The Undertaker's Daughter (35 page)

After the will was made public a curious number of people wanted to be our friends for the first time. Others, not extremely talented at hiding envy, were uncertain if they would ever speak to us again. One thing was certain—after thirteen years, we were moving out of the funeral home.

My father drove me to Miss Agnes’s house early one evening and coasted slowly in front of it. With the same conviction that he said Julie Christie was the most beautiful woman in the world, he told me, “Here is the most beautiful house in Jubilee. I hope you appreciate it.”

It was a prime example of American-colonial-and-Palladian-style architecture. Two-story columns fronted a brick facade and flanked one-story wings. Here were marble statues and massive urns from which red zinnias sprouted. This was our new home. It was too much of a house to talk about all in one breath. The house had nothing of the appearance of a museum because everything in it was personal. It contained a few things a little more worth talking about than others.

German furniture designer John Henry Belter had originated the method of laminating rosewood in his New York workshop in 1844. He kept his method secret for many years, until 1858 when he finally took out a patent for it. The process made it possible to create elaborate designs, and with it he could carve concave backs to his chairs. Before he died in 1863, he destroyed his patterns and smashed his pattern molds so that his ornately carved furniture could never be reproduced. Five Belter pieces, grand and rare, occupied the center of Miss Agnes’s parlor. The sofa and chairs of a three-piece drawing-room suite were upholstered in red satin, as were an additional armchair and a smaller side chair. Candelabra
and miniature glass slippers sat atop tier tables inlaid with French ormolu. Miss Agnes had been particularly fond of her satin ruby and ormolu parlor lamp known as a
Gone with the Wind
lamp, a misnomer because the use of the lamps in the movie was an anachronism; they were not produced until after the Civil War. She didn’t care; it was still valuable. Red-and-white china plates lined the shelves of a cupboard. Copper pots that rested on trivets by the fireplace appeared ready for the boil. There were Duncan Phyfe chairs, a serpentine chest, vases, candlesticks, framed prints, walnut tables, and a bellpull. A thick Oriental rug covered the beautiful wood floor. There was more.

In the spacious entry hall a French crystal chandelier glistened from the high ceiling, and a heavily carved piano graced a corner. Another Oriental softened the walk across the foyer. The house had been remodeled in 1880, and the Victorian influence was evident in the winding staircase in the entry hall. The staircase led to the room that was to be my bedroom. In it, a large, floor-to-ceiling Palladian window divided into three parts dominated one wall. My new view looked out upon shade trees that stretched high above the house, a manicured green lawn, and shrubbery that met a slightly raised front porch supported by two elegant columns. The porch extended the length of the house and was partially framed by the black wrought iron from New Orleans.

A few months after her death, I stood on the concrete floor of a building site in the back of Miss Agnes’s house.

“What’s all this?” I asked my father. “Aren’t there enough rooms in this house for us?”

“There are, but we’re not going to live in all of the rooms. We can’t sit around on Victorian furniture and watch television. And there’s no kitchen in the house to speak of.”

A two-story addition was built in the back of the house, not visible from the street, designed so that the facade was not affected. As my father spoke of the new kitchen and his walk-in, cedar-lined closet, I noticed a small brick structure at the back of the property.

“What’s that?” I pointed.

“Slaves’ quarters.”

We stood before a windowless building, which from the outside had the deceiving facade of a cozy, little brick cottage, the only sign that remained of Major Bibb’s one hundred slaves. My father and I stepped into a close, dark space so small that no more than three people could lie next to each other without touching. I inhaled stale air as my eyes adjusted. The walls and floor were achingly featureless, without even a hearth to lend them character. This was the kind of historical structure of which Jubilee was so proud.

The slaves’ quarters were a reminder to me that ancestors of Noah and Julian had been kept behind the houses of Jubilee in buildings not fit for animals. I was sickened by the very thought. Neither of us spoke and I was glad of it. I had nothing to say that he would understand.

My father didn’t sling the word
nigger
around like many people I knew, and he never hesitated when the black funeral home needed help, but the division remained. In fact, the funeral business was
the most segregated business in Jubilee and the whole of the South.

The line between races in the 1970s was as severe and noticeable as it had ever been. Nothing much had changed since that day at school when Ophelia first entered the classroom in my red plaid dress. My father’s attitude was much the same as that of many in Jubilee. Our black community were to know their place
and stay in it. Our schools may have survived integration, but our churches, restaurants, and our relationships—governed by the largest unspoken taboo—were still glaringly separate.

This was neither a family nor a town in which I could lay down the burden of my secret lovers. As my father closed the door of the slaves’ quarters, I closed the door to the notion that I would ever be able to confide in him. This was one of those moments when I drew a silent breath and told myself to have patience, that I only had to finish high school and then I could leave Jubilee.

 CHAPTER 15 

M
iss Agnes’s house creaked and made noises at night that only I could hear, for while Jemma and our parents slept in the new wing, my room kept a solid foot in the old. Oddly, after living in the funeral home for thirteen years, I thought this was the sort of house in which one could be, well, properly scared. The winding staircase in the spacious entrance hall led directly up to my bedroom. At the other end of my room a heavy door opened into what had been a children’s playroom. Beside my bed was yet another door, behind which a venerable stairway led to an attic room. The grandfather clock at the bottom of the stairs ticked loudly. At night, in the dark, a presence lingered in the baronial rooms downstairs. It may have been age itself. The house seemed to groan under its 155 years. Perhaps the people who had lived here before us left traces of themselves, and the old timbers swelled and sighed in the summers and shrank in the cold of winter, creaking their accompaniment to the house’s watchful
spirits. Some were benign, I felt. Some not so. I wondered if Belle minded working in this house with its loathsome history. She would never say.

Things went missing from my bedroom. Sometimes I phoned her in the evenings.

“Have you seen my blue spiral notebook?”

“I can’t find my red pajamas.”

Every week it was something different. Jemma swore she wasn’t playing games. The items I sought, a pair of socks, a book, disappeared, and items I didn’t particularly need cropped up regularly, such as the red diary Miss Agnes had given me years ago. I wanted to keep a diary, I wanted to record everything, but I couldn’t possibly. The girls at my slumber party had taught me that it wasn’t safe for anything about my life to be written on paper. The risk of discovery was too great, so I tucked it away in a drawer. I found it under the bed one night. The pages were still blank.

In spite of these mildly perturbing goings-on, I fell in love with the house. Just as the funeral home was a house for both living and dead, this house seemed to exist somewhere between the past and the present. If Miss Agnes had suddenly walked in the front door again, she would have been able to pick up right where she left off. Nothing was changed or disturbed; our modern possessions didn’t mingle with her ancient collections. The design of the new addition was clever. It was possible to leave modernity behind simply by walking through a door.

I often wandered through the old part of the house when no one else was home. It felt like eavesdropping on another era. The big, cavernous rooms filled with solid, heavy furniture seemed to suit me. I read while sitting in the Belter chairs and woke from naps with marks from their carved wood impressed into my face.
The ornate piano was sorely off-key but I played it anyway; my father seemed in no hurry to have it tuned. My repertoire contained no hymns or funereal music. No mourner’s crying was to be heard and no dead people were in this house, at least, none we could see. Instead there was silence of a different kind. Miss Agnes was still here. In every corner, in every room bathed in red fabric, she was here. By not occupying her bedroom, by not using her drawing room or her kitchen, we kept our memories of her alive. On our first Thanksgiving in the house we gathered in her dining room, a place that had not been the scene of any human visitation for over thirty years. My father carved the turkey and sliced the ham, and for the first time in over a decade, he didn’t leave the table to go to her.

Not long after we’d moved in, in the middle of dinner, we heard a determined knock on our back door. My mother sighed, my father ignored it, and Jemma looked at me.

“You go,” she said.

“No, you go,” I said.

“No,
you
go.”

“All right, all right, I’ll go!”

I found a young teenager, someone from Jemma’s class whom she barely knew, and a couple of other girls, huddled together giggling.

One of them boldly stepped forward. “We want to see your house,” she demanded.

“I’m sorry, we’re eating supper and now’s not a good time.”

“We’ll come back later.”

“No, please don’t.” I sought for an excuse. “We’re really busy tonight.”

Interruptions like this became a recurring feature of our life. Young, old, middle-aged, people known to us, absolute strangers,
anyone and everyone knocked on our door at all hours and expected
le grand
tour. Many people believed stoutly that now that the strange, old chatelaine was dead and buried, they had every right to demand entrance into the mysterious place from which she had barred entry for so long. Miss Agnes had, of course, known that after she was gone the deluge would begin, this being one of the reasons she’d left the house to my father, to prevent such trespasses. So there we were, bound to respect her wish that her things not be disturbed, trusted to behave as caretakers who lived in a certain way; in the same way, in fact, as we had lived above the funeral home—quietly and respectfully. We had no parties, no large gatherings, and certainly no tours. Our close friends, who had never minded being entertained in the funeral home, were the only people we invited to our new home. Tamales, fried chicken, and barbecue tasted the same wherever they were served. When Jemma and I refused classmates’ requests to sneak them into the house when our parents weren’t home, we became known in certain circles as snobs. I’d unwittingly made the lateral move from being a nigger lover to a stuck-up irritant. I was exasperated when a classmate, who’d never expressed any interest in visiting the house before, told me, “Everyone is jealous of you now.”

There it was, that piercing, clear bell—a warning that eyes would cut away from me and whispers would continue. Under the stifling Southern politeness of this community was a pettiness from which I wanted to flee so badly that I thought my brain would explode. It seemed that my parents accepted the roots they had planted and were absorbed in the minutiae of their chosen spot on the map. But if there had been a small part of me that still found any comfort or sentiment for this small-minded town, it now crumbled to dust like the old bones in the cemetery where I once played.