The Remembering (22 page)

Jack pulled into the long driveway of Carolina’s house just after the sun had set. Every window in the big house was glowing with burning candles and a string of Christmas lights—blues, reds, greens, and golds—circled the doors and stretched across the roofline, finally fanning out and around the stone archway all the way to the ground. It looked like Fort Christmas.

“My, oh, my,” Ray said.

Jack didn’t wait for me to comment. He brought the DeSoto to a stop under the archway and said, “We sort of went crazy because of Georgie.”

“Georgie?” Nova asked.

“
Georgie
, that’s what we call her. Caine and Antoinette’s little girl. She’s only four years old and … well … what can I say? We went overboard.”

I never said a word, but I did walk inside with a wide grin on my face. Santa Claus stepped out of the car and simply said, “Merrrrry Christmas!”

We entered through the kitchen door, as always, and were welcomed by Star, Mercy, Antoinette, and Caine. They were in the middle of preparing dinner, and the kitchen smelled like a dozen wonderful things. Star, now in her late fifties, looked radiant. She was dressed in a sweater and slacks and wore little makeup or jewelry—a touch of red lipstick and two small gold loop earrings. Her hair was a mix of strawberry blond and silver. It was cut short and brushed back from her face. Time had been good to Star. When she smiled, she was still the same eighteen-year-old I had escorted out of Africa. Mercy was also in her fifties. Her close-cropped, reddish-brown hair had turned mostly white. Nevertheless, she looked extremely healthy and happy. She was dressed in a sweatshirt and huge, puffed-out brown woolen pants, which were actually part of her costume from the Christmas pageant earlier that afternoon. She had played Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. I gave her a long embrace, and Star as well, then turned to Antoinette, who was making dinner rolls from scratch. Her hands were covered with dough and flour, so I leaned in and kissed her on both cheeks. She was a thirty-one-year-old mother now. Her dark hair hung down past her shoulders, and her dark eyes were shining. She was in the prime of her life. Caine sat at the kitchen table peeling potatoes. At forty years old, he was a tenured college professor at Washington University and looked the part. He’d grown a neatly trimmed beard and wore wire-rimmed glasses.

Mitch went to kiss Mercy, Jack poured a cup of coffee, and Nova sat down next to Caine. Ray jumped up and sat on the kitchen counter, letting his legs dangle while he closed his eyes and breathed in every one of the mingling scents and aromas. “Ah, home cookin’,” he sighed, “there ain’t nothin’ like it.”

I asked Star, “Where’s Willie?”

“Rockford, Illinois,” she answered. “He’s meeting with some other men from Wisconsin. They’re planning an air show for next summer with experimental and vintage aircraft. He should be back in a couple of days.”

“Where’s Carolina?” I asked. “And where’s Georgia, or should I say Georgie?”

“She’s in the living room with Gran-gran,” Antoinette said. “She loves to play around the Christmas tree.”

“Gran-gran?”

“That’s what Georgie calls Carolina,” Caine added. “It’s her version of Great-grandma.” He paused and smiled. “Why don’t you go surprise her, Z? And I bet you a Budweiser beer you fall in love.”

“A Budweiser?”

“Two!” Caine said with a laugh, waving me out of the room.

I turned and crept through the dining room into the long and wide living room. A fire crackled in the fireplace at the far end of the room. Candles burned on every table and in every window, and several pieces of Carolina’s furniture had been removed to clear the way for a nine-foot Christmas tree, fully decorated and adorned with lights, ornaments, and tinsel. Gifts and presents of all sizes surrounded the tree. A few feet away, Carolina and a four-year-old girl sat on the floor playing. Carolina was wearing a turtleneck sweater and denim overalls, complete with shoulder straps. Her white hair was cut short and brushed back, like Star’s. She was listening intently to Georgie, who also wore overalls. Georgie seemed to be instructing and slightly scolding Carolina about something. There was a big three-story dollhouse sitting between them; however, there were no dolls in the dollhouse. Instead, Georgie was filling the dollhouse with farm animals and she was making sure Carolina put the pig in his proper room. For a few seconds I watched them play without being seen, then Georgie looked up.

“Who are you?” she asked, but she didn’t look surprised or confused, just … curious.

I looked down at her. She had the biggest, most beautiful brown eyes I’d ever seen, like milk chocolate, and they gazed right into mine. She was staring at me, waiting for me to answer. I glanced at Carolina and she winked.

“My name is Zianno,” I said and paused, leaning over. “You, Georgie, may call me Z.”

“Z, Z, Z,” she repeated several times, saying it fast and slow, as if she was trying it out, getting used to it. Finally, she said, “That’s a funny name.”

“Yes, I suppose it is,” I said, then whispered, “but it’s my name.”

“Will you play with us?”

“All right. Sure. Where should I sit?”

“There,” she answered, pointing to my spot. “Sit there.” As I was sitting down, she added, “You’re a boy.”

“Yes, yes I am,” I said, trying to keep from laughing. I smiled at Carolina and glanced again at this little girl, and something happened. I looked into her eyes and saw all the faces of the people inside her, inside her blood, her genes, and it was amazing. I saw her mama and papa, Caine and Antoinette. I saw Antoine and Emme, and I saw PoPo, and I saw Captain Antoine Boutrain, the elder, and I saw the madness of Isabelle, Antoine’s mother. I saw Star and the tragic Jisil al-Sadi, and I saw Nicholas and Carolina, and I saw Carolina’s father, the “Whirling Dervish,” Billy Covington. How did it happen? How did all those people find their way inside this little girl? I looked at Georgie and thought of the unlikely trail of time, circumstance, love, and dumb luck that it took. I thought of my own family and my own mama and papa. I still missed them. I thought of the Meq and the others and their families. I looked past Georgie at the Christmas tree and followed it up to its top, nine feet in the air. The great tree was crowned with a cone, and attached to the top of the cone was a bright red sphere, sparkling with glitter in the light. And I thought of the Gogorati, the Remembering, and I knew instinctively and with certainty that the sphere I was searching for had everything to do with the Remembering. There was no doubt—I had to find it and I had to read it, or there would be no Remembering for us.

“You are the sheep,” a voice said.

I blinked. “What?”

It was Georgie who spoke. “Z, you are the sheep. Here,” she said, handing me the sheep. “Gran-gran, you are the cow. Okay?” She handed Carolina the cow and glanced back and forth at both of us. “Well …” she said, annoyed that we were hesitating.

Carolina glanced at me and laughed. “Moo!” she said. “Moo!”

“Baa! Baa!” I said. I laughed and looked at Georgie and I knew immediately I owed Caine two Budweisers.

Inside Carolina’s house, the holiday season of 1958 was nothing but joy. Every day was filled with feasting, drinking, laughing, singing, and sharing memories and stories, many of them told by Carolina, and they usually involved Solomon in one way or another. Her stories were always hilarious and somehow heroic. On Christmas Day, Carolina and Star cooked a dozen different Cuban dishes and Carolina blessed the meal with a silent prayer for Oliver “Biscuit” Bookbinder. And there were presents, too many presents, almost all of which were for Georgie. That Christmas, Georgie received everything she could ever want and more than she would ever need. Two weeks passed in a blur. The days were cold, but the nights were clear. Venus and Jupiter appeared close together in the southeastern sky, like a big sister and little brother carrying lanterns, lighting the way.

January began with Jack leaving for Washington, D.C., on New Year’s Day after receiving a telephone call from Cardinal. Fidel Castro and his band of revolutionaries had run the dictator Batista out of Cuba. They were now in charge of the government and Cardinal wanted Jack in Washington. Carolina kissed Jack good-bye in the kitchen, cursing Batista and the revolutionaries.

During the next few weeks Carolina and I spent a great deal of time together. On fair days when it wasn’t too cold, we took walks in Forest Park. The walks were not as long as in the old days, but in our hearts and minds they felt the same and were just as enjoyable. Carolina never once complained about her physical aches and pains or even mentioned them. I knew from Jack that she suffered from arthritis in her hips, and yet it made no difference. She always looked forward to our walks, which she began referring to as our “wanderings.” On one of our walks we encountered a woman who also was in her eighties, a woman Carolina had known for years. The woman smiled when she saw us coming. Her name was Millie Westinghouse.

“Hello, Millie,” Carolina said.

“How charming!” Millie replied. “What a gentleman you have there, Carolina. Who is this young man?”

Without hesitation or even a trace of irony, Carolina told the woman, “Why, this boy is my oldest friend, Millie … and he is not that young, by the way.” As we walked on, I glanced back at Millie Westinghouse and winked. Her mouth dropped open and she looked completely blank. She was sure she had either heard or been part of a joke, and simultaneously, she knew she didn’t get it.

Willie Croft took me flying on three occasions in January, mainly because he now owned three airplanes, including his beloved de Havilland, and he wanted me to fly in each of them. Star went with us twice and the third flight I was alone with Willie, all the way to Kansas City and back in his red Beechcraft Bonanza. Willie was sixty-seven years old and most of his red hair had disappeared, except for a little above the ears and in the back, and that had turned gray. He had enough wrinkles and lines on his face and forehead to prove that he’d had his fair share of experience. But when he was flying, none of that mattered. I could see it in his eyes and in the grace of his movements. He wasn’t just flying. He was out of Time.

Mitch Coates had opened yet another nightclub in a neighborhood now known as Gaslight Square. Gaslight Square covered the length of Olive Street from Pendleton to Whittier. Mitch owned two buildings, one on Olive and the other around the corner on Boyle. The nightclub was on the ground floor of the Olive Street building, along with the Mercy Whitney Art Gallery & Studio. They lived in a spacious apartment on the second floor of the building on Boyle. Mitch said there was good live jazz in his club, and he was anxious for Ray, Nova, and me to hear some of it. We all went together the first night and stayed close to Mitch. When somebody asked who we were, Mitch said we were his bartender’s grandkids from New Orleans. However, the ruse wasn’t necessary. Once the music started, no one paid attention to us anyway. Nova and I only went along a couple of nights. Ray went on a regular basis. He asked Mitch to take him to hear the rest of the music being played in St. Louis, especially rhythm and blues. One night Mitch drove Ray across the river to a club in East St. Louis, and after that Ray couldn’t stop raving about a group called the Kings of Rhythm with Ike Turner, and a young girl Ike introduced as Tina belting out the vocals. Ray started listening to music on the radio and buying record albums. He listened to everything, but his new hero was a black, blind piano player, singer, and songwriter also named Ray—Ray Charles. “Genius,” Ray said, “pure damn genius.”

Nova began visiting Mercy in her studio and they quickly became fast friends and confidantes. Three or four times a week, Mercy held art classes for kindergarten-age kids in the neighborhood, kids who couldn’t afford art supplies, and Nova never missed a class, acting as Mercy’s assistant. I knew she loved it and she was a natural at working with young children, but she tried to shrug it off, grinning and saying, “I only do it because they’re shorter than me.”

On February 1 the weather turned bitterly cold and a razorlike wind blew in from the northwest. Everyone stayed inside and Georgie got lots of playtime and an abundance of playmates. We kept the fireplace going day and night. About ten o’clock in the morning of February 4, Ray was tending the fire, moving new logs in with the old. The radio was on in the background, tuned to KMOX. A song by The Rays called “Silhouettes” was playing. Just as they sang the line,
“a dim light cast two silhouettes on the shade,”
the disk jockey broke in with the news that Buddy Holly, the rock and roll star from Texas, was dead. He had been killed the night before when his chartered airplane, a red Beechcraft Bonanza, went down in Iowa at 1:50
A.M
.

Ray turned to me and said, “That’s the same airplane as Willie’s, ain’t it?”

“Yes. One of them.”

“Same color, too, right?”

“Yeah … what are you thinking, Ray?”

“This is a bad omen, Z … a bad omen.”

“In what way?”

Ray paused. “I don’t know yet.”

The next four days passed and the weather improved. By February 9 it was warm enough for Carolina and me to embark on one of our “wanderings” through Forest Park. Antoinette and Georgie stayed outside all morning playing hide-and-seek in and around the “Honeycircle.” Caine was out of town, lecturing at a seminar in Austin, Texas. Ray spent the day with Mitch, helping him build a new stage in the nightclub, and Nova and Mercy took their art class on the road, spending most of the day finger painting at St. John of the Cross Children’s Home. Willie and Star had flown to Rockford, Illinois, and were due back in the early evening. Because of its speed, Willie had chosen his red Beechcraft Bonanza for the trip.

At four in the afternoon, while Carolina and I sat in the kitchen drinking coffee, Ray suddenly burst through the door, with Nova right behind him. “We got to get hold of Willie and Star!” Ray shouted. “They got to stay in Rockford. They can’t fly home tonight.”

I looked at Ray and he was dead serious. “What’s going on, Ray?”