Up Island (13 page)

In the end, though, Tee did come to Mother’s bon voyage party. Just as the afternoon shadows were falling across the patio and the first guests were making noises about leaving, the doorbell rang and Kevin went to answer it. He came back into the living room holding

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an arrangement of blood-red roses so massive that only the top of his head showed over them, only the blue of his eyes glinted through them. Kevin was all pigeon-blood velvet from his waist to his crown. His arms could hardly contain the roses. There must, I thought, have been a hundred of them.

All of them were perfect, breath-stopping, rococo. My first thought was that they must have cost almost as much as the party had. My second was that they were the most ostentatious things I had ever seen. I could tell by the little gasping rush of breath that swept around the room that everyone else thought so, too. Everyone present at my mother’s funeral reception would talk for years about this most stunningly inappropriate of floral offerings.

My mother, I thought, would have adored them.

“Well, my goodness, who on earth?” Sally chirped, breaking the silence.

“Good lord,” my father said.

“Florist’s delivery,” Kevin muttered from behind the jugger-naut of roses. “One I didn’t know.”

I walked over and took the envelope that trembled, like a butterfly, on the topmost petal. It was creamy, heavy stock, and addressed to Daddy, Kevin, and me. I opened it.

“Our deepest sympathy and love,” the card read.

It was signed, “Tee and Sheri.” The handwriting was strong and black and slashing, not Tee’s.

“Another emerging nation heard from,” I said, and handed the roses to Sally and walked into the kitchen, my cheeks and chest flaming. Behind me the silence spun out. It was a full minute before the low rush of talk started.

I was in the kitchen splashing water on my face when Livvy came in.

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“Christ, I thought she was the one raised in a barn,” she said incredulously. “What, did somebody punch a hole in him and all his taste and manners ran out? I never saw such a vulgar bunch of flowers in my life, and I never, ever in my life heard of a guy and his mistress sending flowers to his not-even-ex-wife. They’ll be lucky if Coke doesn’t send them both to Edie Summers.”

Edie Summers was a fiftyish, perennial debutante who taught manners and social graces to the spawn of the big houses of Buckhead. Tee had once, he had said, had an aching adolescent crush on her when he was a freshman at Westminster and she was a senior. She had since been transmogrified into such a porcelain paragon of seemliness and perfection that there seemed nothing left for her, after her banker husband died appropriately on the tennis court at the Driving Club fifteen years before, but to open a small, perfect academy dedicated to varnishing the children of her classmates with her patina. Their parents paid dearly for it, and Edie prospered, and there were few Buckhead teens who left for college who did not know how to comport themselves.

The comporting itself was another matter entirely. Tee and Charlie used to say that the wildest kids who went through Chi Phi rush all over the South were Edie’s kids. I spluttered into my cupped hands at the thought of Tee and the Eel Woman in Edie’s implacable clutches, and bent at the waist, laughing. Livvy laughed with me.

When we had stopped, I said, “Poor Daddy. What a stupid, awful thing for him to have to cope with. Tee ought to be shot; he ought to know better. What did Dad do with them?

I ought to be ashamed of myself for running out like that.”

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“He didn’t have to cope with them,” she said. “I took them away from Sally and stuffed them in the downstairs john and locked the door. You can throw them out or send them to Piedmont or whatever after the party. I personally would take them over to Coke marketing and insert them, thorns and all, up Tee’s ass, one by one, but that’s up to you. Caleb got your dad another Bloody Mary and he and Charlie Davies took him out on the patio and asked him about wiring lamps.

Everybody’s stopped buzzing and is gearing up to leave. The great flower hoo-ha
est fini.
Crisis management is my specialty. You may kiss my ring.”

And sure enough, by the time the last guest had gone and Daddy and Kevin and Sally and Teddy and I had plopped ourselves down in exhaustion on the cooling patio, Tee and his terrible roses and his awful paramour had been tucked away somewhere in our collective tribal subconscious, to be given their indignant due when we could get to them. This was it now, the time I had been dreading for days, the hour when, for all of us, but most especially for my father, the real world rocketed back into motion and the real anguish must begin.

We did not speak at first, only looked around at each other, and I had a swift, panicky moment of thinking that I honestly could not bear the pain Dad must feel. I knew by then that for myself, I could bear it with an ease that was rather appalling. I had, somehow, during the funeral and the gathering that followed, buried my mother as deeply in my own center as we had in the earth of Arlington Cemetery.

Later, I thought; later, when the time is right and I can do it properly, I can think about her. There’s plenty of time. This time right now is for Daddy.

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Finally Dad said, “I thought it went real well, didn’t you-all? I’m always surprised at how many people have seen her plays and concerts. The church was SRO. And this was nice, Molly, this little to-do this afternoon. Good food. And all those young people…your friends, I guess, and Kevin’s. It was nice of them to come…”

His voice trailed off and he looked vacantly into space, his hands folded over the small melon of his stomach as if he were waiting to be called for dinner, or for the rest of his life.

I thought of the awful subway dream and closed my eyes for a moment. When I opened them, he was still looking patiently into nowhere.

“It was a really pretty party, Molly,” Sally said, and then winced. “Or reception, I guess. Very easy and elegant, nothing too stiff or formal. Mama Bell would have liked it.”

Mama Bell wouldn’t have liked it a bit more than she liked the plain little church or the loudmouthed ducks who had stolen her thunder, I thought in my new, becalmed clarity.

She’d have held out for the Driving Club or nothing.

Aloud I said, “Thank you, Sally. I couldn’t have done it without you. And you too, Kev. Of course.”

“Of course,” Kevin said. His voice was a husky rasp. Of us all, Kevin seemed the only one whose emotions were properly anchored to reality. He had lost the love of his life and he was bereft and angry. Angry mostly at me.

Another little silence spun out, and into it Teddy said, “I think I’ll go make myself a sandwich, Ma. Can I fix one for anybody else?”

“There’s a ton of stuff left,” I said. “Didn’t you get any?”

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“I had peanut butter and jelly in mind,” he said, and Dad and I smiled at each other. It was an instinctive smile, our old one.

“I’ll see you before you go, Grampa,” Teddy said, and dropped a kiss on top of my father’s head as naturally as if he had done it every day for years. But Teddy had not kissed anyone in his own family since he’d turned ten. My heart squeezed with love for him.

We were drifting toward silence again. Into it I heard my own voice saying, in the tone I am told I use in my various committee meetings, “Well, I guess we need to make a few plans. Kevin, I know you and Sally will be going on back in the morning, and Teddy’s getting ready for his trip west.

What about you, Dad? Have you thought what you might like to do in the next few days?”

My father did not answer, only studied middle air, and Kevin and Sally looked at me in disbelief, as if I had farted loudly in some solemn, sacred ceremony. I blushed furiously.

I sounded officious and insensitive and horrible even to my own ears, and could not imagine where the fluting words had come from, except that I felt a need, as strong as anything I have ever experienced, to get everyone and everything in some sort of order.

“Sorry,” I whispered miserably to my father, but the need remained, pulsing like an abscessed tooth.

“Don’t be, baby,” he said presently, heavily and without inflection. “You’re right. We do need to make some plans.

Life isn’t going to stop for us.”

Except that, of course, for him it had.

“Come to us,” Kevin said. He said it firmly and strongly, in his anchor voice. He did not often use it off
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the air. It always surprised me when he did, that this authority lived in Kevin.

Dad looked at him, one eyebrow raised.

“I mean it,” Kevin said. “Come stay with us for a while.

We’d love that, wouldn’t we, Sal? You never have, not for any length of time. Mother never liked Washington. Come stay for a few weeks and get to know my world, my town.

I’ll take some time off, and we’ll go to the National Press Club, and the White House press room, and I’ll introduce you to some of the big enchiladas—Brokaw, Jennings—and we’ll go down to the Eastern Shore and do some fishing, and go to the galleries and restaurants—”

“Oh, come, Daddy Bell,” Sally cried. “I redecorated the guest room just for you and…for you. The drapes have ducks on them. Mandy would be so excited…”

Mandy was Kevin and Sally’s eleven-year-old daughter. I did not think she had ever been excited about anything except horses.

“Just like Molly at that age,” Mother used to say. “All arms and legs and feet and shoulders. Except, of course, with Molly it was swimming, not horses.”

Poor Mandy. Damned by her dominant genes.

“It would be nice to spend some time with Mandy,” Daddy said dutifully, but I did not think he was even aware of what he said. He seemed to me much as he always had, loose-jointed and laconic and sweet-tempered, except that there did not, now, seem to be any core to him. I thought that if the rest of us got up and left the patio, he would simply sit there until someone came to fetch him and tell him what to do. I was right, I was not going to be able to bear this…

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“Then you’ll come?” Kevin said.

“It’s something to think about,” Daddy said.

“No!” I cried. Again, Kevin and Sally looked at me in disapproving alarm. Daddy continued to study air.

“I mean, not right now; he needs to be here. There are all these things to be done, and then he needs time to take it in.

He needs to be where he’s always been; he needs quiet and familiarity to sort it all out. I’m going to help. We can be at the condo in the daytime, and at night he can come to me…”

I ran out of steam. The words had been a near frantic tumble. My father did look at me then.

“You’ve got too much on you right now, baby,” he said.

“I appreciate it, but I’m not going to drape myself all over you like a sack of salt. I’ll holler if I think I need any help.”

“No, it’s only logical,” I persisted. “You don’t even like that stuffy little condo and I’ve got this whole big house, and besides, it’s my job. It’s what we do, us women…”

I smiled to let him know I was half-joking, but I could tell he saw through it.

“What’s what you do?” he said mildly. I knew that he really saw me now, perhaps for the first time that day.

“Look after people,” I said lamely.

Daddy sighed and looked at us, Kevin and me, before he spoke.

“What I need now is to be by myself,” he said mildly. “To be alone with your mother. We haven’t said good-bye, and I need to do that. She just looked at me in the ambulance; she never did say anything. I didn’t either, that I can remember. We just…looked. She had this intent, sort of preoccupied look on her face, in her

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eyes, and then her face changed…and she died. But we never said anything to one another. That’s what I’ve got to do next.”

I felt my eyes fill, but it was Kevin who spoke.

“When…when her face changed…did she look afraid?” he asked. I could scarcely hear him.

“No,” Daddy said. “She looked surprised. I appreciate your asking, both of you, but I need to stick around the house until I can see her clearly again, till I can see her like she was and not like at the last…”

“But then you’ll come,” I said stubbornly. “Won’t you?

And we can start doing all the stuff you’ll need to do. Or I could come to your house…”

He drew a deep breath and let it out slowly. He smiled a little.

“No. Then I’m going fishing. I’m going with Harry Florian.

We’ve been talking about spending a couple of weeks at Homosassa for years. Now I reckon we’ll do it. And then I’m going to sell that cussed condo and find another place.

That’s the first thing I’m going to do when I get back.”

“Well, I can help there, at least,” I said. “There are all kinds of nice little places around midtown, full of charm and individuality, most of them not too pricey, and they’re all close to us…”

“Close to who?” my father said cautiously.

“Well, you know…to us.”

“There’s not any you,” Kevin drawled. “Were you perhaps forgetting? What ‘us’ were you referring to?”

Abruptly the killing, red fury surged back, crashing down over me like a great wave. I felt myself lifted on it; I surfed on its curl. I rode it higher and higher. And, abruptly, then I pushed it down. That red wave had already taken my mother.

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“I don’t want to hear any more of that kind of talk,” my father said to Kevin. It was nearly his old voice, out of my childhood. He looked at me with love and, I thought, a kind of weary pity.

“I’m tired of the city, Molly,” he said. “I think my time in the city is just about over. The city was your mother’s place.

The country’s mine. I thought I might look for a little place up around Jasper, or maybe even down in Lowndes County.

Around home. I’ve still got some good friends there. I could have a garden, and a real workshop. And I wouldn’t be more than a few hours away from here…”

His voice cracked, and I knew he meant away from the raw new mound on the shady, duck-haunted hill at Arlington.