudden panic of the blind person confronted by danger, but unable to see it. Her heart began the frantic, caged-bird struggling in her throat, and the buzzing fear ran up her arms. She thought she might faint, there in that same shadowy foyer that she had left in such pain so long ago, and for a moment the thought held great and simple charm and succor. Just not to be here, not to be …

There was a movement in the gloom, and a wheelchair slid forward into the dusty sunlight filtering through the front door, and she saw him. Or saw, at least, a skeleton, a corpse, a cadaver, peering up at her from the sterile armature of the aluminum chair. She thought, suddenly and wildly, of a movie she had seen when she was ten or eleven that had frightened her so intensely that she sometimes still had nightmares about it, a movie called I
Walked with a Zombie
, in which a ghastly, enormously tall, impossibly gaunt Negro zombie stumbled blindly and inexorably after assorted shrieking young women on a dark beach in Haiti, the only sounds the huge, misshapen feet dragging in the sand and the eerie crooning of the warm night wind. The figure in the chair, the parchment face that looked up at her, wrecked and frozen, reminded her of the Negro zombie. But it was not black, and it was not dead; it only seemed so. It was the waxen yellow-white of the supermarket menorah candles Richard’s family had used, and it was her father’s. It must be. Was this not her father’s house?

There was nothing in this creature of the man whose lean face she had last seen frozen in anger on this spot more than twenty years before. This man’s face was set in its own wreckage. This man was completely bald, the skull the decayed mottle of a long-rotted egg. This man was unspeakably frail, almost luminous, and bowed in
the chair, and the gray eyes did not move or blink as he peered up at her. There was a sheen of tears in them, the easy tears of weakness, illness, age; they had nothing to do with greeting or memory. Even in the long moment of ringing shock, Mike knew that. One corner of the mouth and an eyebrow were drawn down into a permanent grimace. A transparent yellow hand plucked mechanically at the thermal blanket tucked around him. His breathing was light and shallow and audible, but he made no other sound.

Something in Mike unclenched, relaxed so suddenly that it left her limp and hollow-feeling, scooped out. Her head rang with lightness and her knees and elbows felt unjointed. She thought again that she might collapse onto the foyer rug. There was nothing here of the tall, remote presence that had shadowed her childhood. This husk was not her father. There was not, in this house, anything left that could hurt her now.

Mike moved forward a little, but did not speak. A kind of deliverance leaped in her. The beginnings of safety sang in her head.

“Well,” John Winship said. His voice was thin and querulous, high and fretful as a child’s. No one’s voice that she knew. Not, certainly, a voice that could flay one alive. Gone, that voice. Gone.

“So here you are.”

“Here I am,” Mike said. She tried a smile. It stretched her dry mouth, a polite, social rictus.

“You by yourself?” he said, after a space of silence in which his breathing came and went like a flaccid August tide.

“You mean did I bring my Jew husband and Jew child?” Mike said, with something mimicking amusement. “No.”

He appeared not to have registered that.

“Did they tell you I couldn’t take care of myself?” he said, and his voice seemed to pick up life and strength
with use. “You think you had to come all the way down here from New York or wherever it is and look after me?”

“Daddy!” DeeDee bleated breathlessly. “You
know
we talked about this! You know you said you thought it would be a good idea if Mikie came; you know I’ve got Mama Wingo at my house now and I just can’t …”

The desiccated figure held up one hand. It was as spotted and brittle as a November leaf; light came through it, outlining clean old bones.

“Daddy …” DeeDee began again.

“Be quiet, Daisy,” John Winship said irritably. “I know what I said. I just wanted to see if Micah knew what she was getting into. Wanted to see if you all had told her the real score. Did they tell you about the diapers, Micah? Did they tell you they have to hand-feed me like a little bird, bite by bite? Tell you about havin’ to hold my pecker so the piss won’t go all over the—”

“Daddy!”
DeeDee squalled. Her chins quivered. “That’s not the truth! You know you can eat and … everything else … as well as you ever could! What on earth has gotten into you, lying to Mike like that? You know you’re the one that asked for her in the first place!”

A cracked, keening sound came from the old man’s mouth, or from half of it, and Mike thought for a second that he was crying, but then she realized that the sound was laughter, and that the tears that runneled from the staring eyes were those of glee. Revulsion and relief, polar twins, leaped in her. She smiled around them.

“Just wanted to see if Micah had any of the common touch left, a high-falutin’ big writer like her, down here to spread joy amongst us peasants,” John Winship said. “Just wanted to see if you had any life in you still, Daisy. Gettin’ boring in your middle age, you are.”

DeeDee sniffed and laid her hand none too gently on her father’s shoulder.

“Let’s move you out on the sun porch where it’s lighter, Daddy,” she said. “You and Mikie can chat a little, and then it’s time for your nap. Sounds like you need it today.”

He shrugged off her hand as if it were a biting insect and peered up at Mike again.

“Just a minute,” he said. “Stay where you are, Micah. Want you to meet somebody. Daisy, go get us some iced coffee. There’s some still left in the pot from breakfast. Take Duck with you.”

“Daddy, you’ll never get to sleep if you have iced coffee now, and you need your nap …” DeeDee started in.

“Better make it buttermilk, Pop. Good for what ails you.” Duck Wingo beamed ferociously.

“DeeDee, I want that coffee
now, “
the wrecked man in the chair said in a soft, dangerous slide of voice, fully a register lower than the cracked chime that he had been using, and for a terrifying eyeblink Mike was a child standing in disgrace before a man whom her viscera remembered better than her mind. Then the impression was gone. DeeDee turned silently and made for the kitchen, vast and blue. Duck padded behind her, heavy-haunched in straining polyester plaid. John Winship made a motion with his autumnal hand and a man came out of the dark-shuttered living room behind him.

“Sam, this is Micah Winship,” John Winship said over his shoulder. He did not say “my daughter.”

“Micah Singer, I believe she is now. A famous lady writer, or so they tell me. Come all the way back here to clean up my slops. Micah, this is Sam Canaday. My lawyer. Excuse me, Sam, my attorney of record.”

He grinned, a feral, death’s-head grin. The man at his side grinned back and then looked at Mike and put out his hand.

“Evenin’, Miz Winship,” he said. “Or Singer. It’s a real pleasure to meet Lytton’s most famous native daughter. Though a pity it had to be under these circumstances. But a real honor just the same. I’ve read your work often, of course.”