The Keepers of the House (27 page)

I looked at the key, an ordinary Yale key to the night lock on the kitchen door. “Where’s Margaret?”

“Been gone.”

“Where?”

“New Church.”

My children were chasing the big grey cat around the yard. “I didn’t know she had any family there to go to. I didn’t know she even thought about going back.”

Oliver looked at me, patiently. “She got a house there, five, six years ago.”

“Oh,” I said. “I didn’t know.”

“Mr. William give it to her.”

“Well, Oliver,” I told him, “I didn’t know that either.”

He smiled, a tiny curl of the black lips. “I reckon you didn’t.”

“Tell me where it is and I’ll go see her.”

He said: “She come to you.” He walked away then, leaving me to stand on the empty porch with a small key in my hand. I started to go in but changed my mind. I would only cry, and I did not want to do that in front of the children. So I gathered them up again and we drove back home.

We saw the will, a few days later, and there wasn’t a mention of Margaret in it. “John,” I said, “we can’t let it go like that. It isn’t right.”

The mottled look hadn’t quite gone from his face. It made him look sick. “Don’t be a pea brain, honey,” he said. “Can’t you figure it out?”

“Margaret’s got to live.”

“God save me from well-meaning people and idiots.”

“You don’t have to get nasty.”

“Margaret’s car, the one she left in—you remember that?”

“Don’t be mean, John.”

“It was her car. It was in her name.”

“Oh,” I said.

“That’s one thing.” He took a deep breath. “I know what you’re going to say to this, because I know what you think—but a respectable man just doesn’t list a Negro woman in his will as one of the major beneficiaries. Not if he’s got children by her. He wouldn’t embarrass his white children with his woods colts.”

“I didn’t know you knew about that.”

He flushed impatiently. “Think for once, God damn it. Just don’t ooze good will and female charm.”

“Well, I didn’t know.”

“Look, honey, I don’t know anything either, except maybe this one thing. He took care of Margaret. He gave it to her, years ago, I bet. He left her plenty to live on, and their kids too. Trust funds when they were in school or something like that.”

“He never said anything.”

“It’s easy enough to do if you want.” A tight little flicker of a smile: “And the gift tax is a lot less than the estate tax. That would amuse him too.”

In about a month, Margaret sent me a message, as Oliver said she would.

That particular afternoon, I had been shopping. As I turned in our street I noticed a green-and-white Plymouth standing in front of the house. It was Margaret’s car, license and all. I hurried into the kitchen, packages spilling out of my arms, expecting to see Margaret’s heavy greying head. But there was only a slender dark boy, fifteen or so. I tumbled the packages to the counter.

“Didn’t Margaret come?”

“No’m.”

“Oh.” I was disappointed. “It’s her car.”

“She sent me.”

He was a handsome boy, and he looked familiar. “You related to her?”

“Her ma and my granny was sisters.”

“You look like her.”

“She sent me to carry a message to you.”

“Fine,” I said.

“She say to tell you that she is living at New Church, if you ever have need to find her.”

“Where, exactly?”

He looked puzzled. “You can’t say hardly, but anybody there’ll show you. It’s kind of back by the baptizing place on the river, sort of.”

Automatically I began to unwrap the things I had bought. Two pairs of sneakers, a wad of blue cloth for a gym suit. They looked silly and forlorn on the bright yellow formica counter top.

“What else did she tell you?”

“That I got to make sure Mr. John ain’t home before I come in.”

That was Margaret, self-effacing, discreet. Margaret, dark and bitter. Except to my grandfather. And what had he seen that was hidden to everybody else?

“Is she living alone?” I asked the boy. “But she wouldn’t be.”

“No’m. My ma’s there and me.”

“Just three?”

“Well,” he remembered, “when she first built the house, the old lady, her aunt, lived there.”

“Not any more?”

“She swelled up and died.”

“When Margaret first built the house, when was that?”

He scratched his head. “I wasn’t nothing but a kid then. Six, seven years ago.”

So that was how long ago my grandfather had given it to her. Oliver had known; he’d told me the truth.

“Well,” I said, “tell her if she needs anything let me know.”

“No’m,” he said, “she don’t have to work.”

“Tell her anyway.” John had been right, too. It had all been settled long long ago.

“She don’t want nothing.” His eyes flicked over me, curiously. After all, we were related in a way.

“Tell her something else.” He turned around in the door. On his face the patient mocking mask of the Negro. “Tell her that I’ll be coming up to see her. That there are some things I want to ask her.”

There were so many things. … All the time we’d been in the same house, and not able to talk. So many things about her. About my grandfather. … How she’d met him, and how she’d come to move into his house, and how it had been during the thirty years she was there. And what it was like to send your children away, one after the other, when they were still so young. And never let them come back, so they wouldn’t feel the blame of being a Negro. And never go see them, so they wouldn’t have the weight of their mother’s black face. They were white and she had made them that way.

Margaret’s house in New Church was easy to find. I asked once at the gas station and then managed the dirt roads without a single mistake. It was a new house, four or five rooms and a wide lattice-covered porch. It was painted and neat, with a clean-swept dirt yard, and beds of petunias and lantanas growing at the front.

Even when we didn’t talk (she was still a silent woman) we communicated. It was just in the air of that house, in the musky Negro-smelling air. I felt at home and comfortable. This was my mother, she had raised me, my grandmother too. … When I finally had to leave, she asked me quietly: “You tell Mr. John you was coming?”

For a second I considered lying, but then I couldn’t. “No.”

She didn’t seem hurt or even surprised. “He’s not like us.” And as she said it, there were suddenly three of us, the other was my grandfather.

On the drive back, he rode right along beside me, telling me how it had been when he had lost his way in the swamp, and had to walk home from New Church. Not on the road (there was no paved road then), but on the trails over the ridges, through pines not touched by the lumberman, with fallen needles so thick there was no sound as you walked.

He was sitting beside me. I could see him. If I looked straight ahead at the road, he was there, right in the corner of my eye. Once I turned to look at him directly and he disappeared. The car swerved and the tires spun up yellow dust from the shoulder.
Watch the road, child,
he said. I didn’t look at him directly any more after that, only peeped with the corner of my eye. And he stayed there. I could even smell the metallic odor his sweat had always had, a farmer’s sweat, sun-dried on skin and cotton cloth.

I could talk to him too.
Why didn’t you tell me anything? You didn’t. Not one thing. You should have, you should have.

By the time I got home that evening, I did understand. As if he’d explained to me at last. He’d protected and cared for so many females in his life, that he just looked on us as responsibilities and burdens. Loved, but still burdens. There’d been his wife, the vague little bumbling girl, who’d been so lovely and who’d died so young. There’d been my mother, who’d read poetry in a summerhouse and married a handsome Englishman, who’d come scurrying home, heartbroken, with another girl. She’d lingered around the house and around the bed until she died. And there was me, the orphan, and my two daughters.

Sometimes he must have felt that he was being smothered in dependents. There hadn’t been a man of his blood in so long. And that must have worried him too.

All those clinging female arms. … And then there was Margaret. Who was tall as he was. Who could work like a man in the fields. Who bore him a son. Margaret, who’d asked him for nothing. Margaret, who reminded him of the free-roving Alberta of the old tales. Margaret, who was strong and black. And who had no claim on him.

I
N
the years that followed, John worked harder than ever, building a solid foundation for his political career, building himself a statewide machine. “Going to be better than the one the Longs have in Louisiana,” he told me once.

Of course, he was away more than ever. And once again, the year after my grandfather’s death, I found myself suspecting, checking on him. I couldn’t help it. I had to. Sometimes I fought with myself for hours. I would work frantically on the napkins I was monogramming and I would try not to look at the telephone, so squat and round and white there on the table. But the end was always the same. Biting my lip and shivering with disgust, I would call long distance and nervously tell them the number he’d left with me. The girls in the telephone office soon got to recognize my voice: “How you, Mrs. Tolliver? This is Jenny Martin.” I knew them, of course I did. I knew all the girls—operators, secretaries, clerks—who worked in the white-shingled building across the square from the courthouse. I could see them gossiping between calls: “She keeps up with him, for sure. You suppose she’s got reason?” I hated that. Hated to set them talking about me, to give them grounds for suspicion. But I couldn’t help it. My arm always went weak, and my will betrayed me.

John didn’t say anything for months. Finally, late one night, I reached him at his hotel in New Orleans. I had less to say than usual, even, and he was very tired and you could hear the rasp of irritation in his voice. “Honey, why’d you call?”

You could hear the annoyance and the nervousness and the waspishness in mine too. “Because I get lonesome and afraid when I’m pregnant.”

In the silence my thoughts ran around my head, rattling like marbles: You’re not sure, you’re not sure. …

“I’ll be damned,” he said.

When he came home, he brought me a pearl necklace. “It’s not the best,” he said, “but it’ll do for a while.”

I needn’t have worried. Soon there was the soft bland feeling of gestation, as my body and I settled down to the comfortable work of building another shape, bone by bone, little flecks of calcium forming, tissue growing, cell by cell, life pouring in through the cord.

I was placid and lazy, and John took charge of the remodeling of my grandfather’s house. He brought an architect from New Orleans and the two of them worked for months over the plans. There was plenty of money now, and John used it well. I’d never known it was such an imposing house. John had been clever enough to go back to the original style, the massive solid farmhouse—of the sort that preceded the rage for Greek Revival. It was heavy and rather African, but it was beautiful. They’d also taken off most of the wings and sheds that had grown on it like mushrooms or barnacles over the generations. And they had cleared away the woods that pressed on it and crept up to it. You could see the river now, you could see the outline and the shape of the crest the house stood on.

Before we moved there, our son was born, and his name was John Howland Tolliver. He was a dark ugly baby, jolly and healthy. John sent me a diamond broach from Cartier. “A wonderful wife,” the card said.

I was happy; I’d had a son at last. There seemed to be no more problems. Just a happy procession of days leading straight to the capital and that hideous governor’s mansion with its ugly red brick walls, and its squat white columns.

I didn’t tell John—I didn’t want to bother him—when I had a message from Margaret saying Nina was dead. And I didn’t tell him when I found out—later—that the news was wrong. I didn’t understand what had begun to happen. That Margaret’s children had finally grown up and were beginning to have a force and an effect of their own.

One afternoon—we were still living in town then—I took Johnny into the side yard. He was waving his absurdly thin arms and legs in the sun and giggling at the lights and shadows. I was twisting his thick black hair around my finger and making faces at him when I heard heels on the stepping stones behind me. I saw a tall, very tall, red-haired woman, well-dressed, as a northerner is well-dressed. She seemed familiar—yes, very—but I did not know her. So I handed the baby a rattle and went to meet her, wondering who she was. She stopped, waiting for me; she expected me to recognize her. “Yes,” I said, “can I …” And I recognized her at the very time she said softly: “I’m Nina.”

The girl I had played with, who’d run the pasture and chased the cattle, had hunted lamb’s-tongue lettuce and pulled dandelion greens for supper, found thickets where deer had lain, sniffed the musky odor of snakes—the girl came back a woman. She stood smiling at me eagerly; she was very beautiful. She looked—somehow—Greek. I blurted the first thing I thought: “Your mother said you were dead.”

Her face emptied out, like a glass, quickly and smoothly. “I know she did.”

“Who could have told her that? … Who’d be so mean? … But come inside. I’ll take the baby.”

Nina shook her head. “We’ve just come from New Church, and we’ll go along. My husband’s never seen the South and we thought he should.”

I said apologetically: “Margaret didn’t mention your marriage. She really didn’t.”

“I sent her a wedding picture—when we were married a few months ago.” She started to say something more. But she shrugged and let the words flutter off her tongue unsaid.

“When I was in New Church—I brought the baby to see her—she seemed fine.”

“Did you see her?” Nina asked politely. “The door was locked and the shades were pulled the very minute we came in sight.”

In his stroller the baby chirped and waved his fist at a beam of light. And what was wrong? … “I can’t imagine why,” I said truthfully.

“Come to the car, and meet my husband,” Nina said.