New Mercies (5 page)

I walked past the mansion and crossed the street to where a stout woman in a housedress was deadheading rosebushes with a pair of scissors. “I have to search real sharp to find those driedup roses,” she said wiping her damp face with her arm. She wore elbow-length white gloves that had gone through at the tips of her fingers, not a bad use for worn-out evening gloves.

“I expect you’re visitin’?” she said.

I nodded.

“That’s Stanton Hall you was looking at. You should see it in the spring, when the jonquils are in bloom—just like sunshine spilled out on the ground.” She pointed with the scissors at the mansion, shuffled along a few steps, and reached deep into the rose hedge. She wore a man’s laceless brogans and old stockings, held up by garters, which showed when she raised her arms. The woman might have been a servant in that house, or maybe she was the owner. “Natchez was abloom with them houses back before the War—Dunleith, Magnolia Hall, D’Evereux, Avoca. I guess you heard of Avoca, where that goat lady got killed.”

“Yes.”

The woman made a clicking sound with her mouth, pushing out her right cheek as she did so. “Everybody has.” She eyed a bush and reached in to clip a dead rose, catching her glove on a thorn. “You know all about it, I suppose.”

“More than I care to.” My reply was sharper than it should have been.

“Well, kiss my foot!” The woman’s expletive was not due to my rudeness. She ignored me as she inspected a tiny spot of
blood spreading across the white fabric of her glove where a thorn had pushed through into her flesh. She mopped her face with her arm again, trying to recall what we had been talking about. Before she could do so, I waved my fingers at her and started on my way. But she remembered what she had been saying and called after me. “All I can say, missus, is there’s lots in the goat lady’s story besides the truth.”

M
Y FATHER, WHO HAD DIED
at the age of twenty-five, when I was three, was a dreamy presence in my life. His sepia photograph, in a silver frame engraved with the initials W.T.B., had stood on the mantelpiece until I was five and Mother married Henry Varian. Then the photograph was moved to my bedroom, where, in later years, it shared space with pictures of my favorite male moving-picture stars. Father seemed to be in the same category as the actors: a person to be admired from afar, someone who was not quite real. In his photograph, Father was young and handsome, a dark-eyed man with curly dark hair, his smile a little lopsided. He seemed tall, although the photograph showed him only from the shoulders up. He probably had been tall, however, because I am five eight. Mother was just over five feet, as was her mother, so my height probably came from Father’s side of the family. After awhile, the
picture became like the lamp or the black Van Briggle vase, a stationary object in my room, one that did not intrude into my consciousness but which left an empty space if it were moved. The photograph went into a drawer when I married, but I missed it, not because it showed my father, but because it was a familiar and comforting presence. So I put it on my dressing table, where it has sat to this day.

It undoubtedly would shock people in Natchez that, over the years, Father was not much in my thoughts. Mother rarely mentioned him. Perhaps his death had been so painful that she could not talk about him. She probably did not want me to feel the loss of him, and in those days, people believed if you didn’t talk about a thing, you would forget it. Mother and Henry had always had a good marriage, and Henry had been a wonderful parent to me, which was another reason I did not miss Father. Henry always seemed to be my real father, and perhaps I believed it would be disloyal to him to ask about Wink Bondurant.

After he and Mother had been married two years, Henry adopted me. “You’ll be Nora Varian,” Mother told me.

“No, I’m not. I’m Nora Bondurant.” Mother probably thought my objection to taking Henry’s name had something to do with my loyalty to Father, so she did not insist. But the real reason was that Bondurant was higher up in the alphabet. I had started school and knew that things were done alphabetically, and those at the end of the alphabet did not fare as well as those at the beginning. That same rationale came to mind fifteen years later, when I married David Tate, although the real reason I did not want to take David’s name was that Tate seemed like a borrowed name (which, in fact, it turned out to be). It would identify me
from then on as a wife, rather than as a person. Of course, I never told David that. It was unheard of and probably not even legal for a woman to keep her maiden name when she married. When, after ten years of marriage, David and I were divorced, the society editoress of the
Rocky Mountain News
referred to me as Mrs. Bondurant Tate, which would have been my proper name as a divorced woman—my maiden name followed by my married name. So I went to court and restored my own name, becoming Nora Bondurant once again. Bearing David’s name seemed a sham, and being called Mrs. Tate, as I was by those who didn’t know I’d dropped his name, made me relive those wretched times that I had tried to bury in a dark place inside myself.

Henry was a man of great character. When he married Mother, he insisted that Father’s money be put into a trust for me, which he managed even after I came of age. A lawyer and a banker, he was a shrewd investor. Shortly before the 1929 Wall Street crash, he sat down with me and said, “Snooks, my secretary told me this morning about a stock tip she heard on the Colfax trolley, and she went right down to the lobby, took out her savings, and put it all into those shares. She even recommended that I buy the stock. The market is full of fools who have no business investing. There’s bound to be a fall. I’m getting out while the getting’s good, and I advise you to do the same.”

“And what do you advise me to do with the money, Henry, put it under the mattress?”

“That’s probably a safer place than the market. Myself, I’m taking your Grandfather Bullock’s advice and investing in land. He said if things go bad, you can always farm it.”

So the two of us cashed in most of our stocks in the spring of 1929 and invested in real estate. I bought the Cardwell, the three-unit apartment building on Humboldt Street where David and I lived and which continued to be my home after he moved out, and two other buildings, just across Cheesman Park. After the divorce, I used the buildings as an excuse to give up the Junior League and other volunteer organizations, as well as golf and tennis outings. “I’m not a gay creature anymore. I’m just a working stiff now,” I told my friends. And they, knowing that so many in our set were experiencing financial difficulties, did not insist. I also began declining social invitations, although it became obvious after David moved out that the world operated on twos, and that as a single woman, I was not as welcome at social events as I once had been.

Even with the rental market off in Denver because of the Depression, my apartments, in a fashionable section of town, had few vacancies. So I never had to follow Grandfather Bullock’s advice and plant crops in the yard.

Although Mother would have preferred that I find another husband, she supported me in my work, probably thinking that being caught up in real estate would keep me from thinking too much about David. “And it’s a good excuse to avoid those gossipy little lunches at Baur’s and the Daniels & Fisher tearoom,” she’d told me once with a little too much enthusiasm.

“Yes, I can’t bear them. You can guess who’s the favorite topic of conversation. If I’m there, people are bound to bring up David’s name, or, even worse, they’ll scrupulously avoid mentioning him. Still, it’s only fair, since I’ve done my share of gossiping over the years.”

“Nora dear, you’re overreacting. You do have good friends. Caroline is a real stalwart.”

Caroline Bancroft, my friend since childhood, indeed had stood by me, suggesting when I left for Reno to get the divorce, “When you’re rid of the old boy, let’s the two of us take a steamer to the Orient.” We had not because Caroline had to work to support her mother. And I was in no mood for foreign travel.

“Name one besides Caroline,” I told Mother.

“Oh, I’m sure there are many.” She changed the subject. “I am proud of you, you know. You’re carrying on an independent tradition among the women of our family.” Indeed, after Father died and before she met Henry, Mother opened a millinery shop to support the two of us, rather than live off her parents. And her mother and grandmother had run a farm when my grandfather went off to fight for the Union in the War of Northern Aggression, as I had just learned to call it.

“That’s the stuff,” I replied cheerfully, although we both knew that my divorce was not in the family tradition.

I first read of Amalia Bondurant in the
Denver Post
. Handy Dan, who did odd jobs for me, had spent the day helping me clean out the flower beds and plant lilac bushes at the Cardwell. Since my divorce, I had become quite the gardener. The physical work felt good, and there was something soothing about watching my plants flourish. I’d even written a few articles on gardening that were published in the
Denver Post
, thanks to Caroline Bancroft, who was a reporter there.

At noon, the workman went to his rickety truck, with
HANDY DAN—NO JOB TO SMALL
on the driver’s door—the word
too
misspelled—and brought out a battered dinner bucket with a boiled potato and a chunk of hard bread inside.

I couldn’t let him eat such a pitiful lunch, so I said, “Why, Handy, I have the fixings for your lunch upstairs.”

“Oh, you don’t have to do that, Miss Nora.” He put the food back into the pail.

“You’ll hurt my feelings if you don’t eat it.” I hurried upstairs to my apartment and fixed sandwiches, and on impulse, I took two bottles of bootleg beer out of the icebox, opened them, and carried them down with the sandwiches and some cookies. I handed him a beer. “Here’s to you, Handy.”

“And right back at you, Miss Nora.”

We sat in the front yard, eating egg-salad sandwiches and drinking beer, and when the bottles were empty, we drank two more. It was strong stuff, and I got a little high. The afternoon was pleasant, since the gardener was not listening for hidden meanings in my talk. In fact, I had as good a time drinking beer with Handy Dan and talking about the best kind of manure to mix with soil as I’d ever had dishing the dirt over cocktails with my girlfriends at one of Denver’s speakeasies

When Handy Dan left, I went upstairs, dirty and tired, took a shower, and swallowed a couple of aspirin for my sore muscles. Then I mixed myself an Orange Blossom, heavy on the orange juice, light on the gin, because of the two beers; I didn’t want to wake up with a hangover, which had happened more often than it should have since my marriage fell apart. I carried the drink and the newspaper from the kitchen to the dining room and then into the little sunroom that looks out over the park. The
Post
,
Denver’s yellow journal, always had screaming headlines and stories on crime and human oddities played up on the front page. I subscribed partly because it was lively and partly because the owner, Frederick Bonfils, an acquaintance of my parents, had lived in a mansion just up the block from me on Humboldt Street. It had always seemed odd that no story was too vulgar for him to print, and yet he himself had been a gentleman with impeccable manners. When he had passed me walking in the park, he had never failed to remove his hat and say, “Good day, my dear Miss Bondurant. And how is your lovely mother?”

The
Post
had run a story about David’s death, under a banner headline, but the piece included few particulars. At first, it seemed that Mr. Bonfils, who was ill at the time and then died not long afterward, had held back in deference to Mother and Henry and me. But Henry dismissed that idea, snorting, “Even on his deathbed, old Bonfils would destroy his own mother’s reputation to sell newspapers.” So Mr. Bonfils had not known about David and me. Neither had Henry, for that matter.

The
Post
was delivered at home of an evening, and that was another reason for my having taken out a subscription to it. The paper filled up the most difficult hour of the day. Early evenings were the time David and I had liked best, when we would sit together over a drink and talk about our day. We would wheel a tea cart containing crystal decanters and glasses and a silver dish of nuts or crackers, caviar on special occasions, into the living room and sit on the sofa, where we could just see the mountains over the treetops. “It’s cozy up here, like our own little tree house,” David had said more than once.

When the air outside had not been too hot or too cold, we’d
preferred the sunroom, where we would open the casement windows to let the breezes come through. We’d listen to the shouts of children playing in the park, dogs barking. Once, a bagpiper had walked all the way across the slope of lawn from the pavilion to Franklin Street, casting a long shadow on the grass. “Do you think they play the pipes on the streets in Scottish towns, or do they do it just on special occasions?” I’d asked David that evening.

“Why don’t we go there and find out.”

“Go to Scotland?”

“And England. Wouldn’t it be swell, Muggs? Let’s do it.”

We wrote away for hotel and steamship brochures, but then Wall Street crashed, so we put off the trip, and by the time we felt we could go, it was too late.

I spread the newspaper on the sunroom table and then looked over the headlines, which were mostly about President Roosevelt and the people he had appointed to get the country moving again. Eleanor Roosevelt had gone off to visit poor folks somewhere in the South. The government was urging us to look for the NRA eagle. A circus elephant had crushed a man in Ohio; unusual human deaths involving large animals were a
Post
favorite. Below the fold was the headline
RECLUSE MURDERED IN LOVE NEST
. I was a sucker for such stories and chuckled when I read the subhead: “Southern Belle Bondurant Called Goat Lady.” Imagine my sharing a name with such a creature!

The story was indeed worthy of the
Post
. The body of Amalia Bondurant, who was seventy-five, had been found in bed in her ancient mansion by a Negro servant. Near the dead woman was the body of her neighbor, Bayard Lott. After an investigation, the
sheriff concluded that Lott had shot the woman, then turned the gun on himself. While the sheriff didn’t speculate on the reason for the shootings, the reporter suggested it had something to do with love gone bad, albeit more than fifty years later. Magdalene Lott, who lived on in her husband’s family home next door to Amalia Bondurant and who was referred to repeatedly as “Lott’s wife,” had told him that when they were young, Amalia and Bayard had planned to be married. For a reason that Magdalene didn’t specify, Bayard had asked to be released from the engagement.