The Undertaker's Daughter (36 page)

M
y last year of high school was made memorable for me by a woman who seemed to care little for antebellum mansions or racial slurs. Mrs. Flanders stood at the door of the classroom as we entered, silently relaying the message that we were on her turf now. Occasionally she grabbed my arm, looked straight into my eyes, and quoted Keats and Byron without explanation. She was our Senior English teacher, her glasses so thick that her saucer-size, brown eyes seemed to have a separate existence. They remained slightly moist when she beseeched us to always remember that Robert Burns was much more than “Auld Lang Syne.” When we were required to read
A Tale of Two Cities
, I thought she might be something special, but when she announced that our next book was to be Bram Stoker’s
Dracula
, we couldn’t believe our luck.

I had no rational explanation for my subsequent search for a string of fresh garlic, and no excuse, except to say that I was frightened stiff by that book. Ours was not the perfect house in which to read
Dracula
. Or, actually, maybe it was. I read late at night when everyone else was asleep. The windows in my bedroom unsettled me. Set high up beneath the portico, they rattled from the lightest breeze. These were windows a bat would love, I was sure of it. I thought,
Here I am with two sets of stairs in my room . . . a front door below me.
No one would ever know if I was taken away. What if Evelyn had told the truth that time and I really was a sleepwalker? What if I began sleepwalking again? Mr. Stoker’s Lucy found herself a heap of trouble walking in her sleep. The brave and daring person who had sneaked out at night from the funeral home was reduced to nursing a morbid fear of bats.

Then the thing we’d all been fearing arrived. The Senior English term paper was dreaded for the entire four years of high school. This obstacle was similar to the nauseating dissection of frogs or the rote recitation of Brutus’s speech by every member of our class, one after the other. I was enthralled by Dickens, but thought he would be pure hell to pin down. Hoping better to understand Miss Agnes’s obsession, I chose to write about Edgar Allan Poe—a different kind of hell.

I thought it would be easy, but I was wrong. Old Poe worked his dark magic on me, and the night before the paper was due I still hadn’t completed it. I was no closer to unlocking his secrets than I was those of Miss Agnes. I coerced a friend to help me, and we sat at a table piled high with books. Someone made coffee. I wrote, he referenced, I read, and he typed.

When it was all over, Mrs. Flanders asked me to stay after class. “Do you think that creativity must be fueled by alcohol or drugs?” She never bothered to lead into her searching questions. She threw them straight.

“Oh, God, I hope not. I mean, I don’t know, but . . .”

“It doesn’t work like that. People think it does. It’s tricky, because at first you’ll think you have the tiger by the tail. But it will tire you out. You’ll lose and then those substances will kill creativity stone dead. Kill it, kill it, kill it. Mr. Poe was not a party animal. He was a
very sick man
.”

“Mrs. Flanders, I don’t do drugs.”

“I know that.” She sounded as if she wanted to add the word
silly
.

“I mean, to tell you the truth, I’ve tried, but I’m naturally too paranoid.”

Although she didn’t flinch or raise her eyebrows, her saucer eyes grew sad. “I never thought I’d see the day when so many of
our young people would arrive in school wacked out of their brains.”

She was right. Drugs of all kinds had infiltrated our community. The fields surrounding little ole Jubilee were rife with a homegrown variety of marijuana guaranteed to sneak up on you and rob you of your equilibrium. Several of the girls who’d made such an effort to make me uncomfortable became druggies and confided they had serious addiction problems. That’s how it worked in our small town. In a moment of weakness, a flaw was laid bare.

“Do you think Mr. Poe was mad?” Mrs. Flanders asked.

“I’m not sure, but I think he must have known someone who was.”

“You should have written more about his influences. Form an opinion next time and allow yourself to be wrong.”

Shortly after Dracula’s demise, I grew my own set of fangs. My father’s former lover slipped back into town, hopefully chastened by her banishment to Louisville. Viv smiled and nodded to me at social events in Jubilee. In a show of loyalty to my mother, I ignored her and developed what I hoped was a smoldering look. Once, we couldn’t avoid one another and her eyes dogged me whenever I moved across the room. Jubilee never felt so stifling and small. I wondered how my mother could stand it.

I never saw my father share a public space with Viv, although I’m sure they must have run into each other from time to time. He had other things on his mind. One morning he sat at the breakfast table, his shirt collar unbuttoned and tieless.

“What’s the matter?” I asked.

“You father’s not feeling well.” My mother spoke for him—another peculiar sign.

Later that day the principal announced my name over the loudspeaker right in the middle of a class.

My mother stood inside the office, waiting for me. “Your father’s had a heart attack. He’s been taken to Greenville.”

“Is he all right?”

“Yes, but get your things, we’re going there right now.”

He was fifty years old. The doctors told us that the heart attack had been mild. He didn’t need surgery, but they wanted to keep him there for a week or so to watch over him. He recovered brilliantly, but was frightened by the experience, which brought him face-to-face with his own mortality. The doctors advised him that it wouldn’t be a bad thing to lighten his workload.

Competition had become tougher in Jubilee. My mother kept her ear to the radio, listening to the funeral announcements, keeping a tally of which families had moved over to Sonny’s camp. A small group of men remodeled Alfred Deboe’s former premises and began an entirely new funeral business. The population couldn’t support three white funeral homes. My father respected these people and liked the way they conducted business. Without even consulting Rex, he sold his business to the new consortium.

My father, Rex, and Fount were all invited to work at the new funeral home, and that seemed to suit my father and his new lifestyle. A lighter schedule without the headaches of ownership left him free to do a bit of traveling and enjoy his new home. Before everything began to wind down at the funeral home, my mother asked me to deliver a package to Fount’s wife, Martha; the couple now occupied our former residence upstairs. I felt disoriented climbing the stairs, strange to be the one visiting.

“Martha?” I called to her. “It’s me.”

Nothing.

I entered the room that was once our dining room and found it transformed. It looked like the interior of a Gypsy’s wagon. Lampshades covered in dark-colored handkerchiefs shed
minimal light. A large cloth in muted hues draped a sofa that was oddly placed in the middle of the room. The faded fabric of a couple of easy chairs lent the room a tired parlor look. I found Martha nearly concealed from view but for an arm dangling down from the back of a wingback chair. She usually had a glass in her hand. I moved in front of her to avoid startling her. Slowly, she tilted her head and with some effort fixed her gaze upon me.

She immediately began speaking to me as if I were her closest friend, confiding in me as if we were not more than a few years apart in age. I didn’t mind at first that she rattled on because she made fun of herself in a breathless stream of words. Then I noticed that these words, this story, had come round before. Her voice, and its slow, deep drawl, began to grate; there seemed to be no end to the sentence, the story, or the day. Then I noticed what I’d not seen before. The ice in her glass was trembling a little. Her chocolate-colored eyes, which I’d at first admired for their directness, were glazed over and out of her control—they didn’t move because they couldn’t. Her lipstick, upon further scrutiny, had missed the mark, and the faded color revealed the true line of her thin upper lip. When she occasionally ran her hand through her dark red hair, she exposed half an inch of white at the roots. A whiff of the sweet odor of bourbon and Coke, heavy on the bourbon, inflamed my nostrils. By the time I began to retreat from her, it was too late. Her bony hand had fastened on my arm and I was hers for the rest of the hour.

She was not going to make a précis of her story. No, she had me now and I was ensnared by whatever she desperately wanted to share. She spent some time talking about the place she was from without ever telling me where it was. Of course it was much farther south, easy to tell from her single-syllable words that
picked up two or three more in her drawl. Then she switched gears and made me her confessor.

“Fount, ya know, spent some time in the pen.” She held an unlit cigarette. “Your daddy didn’t care. He hired him anyway.” Tap, tap. Tap, tap. Maddeningly she tapped the cigarette on a coffee table littered with pink cellophane wrappers and overflowing ashtrays.

“Fount had a lot of difficulty in his life. Did ya know he used to be a policeman in another county?” She didn’t wait for an answer. “Yeah,” she slurred. “He worked at a car dealership, too.” She put the cigarette to her lips, but took it away. “The man he worked for got himself involved in a car-theft ring. But Fount took the rap.”

She closed her eyes and I thought she was gone. I made a move, but as soon as she heard the floor creak, she sat up, wide-eyed.

“He was innocent.” She finally lit the cigarette and sucked on it as if it were her last. “They sent him to the federal pen in Atlanta. He loves the funeral business. He adores your daddy.” She threw back the rest of her drink. “Sonny, that sorry-ass son of a bitch, he found out.”

She used the tip of her ring finger to remove a speck of tobacco from her tongue. “Sonny let it out of the bag. About prison. Fount wanted to get his funeral director’s license, but that son-of-a-mother-whore told them about Fount. What did he care? He’s got his own rotten funeral home now. Told them about Atlanta. So Fount can’t get his license. Because of the conviction.”

“I know, Martha, you told me before. Remember? And I’m so sorry. I’ve got to go. My mother asked me to give you these fresh tomatoes from the garden.”

Her lips curled up into a half smile and her head moved in slow motion, as if to say thank-you. We both knew she didn’t care
about the tomatoes. She tried to cadge a few cigarettes off me before I left, but I didn’t have any.

Even though my father seemed content with his decision, it was the end of an era. After Fount and Martha moved out, the funeral home fell abandoned. I felt an emptiness whenever I drove by.

Wrapped up in a hundred senior-year activities, at first I didn’t notice the change in my father’s behavior. I knew he was spending more time “checking the garden,” and at times when I stopped by to see him at the new funeral home, Rex or Fount told me he was out. Sometimes at breakfast he was quiet and moody. I asked him once if he was mad at someone or something and he shook his head no. Then, out of the blue, he’d act angry.

I’d been rehearsing long hours for our high school’s first musical-theater production, a big event for our little town. I came home late one afternoon to grab a quick bite before heading out to another rehearsal. After a shower and a change of clothes, I sat at my place at the table opposite him. My mother always sat beside him and Jemma sat on the other side. He put his fork down and, with elbows on the table, folded his hands and stared at me. Angry disapproval was on his face.

“What?” I asked.

“You think you’re so damn pretty, don’t you?”

Nothing could have been further from my mind.

“Don’t you?”

His voice was accusatory with something bordering nasty thrown in. It was unlike him. I was embarrassed by his glare and looked down at my food. Suddenly I had no saliva to wash down the steak I chewed. I was the little girl again who had walked through the kitchen, innocent and unaware of the spanking to come. He might have smacked me, his words stung so. I glanced at Jemma out of the corner of my eye, and she looked down at her
food and pushed her fork around on the plate. I thought my mother would come to my rescue, but she too was angry and accused me of the high crime of never being at home. Then, within their silence, they both grew distant from me and from each other.

On another night, after he returned from the funeral home, I broached a subject with as much subtlety as a wrecking ball.

“I don’t want to go to college. I want to go to New York to study acting.”

My mother said nothing. I think she held her breath, waiting for the explosion. My father acted as if I’d told him that I was going to throw myself in front of a train.

“New York?” He raised his hands like a hellfire preacher. “New York! Do you know what you’ll be in New York? Another pea in the pod, that’s what you’ll be. Just another pea in the pod. Well, you can forget that. You’ll go to college or you’ll get a job.”

Cigarette-smoking, alcoholic, adulterous, and now leash-holding Big Daddy—Tennessee Williams made a fortune off men like my father. We had reached the stage that so many Southern daddies and daughters approach—the time for letting go. I was a teenager who was too much like him, and he was having trouble with his loss of control.

I didn’t mention New York again. Instead I approached Mrs. Flanders for a written recommendation to her alma mater, a university within the state. When I dropped by her classroom to retrieve it, she asked me to close the door.

“You know I’m happy to give you this.” She licked the envelope.

“Yes, ma’am, I appreciate it.”

“But really, you need to go far from here. Not to some little university forty minutes’ drive away.”

I don’t believe any adult had ever spoken to me so honestly before. Not even Miss Agnes.

“You’re different,” she said matter-of-factly. “And I mean that in the nicest way possible. You just don’t belong anywhere near here.”

Hearing her drop this soft bomb so simply, so bluntly, was a relief. Her words hit me at the core and I knew she was right. But my father’s hold on me was still too strong. New York would have to wait until I was more capable—if that moment ever arrived.