Where We Are Now (17 page)

I was speechless. I leaned forward as if to question her more. It was so ridiculous on the surface. And perhaps that was it, a surface, something Dorothy had fashioned to explain a part of her life to herself. I slid my cup slightly in the saucer as if searching for the circle it fit within. When I lifted my eyes, I saw, without meaning to, my own middle-aged face for a second in the mirror over Dorothy's shoulder, the familiar lines between my eyebrows, and those beginning to show on both cheeks.

“It's hard to know, isn't it, hard to look back and see it all.” Before she could answer, I added, “Fergus has never said anything.”

“That's like him.” She turned her head, her pearly earrings reflecting the light softly, luminously. “It's odd, isn't it? Here you're going to my ex-in-laws' anniversary—How many is it?”

“Fifty-five. Fergus wanted to give them a party, for their fiftieth, but Aunt Lucy was ill then. Sometimes I wonder if Marshall and I will last that long.”

The party was held that evening out at an old log cabin, one with a dog run in the middle, surrounded by oaks, one of those places people rented when they wanted to surround themselves with history, or with the feel of history, a stage set borrowed for reflections it cast on people. Aunt Lucy, wearing a blue-gray dress she'd ordered, and Uncle Phillip in his usual dark suit, looking pleased with themselves one minute, the next looking faintly surprised to discover they were there, greeted their guests outside on a stone patio.

Marshall complimented me on my dress. So did Fergus.

“I got it at this little place your mother sent me to … or rather a friend of hers told her about it.”

Fergus gave a short laugh and walked off abruptly taking little steps toward the band hitting the patio stones hard with his heels.

The band was playing
The Tennessee Waltz
—not particularly appropriate for the occasion. I thought at first Fergus was angry about that. He didn't stop to say anything to the musicians though. Instead he marched toward his mother who was too busy talking to someone to notice his approach. Just before he reached her he veered away to the
bar where he stopped to pick up a drink and circled back to me.

“How was she?” There was an edge to his voice as if he were forcing out the words. He stood in front of me rocking back and forth on his boot heels.

I puzzled over his question for a long moment before I realized he could only be talking about Dorothy. “Oh….” I shrugged, still uncertain but not wanting to give her away.

“You bought that dress from her, didn't you?”

Marshall had gone to get us both drinks, and on his way back I could see he'd stopped to talk to someone I didn't know. I turned to walk a little way to a big oak on the edge of the lawn.

“Marianne—” Fergus was right behind me.

“Yes?”

“Dorothy sold you that dress, didn't she?”

“Marshall could get by in jeans, but I couldn't come to your parents' party in them.”

“Oh, you couldn't.” He raised his voice in a falsetto imitation.

His lower lip stuck out reminding me of the time he was a furious little boy who'd pushed me off the porch swing. I was five-years-old; he had been ten. I'd told on him, tattled immediately and without remorse. He was bigger then, older, and had known the rules longer. No hitting, pinching, scratching, pushing. And the most important, no mocking. For a moment I was five-years-old again, enraged and searching for Aunt Lucy so I could cry, “Fergus is being mean to me.”

He shook his head slightly. “I'm sorry, Marianne. I guess I was mad at Mother. She knew whose shop that was. She's always known. I gave Dorothy the damn place, gave her half the money to buy it. Her mama and I did. We each put
up half when Dorothy and I divorced … the only time the old lady was ever on my side.”

“It's only a dress, Fergus.”

“I know.” He nodded. “I just … just wanted to be—Sometimes I wonder if anybody's ever through with anybody! Here's Dorothy crossing my path today just because Mother thinks she may need the business. My ex-wife has one of the most successful shops in town. She doesn't need anything.”

How did he know? How could anyone know something like that? He was only going on appearances and he hadn't even seen her, not for years. But had I seen much more—the clothes she wore, a flicker of a knowing gaze in a mirror? And I had been told only what she chose to tell me. Could I blow into town and discover the elusive truth in a morning when Fergus and Dorothy may not have known it themselves? I took Fergus's arm. Together we walked back to the patio to find Marshall who was looking for me in the crowd.

F
ergus's business
attracted women. A recording studio was a magnet for those possibly on their way to stardom as it was for those simply following their men. Some of the followers fell in Fergus's lap. They were around his cluttered office waiting, hoping, while some young man, isolated from his band in a small glassed-in room, wailed again and again into a microphone.

The sound engineer—Fergus sometimes—and the producer, their ears clamped between headphones, sat in a larger booth facing both the singer and the band in another room adjoining. There microphones sprouted in front of guitars, drums, a bass fiddle, and wires looped around the floor like long gray ropes dropped by careless cowboys. In the darkened booth, lights, and sometimes candles, glowed. Fergus didn't use candles, however some of the sound engineers liked them. They transformed the sound booth into a strange modern altar, one dedicated to making a perfect song, to be sent out to disk jockeys who might, or might not, like it and play it for listeners who might or might not request it again and again; a lucrative contract might follow. Fergus complained that I over-simplified his dealings with the uncertainties of agents' promises, the dangers of drink and drugs, the failures of hope and goodwill in his iffy business, but it remained his business. I was just a visiting cousin. I did know that if the talents of the musicians, as well as the work of the agents and the choices of disk jockeys concurred, and if the audience happened to agree that elusive thing, a hit, a possibility already proven by the framed gold and platinum records lining a hallway, might be made.

All this yearning, this concentrated attempt to please thousands, seeped through the studio's walls, through Fergus's filing cabinets, his boxes and the shards of his existence—a broken drum, a charro hat from a long ago trip to Mexico, innumerable photos, some framed, some thumb tacked to the wall, most of them of Fergus and musicians, a pair of longhorn bull horns he picked up while in the Air Force in Texas. A pot of red plastic geraniums dangled from one of the horns, stolen, he said, on a bet, from a window box in New Orleans. He hadn't parted with any of this stuff since I first visited him at the studio, and I wouldn't ask him to. I don't know why he had to have these pieces of his past all around him. Perhaps they are confirmations, reminders that the years didn't go by in a blink. No. He'd spent two months in Mexico, two years in Texas, a Mardi Gras in New Orleans. Now he spent most of his time helping young men make music. This wish to memorialize twisted round the yearning in the air, one strand elegiac, the other unraveling toward the future. Somehow the two so roped together—anything might have happened, might still happen if desired—along with the bar smell of cigarettes and whiskey gave the place a sexual atmosphere.

I didn't visit Fergus often at the studio on Music Row. In Nashville I saw him usually at Aunt Lucy's and Uncle Phillip's or, sometimes, at his house which was filled with our grandparents' furniture that had long since over-flowed from his parents' home. He also had some pieces of Uncle George's. He'd chosen, fittingly I thought, his mahogany bed and dresser. Mixed with the dark carved antiques were contemporary pieces—a glass-topped coffee table, a reclining chair, digital clocks, a jambox in the bathroom. I supposed he'd have his whole house wired for sound, but he didn't. The place, in spite of its furnishings, was rather bare. Compared to his office, it had a distinctly unlived-in-look and
absolutely no atmosphere, sexual or otherwise. Apparently he used it for sleeping and TV watching. Ill arranged, dusty, I saw it needed a woman's hand, but I'm not in Nashville all that often and even if I were, I wouldn't meddle with Fergus's house. Since he was divorced in the '50s and never remarried, it didn't look like anyone else was going to offer housekeeping services. I was sure Uncle Phillip and Aunt Lucy had long ago resigned themselves to a general handsoff policy. Fergus, past fifty now, was definitely a man in charge of his own domain.

My husband, Marshall, believed Fergus brought women to the house which was why he kept it, his permanent motel where he took those he called his “passing fancies.”

All this changed. On a visit one summer, I noticed when I walked in, there was a plant on the coffee table, and the glass top was noticeably cleaner than usual. The entire house had been carefully rearranged, not totally redone, no major changes, but at least the reclining chair had been moved out of the living room to a spot in front of a TV set on an adjacent glassed-in porch, and I didn't have to circle around another chair to walk through the hall. Someone … probably some bright woman who knew Fergus hated upheaval in his domestic scenery, had been at work there.

Aunt Lucy and Uncle Phillip had mentioned no one.

“Fergus,” I paused before continuing slowly, “Is… ? Is somebody living with you?”

“Thought you'd notice, Marianne.”

“Well?”

“In a way.” He waved the cigar he no longer smoked in the air as if to make a general announcement. “Cynthia … Cindy.”

“Do I get to meet her?”

“Not tonight.”

Marshall and I were taking his parents out to dinner, so I said, “Why not? We'd be glad to have her join us.”

He shook his head. “Keep it to yourself, honey.”

I nodded. Aunt Lucy's need for what she considered conventional behavior was well known. My own daughters had been taught to say, “Yes, ma'am” and “No, ma'am” to her, though they said it to almost no one else, and certainly not to me.

“Tomorrow night?” I asked. “We could go out—”

He waited a moment before saying, “Why don't youall come over for a drink and—”

“Yes. Fine.” I agreed before he could finish. He might let me know he was more than usually interested in a woman, but I hadn't expected him to allow anyone in the family to meet her. If Marshall and I were the first, couldn't Aunt Lucy and Uncle Phillip follow?

“Fergus is living with somebody. Or somebody named Cindy lives with him sometimes.” I told Marshall. “And he doesn't want Aunt Lucy and Uncle Phillip to know.”

“Why didn't that ever happen to me?”

“We were born too soon and married young. Remember?”

“There's a whole stage of development I missed.” He pulled on a pair of loafers.