Homeplace (15 page)

She got out of the bathtub and scrubbed her body with the thin, grainy old towel, and wrapped her hair in another, and stepped into bikini pants and bra from her suitcase. She rummaged for slacks, and then, on impulse, went to the great old mahogany bureau against
the far wall of the bedroom and opened the drawers. The various mothballed years of her life lay there, neatly folded by some hand other than hers. Who could have put them there? Rusky was years dead when she had left this house, DeeDee married and gone, John Winship unthinkable. In the bottom drawer she found and put on a faded-to-milk-white pair of blue jeans she must have had when she was a preteen, because they still bore the name tag that Rusky had sewn into her clothes when she went away to Camp Greystone, and that had been when she was eleven. The blue jeans fit; were, in fact, a little loose in the waist. She grimaced at her thinness. In another drawer she found T-shirts and put on one that had the face of Mickey Mouse on it. Like the blue jeans, it was clean and faded and smelled of mothballs and fit loosely. Mike remembered her joy at joining the Mickey Mouse Club, the new and warming sense of belonging that flooded her when she became a Mouseketeer. In the bureau’s wavery, bluish mirror, her face looked back at her as if up through water, and her eyes, large and light and slightly puffed from sleep, could have been the eyes that first gleamed silver with joy at being one of Mickey’s children. She anchored the towel into a damp turban with an old leopard-printed scarf and padded, barefoot, down the stairs and through the foyer into the kitchen.

Her father was there, sitting, not in the wheelchair, but in one of the blue and white chrome chairs that matched a hideous dinette set she had not seen before. A small Sony TV set on the counter next to a new microwave oven brayed out a game show; captive in it, a fat girl and a chinless young man jumped up and down in slack-mouthed excitement. Her father was staring expressionlessly at the set while a cup of coffee cooled in front of him. A barely touched plate of toast and scrambled eggs sat on the table in front of him, and a jar of strawberry preserves with a spoon in it. While she
watched, he reached over and dug a heaping spoonful of the viscous red substance out of the jar and put it into his mouth, not taking his eyes off the Sony. Some of the preserves missed his mouth on the side that curved downward into his neck, and clung there on his chin, glistening. He did not seem to notice. A soapy clink sounded from across the room then, and Mike looked in the direction of the sound. Sam Canaday stood at the sink, his back just as broad in an improbable cotton-knit burgundy this morning, his arms disappearing up to the elbows in dishwater. The round clock over the stove said quarter past eleven.

“Is it possible to get some of that coffee?” Mike said over the idiot babbling of the game-show host, who was visibly flinching away from the embrace of the fat girl. She had obviously won something of great value to her.

John Winship’s eyes swung away from the set and fastened on her blankly for a moment, as if he did not know who she was. She saw recognition come into them then, and a kind of narrow life, as if he had focused them on her with the intent to memorize her. Sam Canaday turned from the sink, his lifted hands dripping. He wore, this morning, appalling plaid polyester beltless slacks of the kind called Sansabelt, in shades of burgundy, pink, white, and yellow, and his burgundy polo shirt had an alligator on it. On his feet he wore, instead of the cowboy boots, white bucks of a blinding cleanliness. The effect was that of a voyager on a cut-rate cruise ship plying between Miami and San Juan. The tan of his face and the tow-yellow of his hair, more apparent in the light-flooded kitchen, heightened the door-prize-cruise effect. He grinned the wolf’s-head grin.

“Morning, Miz Singer,” he said. “Trust we didn’t wake you carousing over brunch down here. Have a seat, there’s fresh coffee perking, and some cheese Danish in the oven.”

“Just coffee, thank you,” Mike said primly. The sight of him, pastel and bustling in this familiar kitchen, irritated her with its easy presumption of belonging; she almost felt as though she were the visitor to this house, and not he. But she was glad, on the whole, that she would not be alone with John Winship just yet. She glanced at him. He was staring at her as though in disapproval, but that might have been the newly canted scowl the stroke had painted on his mouth and eyebrow.

“Good morning,” she said to him, rather formally. She still had trouble with “Daddy,” and she had never said “Father.”

“I hope you had a good night. I certainly did. I don’t think I turned over once.”

“Well, you’ve got another think coming,” John Winship cackled at her. “You rolled and wallowed like a forty-dollar mule with the colic. Hollered out once, too. Could hear you all the way downstairs. Thought you were having a fit.”

Abruptly one side of his mouth flew up, and she realized he was smiling with the same glee he had shown when tormenting DeeDee the day before.

“Sam, get her some milk and pablum,” he said. “Can’t give coffee to a baby. This here’s a baby, all dressed up in mouse clothes and a big bow on her head. Thought we had us a big-shot writer from New York down here, but this isn’t anything but a baby.”

Outside of the bell jar, Mike saw anger. It swam up to the edge of the glass globe that enclosed her and bumped against it like a shark in an aquarium, looking in, but it did not penetrate. She studied the gaunt man in the chair, thinking again, as she had the previous day, that there was nothing of her father left in him. The difference seemed to go even deeper today; this man seemed not changed from the man she had left in the twilit foyer twenty-two years before, but another man entirely. This man seemed never to have been different
from the way he was now. The shape of feature, play of muscle, cant of mind, pattern of speech, manner of thinking and speaking … all were the property of this wrecked man, coarse and simplified into caricature. That other man … slim, austere, fine-bladed, wounding … was gone from this house.

“Well, this baby has fallen into some bad habits and needs her coffee,” she said.

“Coming up,” said Sam Canaday. “Mind your mouth, Colonel. Miz Singer would be within her rights if she booted you in the bee-hind. Besides, I think she looks cute as a bug in those britches and that T-shirt. Vintage Mickey Mouse Club, if I’m not mistaken.”

“You’re not,” Mike said crisply. The “bee-hind” and “bug” grated on her ear as if he had scraped his fingernails down a chalkboard.

“Were you one of us?” she asked acidly. She could not imagine this man’s feral white smile over a Mickey Mouse T-shirt.

“Charter member,” he said. “First Mouseketeer in Birmingham. Almost the last, too. The only thing they knew to do with mice in the part of town I grew up in was to shoot ‘em or squash ‘em with a baseball bat. Rats, rather. They were native fauna in Elyton Village.”

Mike wondered detachedly how this crude, square man from the smoldering, sunless slums of Birmingham, Alabama, had won the right to be called attorney, practice law; had found his way to Lytton, Georgia, and into this house. She thought dispassionately that he might well be the charlatan DeeDee pronounced him to be, and that the association might be disastrous for her father. Her imagination played around the edges of Sam Canaday, nibbled desultorily at the potential drama of the situation. But the new peace was too seamless to permit much mental effort, and too attractive to risk it. She concluded, after a brief scan of the possibilities, that her father was, after all, an attorney himself, and a
good one, and should surely know the difference between one of his kind and an outright inept. Also, the association had to it the patina of long wear and comfortable use, and surely must have been formed well before John Winship’s illness. Mike let the opening gambit about Sam Canaday’s background lie where he had tossed it and drank the coffee that he set before her. It was good, fresh and strong; perked, not instant. She was surprised to find that she was hungry.

She finished the warm cheese Danish in silence and had another cup of coffee. Sam Canaday dried and put away the dishes they had used, ignoring the dishwasher that squatted now under the counter beside the sink. Looking around the kitchen, Mike saw other labor-saving devices that had not been there when she had left: a disposal switch, a food processor, a gleaming mixer stand bristling with attachments, the microwave she had noticed before. DeeDee may have spent her days laboring in her father’s kitchen, but she had had, to be sure, a space-age arena for her labors. It occurred to Mike to wonder who had paid for the appliances. Not, she would have bet, Duck Wingo.

She flexed her bare foot idly in a shaft of sunlight, watching the fine bones play beneath the bluish-white skin. The same sun, not yet savage with noon, was warm between her shoulder blades, and Sam Canaday had switched off the television set and turned on the radio. A little Haydn quartet poured into the room, like water pouring over crystal, and he did not move to change the station, but hummed along with the radio under his breath as he moved about the kitchen, occasionally conducting with a soapy forefinger. Her father dozed in the chair, his chin nodding to his chest and jerking upward, then nodding again. He had said nothing further. Mike supposed that he must sleep or doze much of the time, and was grateful. It would spare conversation. She felt lulled and mindless, as floated on the
pure ontology of the moment as an animal with a full belly in the sun. It was not content; more nonbeing. She could not remember a moment in her life like it, no eyeblink of time in which she did not yearn toward something, was not focused upon something.

The Haydn spilled to an end and an announcer’s lugubrious voice said, “This is WABE, the Voice of the Arts in Atlanta. That concludes our Second Cup Concert for this morning. Stay tuned—” and Sam Canaday clicked it off and sat down at the table opposite Mike, scraping his chair loudly and thumping down a half-full cup of coffee. John Winship jerked and slid dull old eyes toward the two of them from under half-lowered turtle’s lids.

“We need to talk a little business, Miz Singer, and then I’ll get on down to the office and let you and the Colonel get acquainted,” he said. “I’d have made myself scarce this morning, but I thought you could use some sleep.” His voice was different, somehow, quicker, deeper. The thick-flowing banter was gone out of it.

“By all means, let’s do,” Mike said. “And call me Mike, for God’s sake, or Micah, or anything but Miz Singer. I’m not Mrs. Singer anymore, and I never used it anyway.”

“I know,” he said. “As I said, I’ve seen your by-line every now and then. Micah Winship. For the longest time I thought you were a man.”

“Sorry to disappoint you,” Mike said, flicked through the bell jar by the tiniest refraction of irritation. Why did that all-too-understandable assumption suddenly rankle? “You were saying about business?” she went on.

“Yeah. Well, I think you need to understand the basis you’ll be operating the house on, where the money stands, what’s outstanding, and so on. It’s not complicated, but it’s a little unusual …”

“I don’t need to know at all, and I don’t want to,” Mike said. “I’m really not going to be here that long. You must know that DeeDee will be finding me some live-in help for … my father … and as soon as that’s done and she and I are satisfied that things are running smoothly, I’ll be going back …”

“Back to New York?”

“Yes, of course New York. Where did you think?”

“Just making conversation. Well, I’m sorry to hear that, and I’m sure the Colonel is, too. We’d hoped you’d be able to stay awhile, get reacquainted with your folks and the town, all that. Everybody’s mighty curious about you, anxious to meet you. You’re our only claim to fame, you know.”

He spoke of Lytton as though it had been his town since birth, and Mike felt the faint smoke-curl of irritation again.

“I’ll just bet they are,” she said. “But Lytton’s in pretty bad shape if I’m the only thing between it and obscurity. No, of course I’ll be here for a while … two or three weeks; I’m not going to run off and leave DeeDee with everything on her hands. I just want to know what sort of household account I have to draw from, and where … he does his banking now, and what I have to do to get power of attorney. I guess you can handle that for me.”

“As a matter of fact, I have power of attorney,” Sam Canaday said. He did not say anything else. Across the table, John Winship raised his head and looked straight at Mike. He grinned openly and unmistakably, an evil old goat’s grin.

“You have power of attorney?” Mike parroted. She felt simple incredulity. Why would this poor-white upstart have power of attorney over John Winship’s assets? Why not DeeDee, if her father was incapable of managing his money, which she did not think that he was. Was her sister right, after all?

“That’s right. The Colonel thought it would be less worry for Miz Wingo … for DeeDee … if she had a set amount of cash to work with every week and didn’t have to worry about paying bills and tending to everything else. I just give it to her every Monday morning … and it’s a right generous piece of change, too, if I may say so … and I handle everything else, pay the bills, all the other expenses. It’s worked out right well. Of course, if you want to change the arrangement …”

He looked, not at her, but at John Winship. The old man blinked slowly, like a desiccated snapping turtle on a sunny rock, and then gave one of the surprising bleats of cracked laughter.

“Don’t see any reason to change things if Micah’s only going to be here a little while,” he said. “Don’t reckon she needs to bother with it. Of course, if she needs some spending money, we can fatten up that envelope some. Don’t guess she does, though. She must be rich by now.”

“I’ve got money,” Mike said tersely. She did, but it was dwindling fast. The plane fare to Atlanta and the storage bill for her furniture had eaten drastically into her checking account, and the savings account had always been slender. She did not want to think of the publisher’s advance that must now be repaid, or what a new apartment would cost her, in the event that she was able to find one. And there was no way, now, to know what Rachel’s needs would be … She willed the thoughts beyond the confines of the bell jar, and they slunk there.