The Improper Life of Bezillia Grove (14 page)

chapter eight

S
trangers had taken their places inside my house by the time Nathaniel and I got to Grove Hill. Ladies dressed in black were carrying casseroles from the kitchen to the dining room table, each one wearing a sweet but ingenuous smile that was intended to provide some unspoken comfort. Men, dressed in black, stood about the living room swapping stories, seemingly not as interested in their newly departed friend as they were in Orlando Cepeda’s chances of leading the Cardinals to the World Series.

Maizelle and Adelaide were huddled in the kitchen, trying to occupy themselves by walking from the refrigerator to the stove and back again. Their shoulders were slumped forward, and their eyes were red and swollen. When I stepped into the room, they both rushed toward me, and we stood there in one another’s arms, supporting our bodies as they heaved in sorrow.

“I’m sorry, Miss Bezellia. I didn’t hear a thing. Down in that basement I can’t hear an elephant sneeze. I’m so sorry, child.” Maizelle finally broke the silence, needing to confess something she couldn’t have done anything about.

“Me too, I’m sorry too,” Adelaide sobbed. “It was my fault. It was all my fault. If I’d been a good girl, then Father would still be here—”

“Adelaide, child,” Maizelle interrupted. “Hush up. I want you to stop that now. This was not your fault.” And then she turned to me. “Your mama had me give your sister one of those Contac pills before going to bed. Knocked her right out.”

“Where is Mother?” I asked as I held Adelaide tightly in my arms, reassuring her that this was certainly not her fault.

Nathaniel, who had been standing quietly by my side, suddenly interrupted and announced that Mrs. Grove was still in her room. “She won’t come out. She knows what all of those people out there are saying about her. She won’t show her face. Says she won’t even go to the funeral.”

“What? What are they saying about her?”

Adelaide turned to Maizelle and dropped into her arms as if she was burying herself in some deep, faraway hole. Nathaniel and Maizelle finally lifted their heads, both obviously wanting to say something but neither having the courage to say it.

“What? Damn it, Nathaniel, what are
they
saying?”

“Uh, well. I really shouldn’t be the one telling you this.”

“If you don’t, nobody will. Now what is it? Tell me.”

“Well, you see. Thing is, Miss Bezellia, your daddy came home late last night.”

“So? So what? He always comes home late, for one reason or another. I’m sure some dying patient needed him desperately, or maybe Mrs. Hunt had him all tied up in her arms. Which was it this time?”

“Bezellia!” Maizelle said with a rush of surprise.

“I don’t think now’s the time to pretend Father was a loyal and devoted husband, Maizelle,” I snapped, finding it much easier to be mad at Father for cheating than sad and brokenhearted that he had died. After all, my father wasn’t the first married man to screw another woman. And my mother was like so many other upstanding, country-club-going women who had lived with infidelity. She acted as though she knew nothing about it. God, I thought to myself, if she had only listened to Loretta Lynn.

“Yes. That’s right,” Nathaniel continued. “We all know about Mrs. Hunt. Your mother does, that’s for sure. And probably most of Nashville knows it by now. That’s the truth. But see, Miss Bezellia, the police found a bottle of gin in your mother’s bedroom. Apparently she done finished it off. I told them she hadn’t been drinking lately. But they couldn’t wake her when they came to pronounce Mr. Grove … Well, they couldn’t wake her.” Nathaniel paused, clearly afraid to finish what he had to say.

Maizelle stood by my side, patting my back in a smooth, simple rhythm. “Miss Bezellia, I think you better sit down.”

“Why does everybody think sitting down is going to make any of this any better? Damn it. I am not sitting down, Nathaniel, so just go ahead and tell me what you have to say.”

Nathaniel repositioned himself so he was standing directly in front of me. He adjusted his weight from one foot to the other and then back again, as if finding the perfect balance was going to ease what needed to be said. Maizelle gently nudged Adelaide toward the butler’s pantry. She said she needed to find more linen napkins, but I knew she really wanted to keep Adelaide from hearing too much. I leaned against the kitchen counter, now wondering if I should have found a place to sit.

“Some people,” Nathaniel continued, “knowing of your mother’s lingering condition, are wondering if your mama had something more to do with your daddy’s dying. Some people think she pushed him down the stairs. The police haven’t come out and said that, and I don’t think they ever will. At least that’s what your uncle Thad said, and he spent several hours down at the police station talking to some old friends of his. But people around town, they’re saying something different.”

I reached behind me and gripped the counter till my knuckles turned white. I tried not to fall, to keep my knees locked in place. But I sank to the floor in silence. I couldn’t scream. I couldn’t cry. I couldn’t make sense of anything Nathaniel was saying to me. He knelt down in front of me and took my hands in his.

“Everybody standing out there eating cheese thins and casseroles is going to think what they want, child. Some of them may want to believe your mama pushed him. Some of them may think she had a right to. But at the end of the day, nobody knows what really happened here last night. Only one left who knows for sure is your mama, and I’m not sure given the state she was in she’ll ever really know what happened at the top of those stairs,” Nathaniel said, squeezing my hands in his. “One thing I do know for certain, you had nothing to do with your daddy’s dying, nothing at all, nor did your little sister,” he added, staring toward the pantry as if he was looking for Adelaide. We were, he said, our father’s bright, shining stars.

“Maizelle,” Nathaniel called.

“Uh-huh,” Maizelle answered from deep inside the pantry. She walked back into the kitchen with my sister’s small hand still tightly clutched in hers.

“Why don’t you help Miss Bezellia up to her room and get her all settled. She might want to rest a little bit. It’s been a long morning, and it’s not even noon yet.”

Maizelle lifted me to my feet, and together we walked up the back staircase, careful to avoid the crowd of mournful-looking people who called my parents their friends. Those men and women looked as though they could just as easily have been going to a cocktail party as to a funeral. And now, when they weren’t busy talking behind my mother’s back about her drinking and her unfaithful husband, they wanted to comfort her, hug her, tell her everything would be all right. I hated them all.

Maizelle was afraid my mother might not ever recover from losing Mr. Grove. She was afraid she would blame herself. She was afraid the guilt might spread through her body like some kind of cancer, that it might take her life as swiftly as Mr. Grove’s had been taken from him. She said that happens sometimes.

My mother’s door was closed. I walked into her room without knocking. The curtains were drawn, and not even a small slice of sunlight had found its way past the heavy fabrics. With my arms outstretched in front of me, I felt my way to her bed and then reached for the lamp by my mother’s side. She covered her head with her blanket but didn’t snap at me for blinding her like she had done when I was little and rushed in to show her a necklace I had made out of dried macaroni and yarn. That time, she’d grabbed the necklace out of my hands and thrown it across the room. Now I sat down on the edge of her bed and gently pulled the blanket back so that I could see my mother’s eyes. They were more than swollen and red. They were empty and broken.

“Everybody thinks I killed your father,” she said in a voice so weak and fragile that I had to put my ear next to her mouth just so I could understand what she was saying. “I guess they’re right, Bezellia. I guess I did.” She started to cry, and between deep, tearful sobs, she could barely catch her breath. She mumbled something more about my father, but I couldn’t understand what she was saying. All I knew was that, in the midst of my mother’s confession, she had called me
Bezellia
. Whether she had done so out of guilt or affection didn’t really matter. I had never heard my mother speak my given name. And even though her voice was almost inaudible, and even though I knew my attention should be someplace else, I desperately wanted to hear her say my name one more time.

Father, she admitted, had come home late last night, smelling of alcohol. He sat next to her on the bed so that she could almost taste the remnants of the other woman on his skin. He leaned down and kissed her on the forehead. She didn’t know why—maybe he was feeling guilty or lonely or simply unsatisfied. And she wasn’t sure she really cared. She wanted to tell him that she missed him. She wanted to ask him to stay with her, to lie next to her, to love her. But instead she said nothing and rolled onto her side, turning her back to him as she must have done so many other nights since they married. He got up and walked out of the bedroom. She heard the back door open and close and understood that he had gone to be with someone else. She picked up the silver-framed wedding photo that sat on her dressing table and threw it across the room and searched for a bottle of gin she had hidden under the mattress.

Shards of broken glass scattered on the bedroom floor and an empty bottle of gin now sitting on my mother’s dresser were both testaments to the truth of her account. And now a desperate, repentant soul was curled up in a tiny ball, weeping into her pillow. I crawled in bed next to her and wrapped my arms around her trembling body. She cried until she fell asleep, and even then I could tell that she was grieving. I stayed there for a while, rubbing her back and thinking of every time she had forced me to smile.

When my toe was broken and I had to go to the cotillion because Rawley Montgomery wanted to dance with me, Mother told me to smile. When Jan Hobdy invited me to her thirteenth birthday party but Mother made me go shopping with her instead, she told me to smile. When Megan Scott’s mother asked me to spend the weekend with them at the lake but Mother said I wasn’t wasting my time with a girl who couldn’t talk, she told me to quit crying and smile. Tomorrow, I whispered in her ear, she would get dressed, fix her hair, come downstairs, and greet her friends, and she would do it all with the perfect smile.

My mother slept the rest of the day. I bathed and changed clothes, and even though my eyes were heavy and tired, I couldn’t sleep. So I found myself back downstairs looking for a little something to eat and a little comfort in the kitchen. After Maizelle fed me, Nathaniel handed me a tray stacked with glasses of lemonade and told me to walk through the living room and see if anybody who had come to pay respects was feeling parched and thirsty. He said it’s better to be moving around at a time like this than just standing there lost in your own dark thoughts. Maizelle and Adelaide kept their places in the kitchen, finding it easier to hide behind the stove and another chicken artichoke casserole.

Nana and Pop arrived shortly before dinner. Nana said Ruddy came by not long after I left. He said he was sorry for keeping me out so late, and he was really sorry to hear about my daddy. He wanted to drive his daddy’s truck down here to see me, but Nana told him that my mother would not likely appreciate the concerns of a guitar-picking country boy who’d kept her daughter out till daybreak. I imagined I wouldn’t hear from Ruddy again. Probably just as well.

Thankfully Uncle Thad stayed at the house until the last guest had left. He talked to my grandparents mostly, somehow knowing the longer he kept them on the front porch the easier it would be for my mother. He said he wanted to make sure his baby girls were okay and even offered to stay the night. Cornelia would be flying home from Boston tomorrow. She was worried sick about me, he said. She had already called the house twice this evening just to check on me.

Uncle Thad had insisted Cornelia go to college above the Mason-Dixon Line. He always said he wanted her to see how the
other
people lived. But I always figured what he really wanted was for Cornelia to come to know her mother, who had been living in New England since her daughter was two years old. Apparently the great New York painters were not very impressed with my cousin’s mother. But she found the people in Boston loved her and her ability to paint one rugged seascape after another.

“You know, I was thinking on my way over here this morning, Beetle Bug, that it was a damn good thing my brother insisted on calling you Bezellia,” Uncle Thad told me as he rubbed my shoulder with his strong right hand. “Your mother really didn’t care for the name. I guess you’ve figured that out by now,” he said with a tender grin on his face. “But you know, I think you’re probably the first Grove to wear that name well since the first Bezellia fought those Indians down at Fort Nashborough.

“Now I know you’re not going to be fighting any Indians around these parts, but I’m afraid you may have an even tougher battle up ahead of you—although you surely know that by now too. People can be mighty cutting without knives in their hands. They can say all sorts of things that aren’t true. Damn near make you bleed. Hell, sometimes I think they just make up some of this shit so they have something to spread about town like manure on a vegetable crop. Look, Bee, your mother ain’t no angel. But she’s not all devil either. Sometimes life just forces the good right out of you so that nobody can see anything else but the bad. And your father, my brother, he wasn’t perfect either. But be careful, sweetie, because when somebody dies, it’s easy to start seeing them that way. Perfect, you know. And it’s real easy to start blaming yourself and everybody else for everything that went wrong.” Uncle Thad put his hand on the back of my head and drew me close to his body. I felt warm tears rolling down my cheeks.

“Your daddy wouldn’t want you to hang your head in shame. No sir. He’d want you to be proud, proud of yourself, proud of your family, and especially proud of that big name he gave you,” he told me, and then leaned down and kissed my forehead and whispered in my ear. “It will carry you through this, Bezellia. Don’t you forget it.”