The Truth Hurts (22 page)

26
Marie

“It isn’t much to go on,” I admit to Nate, after he finishes reading it. “But it’s the closest I’ve ever come to getting a sense of what they were like.”

“Your mom sounds hot.”

“Please! That’s my mother you’re talking about!”

He smiles, and I know he’s only teasing me to make sure I don’t get maudlin on him. “You ever do therapy, Marie?”

“You know I have, Nathan. Isn’t it required for every American born after, oh, 1940?”

Nate laughs again and lays a hand on the scene he just read.“So, what’d your therapist think about all this?”

“She wanted to talk about my abandonment issues.”

“And?”

“I told her, I don’t got no steenking abandonment issues.”

My cousin appears ready to argue with that, but fortunately for me, just as he opens his mouth, there’s a knock on the door of our suite.

I call out, “Come on in, Steve! It’s your room, too!”

But when the door opens, it isn’t Steve Orbach who’s standing there, but Maureen—Mo—Goodwin, with a hesitant expression on her face.

“I’m sorry to bother y’all.”

“That’s all right, please come in.”

She does, but just barely, and doesn’t close the door behind her. “I have been asked to extend an invitation to you from Miss Eulalie—”

“Mrs. Fisher?” I glance quickly at Nate, whose face registers the sheer coincidence of this. “How in the world does she know I’m here?”

An embarrassed look crosses Mo Goodwin’s plain face. “Probably because of me. I hope y’all don’t mind. I told my mother I had new guests and she asked me who, and I told her, and she told my dad and he mentioned it to Mr. Clayton and he told Miss Eulalie, and then she called me.” She shrugs apologetically, as if to say, What can you expect in a small town like this?

“No, that’s fine, I don’t mind at all, I just wondered.”

It’s odd to consider the strange connection between Mo Goodwin and me, of how our parents once were friends together in a dangerous enterprise. Her own parents’ sense of betrayal by my parents could well explain how awkward and uncomfortable she seems to be around me. Now she says, as if reading from a formal invitation, “Miss Eulalie and Mister Clayton kindly request the pleasure of your company at a light supper at their home tonight. She says she’ll be havin’ a few folks over to meet you. My parents. The Wiegans. The Reeses.”

The white members of Hostel,
I realize with a start.

“Miss Eulalie asked me to beg your forgiveness for her not callin’ you personally, but she doesn’t believe in telephones anymore.”

I have to smile. It sounds so like the woman I met.

“Anymore?” I inquire. “What happened?”

Lackley Goodwin’s middle-aged daughter shrugs again. “It was those telephone solicitors, you know, callin’ at supper time. Miss Eulalie finally got as how she just couldn’t stand them anymore, so she had the telephone company come and rip out her telephone lines.”

“But what did Mr. Clayton think of that?”

For the first time, Mo Goodwin can’t seem to help but loosen up and grin a bit. “Mr. Clayton got himself a cell phone that he likes just fine.”

“A little more in tune with this century than she is?”

“Oh, my, yes! I used to be his secretary at the bank—”

“You did?”

“Yes, ma’am, before my parents invested in this place and I got a chance to run it. At the bank, Mr. Clayton took to fax machines right off, and you’d have thought that computers were invented just for him. I taught him myself how to surf the Web. Mr. Clayton just loves new gizmos. I’ll swear, he takes to ’em like ham on beans.”

I can sense my cousin’s inner amusement at the sound of that.

“Since she doesn’t have a phone, will you pass on to them that we’d love to come?”

“Am I included?” Nathan asks, sounding surprised.

“Oh, yes, they mean to invite you, too,” Mo says politely to my cousin. “Miss Eulalie specifically said so, and when I told her—I hope you don’t mind—that y’all have another friend with you, she said, the more the merrier.”

“That’s very kind of her.” I get a mental image of fierce-looking Steve mixing at a southern soiree. “What time?”

“They eat early. Six o’clock.”

“Will you be there?”

“I’m invited,” she says ambiguously, and then leaves, quietly closing the door behind her.

Nate looks thoughtful. “I guess we didn’t exactly sneak into town, did we?” Gently, he then asks, “Will you let me read the other thing now, Marie? The one that’s supposed to be about your parents’ deaths?”

“Murders,” I correct him, and hand it to him.

A few minutes later, he looks up and says, “I don’t know. Do you?”

“It sounds pretty real,” I tell him. “It feels real.”

“Yeah,” he agrees, sounding sad for me. “It does.”

“Look on the bright side, Nathan.”

“There is one?”

“Sure. If this is true, at least I’ll know for sure they’re dead.”

He just shakes his head, having no smart retort for that.

Next, I let him have the other chapters I wrote before there was ever a Paulie Barnes to force me to do it. When he’s finished with all of that, we don’t even stop to talk about it. It’s as if it’s too much for him to absorb all at once, and I’m suddenly feeling far too restless to sit still. We go looking for Steve, and when we find him outside, the three of us get into my rental car and drive around the area to sightsee.

On our way out of the inn, I see Mo Goodwin and pause to ask her a question. “Where could we go to get some copies made?”

“How many do you need, Ms. Folletino?”

“I wish you’d call me Marie.” I smile at her, but in her shyness she isn’t looking right at me, and so she doesn’t see it. “I need eight copies of three pages.”

“We have a copy machine. I’ll do it for you.”

I hesitate, thinking of what it is I want copied, but I realize that it might not be a bad thing if she were to read it. Maybe she knows something I should know, and maybe she’ll even decide to tell me so. “That’s very kind of you. I’ll pay for them, of course.”

“What’s that all about?” Nate asks me, on our way out.

“You’ll see,” I tell him. “It’s a surprise, for later.”

I’d tell him what it is—I’d tell Steve, too—but I don’t want anybody talking me out of doing what I want to do.

On our Magical Memory Tour, we make a stop in front of my parents’ old home, an impressive pile of architecture that’s vacant now and gone to seed. The “famous” parson’s chamber is not visible from the street, nor is the magnolia tree that the young black man saw from the windows of it. There’s a circle drive where Hubert Templeton would have kept the car running while my father ran in to get my mother. It’s easy to imagine the front door flung open and three dark people standing in the shadows of the hallway, watching. I’ll have to settle for imagination. I have no actual memory of this house or of the events that happened in it, just a recurring dream of myself as an infant riding in the backseat of a car, at night, with my daddy.

After that stop along memory lane, the three of us park briefly in front of the house where Nate and I lived with his parents.

“Want to ring the bell and ask for a tour?” I ask him.

But he shakes his head vehemently. “No. Let’s go.”

We drive the streets down which the white Hostel members of Sebastion were paraded on the evening of June 12, 1963, and I tell Steve about it.

“You think Julia and Joe were in that crowd?” Nate asks me, referring to his own parents, my mother’s brother and his wife. “Throwing stones?”

“I kind of doubt it, Nate. That would be too undignified for your mother, and your father wouldn’t want to stick his neck out. Anyway, don’t you think they’d leave that to the rednecks?”

“As if they aren’t rednecks, themselves,” he says, with a derisive snort. “Just better dressed, with a few more years in school, not that it improved them any.”

But these are old complaints, and we tire of them quickly.

We circle the town, taking a look at all the roads that enter and exit from it, wondering which of them leads to a crossroads where two people might have been shot and killed on the night of the parade.

It’s a small city/town, and our tour doesn’t take much time, at least not by the clock. In terms of our personal histories, however, it covers an awful lot of forgotten ground.

When we return to the inn to change for dinner, we argue about whether or not to stay crowded into a single suite or to ask Mo for another one. It quickly becomes clear to me that neither man wants to leave me alone with the other one. To avoid nastiness, I capitulate: we’ll manage with just this one set of rooms. We divvy up the suite, with me assigned to the smaller back bedroom and the two men taking the front one. Steve insists that my cousin have the bed, and he takes the rollaway that somebody has placed in our suite in our absence. Although there’s only the one bathroom it has doors opening into each of the bedrooms, so we ought to be able to manage okay, though I wish they weren’t so stubborn.

As per my request, I find a neat pile of stapled copies stacked on the desk in the front bedroom. Before Steve or Nathan can see them, I take them into my room and stash them in my suitcase. Then I grab my laptop and head out the door.

“You guys can have the bathroom first. I’m going downstairs to work.”

“By yourself?” Steve asks sharply. “I’ll go with you.”

“No, I’m fine, remember what you said? I’m still safe until I finish his book.”

Neither of them looks particularly happy at the idea of being left alone with the other, but they’re just going to have to get along. Nathan could get a private suite if he wanted, but he hasn’t shown any more inclination to leave my side than Steve has. I’m beginning to wonder if each one thinks he’s protecting me from the other.

It’s a thought that has me grinning to myself as I close the door on them.

On the wide staircase I meet a surprise: Rachel Templeton.

“Mrs. Templeton!”

Her head jerks up, and she frowns at me. I’ve startled her, and she looks angry about it, as if she had been deep in her own thoughts and now I’ve interrupted them.

“I didn’t mean to scare you. Do you remember me? I’m Marie Lightfoot? Marie Folletino? I was here in Sebastion five years ago, and we talked about my parents?”

On that trip, I stayed in Birmingham and commuted here. Looking back at that choice now, it doesn’t make much sense. I can only surmise that I didn’t want to get any closer than I had to, didn’t want to spend any more time here than I needed in order to interview a few people.

“I remember,” she says, without warmth.

This black woman who once worked for my parents is in her sixties now. From the looks of the vacuum cleaner she’s lugging up the steps, she is still working as a housecleaner, only this time for the Old Southern Inn. It makes my heart hurt to realize that although many things have changed since those days, for a black woman with little education, some hard things never changed. Here is Rachel, still sweeping up the dirt from under the feet of white folks. Or, maybe I should say, wealthier folks, since surely some of the tourists who stay here now are black. She’s wearing blue jeans, with a man’s shirt hanging over them, and her head is wrapped in a white turban. I get a glimpse of the beautiful girl she once was, but the years have lined her face and deepened the shadows and circles under her eyes.

“What’re you back here for?” she asks me, blunt as a hammer.

She was a little friendlier than this the last time I saw her, but not much.

“I’m just trying to find out a little more about them.”

She shakes her head, as if she thinks I’m foolish to pursue it.

“You’re working late,” I comment, kind of desperately, as if I think that if we stand here on the steps long enough she’ll warm up to me.

“I work another job first.”

Stricken at the idea of this sixtyish woman working two jobs—or more? —to make ends meet, I’m at a loss for any other words except, “How is your husband?”

“Hubert’s doin’ okay.”

“Where’s he working these days?”

“Little of this, little of that. Yard work. Got himself a truck, pickin’ up some towing business out on the highway. Never run out of that kind of business.”

Into the awkward pause that follows, I say, “Please give him my best regards.”

She nods, unsmiling. “I’ll do that.” Without another word, she starts to move on around me. I turn and watch her labor on up the stairs. I ache to ask if I may carry the heavy appliance for her, but she’d find that absurd. She has been carrying such loads most of her life. How can this possibly be fair or right, that these two courageous black Americans could still be piecing their income together from such laborious tasks as cleaning houses and towing wrecks? Where’s the justice in that?

And then it’s my turn to be startled.

At the top of the stairs, as if aware of my eyes focused on her back, she suddenly turns to glare down at me. “If I had a mama and a papa like you had I’d never ask a single question about them. You oughtn’t to be prying. You ought to just let it go. Hubert and I, we put up with you and all your questions one time, ’cause we felt sorry for you. It wasn’t your fault, what your parents did, but now here you are back again. You ought to just be ashamed of them and be done with it, instead of carrying on about writing a book about them, like they was something to be proud about. You ought to take yourself on home is what you ought to do, and forget about us, and don’t never come back to Sebastion.”

Stung, I shoot back, “Maybe it wasn’t their fault.”

Her expression is bitterly scornful. “And maybe the sun don’t rise.”

“Maybe they were murdered.”

But that only deepens her contempt. “You think everybody’s an innocent victim? You got a lot to learn, girl, but if you’re smart, you won’t try to learn it here.”

She picks up her vacuum again and turns her back on me.

Feeling shaken, I turn and continue on down the stairs.

Hardly aware of where I’m walking, I end up in the parlor.

There’s no one else around, but there could be a whole convention of people in here and I wouldn’t feel any less alone. There was something so alienating about what she said to me, the way she said it, the cold, determined way she froze me out when she walked off. I feel as if I’m my mother, rejected by her friend whom she once loved and trusted. There are all kinds of betrayals in the world and one of the worst is to think the worst of people who have never previously given you any reason to doubt them. If I were my mother, I’d feel terribly betrayed right now, which is really ironic, considering that Rachel and Hubert think they’re the ones who have the right to feel that way.