The Sweetest Thing (2 page)

“After school we go to Jacobs' Drugstore and order Coca-Cola or something else from the soda fountain. I love to ride horses. Fox hunting is my favorite. Let's just say I'm rarely bored.”

Dobbs stared at me the whole time with a tiny smile spreading across her lips. She cocked her head and just kept staring—jet black eyes looking straight through me—and said, “Well, thank you for that monologue, Perri Singleton. But I'm sure there's a lot more to you than that. It will be nice to get to know who you
really
are.”

I glared at her, stuck my nose in the air, and turned to Mamma, who always said that when I was mad, lightning bolts flashed from my eyes, “seeking someone to sizzle.”

Dobbs did not seem to notice but leaned forward and said, “Aunt Josie, wasn't Mr. Roosevelt's speech fabulous!
‘We have nothing to fear but fear itself!'
He's going to bring this country around! I just know it! The way he said we have enough, but that we just haven't been using our resources the right way, is the plain truth!”

Dobbs sat beside me in her rags and talked on and on about the “religious tone of Mr. Roosevelt's address” and how he put words to the feelings of the American people. Mrs. Chandler nodded politely but looked as if she were more worried about getting a crick in her neck as she twisted around in her seat to look at Dobbs.

She's just trying to impress Mrs. Chandler,
I thought.

I finally shot Dobbs my lightning-bolt look, and she smiled back at me, completely unfazed. “What did you think of the speech, Perri?” When I didn't respond, even after Mamma elbowed me twice, the three of us sat in silence again.

Thank heavens we arrived at the Chandler place a few minutes later. I mumbled, “Nice to have met you,” and Dobbs said, “Likewise. See you on Monday at school.”

“What a strange person,” I said to Mamma as she drove the Buick toward home and turned onto our street. “She's a bit dramatic, wouldn't you say? Babbling on and on about the new president as if she knows it all, in her potato-sack dress and pitiful suitcase. I'm glad we wear uniforms at Washington Seminary. At least the girls won't have to see her wardrobe. Yet.”

“
Shh
now, Perri. Yes, she is a bit different, but I think she's simply very excited to be here, considering where she came from. She'll fit in fine, I'm sure. Please try to introduce her to a few girls on Monday. And don't judge her too soon.”

Sweet Mamma, she always gave people the benefit of the doubt.

Dobbs to me spelled trouble.

We got back home, and Mamma parked the car in the driveway. “Holden, dear. Holden,” she called out lightly once we were in the entrance hall. “I made it just fine in the coupe. Not one bump or scratch. But I left the car in the driveway, as you like. I'll let you maneuver it into the garage.” She chattered along, walking back to Daddy's study.

I had turned to go upstairs when Mamma uttered a tiny shriek and came into the hall with one hand over her mouth and holding a piece of Daddy's stationery in the other. “Your father . . .” she started. “We've got to find your father!”

She ran out the back door toward the garage.

I felt my heart pumping strangely in my ears, and my vision went momentarily blurry, taking in the horrible expression on Mamma's face. Then I followed her out the door and took off at a dash in the opposite direction from Mamma—across the back lawn to the stables where Daddy kept his horses. Riding and fox hunting were his favorite hobbies, and I imagined he had gone on a trail ride. I flung open the door to the stable. The long hallway was empty, save a few strands of hay probably dropped by the stableboy from the morning feeding. The horses, all five of them, were pacing nervously back and forth in their stalls, nickering.

“What is it, fella?” I asked, as I ran my hand along the forehead of Windchaser, Daddy's favorite. Then I caught sight of something out of the corner of my eye. I turned and went into the tack room, and there I saw it—Daddy's tasseled leather dress shoe turned on its side where it had fallen amidst a few strands of hay and shavings. I looked up to see . . .

Daddy's lifeless body was swinging from the rafters, a lead shank around his neck, his long legs in their dark gray business slacks, moving almost imperceptibly, one foot hanging shoeless. The guttural scream that issued from inside me seemed to go on forever.

Then I fainted.

That was where they found me, Jimmy and Dellareen and Ben, their oldest son. Ben splashed water on my face, and as I came to, I looked to the side and saw tall, thin Dellareen running out of the stable gate to where Mamma was approaching, grabbing Mamma around the waist, and pulling her away from the stable door. Mamma fought with her, but Dellareen's strong dark arms engulfed Mamma, dragging her away while Mamma's stricken face looked at me and screamed, “Holden, Holden, Holden.”

I remember the fierce determination on Dellareen's face, and I remember her words too. “You ain't gonna see none of it, Miz Dorothy.”

Then Jimmy, who was as thin as Dellareen and not any taller, picked me up, carried me back to the house, and laid me down on the sofa in the sitting room, and Dellareen placed a damp cloth on my head.

I guess Jimmy and Ben got Daddy down.

The afternoon became a blur of people parading in and out of the house. I was thankful that Barbara and Irvin were still gone. I sat petrified—like a piece of old wood—on the sofa, watching people in a type of fog. Mrs. Chandler and her servant showed up first, then Daddy's business partner from the bank. Later his good friend and accountant, Mr. Robinson, stopped by, and Mr. Chandler came off the golf course, dressed in his plaid knickers and polo shirt. Little by little the house filled up with people, and the stench of body odor—all of ours, all of our grief let out from the pores of our body—permeated the downstairs.

Evidently, after some discussion, Mrs. Chandler called Lulu's house, where Barbara was playing, and the coach of Irvin's baseball team, and asked if the children could stay over until after dinner.

After a while, Mrs. Chandler took Mamma upstairs, and at one point, I heard Mamma wailing, “Poor Perri! And how am I going to tell Barbara and Irvin?”

I was still sitting on that sofa, arms wrapped around myself and just plain numb, but when I heard Mamma's stricken voice, I said to Dellareen, “I'll tell them.”

She looked at me, startled, and shook her head. “No. No, Miz Perri. It ain't yore place.”

“I want to. I
need
to. Mamma can't do it. You know that.” I still had not shed a tear, but my face was burning with the fever of tragedy, and I could feel the red splotches on my cheeks.

Dellareen squeezed my hand, her brow wrinkled with worry, her face shiny with perspiration, her servant's uniform, usually impeccable, soaked under the arms with her sweat. She took my face in her calloused hands and looked me straight in the eyes.

Dellareen had known me from the time I was “knee high to a grasshopper,” as she always put it, and that day she read my mind. “It ain't your responsibility, Miz Perri. You understand that? I know you loved your papa and he loved you, and he wouldn't want you carryin' this on yore shoulders.”

The tears came readily, and I let Dellareen pull me into her arms while I cried. Finally, I whispered through the ball in my throat, “I wanna see Mamma.”

I found her propped up in her bed with Mrs. Chandler beside her. Mamma's pretty powdered face was smudged with mascara as she wept softly. She reached out to me. “Perri, Perri.” Then she whispered to Mrs. Chandler, “Perri's the one who found . . . who found . . .”

I squeezed Mamma's hand, and Mamma pulled me into her arms. I stood there leaning down over Mamma for a few seconds, feeling her tiny arms around me, the weight of her body, so frail, holding on to me, it seemed, for life. I held her tight, and from somewhere outside of myself, I pronounced the words, “It's gonna be okay, Mamma. Somehow it's gonna be okay.”

But in my mind, I was thinking,
Nothing will ever be okay again unless I make it okay. It's up to me now.

CHAPTER

2

Dobbs

Some things I just know. For sure. Don't ask me how. I just know them. And from the moment that Mother (and eventually Father) insisted I leave for Atlanta—Atlanta! A southern town!—I knew that my life had just bifurcated in a way that would have repercussions for my whole family.

At first I resisted, of course. I like to do things
my
way. “Aunt Josie means well,” I told my parents. “Certainly, there are benefits to a good education. Certainly, it can be a wise investment for the long term. But what about you? How can I leave both of you and Coobie and Frances up here in Chicago, wondering where the next meal will come from, while I gallivant around in Atlanta?”

Father pronounced the words that always convinced me. “It is for the larger cause, Dobbs. You need this.”

A larger cause! I loved causes, and especially the one Father referred to: propagation of the Word of God. So off I went on the train to Atlanta with one measly suitcase in my hand and my head swimming with ideas of adventure, possibilities, a whole new world to conquer! I was bursting with excitement inside over Mr. Roosevelt's inauguration. I'd listened to his speech on the radio when I'd changed trains that morning—in fact the conductor had postponed our leaving so that everyone could hear it. So on the last leg of my two-day trip down to Atlanta, I kept thinking,
Franklin D. Roosevelt is God's man for such a time as this. He will help pull America out of this mess!

Father always said we were in this mess—otherwise known as the Depression—because of man's greed and God's judgment and a whole bunch of other things mixed together. He was probably right, but with Roosevelt in office, America could mend her evil ways and start over again!

So I stepped off the train with a big smile on my face, anticipating a new beginning for me and for America. Aunt Josie and her chauffeur met me at the station along with Mrs. Singleton and her daughter Perri.

The first thing I felt was a stare of disapproval. Aunt Josie's eyes said it first and then Mrs. Singleton's and Perri's too. Astonishment. Then pity. They recovered quickly, and we rode home in one of the fanciest cars I'd ever seen. Aunt Josie sat up front with her chauffeur—his name was Hosea—and I was in the back with Mrs. Singleton and Perri. I started rattling on, as I always do, to Aunt Josie, and she politely listened. I talked a lot, but I could tell pretty quickly what someone else was thinking, and Perri Singleton's face told me that she didn't like me one bit. Yet.

Hosea turned the car into a long private drive, framed on either side with stone posts, which would have fit nicely in a Roman piazza, I imagined. Father had tried to prepare me for the Chandlers' home, describing it to me and even showing me an old photo, but as Hosea drove around the bend, I stared, my mouth almost hanging open, at a sprawling—and imposing—white stucco house, something fit for English nobility.

Hosea pulled the car under a covered driveway to the right of the house. My aunt called this the “porte cochere,” which I later realized was French, except she pronounced it in long, drawn-out syllables—
po-wart co-share,
which meant absolutely nothing to me.

When we stopped, Perri almost jumped out of the car. Perhaps she thought I had lice or some other terrible ailment that came with poverty, but she got in their car with her mother, and they drove away without a glance back at me.

I got out of the Pierce Arrow and followed Aunt Josie as she walked me in a circular tour around the property. Acres and acres of open land surrounded the house. To the left of the mansion were the garages for cars, and off behind the garages, a stable that Aunt Josie said was filled with horses as well as a cow and a pig, and farther out, in the fields behind, beautiful vegetable gardens, and the servants' quarters off to the left of the stables.

Then she shaded her eyes with her hand, squinted, pointed, and said, “Down the hill to the right by the little lake is the summerhouse. It's such a lovely spot. The orchestra plays there when we have lawn parties.”

She said this without a hint of pretension, so I nodded as if I were used to staying at a mansion with property that spilled out everywhere and attending parties with a live orchestra playing.

I had arrived in Atlanta at the pinnacle of spring. The dogwoods and azaleas were beginning to declare the joy of rebirth, the air was mild, the daffodils were swinging their happy yellow heads back and forth, the sky was a soft pastel blue, and the scent of hyacinths tickled my nose. I twirled around with my hands outstretched and soaked it in. Fresh air and rebirth! I twirled around one more time. Aunt Josie's face once again wore a regard of disapproval, so I stopped and followed her back to the porte cochere, and we walked inside.

The best word for Aunt Josie was buxom. Or well-endowed. Or sturdy. She had the same Dillard nose as Father, straight and pointed down, and eyes like Father's too—dark brown—but they weren't nearly as flashing and passionate as his. Her hair was a pretty cherry-brown color, like Father's had been before he lost half of his and the rest turned gray.

Overall, Aunt Josie was a large, striking woman, dressed in tailored silk and pearls. She seemed to me the kind of woman you'd like to have around if you were inviting a hundred people to your house for a fancy affair, but not so much the person you'd want to confide in about a boy. Which I did. I was fairly exploding to tell someone about Hank. But I kept my mouth shut.

I'd seen Aunt Josie for the first time in years when she'd come to Chicago to visit us—her baby brother and his family—back in October. It turned into a disastrous visit, to say the least. She saw where we lived, that there was no food in the icebox, and the state of our clothes, and she was livid at Father.

“You're preaching to others and not taking care of your own family. Haven't you read the Scriptures? Saint Paul calls you an infidel!”

Father was all torn up about her saying that, but Mother stuck by him and said that they weren't called to speak to the people who had means, but to those who had nothing, and he wasn't going to pass around the offering plate to people fallen on such bad times. God would provide.

The day after Aunt Josie left for Atlanta, a man came to the apartment and handed Father an envelope with twenty dollars in it. We whooped and hollered. Just like every time, God had provided for us; money came out of nowhere. And besides that, before she returned to Atlanta, Aunt Josie left a bag of clothes for Coobie and Frances and me, and she bought us enough groceries for two whole weeks. I wondered if she realized that God was providing through her too.

The front hall in my aunt's mansion was paneled from floor to ceiling in some kind of dark, gleaming wood, and the ceiling was sculpted like something I'd seen in a history book of the European Renaissance, and there was an enormous stone mantelpiece above the fireplace. I wanted to stop and take it all in, but Aunt Josie had already turned to the right and started upstairs. The staircase was split in two sides that wound around above the porte-cochere entrance, and the dark walls leading to the second floor were decorated with big oil paintings of what must have been family members. Most were portraits of somber-looking people, but I recognized one of Father as a child with a little dog in his lap.

“Well, here's your bedroom, Mary Dobbs. I hope you'll find everything to your liking. You've got the bathroom right there to yourself, and there are fresh towels and sheets in the linen closet. Parthenia, the servant girl, changes everything twice a week. You can put your clothes away in the chest of drawers and the closet. I've put a few other things in the closet that you might need.

“The upstairs telephone is in my room. If you need to make a call, just tell me. Your uncle Robert doesn't like us to call long-distance very often, but I'm sure your parents want to hear you've arrived safely.” She ruffled her nose, frowned slightly, and said, “Your parents don't have a telephone, do they?”

“No, that's correct.”

“We'll send a telegram.”

At that moment, the telephone actually began to ring. “Let me go get it,” Aunt Josie said and hurried down the hall.

Walking into my new room, I surmised that God had very generously provided again. The bedroom seemed almost as big as our whole apartment in Chicago. Large-paned windows overlooked the property out back. I could see the stables and the servants' quarters, and if I opened the window and stood on my tiptoes and leaned out as far as I could—which, of course, I did—I could see the summerhouse down the hill perched beside the little lake. I closed the window, twirled around again, laughed, let myself fall backward on the big bed with its fluffy comforter, and stared up at the white-laced canopy overhead.

Then I deflated, thinking about Mother and Father with my little sisters, Coobie and Frances, huddled together in that small apartment. Mother had cooked the last of the chicken three days ago, and before they took me to the train station, we'd picked every scrap of meat off the bones and boiled the bones to make broth. I imagined them hungry, and it made me want to go right back to Terminal Station and catch the next train to Chicago.

Suddenly Aunt Josie hurried back into the hall, calling down the stairs, “Hosea! Hosea! Come quickly. Yes, yes. There's a problem. A big problem.” Almost as an afterthought, she stopped by my doorway. Her round face was pasty white. “I have to leave. There's been, there's been a terrible . . .” She didn't finish the sentence, and I heard her pumps making a racket on the stairs as she rushed down them.

I sat there bewildered. My practical, competent aunt had looked as if she had just been clobbered over the head and was seeing stars.

I waited to hear the news of what had happened, but Aunt Josie didn't come back upstairs. After a few minutes of a general state of commotion, with Aunt Josie calling out to Hosea and someone else, the front door slammed. I heard the roaring of a car engine, and then the house fell silent.

I tried my hardest to imagine what could possibly have happened to fluster my aunt to such an extent. Had Uncle Robert had another heart attack? Originally, I was supposed to come to Atlanta in early January, to start the new term at Washington Seminary, but on the day after Christmas, Uncle Robert had keeled over in front of the Christmas tree. Massive heart attack. It had taken him two months to recover, and hence my arrival in March.

Something downright horrible had happened, but there was no use in my trying to figure it out, so I turned my thoughts to Hank. Hank! Working in the steel factory, hurrying to night classes, preaching at the little church with Father. I wondered if he really meant it—that he would wait for me. Surely he did. Some things I just knew were supposed to be.

I had wanted to tell Mother and Father about Hank. I felt sure they had noticed something, and then I wasn't at all sure.

Coobie, my bratty little sister, noticed though. She whispered to me before I got on the train, “Has he ever kissed you?”

My face turned red, and my expression must have given me away, because she clapped her hands together and squealed, as only Coobie can, “I knew it!”

I closed my eyes and remembered our first meeting. I saw Hank standing in the alleyway behind our apartment, dressed in a white cotton T-shirt and overalls and a smile. That first time he smiled at me, I started coughing. I couldn't stop staring at his eyes, periwinkle blue, as if the brightest cloudless sky had floated down and drifted into them, filling them with life and laughter; and his hair, a blondish brown, was straight and needed a trim, but the bangs falling over his eyebrows made him all the more delectable.

“Hello, my name is Hank Wilson,” he said. “I'm looking for Reverend William Dillard.” He smiled again and then looked down at a piece of paper he was holding in his hand.

I giggled nervously, recovered, and said, “You're at the right spot. Come on in, and I'll take you up to meet him.” I motioned for him to follow and then added, “By the way, I'm his daughter, Mary Dobbs.”

“Nice to meet you, Mary Dobbs.”

We walked into the apartment building and climbed the steps to the second floor, and right before I opened the door to our apartment, I turned to him and said, “Everyone calls my father Reverend Billy.”

At that first encounter, eighteen months earlier, when I had barely turned sixteen and he was already twenty, I had wanted to say, “I'm gonna marry you.” But I refrained. I could keep my mouth shut when needed.

“Henry ‘Hank' Wilson,” I said out loud to the empty Chandler house. He had promised he would write as soon as I left, and I wondered how long it took a letter to get from Chicago to Atlanta.

After I unpacked my little suitcase—all of my clothes fit into two drawers in the chest—I opened the closet. Hanging inside were three school uniforms and two other dresses—pretty, feminine dresses, the kind I had never even dreamed of owning. Had Aunt Josie bought these for
me
? I giggled, touching one of them, feeling the cool, fancy fabric. The lovely slim day dress with a tailored bodice was bright pink with tiny white flowers and had an oversized belt, a white ruffled collar, and cuffed sleeves! The absolute newest fashion.

I took it off the hanger, quickly undressed, and slipped it over my head. It fit perfectly. I buckled the belt and stared at myself in the full-length mirror on the other side of the bed. I was glowing! I looked like a woman, with curves in all the right places. I wished Hank could see me in this dress! The price tag was still on it, and as I glanced down, my eyes grew wide. My family could eat for two months on what the dress had cost.

I wanted to waltz from room to room, barefoot, in the elegant day dress, but I feared that someone might find me strutting around like a movie star. Embarrassed, I changed back into my humble attire, caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror and realized just why the Singletons and Aunt Josie had regarded me with pity. The plain dark blue dress, stained and faded, did look pitiful. Mother had wanted me to wear the pale green suit she wore at Father's revival meetings, but I had refused to take that from her.