Southern Hearts (2 page)

“I received something from FedEx, but I haven’t opened it.” I had, but procrastination irritated my mother more than mosquitoes in April, and I had never been able to pass up the opportunity to indulge myself in provoking her.

“We can talk about the rest this afternoon. Have a safe flight, chèr, and I will see you when you get here.”

The line clicked and then went silent. I took a deep, clearing breath and leaned back against my headboard.

I loved my mother. Some moments that love was hard to find, like the foundation of a building buried under layers of concrete and rebar, but I knew it was there just the same. It had been that way as far back as I could remember, and my father’s passing three years ago had only put more stress on the already deteriorating ties between us. I was Daddy’s little girl and my mother’s daughter—that summed up our relationship exactly. We were polar opposites; she was south, and I was about off the globe to the north. It didn’t matter what the issue was—it could be as large as the equator is long or as small as a pond is shallow, and in the broad scheme of things mean little if anything—we could argue our views endlessly, never finding an even pegging. There had been times over the years when our positions, our views, seemed very near to each other, but even on those rare occasions it still felt as if we were reading from different manuscripts.

I remember the glow of amusement that used to wash over my father’s face at our bantering, and how angry my mother and I would get when he shrugged his shoulders and refused to sway his opinion to one side or the other. During those years we were better than George Burns and Gracie Allen. He would watch our nightly performances with more ardent mirth than even Lucy and Desi could conjure up. He’d snip the end of his cigar, grab a novel from the library shelves, kick his shoes to the floor, and rest his stocking feet on the ottoman at the foot of his favorite armchair. He’d sit in repose, as if enthralled by the pages of brilliance resting over his chest, stirring only long enough to raise his fist and circle it above his head when one of us managed to toss in a more convincing argument. I remember being rebellious during those years, not from the pressures of puberty, but from a need for something heightened, something more devoted between my mother and me. I had longed for it, but that bond that I had spent so many nights dreaming about still failed to present itself.

I’m older now, more able to handle the rejection. I don’t blame her, really; I have come to know that her feelings and her reactions to them were inbred, perhaps as far back as my grandmother and hers. She was a Southern belle, and a Southern woman was never openly affectionate—it left one vulnerable, and a Southern woman was never vulnerable.

I often wondered if my father had been allowed even the minutest insight into her in the solitude of their bedroom or if the woman beneath the lace tabards and big bonnets was as unknown to him as she was to me. Maybe his actions over the years, his many mistresses and late-night liaisons in Lafayette, told me everything I wanted to know without saying the words.

There is something about going home, the return to things familiar, the return to things unsettled that I had fled before there had ever been the faintest hint of conclusion. Escape often seems vital to parts of a person’s life, and for some has the potency to invigorate without leaving remorse in its wake. But I was not that fortunate. I had never reached a place that allowed me to forge ahead without the ever-present guilt creeping inward and taking hold of me with mournful vengeance. I could sit for hours compiling lists of reasons for my leaving and collect a trove of material to validate them, but my father had died in the arms of my sister, in the loving shadow of my mother’s glance, his last words spoken to a peaceful room that screamed of my absence, and that would follow me forever.

The cab pulled from the pavement into the driveway, past the metal gates, and down the band of gravel lined with a colonnade of magnolias. My family home was on the emerald banks of the Bayou Teche, a plantation home stately and grand with intimidating mystique. The architecture tended toward Victorian rather than Creole, but to the elitists of the South, the latter was the only acceptable description.

The entrance between the fluted columns brimmed with Greek style, and the two-level Ionic portico that wrapped the exterior seemed to have a start and no finish. The portico was fully clothed in white, and each end had a huge entablature that revealed only a hint of the expansive roofline. The back side was an exact duplicate to the front and smiled toward the tall reeds and bayou trees sprouting from the murky water of the Teche. The grounds surrounding the house were dotted with a blend of arbors and evergreens. The interior was abundant with well-appointed rooms that still reeked of the ancestral rosewood furniture common during the Civil War, weighted planked flooring, and inlaid wood for the eye to marvel at. The house had been burned to the baseboards and rebuilt twice during the antebellum era, gathering more impressiveness with every coat of whitewash and each newly placed timber. It was a true treasure to Louisiana and the only delight I could recall about my trips home.

My room faced the large, carved sliding doors of my father’s study at the top of the spiral staircase, and even now I could still smell his Havana Bucchus piled neatly on the felt of the humidor, the pungent odor filling my nostrils just as his roar of contagious laughter rang through my ears. Most of the upstairs remained the way my father had left it, his favorite paintings by Renoir and Gauguin hung in perfect lines along the hallway and his collection of rare coins and first-run baseball memorabilia mounted on the dustless glass shelves scattered throughout the house. His elegant oak English writing desk with age scars that marred the distressed leather top. His khaki-colored jerkin flung haphazardly on the coat tree that stood quietly in the hollows of the now eerily abandoned room. His Parker Sonnet fountain pen, the nib still perched beside the India ink, now dried and stained to the bottom of the well.

I missed my father. He had a way of believing in me like no one else, a way of understanding things when no one else did. But I guess what hit me the hardest over the years was the absence of his dwarfing squeeze, his touch that dispelled everything bad, releasing a wealthier spirit within me. I had come to realize that finding someone or something to help me regenerate energy from inside myself was near impossible. I knew my father was gone and I had accepted it, though somehow I still siphoned strength from him, as if he were feeding it through a tube at my side. I could feel his support, and as the summer progressed I knew I would need it.

I threw my duffel bag onto the chaise longue just inside the door of my room, peering inside. It was just as I had left it, the walls cluttered with an arrangement of videotapes and pictures, the shelves crammed with trinkets, books, and the lonely Madame Alexander doll my mother had given me for my twelfth birthday. Evening Star Matilda was her given name; her hair was golden, swept up, a woven appliqué pinned into place like a tiara, and her dress was full length, black over peach charmeuse. She was the first and only doll I owned, and looking at her again only fostered more questions about why she had been given to me in the first place. She was frilly, girlie, and the complete opposite of the tomboyish young woman I had been.

I stepped back into the hall, eyeing the familiar Oriental runners and potted palms that covered the tongue-and-groove flooring in each direction. I stood silent, listening to the wind blowing through the open vestibule, brushing the sheers into a wave before surging out the shutters and out over the bayou. I brushed my fingers though my hair, took a few encouraging breaths, and headed down to the back porch, where my mother would be lunching on her customary tuna salad, sipping sweet tea with her eyes narrowed toward the lines of the
Times-Picayune
.

“Oh, my baby’s home, come give your Marney some sugar.” Before I could even react to the voice, bare caramel arms squeezed around me and I was grabbed into a tight lock.

“Marney, I missed you!” Marney had been my nanny growing up and more of a mother than the woman who actually bore me. I smiled at her as the ties of her familiar braided locks twisted from side to side and the fringe around the hem of her thin dress twirled lightly in the whirling breeze.

She had been my father’s secretary for many years at his law firm of Bossier & Belisle. Soon after he gave up his practice and took an early retirement, she sank into a deep depression after her husband Gene and daughter Maybell disappeared one night, and at my father’s urging joined our family. She had been my mother’s friend for many years, so it seemed only natural that she would become a welcome addition to our home.

It had taken four months from the time her husband and daughter first vanished until they were found trapped below their ’54 Oldsmobile Holiday in the muddy sand at the base of Crooked Creek along the rural back roads of Evangeline County. It had been ruled an accident—death by asphyxiation had been the official finding. A spark near the fuel tank had ignited a fire that charred the car into a twisted, melted shell.

The thing that remained hard to understand was how the car had wound up on top of them, pinning their burned bodies in the slush of the bog. Many found the whole thing odd and thought that there had to be more to the story. The local arm of the law during the late sixties and early seventies was composed of good ol’ boys, more bungling then believable. I could tell by my father’s ever-widening eyes as he first informed us of the police’s conclusions about the events of that night that he had his own doubts. As he demonstrated the position of the car, its proximity to the road, the lack of skid marks, and the unexplained removal of heavy thickets of dense underbrush that lined both sides of the highway, I knew that he had drawn his own conclusions, though he never dared share them.

I cared deeply for Marney, and seeing her stand before me, feeling her warm hugs that took the air out of me, warmed my heart and brought a beaming smile to my face.

“How are you, darlin’? Ooh, girl, you are looking thin, don’t they eat out there in the west?” She laughed, pulling me back toward her.

“Maybe it’s the rain,” I joked.

“Well you’re home now, baby, and I guess I’ll just have to fatten you up with some of my good old Southern fare this summer.” She put her hands over her stomach, wiggling it like St. Nick’s jolly tummy once it had been filled with eggnog.

“You know I look forward to that!”

“Is that you, chèr?” my mother’s voice called from just outside the French doors, which were parted as if in anticipation of my arrival.

“She’s been waiting for you, honey, she can’t wait to see you,” Marney whispered.

“I’ll bet!”

“You know she missed you. Now get out there!” Gently, Marney shoved me from behind.

“Yes, Mother, it’s me.”

“Well, come on out here and have some lunch. It’s tuna salad with walnuts, your favorite.”

My favorite. I hated tuna salad, particularly with nuts floating around in it. Reminded me of the wrinkled raisins suspended in the tofu Jell-O mold that my mother’s friend Ethel used to bring to Christmas dinner and the way the slimy bean curd tasted as I choked it down at my mother’s urging. But again, where I was concerned, my mother approached things with the cluelessness that had become her trademark.

“I ate on the plane, Mother.”

Without turning her attention from the lines of text folded out in front of her, she asked, “How was the flight?”

“Fine,” I said with little expression.

That was my mother’s best attempt at conversation, and her ability to express emotion was defined in a single action—the slight eye movement in my direction as I entered. It had been three years since I had seen her, and a question about my flight was the most she was capable of saying to me.

I stepped down onto the davenport, my legs shaky and quivering underneath me as I stood just to her rear, in her blind spot. She looked more worn than I remembered; her hair had thinned around the crown and her stature had become more hunched and frail. I wondered if I should hug her. I wanted to. I wondered what her response would be if I acted offbeat and threw my arms around her in spite of how I knew she felt about those kinds of displays. Lukewarm at best, most likely. But I couldn’t help it, she was my mother, and in my own way I had missed her and wanted to feel the texture of her skin against mine and smell the faint scent of jasmine that always emanated from her. I just wanted to touch her, to put my head to her side and rest my arms around her fragile shoulders.