Phantom of Riverside Park (2 page)

Suddenly there ahead of her was the Peabody
Hotel, symbol of everything that was good about the Old South, the
easy grace, the unstudied charm, the slow drifting of days that
afforded time to sit on verandahs or in bars with brass foot
railings and sip mint juleps.

Elizabeth pushed open the heavy doors and was
suddenly caught up in the past. Her parents had brought her to see
the Peabody ducks when she was five and still owned the world.

It was only when she entered school that she
realized she didn’t own the world at all. She was a dirt poor
country girl in a borrowed dress and hand-me-down shoes. Her
classmates, all those little girls bound with pink ribbons and
prejudices handed down by generations of landed Delta gentry, had
formed a circle around her, chanting,
cotton patch
trash.

By the time she was eight, Elizabeth decided
a shadowy ancestor named Major Hiram Jennings must have stolen her
future, for her mother had repeated the story of his folly so often
she knew it by heart:

In l872 when gambling was as common as grand
balls in the South, Elizabeth’s ancestor had swaggered into the
Peabody full of bravado and bourbon and won two hands of seven-card
stud. Holding a king-high straight flush he’d yelled, “Lady Luck’s
sittin’ on my lap tonight, boys,” then he’d wagered the only thing
he had worth wagering, a thousand acres of the richest Delta land
east of the Mississippi.

With one draw of the card, Elizabeth’s whole
history changed. Major Hiram Jennings lost to the ace.

Sometimes it seemed to Elizabeth that she had
not been born in the Delta at all, but had sprung to life in the
Peabody more than a hundred years ago when Hiram Jennings played
his losing hand. She closed her eyes and gathered her strength. She
had to go to Riverside Park and fetch her family. She had supper to
prepare, bedtime rituals to perform. She had a night job waiting
with Quincy’s Cleaning Service.

“I thought I might find you here.” Suddenly
there was Papa, his back stooped and his hands spotted with age and
gnarled with arthritis. He squeezed her shoulder, knowing why she
was there, knowing and understanding. “Don’t look back, Elizabeth.
It does no good.”

“Mommy!” Nicky launched himself at her
squealing with laughter then covered her face with kisses; and
Elizabeth thought,
this is the reason I can never in a million
years run away and call myself Chiquita
.

“Did I grow in your belly?” Nicky pressed his
smudged face right up to hers, and she felt defeated all over
again. Nicky’s lips had been left disfigured by a severe infection
from the welfare-paid surgery that had corrected his garbled speech
from a cleft palate.
I wish I could help you,
the doctor
had told Elizabeth when she went back to him about the new problem.
But welfare doesn’t pay for cosmetic surgery.

Since then she’d been turned down by every
agency she knew, so she was saving up for the surgery, cramming
whatever cash she could spare into a ceramic cookie jar that had
belonged to the grandmother she called Mae Mae.

“Did I grow there,” Nicky said. “Quincy said
I did.”

“Lord, that woman.” Papa beseeched the
ceiling, but Elizabeth only laughed.

“You certainly did.”

“Am I a belly button?”

“No, you’re a boy. A hungry little boy. Let’s
get you home and feed you.”

She linked herself to her little family with
Nicky swinging between her and Papa, a four-year-old boy who owned
the world. And why shouldn’t he? He had Papa and Elizabeth to
shield him from the ugly truth of his life, Papa who watched over
him with the fierce protectiveness of an avenging angel and
Elizabeth who edited out Judith’s harsh legacy and taught him to
sing Mae Mae’s theme song, “Look for the Silver Lining.”

Nicky embraced it as his own. As they
approached their house, he shouted, “Look, Papa. I see a silber
lining.”

“I see it too,” he said, then shielded his
eyes and looked toward the west where the sun lay almost hidden
behind a gray cloud, a thin rim of gold barely showing.

Hoping she’d find the same magic, Elizabeth
looked, but all she could see were the sagging shutters and the
broken front steps and the ugly spotted roof where brown shingles
had been used to patch the black ones already there. The rude
rental house was all her fault. She never saw it without
remembering Papa’s neatly kept white farmhouse with the bright blue
shutters and the swing on the front porch. She never viewed the
unkempt yards and scraggly flowerbeds of her present neighborhood
without picturing the massive magnolia trees Papa had been so proud
of, the rolling green pastures and the lake where in the hot
summertime fat cows waded up to their ankles to keep cool, the
gardens Mae Mae tended. A rainbow of color had bloomed there season
after season.

Papa never spoke of his farm, never mentioned
the big barn with its rows of stables and its stacks of clean
smelling hay. But Elizabeth knew he missed it. She could see
longing in the faraway look he sometimes got, in the way he would
tip his head forward and close his eyes when mention of farm prices
would come on the six o’clock news.

The sense of loss Elizabeth felt would suck
her soul right out of her if she’d let it. Instead she left Papa
and Nicky admiring his latest silver lining while she went inside
to prepare their dinner.

The refrigerator was bare save for a carton
of milk, a carrot and two beef and bean patties. Elizabeth grated
the carrot over the patties to look like cat whiskers.

“Oh boy, kitty cats for supper,” Nicky
yelled. “Yay!”

“Let us pray.” Papa bowed his head and lifted
his praises, strong and sure, toward the Maker he’d believed in all
his life. “Master, thank you for the bountiful blessings you heap
upon us. Thank you steering my little family through the rough and
murky waters of the past, and if it’s not too much trouble, keep
our course clear for the future. I’m not as young as I used to be,
You know, or I wouldn’t ask so much of You all the time. I hope You
understand. Amen.”

Without another word, Papa cut his patty in
two and put half of it on the edge of the saucer where Elizabeth’s
teacup rested.

“What’s murphy waters?” Nicky asked.

“It’s like your bathtub water after you’ve
been playing all day in the dirt.” Elizabeth tousled his hair, then
glanced from her saucer to Papa.

“Eat it,” he said, and Elizabeth went to get
a fork. “Did I ever tell you about the time I met Lola Mae?” he
asked when she sat back down.

He had. About a million times, but she and
Nicky never tired of hearing stories of their beloved Mae Mae.
“Tell it, Papa,” she said, and Nicky added, “Yay! Tell it.”

“Well, there was this big county fair,” Papa
said, “biggest thing the Delta had going for it except cotton.” And
as he began to talk, the bloodlines of Elizabeth’s ancestors flowed
through her like a river, leaving behind a history as rich as the
alluvial plains of the Mississippi Delta.

“When the carnival people started setting up
their Ferris wheel we’d leave our cotton sacks in the field to go
and watch.”

“Can I ride a Ferris wheel?”

“Someday, Nicky... Yessir, it was the hottest
fall you’d ever seen that year, so hot the June bugs had stuck
around thinking it was still summer. My cousin Hiram...named after
the old major, you know ...decided to put the portable outhouse on
top of the building where the Home Demonstration ladies were
selling lemon pies and pickled peaches, and being full of oats I
decided to help him.”

“What’s full’a oats, Papa?” Nicky asked.

“Young.”

“Like me?”

“Not quite. I was old enough to shave.”

“Can I shave?”

“Not yet. But someday you will. Anyhow...we
waited till Miss Sudie Cummings pulled up her drawers and came out,
then Hiram grabbed one side and I grabbed the other and off we went
down the hill with the outhouse between us. Things were looking
pretty good till a bumblebee got up Hiram’s britches. He let go his
end, and the toilet went tumbling down the hill with me hanging on
for dear life trying to steer the thing.”

Nicky was already laughing and clapping, but
the part Elizabeth loved best was yet to come.

“I was yelling at the toilet like it had
ears. ‘Hold on just a minute, wait up there.’ But that old outhouse
just kept on going like it knew something I didn’t know. And sure
enough, waiting at the bottom of the hill was Lola Mae Johnson. We
crashed headlong into her booth and banners went flying every which
way. When the toilet finally came to rest, I looked up into the
bluest eyes this side of heaven and a face like an angel.”

“Tell about the red banner, Papa.” Nicky was
clapping so hard his little palms looked blistered.

“Well, sir, one of the banners that had come
loose was draped around Lola Mae’s neck, and when I read what was
printed on it I said, ‘Is this the kissing booth?’ and she said,
‘By golly, it is,’ and she kissed me smack dab on the mouth.”

Papa got tears in his eyes. “She was the
first woman I ever kissed and I never kissed another. Never even
wanted to. Not once.”

“Except Mommy. You kiss mommy.”

“On the cheek, and that’s different.”

“How different?”

Papa gave Elizabeth a look that said,
he’s all yours now
, and she said, “Let’s go make some
murphy water, Nicky.”

“I’ll race you down the hall.” Nicky streaked
off with Elizabeth not far behind, and the water he made was indeed
murphy.

“There’s so much of the park in the tub I
wonder if you left any for tomorrow,” she said when she dried him
off.

He climbed into bed giggling. Tonight he
didn’t demand another story of Mae Mae, as he often did, but
instead settled down after hearing of the adventures of Winnie the
Pooh in the Hundred Acre Wood, an innocent child who still owned
the world.

“Sweet dreams, Nicky.” As she leaned down to
kiss him, leaned close to the disfigured lip, her heart squeezed.
In another year he would be old enough for kindergarten and the
often cruel honesty of other children. That little incident in the
park would be nothing compared to the reign of bullies in a school
yard.

“Sing me a song, Mommy. Sing about look for
the silber lining.”

Instead, she chose one based on her own
needs. Proving she hadn’t escaped Judith’s influence entirely, she
sang a song that was pure Elvis, not one of the rockabilly ballads
but one of the hymns he’d first heard in a small country church and
then later had made his own, “Precious Lord.”

And while she sang she silently prayed that
Somebody was leaning down to listen, and that He would take Nicky’s
hand and hold on tight. She would ask Him to take hers, too, but
she figured God had enough to do without watching out for a woman
perfectly capable of taking care of herself.

When she went back to the den, Papa looked up
from the Psalm he was reading.

“I should have let Judith name you Elvisina,”
he said, deadpan.

They broke up laughing, laughing to keep from
crying.

It’s the way of the wounded everywhere.

Thomas resettled himself on the park bench,
trying to stay awake. Mornings were fine. Fresh from a good night’s
sleep, he’d watch Elizabeth kiss Nicky before she headed off to
work, and then he’d settle in to watch his great grandson dig a
hole to China. But getting through the afternoons without falling
asleep took some concentration. He’d tried everything, counting the
number of people who walked by, trying to guess how many squirrels
he’d see. Today, he was hanging onto wakefulness by counting his
blessings. He was grateful for the sausage and biscuit he and Nicky
had shared for lunch; he was grateful for sunny Southern days that
made it possible to bring the boy here to play instead of staying
cooped up in that little house; he was grateful he’d known the love
of his life with Lola Mae; but most of all, he was grateful to
still be alive.

He was wondering how long an old codger like
him would be around when this man he didn’t know from Adam’s house
cat walked right up to him and called him by name.

“Good afternoon, Mr. Jennings.”

As if that weren’t shock enough, the young
man sat right down on the bench beside him without even being
invited.

“This is my bench you’re sittin’ on, young
man.”

Thomas didn’t tolerate bad manners. Besides
that, the man seemed kind of sleazy to him - hair slicked back
under a gangster hat, reeking of Old Spice and a shave so close you
couldn’t make out a single hair on his face. Not that Thomas could
anyhow, his eyesight not being what it used to be, but he simply
didn’t trust a man who looked that smooth.

“I won’t be here long, Mr. Jennings. Just
long enough to give you this.” Thomas’ mouth dropped open when he
saw the check. “This is not a joke, it’s not a prank. It’s
real.”

Thomas was in a trance staring at the check,
disbelieving.

“I’m leaving now and you’ll never see me
again. Don’t try to follow me, don’t try to find out who I am, and
don’t tell anybody about your good fortune. Except your
granddaughter, of course.”

The man swore him to secrecy, especially with
the press, then tipped his hat in a latent display of Southern
breeding. “Good day, Mr. Jennings,” he said, then vanished as
quickly as he’d come.

Hot tears squeezed out of the corners of
Thomas’s eyes blurring everything except his great grandson playing
under the oak tree where Jefferson Davis once tied his horse. All
he could think of was that suddenly there was God, right in the
middle of Memphis, Tennessee, smiling down on him and saying, “You
can rest now, Thomas.”

Miracles happen when you least expect
them.

Thomas had always known that, even five years
ago after he’d sold the land he’d poured his sweat as well as his
heart into and headed up here with Elizabeth pregnant with the baby
nobody wanted.