The Solace of Leaving Early (15 page)

Chapter 14

SIGHT

It was nearly time for Langston to leave for Beulah’s. She and AnnaLee had decided that Langston would make contact with Madeline and Eloise sometime after they had spoken to the tree trunk, but she couldn’t leave until she stopped pacing. The nerve! She was saturated with regret over what she hadn’t said, sentences that included the words “impertinent” and “supercilious.” And also she should have said, “Yes, please, do tell me everything you’ve learned about children as a lifelong bachelor.” (Oh, but perhaps he’d think she was in some way referring to his sexual orientation—about which she was entirely indifferent—if she used the word “bachelor.” But how else to say it?) And also: “Having this conversation with you is not making the taking on of this onerous task any more palatable.” Except that was a ridiculously awkward sentence. Perhaps: “This conversation is less—” “This onerous task is even less—” She paced and wrote what amounted to a long dialogue in her head, one in which she was quick and dismissive and Mr. Townsend simply tried to keep pace, unsuccessfully. And then the phone rang again, awakening her from her reverie, and she flew down the steps and out the front door, Germane at her side.

“You think there are nuances I am unable to grasp in this situation, Mr. Townsend?” she muttered, stomping down to the sidewalk. “Perhaps, before I begin performing this unpaid and onerous task, you’d like documentation of my ability to appreciate
nuance
. Would my master’s thesis suffice?” She walked so fast and hard past her backyard that Germane fell behind, keeping his distance. “It traces the tradition of the coterie poets, and then argues for such a presence in the American Romantic—” She crossed Chimney Street without either looking for traffic (there was none), or grasping Germane’s collar. He loped along beside her, having decided to catch up. “Or maybe you’d like to engage in a serious conversation on the history of Western philosophy, in order to determine my ability to
babysit
—”

When she came to her senses she was standing on the sidewalk at the edge of Beulah Baker’s mobile home, and the two girls were sitting frozen on the edge of the sandbox. “Oh, hello,” she said, raising her hand in a friendly wave. “I’m Langston Braverman, I live across the street from you, there, AnnaLee is my mother, and I temporarily lost track of myself. I was having an interior conversation with someone I’m very, very upset with. And this is my dog, Germane. He is entirely civilized.”

The older girl stared at Langston suspiciously, then slowly put down her teapot and reached for her younger sister’s hand. Langston walked over and sat down on the opposite side of the sandbox, first brushing off a seat as she’d seen the children do. Germane lay down in the shade under the dogwood tree.

“You know I’m going to be spending some time with you? I’m not ordinarily so
loquacious,
it’s just that I’m angry.”

“Who are you mad at?” the older girl asked, still giving Langston a dark look.

“I’ll tell you: Amos Townsend. What do you think of him?”

“Do you like him?” Madeline asked.

“Not today.”

The girls looked at each other. “We don’t, either.”

“Good. Do please tell me what to call you. I understand you’ve rejected your names.”

Madeline pointed to herself first. “I’ve been given the name Immaculata, and this is Epiphany.”

Langston sat back, surprised. “Oh dear. How very Latin and archaic and liturgical. And also metaphorical. I too have a strange name.”

“Langston, is that right?” Epiphany asked, looking down. She seemed embarrassed to have spoken.

“Yes. And don’t ask me who I was named after; I’ve never actually asked my mother for fear she would say it was the poet of the Harlem Renaissance, Langston Hughes.”

The girls were silent.

“Perhaps you’re wondering why I would find that objectionable. Langston Hughes was a brilliant poet, one of the great lights in the American canon. And naming a little white baby girl after him would constitute the worst kind of co-opting of his eminence, no different than if she’d named me Duke Ellington. Tomorrow I’ll bring some of Hughes’s poems to read to you.”

They said nothing, but Immaculata suddenly stood and said to her sister, “It’s time for our walk.”

Langston took out the pocket watch that had formerly served her Grandfather Wilkey. Ten o’clock sharp. How did they do that? “Shall I wait here for you?”

The older girl nodded and they set off. Immaculata leaned in toward her sister, speaking quickly and low. Langston couldn’t hear what she said; they disappeared down the alley, heading west toward Scarborough Street.

*

Langston knocked on Beulah’s front door and walked in at the same time. The television was on in the living room, tuned to a game show, the sound low.

“Sarah?” Beulah called, stepping out of the kitchen drying her hands on a towel. Every day she wore a dress with stockings and thick black shoes. Often she kept a sweater draped around her shoulders. Her hair, which had gone so suddenly white, was cut short, and seemed to be thinning. Langston was struck again by the dark circles under her eyes.

“No, Beulah, it’s me, Langston.”

“Well, where’s Sarah?” Beulah stood still, perplexed, the dish towel wrapped around her hand like a tourniquet. She seemed to be short of breath.

“I’m sure I don’t know. I don’t even know who Sarah is,” Langston said.

“She said she’d be here. She’s the only one who understands this recipe.”

“Oh, well, then. I can’t help you. I’m entirely helpless when it comes to cooking.”

They looked at each other a moment, and then Beulah’s eyes, which seemed to be looking past Langston, came into focus. “
Langston
. Hello, sweetheart.”

“Hello, Beulah. Let’s go sit down, shall we?” What was the problem here? Everyone seemed to be coming unstrung. Langston led Beulah to the kitchen table, pulling out a chair for her. There was no evidence that Beulah had been cooking anything.

“Now,” Langston said, taking one of Beulah’s hands, “do tell me who Sarah is, and why you are so confused, and if, in fact, you’re losing your eyesight. Because I believe your eyes are a bit cloudy. I once wrote a poem in which I said a man’s eyes had ‘gone milked and filmy / Like a June sky that disappoints the picnic.’ ”

“Oh, that’s very fine. I like that so much.”

“I think you’d like the whole poem. I’ll bring it tomorrow. Sarah?”

Beulah sat back in her chair, then raised a hand to her forehead, rubbing it as if to raise an answer. “Sarah was. Sarah. You know that people think I was close to forty when I had Alice, yes? But in fact I was forty-five, I was just much too old, especially at that time. They told me she’d be ‘mongoloid,’ that was the word they used then, but I wasn’t giving her up for anything. My only baby. The only time I ever got pregnant. And I don’t know why Francis—Frank, Alice’s father—lied to people about how old I really was. Who cares what they think?”

“Good heavens, I couldn’t agree more.”

“I know this about you. But he also—there were a few years, shall we say,
unaccounted for
in my youth—and he was covering those up.”

“Ah,” Langston said. “The Sarah years?”

“Would you like something to drink? Some iced tea or lemonade?”

“I’ll get it. Go on.” Langston opened the refrigerator. It was clean and bright, and there was a story in it. In a corner of the top shelf were the things Beulah had kept, just things an old woman living alone might eat: a single block of cheese, a quart container of skim milk, small bottles of condiments, and the sort of luncheon meat that came in a tube and reminded Langston of all that was godforsaken. The rest of the refrigerator had been taken over by AnnaLee: a gallon of whole milk, two pounds of butter, three different kinds of fruit juice, apples and oranges, broccoli, packages of chicken and steak, a gallon of sun tea, the whole American profusion. Langston poured two glasses of tea and carried them back to the table.

“Langston, you mustn’t repeat this to anyone. Sarah and I ran away and spent three years at circus college.”

Langston sputtered into her drink. “Dear me, I. Well,” she said, wiping up tea with Beulah’s dish towel.

“Sarah came here from Macon with Ezra Jones, he was no-account. He’d gone to Macon on some sort of gambling . . . I don’t know what. And met her in a bar. They got married drunk and he brought her all the way from Macon to Haddington. She could
cook
.”

“Yes, but.” Macon, Ezra, no-account, gambling? “How does her cooking have anything to do with, what did you call it? Clown college?”

“Circus college. There are some excellent schools in the world that train you for the circus; the best ones now are in Russia, and France, of course. They still take it seriously there. We had a trapeze act, The Macon Sisters. Not so original, I’m afraid.”

“Circus college?”

“Langston, we flew.”

“My goodness.” Langston sat back in her chair. “Whatever caused you to come back
here
?”

“Sarah disappeared. She took off with someone as we were shutting down in Ontario and I never saw her again, and then. My sails dropped. I got homesick, so I took a bus into Jonah and called Francis and he came and picked me up and we started over like I’d never been gone.”

“For heaven’s sake.”

“Except we couldn’t seem to have any children. He thought, well, he didn’t ever say it in so many words, but he thought I’d been ruined.”

“By flying.”

“By lots of things, but yes.”

“But then you had Alice.”

“When I very least expected it. And you know, when I first saw her—she was just a normal-looking baby, but—I saw . . .” Beulah paused.

Langston took her hand again. “What did you see?”

“I saw stars. It’s nothing.”

Langston put her hand against her throat. “Beulah, I am
so sorry,
there’s no way for me even to say—”

The look on Beulah’s face made Langston afraid; it seemed Beulah might vanish completely. “You can’t imagine how—”

The screen door opened and the girls walked in, Immaculata first. Langston turned toward them and started to say something, but Beulah interrupted her. “Let them go their way. They have to do everything the same, every day. Nothing can change. Right now they’ll go back to their room and pray. Then they’ll wash their hands for four or five minutes. They’ll make sure their shoes aren’t dusty, and then they’ll come out and tell me they’re ready to go see Lillian, the therapist in Jonah.”

Langston’s heart was still racing, but the girls were a distraction. “All right. I see. I have my own habits.” She rubbed her hands over her arms, which had begun to itch. “Mama’s just gone to pick up the car at Tim Clyde’s. She was having the oil changed, that sort of thing. Then she’ll be ready to drive them to Jonah.”

Beulah nodded. “I’m grateful.”

“You’re losing your sight, aren’t you?” Langston said it quietly, hoping the children wouldn’t hear.

“I have cataracts. But I don’t want the surgery. I don’t care anymore.”

*

“Well, if this doesn’t just take the
prize,”
Langston said, so angry she was nearly stuttering.

“Langston, please don’t be angry with me, it’s just that—”

Langston and her mother were standing on the sidewalk outside Beulah’s trailer. “I know exactly what it is. You roped me into this, and now it turns out you lied about the requirements.”

“I didn’t lie, it’s just that—” AnnaLee looked a bit wretched. A part of Langston felt sorry for her, and another part wanted to tell her mother to comb her hair and put on some shoes. “Your daddy dropped me off at Tim’s and I was fine. And then I got in the car and I was fine. And then on the way here I started to get a little jittery, and then I thought about driving the girls all the way to Jonah and I couldn’t catch my breath.”

Langston looked around for someone to help her, but there was no one. Beulah’s door was still shut. “Jonah is eleven miles from here, on country roads and one stretch of perfectly straight, flat highway. What? Can you not steer? Have you developed paralysis in your accelerating foot?”

AnnaLee blew hair out of her eyes, then shielded her face from the sun, which was neither bright nor overhead. “You are merciless. I’m
afraid
to drive them, Langston. If it were just the two of us I wouldn’t feel that so much was at risk—”

“Thanks for that.”

“Oh, stop it. You know what I mean. But what if I made a mistake and traumatized them more?”

“You are traumatizing
me
more, Mama! I was going to use the Jonah time to work on my book. I tell you, I know you don’t realize this, but books can get away from one. And if my books get away, then what do I have? And also, a vital point, this, it’s
your turn
. Tomorrow is my turn.”

AnnaLee shook her head. Her eyes seemed to be sloping down in the corners, dragged by some weight. “I can’t.”

“Well!” Langston threw her hands up in surrender. “Fine, then! I’ll just go get them, and
I’ll
drive them to Jonah, and then
I’ll
procure some sort of lunch for them, and then
I’ll
bring them back here and occupy them for two hours, and then
I’ll
have to come face-to-face with Amos Townsend—”

“He called, by the way. He thinks you’re not suited to the job.”

Langston made a sound like a cat vomiting, then caught herself. “I beg your pardon?” Her jaws began to ache and she felt a strange itch in the palm of her hand. “He said that?”

“I told him he was wrong.”

“Let me tell you something about Amos Townsend, Mama, and do please feel free to repeat it—” Langston was pointing at her mother most rudely when the trailer door opened and Beulah walked out, her sweater buttoned up in the heat. The girls were behind her, wearing their hats.

“Langston, can I speak to you a minute?” Beulah said. The girls remained on the trailer steps, as if playing Statue. “There’s a slight problem. Madeline says they can’t ride in your mom’s station wagon because it’s too long. And Eloise says they can’t go without me. I convinced them to allow you to drive my car, and I’ll ride along in the front seat. But Madeline has to sit behind the driver, and Eloise has to sit in the middle. And Germane can’t go. And on the way we have to stop at the Milky Freeze. Alice used to take them there. And then they go into Lillian’s, and you and I have to remain in the waiting room. I sit by the plant, and they’d like you to sit by the door. And—”