A Comedy of Heirs (13 page)

Aunt Ruth had just arrived late yesterday evening and I hadn't gotten to talk to her much. She usually arrived as late as she could without being talked about, because she was basically a snob and liked to forget that most of her relatives were … well, related to her. Born in 1922, she was the oldest girl of the seven children. She and Wilbur had the perfect suburban family of two wonderful sons, who grew up to be a doctor and a lawyer. They had four grandchildren, played bridge every week, and still lived in the three-bedroom ranch house that they bought in 1953, eight years after Wilbur came back from World War II. Nothing bad ever happens in their house and nothing ugly exists within their one quarter of an acre of Americana. Even if they had to deny it and shove it under a really big rug.

Aunt Ruth was about as far on the opposite end of the spectrum from Aunt Sissy as one could be. It was no accident that they weren't seated at the same table. They got along okay, but never socialized. Aunt Ruth and Aunt Charlotte, although not close, were still better suited to each other. Aunt Charlotte was hard not to get along with because she was genuinely down the middle on so many things.

I really wanted to talk to the sheriff about what I had found out at the Progress library today, but thought it would look pretty funny if I just jerked him by the tie into the hall and talked to him for half an hour. My mother wouldn't appreciate it much either.

The conversation spilling around the table was about Uncle Curtis's latest investment adventure, in which Aunt Ruth assured him that he would lose the shirt off of his back.

“So, Aunt Ruth,” I said. “What do you remember about Nate Keith?” It was as subtle as I could make it. The sheriff gave me a sharp glance over his glass of wine.

“The queen of segue,” I heard the sheriff say toward me. He was at the head of the table with my mother to his left between us. He didn't have to say it very loud for me to hear.

Aunt Ruth, in her pink jacket and skirt, looked positively a seventy-six-year-old version of Jackie Kennedy. She smiled at me from directly across the table, but the smile never quite reached her eyes. “Still tracing the family tree?” she asked. “I thought you would have grown tired of that little hobby of yours years ago.”

“Why should I?” I asked. “It continually amazes me.”

“Oh, really?” she asked.

“I find out new things every week,” I said.

“Like what?”

“Well, my great-greatuncle on my mother's side was a genuine bona fide horse thief,” I said.

Aunt Ruth flushed a little and took a drink of her iced tea. “Not the sort of thing you would think that you would brag about,” she said. “No offense, Jalena.”

“None taken,” my mother said.

“We are who we are,” I said.

“Never could figure out why you wanted to know all that stuff about a dead person,” she said. “For that very type of reason. Who knows what you could find.”

Uncle Wilbur piped up and said, “Yeah, what if you find out you're descended from a … non-Caucasian person?” He could be politically correct even when he was dishing out racist slurs. Amazing.

“Uncle Wilbur!” I said. “I can't believe you just said that.”

He absolutely had no clue as to why I was chiding him, so I just shut up. He was old and he would die thinking the way he thought, regardless of how many “all one people” speeches I tried to give him.

“Well?” he asked. “Just what would you do?”

“I guess I'd laugh a little, file it and move on,” I said.

“Laugh?” he asked. Uncle Wilbur had absolutely no taste in clothes. Well, actually he did, it's just that most of it should be worn on a golf course by colorblind people. His jacket was almost always some sort of checked thing, and his pants a pinstripe, with brilliantly spit-shined black shoes.

“Yes, I'd laugh. It would be hilarious to imagine all of your faces when I told you the news,” I said. My mother elbowed me slightly. It wasn't that she disagreed with me, she just knew that this argument was pointless.

“You know,” I said. “Black people are probably just as shocked when they find out they have a white great-grandpa.”

You could tell that idea had not occurred to him, because his forehead shifted about a foot backward and his eyes got real wide. “I never said anything about a black person.”

“There aren't many non-Caucasian choices, Uncle Wilbur.”

Aunt Ruth, who had remained dutifully quiet on the subject, finally said something. “Really, Torie. What's done is done. What does it matter to you what these people were?”

“You were pretty excited when I could prove that you were descended from King James the Sixth of Scotland. Remember?” I asked. “You invited me to your local historical society to explain to them just how the line of descent went. You have to take the bad with the good. We are what we are, and every single action that took place before us brought us to this very moment.”

In light of my newfound discoveries, this particular philosophical statement had a lot of meaning. I wasn't just whistling Dixie.

“Nevertheless,” she said. “Why did you want to know about Nate Keith? I thought you had everything you needed on him.”

“Thought I knew everything about the man,” I said. My girls were playing with the little butter dishes on the table and Rudy had struck up a football conversation with Uncle Curtis. Aunt Charlotte was all ears at the conversation on our end of the table, but said nothing. “Turns out—”

“Our food should be getting here pretty soon,” Sheriff Brooke said.

I gave him the look of daggers. I'd been wanting to have this conversation with Aunt Ruth for a long time, because I had found out that Nate had been murdered and she was the first one to tell me the hunting accident story. Because she had chided me and hounded me every step of the way when I was heavily researching the family tree, until I found out about our royal lineage and suddenly she was even prepared to fund some of my research. Her two-faced, fake, variety-hour Donna Reed impersonation was just more than I could stand.

“I heard something about a swimming accident?” I ventured.

“When he was a small boy,” she said, cautious. “How did you find out about that?”

“Believe it or not, very little is safe, Aunt Ruth. It was in the newspapers of the time,” I said without really knowing if this were true. Like she was going to check.

“Do you routinely check the newspapers for information?” she asked and took a drink of her tea. I'd struck a nerve. If I discovered the swimming accident in the papers, what else had I discovered? A little murder on the front porch?

“When all the other resources dry up, yes. I'm not a fan of newspapers because you can scan through them for hours without finding anything on your family,” I said. “But, when you do find something, you usually hit pay dirt.”

“Really?” she asked.

“Yeah. So what about the swimming accident?” I asked.

The waiter came to our table with a big platter of food and an assistant waiter who helped him distribute the steaming dishes. I got the fettuccine Alfredo, of course. That is all I ever get at an Italian restaurant. Del Pietro's was the best I've ever had.

“Well, if you've found the newspaper articles,” Aunt Ruth said smugly, “then you don't need my input. You know everything.”

Darn. I wasn't planning on her taking that defense. “Well, the article was very brief and it just mentioned a bunch of boys swimming, Nate Keith being one of them, and that a boy drowned, I just thought maybe you would know a personal account of it. Nate being your grandfather and everything.”

Still she said nothing. I was desperate now. What did I have to lose but to just throw out a name? “They mentioned a Ferguson boy…”

“Grandpa Nate swore that he didn't mean for anybody to get hurt when he made the dare. He mourned the death of that Ferguson boy every day,” she declared.

The Ferguson boy? Bradley? “Ferguson,” I said. “Um, you mean Bradley?”

“No, Bradley's older brother Wil,” she said.

“Oh, yeah, that's right. Wil. And the others…” I snapped my fingers, pretending they were on the tip of my tongue.

“Patrick Elster and Zack Clayton,” she said.

I knew it! “Weren't they related to us?”

“Yeah, you've got it all in charts,” she said and went about eating her food.

“So it was a dare?” I asked. “The papers didn't mention that part.”

“Is this what you've been after? You just wanted to know about the swimming accident?” she asked.

“Well, that and I heard that Grandpa Nate's barn was burned and his pigs poisoned…”

The color drained from Aunt Ruth's face like a Warner Bros. cartoon. “You didn't find that in any newspaper,” she hissed.

“So is BJ playing hockey this year?” my mother asked Aunt Ruth. BJ was one of Ruth's grandsons. I had the feeling my mother had been trying to remember the name of one of Aunt Ruth's grandchildren for about the last two minutes to be able to jump in and stop this conversation. It was all right. I knew I was being bitchy and pushy. I was being as bitchy and pushy as Aunt Ruth had always been fake and two-faced.

“Yes, he is,” Aunt Ruth answered my mother with much relief. “There's great hope for him that he will make the Olympic team. He's quite the little star. The apple of our eye.” Never mind the fact that the kid couldn't read, had impregnated something like three different freshman girls, and stolen his mother's mink to buy an eightball of cocaine. All things that I had heard from BJ's mother.

I strained to see past Aunt Ruth at the table over by the window. My father, Uncle Melvin and loads of cousins. Another table had Uncle Isaac and Aunt Sissy and tons of cousins. I wondered if any of their conversations were as strained as the one at this table. Of course, I had to remind myself, that I had pushed it in this direction.

I looked over at my mother who was holding the sheriff's hand and listening intently to Aunt Ruth go on and on about her wunderkind offspring. My mother seemed really happy with her life right now, my girls were healthy, I was pregnant and Rudy's nose was healing quite fast. The things that were important to me were good. I wasn't going to let an age-old irritation with Aunt Ruth sour my evening or my family reunion.

Damon stood and clanked his glass with his knife. “Announcement, everybody … If you are going caroling with us after dinner, you are to meet at the Santa Lucia Catholic Church. Okay? Everybody hear me?”

“Are you really going to let Uncle Isaac sing?” somebody said.

“Yeah, even Ike gets to sing,” Damon said and sat back down.

I smiled to myself and ate the best fettuccine I'd ever eaten. I say that every time I come here.

Sixteen

“You know,” my mother said. “You were pretty rude to your aunt Ruth.” She was sitting in the passenger seat of Sheriff Brooke's yellow Festiva. The engine was running while she waited for the sheriff to come back to the car in the parking lot of the Santa Lucia church. He had pulled in here to check up on Father Bingham and make sure everything was all right before taking my mother home. Her circulation wasn't the greatest and being outside in the freezing cold for hours to sing probably wasn't the best thing for her.

“I know,” I answered her. “I couldn't help myself.”

“Help yourself? What is all this about?” she asked.

“You know that Aunt Ruth and I don't exactly get along,” I said and hugged myself to shield against the cold. “She and I have had issues that go back years.”

“I thought those had been settled,” she said. A small crease had formed between her eyebrows.

I shrugged my shoulders. “She and I yelled at each other once because she told me I didn't have a right to know who my ancestors were. Only if my elders decided that it was all right for me to know. She's a fake. I hate fake people. I hate people who try to make the world believe that their crap don't stink.”

“You don't have to get nasty,” she said. “There's more to this.”

I glanced across the parking lot and saw the sheriff standing on the steps of the rectory. “She and I have always been at odds. Remember how she used to bad-mouth Grandma, because Grandma's house had that linoleum in it with the rips? At Grandma's funeral that was all I could think about—was the look on her face when her daughter berated her for her floor.”

“You're still peeved about that?” she asked.

“Well, it's everything. She was ashamed of her father because all he ever did was farm and play music. Forget the fact that he was one of the most kindhearted individuals in the world. He had a great sense of humor and she probably could have learned a lot from him, if she could have gotten past the fact that he didn't wear Topsiders and a suit. He wore flannel shirts and muddy work boots.”

“So you decide to take out all of your anger on her tonight? I know there is more,” Mom pushed further.

“I don't have time to go into it right now, Mom,” I said. I took a deep breath and decided to just tell her. “Suffice it to say, I found out that Nate Keith—you know my great-grandfather—was murdered, and that all of my ‘elders' knew about it and lied to me.” My mother gave me a look like she was about to argue with me. “Mom, I've talked to the investigating officer. Everybody, including my father, knew it and lied.”

My mother said nothing.

“Aren't you going to say something?” I asked.

“I don't know what to say. I thought your dad's grandfather was killed in a hunting accident?”

“Yeah, a hunting accident right on his own front porch. I don't think he was hunting. I think he was the hunted,” I said. I could tell by the look on her face that she believed me. What doubt she had at first was now gone. My mother trusted me and trusted what I said to be true to the best of my knowledge. She was one of the few people who would put blind faith in me. She was also one of the few people that I was totally honest with.