Phantom of Riverside Park (42 page)

Here she was on her pity pot, but not once
had he ever complained. Not once had he ever said,
Wait a
minute, what about me?

He was so fragile she could see the pattern
of bones through his loose skin. Already she could see angels
sitting on his shoulders. Didn’t he deserve a dream before he
died?

That’s exactly what she was going to give
him. It had come to her in the middle of the night while she paced
the floor thinking about the future. She didn’t like to think too
much about what lay in store for her. It scared her. There’s so
much at stake when you have others depending on you.

Instead she’d concentrated on what lay in
store for her Papa, and what she could do to make his last years
good ones. Glancing out the window she saw how the heavy farm
machinery turned the rich black earth and how some of it escaped
into the air and floated across the road as if it were rising up to
meet them, as if it were saying, hello, welcome home.

“Where’re we headed?” Papa asked,
suspicious.

“To the Delta, Papa.”

“I can see that. I still got my eyes. What I
want to know is how come?”

Elizabeth’s feathers fell. She’d thought he
would be tickled pink. She’d thought his first glimpse of the Delta
would put a permanent-press smile on his face. She’d thought a
triumphant return to Tunica would help make up for all he’d
sacrificed.

“I thought we’d spend a few days here, look
around a bit, maybe find a nice little house on a piece of land
where Nicky could have a dog and you could have a few cows if you
wanted to.”

Papa set his jaw and turned his face from the
window.

“I thought we could finally go back home,
Papa.” He didn’t answer her, and Elizabeth anchored herself to the
steering wheel. She’d committed herself to this course of action
and she wasn’t ready to give up yet. “I thought you’d like to be
back where Mae Mae is. We can plant bulbs around her headstone so
she’ll have flowers next spring.”

“Lola Mae’s not in that grave.”

“Well, I know that, Papa, but I
thought...”

Whatever she was thinking just petered out,
and since there was no place to turn around and she hadn’t called
Quincy to ask if they could stay with her and she’d simply die
before she’d go back and cast herself on David’s mercy for even one
more night, Elizabeth kept on driving. It would soon be dark
anyhow. They’d get a motel and stay the night, then decide what to
do.

She pulled in at a McDonald’s sign. “Anybody
hungry?”

After their orders came Papa said, “Oh, Lord,
bless this food, Amen,” which showed how upset he was. He believed
the more you talked, the harder God listened.

Nicky took three bites of his hamburger then
raced off to the slides to play, and Papa, who had hardly eaten a
bite said, “Not that I’m complainin’, mind you. I guess you’ve got
your reasons.”

“Ralph Belliveau called early this morning
and said they wanted to see Nicky.”

“What’d you say?”

“I said no, not yet, at least. He’s been
through too much.” Papa nodded. “He’ll hate me when he’s grown
though, if he learns I’ve kept him from grandparents who might have
loved him.”

“What are you gonna do?”

“I told them they had to earn my trust before
they could see my son. Eventually I’ll go see them. But not yet,
Papa. I want to try and make up for all the trouble I’ve caused
you.”

“Have I ever acted like I thought you and
Nicky were any trouble?”

“No, of course not. But I know how you’ve
missed your farm. I want us to have a real home, Papa.”

“Seems to me like we had one.”

He took a bite of his hamburger and began to
chew and when Elizabeth said, “Do you want to go back to Memphis,”
as if she couldn’t believe her ears, he just kept on eating. All of
sudden it hit her that he wasn’t talking about Memphis at all: he
was talking about David’s farm.

“You want to go back to New Albany,
Papa?”

He turned his face toward the playground and
watched Nicky a while, then wrapped his left-over hamburger in a
paper napkin, put it in the sack and folded down the top before he
ever answered her.

“It’s not for me to say.”

o0o

She’d got the cheapest motel rooms she could
find, never mind that she could afford better, and now Papa was
snoring in the next room and Nicky was taking a bath and she was
staring at the annulment papers as if they’d sprouted horns.

There it was in black and white. The severing
of all ties with David, signed, sealed and delivered. With her
signature, the deed was done. So why couldn’t she sign it?

Snatches of song drifted from the bathroom,
Nicky belting out “I’ve found my pill on Blueberry Hill.”

That’s why she couldn’t sign the annulment
papers. She’d found her thrill, too, and he had let her go without
so much as a single word of protest. She’d hugged him and kissed
him and done everything she knew to let him know she cared short of
getting down on her knees and begging him to pay attention. She’d
even given herself body, heart and soul to him in the big canopied
bed.

And still he’d let her go. Sent her away with
legal papers in her hand, as a matter of fact.

He set you free
. There was that
voice again.

Elizabeth went to the window and leaned her
head against the cool panes. Though she’d paid attention to every
detail, every familiar piece of farm machinery, every stalk of
cotton in every field, every petal of every flower along the road,
the Delta no longer sang its home songs to her.

Every fiber in her being longed to be in
another county, another town, another room.

There had been a connecting door. Why hadn’t
David ever come back through?

Because he’s a gentleman and a man of
honor
.

And because he would never do anything or say
anything to make her feel obligated. The man who didn’t want her
pity would never try to buy her love.

All of a sudden someone as dear and familiar
to her as her own skin was standing in the room, someone Papa had
kept alive through the years and made so real, so much a part of
their family it was as if she’d never died.

“Mae Mae?”

I thought I never was going to get you to
listen. Haven’t you heard a word I’ve said to you all these
years?

“What have you been trying to say?”

Home is not a piece of earth. Home is
somebody to love, somebody who loves you right back
.

“Mommy! Can I get out now?” Elizabeth turned
her head toward Nicky yelling in the bathroom, and when she turned
back around Mae Mae was gone.

“Come back, Mae Mae, I need you,” she
whispered.

You won’t be needing me anymore.

Elizabeth’s hands trembled as she picked up
the annulment papers. “Are your ears clean?” she called to her
son.

“Yep.”

“Then you can get out of the tub.”

Nicky appeared in the doorway swathed in an
enormous white towel, his hair sticking up like bean sprouts, his
eyelashes spiky with water.

“I’ve been thinking about what we might do
tomorrow. I could take you to the ice cream shop I used to go to
when I was little like you.”

For a minute Nicky’s eyes got big as saucers,
then he went to the window dragging his towel behind him, and stood
with his back to her. She could tell by the rigid way he held
himself that he was doing some serious grown-up thinking.

Elizabeth waited, and when her son turned
back around he’d adjusted his towel. With his serious and angelic
face, he looked like a miniature pope.

“Bear’n David’s callin’ me,” he said. “When
can we go home?”

David traced the familiar lines and ridges on
the left side of his face. The surgeon he’d talked to yesterday had
been the most impressive of the lot. His practice was in Houston,
Texas.

“There have been many improvements in plastic
surgery in the last few years,” Dr. Lance had told him. “I can’t
promise you perfection, but I think I can safely say that you will
be very pleased with the results.”

“What’s holding you back?” McKenzie had
asked. “Why don’t you go ahead with it?”

The answer, of course, was Elizabeth. What if
she called while he was gone? What is she needed him and he wasn’t
there? What if something happened to her and he was stuck in a
hospital somewhere and couldn’t get to her?

She’d been gone four days and he hadn’t heard
a word from her. He didn’t even know where she was. It felt as if
she’d dropped off the edge of the earth.

She hadn’t sent back the annulment papers,
either, but he knew better than to take heart from that. There
could be a dozen reasons why she hadn’t. She was too busy taking
care of a little boy and two old men. She was having too much fun.
She’d met somebody else.

David prowled the library looking for a good
book he hadn’t read. Or even one he had. Anything to keep his mind
off the fact that Elizabeth was young and beautiful and available,
and men all over the country would be fawning at her feet.

It was enough to turn any girl’s head. Who
could blame her for falling in love with one of them? Who could
blame her for not writing, not calling? By now she probably didn’t
even remember his name.

“David?”

He squeezed
A Farewell to Arms
so
hard his knuckles turned white. He was dreaming with his eyes wide
open, imagining her soft voice calling to him.

He turned around just in case he wasn’t
hallucinating, and there was Elizabeth standing in his doorway.

“I’ve come home,” she said, and because he
couldn’t trust what he was hearing, he said, “Home?”

“To you, David.”

She smiled at him, and at last he knew. David
opened his arms and folded her safely inside where she belonged,
where she’d belonged all along. And suddenly love spread through
him like a river, cleansing everything in its path.

Thomas didn’t feel as young as he had during
World War II, but he felt at least fifteen years younger. So did
Fred. Their favorite thing to do in Paris was sit in the sunshine
in the little cafe by the Louvre and discuss their remarkable
rejuvenation.

“I can feel the old sap runnin’ again,” Fred
said. “Makes me wish I’d brought Quincy.”

“Like she’d come.”

“She’d be over here in a minute if she could
see that fancy hotel. And lordy, that bidet. Ain’t that somethin’?
The Mayfair! Shish! I done fell in with some high falutin’
company.”

Their lifestyle was high falutin’, all right.
Had been ever since Elizabeth had gone back to David. Thomas
reckoned they could afford anything they wanted now, but Nicky
still liked his Papa’s homemade biscuits and he still wrapped his
leftovers and put them in a paper sack. Waste was a sin.

Having their financial burden lifted was a
gift of the Almighty, but the thing that blessed Thomas most was
seeing Elizabeth happy. She and David were finally living the way a
husband and wife ought.

The day he and Elizabeth and Nicky had left
the Delta and gone on back home where they belonged, Thomas had
dropped to his knees right there in David’s driveway. “Lord, I
don’t know why You’ve been so good to me, but I sure do ‘preciate
it. Looks like I won’t be worryin’ You about so much now. Looks
like me and You can both take a rest, and I humbly thank You.”

That night he’d gone out to set a spell with
Lola Mae’s star. “You ought to see the two them, Lola Mae,” he’d
told her. “They’ve nearly ‘bout happy as we were.”

Yessire, that David Lassiter was a fine man.
And generous... Lord, after that man had his reconstructive surgery
he’d set up a foundation that heaped millions on causes like
Wounded Warriors and homes for unwed mothers, then he’d put
McKenzie and Peter in charge. She’d had a thing or two to say about
that, but you could tell it was all a bluff. She was as happy as
Thomas to see the way David plunged into life of as a husband and
father.

How many men married little more than a year
would take a bunch of kinfolks to Pairs? And their friends, to
boot.

Thomas wished Lola Mae could see him now, him
just spittin’ distance from the Seine, not to mention the Jardin
des Tuileries. Fancy names for fancy places.

He and Fred were having the time of their
life. So was Nicky. His favorite place so far was the Zoo de
Vincennes which boasted of twelve hundred animals. Yesterday when
they took him, Nicky had wanted to see every one of them. Fred and
Thomas had finally said enough, then sat down in front of the
monkey’s cage to wait.

“Reckon who’s entertaining who?” Fred had
said. “Look at that red-tailed baboon. Looks just like he’s
laughing at us.”

“Laughing at you, maybe. You’re too old for a
hat like that.”

“It ain’t a hat, it’s a beret, and that
little French dish that sold it to me said it made me look like
Walter Matthau.”

“He’s dead.”

“Don’t matter. He’s a movie star, ain’t he?”
Fred had turned his face up to the sun, just the way he was doing
now at their favorite cafe. “Here I am in Paris, movie star hat and
all.”

Paris is bittersweet to Thomas. Seeing his
family having such fun here makes him thankful just to be alive,
but the one he’d most wanted to bring to Paris never got far from
the rich black earth of the Delta.

Thinking of Lola Mae, Thomas sighed.
Mistaking the sigh for contentment, Fred said, “Me, too,” then
signaled the waitress to their table.

She took their drink order, and when she left
another young woman came up with a basket of flowers on her
arm.

She stood in front of Thomas smiling.

“A lady said to give you this,” she said,
then bent over and pinned a daisy in his lapel.

Thomas’ heart beat so hard he thought he was
having another attack. “What lady?”