After You've Gone (6 page)

Zelda then begins to think of a small trip alone somewhere. Maybe to San Francisco. Well, why not? This is something that women do all the time these days. She could get tickets through the agency, and she could see the city, San Francisco! (She notes with some interest that she is not thinking of New York, or Evan.)

Dozing off, Zelda dreams of freedom. Somewhere else.

Beside her, Abe, who is not asleep, is thinking somewhat resentfully of Gabino, who after all could have written a note when he got the shoes. Abe very carefully included his own name and address, both inside and outside the package. A postcard, any sort of acknowledgment would have done. And today he didn't even wait for Abe to come up from swimming. Surely Zelda would have said that that was where he was.

Or would she?

The intensity of the downpour, the extreme heaviness of that deluge suggests that it won't last long, the rainstorm.
But it seems to go on and on, heavy water pouring from the sky.

It could cause some very bad flooding, Abe thinks next, as he envisions the dry riverbeds, the eroded sloping fields that they pass on their way from the airport to this hotel. And in his mind he can also see a cluster of shacks, the floorless dwellings of the very poor. Small and fragile, hardly shelters at all, precariously perched on the crumbling hillside earth.

Where Gabino might well come from.

His resentment vanished as though washed away in the rain, Abe determines that tomorrow he will go and find Gabino. He will find out just where he lives (he has kept the address), what the circumstances of his family are.

Evelyn Fisk, alone in her wide lumpy hard bed, is thinking that if the cats were still around she would at this moment be worried about where they were now, in the drenching, unaccustomed rain. However, she derives small solace from the fact that there are no cats for her to worry about. Really no solace at all.

In a terrible and permanent way she misses all of them, with their long skinny graceful bodies, their blue-green-yellow wise watchful eyes.

Unspeakable Oscar.

And Grantly, never allowing cats in their house. She has never seen him sneeze or turn red, no true allergic symptoms. He simply doesn't like them.

Well
, thinks Evelyn, warm beneath her covers, taking in cool air, Well, there's more than one solution to that problem.

And she smiles.

A long time ago, in the thirties, two little girls found almost perfect complements in each other. Theirs was a balanced, exceptionally happy friendship: skinny, scared, precocious Prudence Jamieson and pretty, placid, trustful Laura Lee Matthews. Such friendships quite often occur, of course, among small girls. They find each other. What was perhaps unusual about this one was its having been arranged, indeed contrived, by the parents involved, for their own convenience—so often under such circumstances the children refuse to like each other. But Prudence and Laura Lee really took to each other, as their grateful, hard-drinking parents remarked, making everything easy for the parents (for a while).

In any case, in the long, Southern summer twilights, after supper the small girls used to play in the sprawling, bountiful Matthews garden, and one of their favorite pastimes involved making a series of precariously fragile, momentarily lovely dolls out of flower petals. Pansy faces with hollyhock skirts, like dancers' tutus, for example, or petunia skirts and tiny
rosebud faces. The idea had been Prudence's, but Laura Lee was more successful in its execution, being more patient and much more deftly fingered. This occupation entirely absorbed both children, and it formed an idyllic part of their childhood, something they lightly, laughingly mentioned to each other as they became more complex but still firm adult friends.

The friendship among the four grown-ups, which did not end well, was based largely upon their shared enthusiasm for drink—three of those four people were borderline alcoholics; the fourth, Sophia Jamieson, mother of Prudence, became a full-fledged alcoholic. Another bond, even more perilous, was the violently flaring, illicit (though never even nearly consummated) love affair between Dan Jamieson, father of Prudence, and Liza Matthews, the beautiful mother of pretty Laura Lee. Given all these danger-fraught circumstances, it is surprising that the four-way adult connection continued for as long as it did; in recent, more accelerated times, disaster might well have struck much sooner.

All these things happened, then, in a place called Hilton, a college town in the middle South, a pleasantly heterogeneous collection of old buildings, old houses, and a lot of ancient brick and ivy and Virginia creeper. Both town and college were built among gently rising inland hills whose green velvet undulations gave credence to a local theory that all that land had once lain beneath the sea.

Many of the faculty members and a few of the more imaginative townspeople lived a mile or so from town in what had once been farmhouses, old rambling structures now more or less converted into practical houses. The Jamiesons, Dan and Sophia and Prudence, lived in one such house on a hilltop; Liza and Carlton Matthews, with Laura Lee, lived on another
hill, about a mile away. Small, handsome, jokey Dan Jamieson taught history at Hilton. Big, serious Carlton Matthews was a doctor, one of the two in town, and consequently he was overworked and often terribly tired; at night he liked to drink. Liza Matthews, in addition to keeping a perfect house and cooking well (and being very beautiful, a blue-eyed, black-haired sprite), was a gifted gardener; almost single-handedly she had achieved the generous garden in which the little girls played their games of dolls among the flowers.

Sophia Jamieson seemed to drink less than the others did, at first; she even carried glasses of Coke and water, resembling bourbon and branch, to fend off assiduous hosts. She was a difficult, complicated woman; to her daughter she was terrifying. In fact, Prudence was so afraid of her mother that she could not have named that emotion, fear, in much the same way that extremely lonely people often do not quite know that loneliness is what is wrong.

Sophia did not look like a frightening woman. She was small, much smaller than Prudence eventually grew to be, very erect, and somewhat plump, with an oddly unindented body. Long brown hair worn braided, impeccably, around her head. Her skin was reddish brown, often flushed, rather coarsely textured (to Prudence as a small child, those pores seemed amazingly large—frightening holes). Sophia's voice was soft and very gentle (usually); on the whole a quiet person, her presence still was felt in any room—Dan always felt it, as God knows Prudence did. An extremely intelligent, highly efficient woman, Sophia headed the local Red Cross, organizing volunteers and fund drives. Doing good.

Both families had swimming pools, which in those days were not overwhelmingly expensive. The Jamieson pool was down in a ravine, separated from the house by a long, wooded slope (dogwood, maples, small pines). The water in its narrow
oval was often cold. The Matthews pool, near their garden, was large and round and shallow, open to sunlight. Warm. (The symbolism of the two pools struck Prudence as an adult, naturally; it was not something mentioned at the time, though others must have thought of it, especially infatuated Dan.) In any case, while the couples still were friends, the Matthews pool was mostly used for daytime swimming; Liza would bring out trays of sandwiches and iced tea or lemonade—none of them were really daylight drinkers.

The Jamieson pool was ideal for summer-night parties. Sophia's maid would leave bowls of potato salad in the icebox, and at suppertime Dan would build a fire down by the pool; he would roast hot dogs, hamburgers, or cube steaks and pass them out in buns to everyone there, the dozen or so good friends. They would all be sitting around on steamer rugs, on the summer dew-damp ground, as fireflies drifted through the darkening evening air. As flirtations and arguments grew heavier with drink.

It was most often Prudence who spent the night at the Matthews house, far out of the way of the parties. Which, for every reason, Prudence loved. Before her parents got to be friends with the Matthewses and she was invited to go spend the night with Laura Lee, the sounds of those poolside parties used to scare her badly. They sang a lot, her parents and their friends, as the night wore on; to Prudence they sounded like the cannibals in Tarzan movies—terrifying! At the Matthewses', she felt safe: there was Laura Lee in the other ruffled white twin bed, and the only night sounds were perfectly ordinary ones: a friendly wind in the trees, someone's dog.

Even the trees around Laura Lee's house seemed safe: sturdy, fat, upright cedars, and nice, small, squat pines.

…

On weekends, the children often took picnics out into the woods that surrounded both their houses. There Prudence was the more adventurous of the two; perhaps being taller gave her more confidence, or maybe it was only people that she feared. She led Laura Lee down a steep hill all billowing with new green leaves, in the springtime, and across a dark field of dry, pale, broken straw, over tiny wildflowers, almost invisible. They pushed through strong, dense, fragrant thickets of honeysuckle and brambles to the stream, where it was Prudence's idea that they should build a dam. And she had a plan, an engineering outline: first stones, then small, thick sticks, and then the whole all packed with mud.

“But, Prudy, we'll get mud all over.” Tidy, sweet-faced Laura Lee still laughed as she said this, excited by the very possibility of so much dirt, of such abandon.

“They won't know. We'll sneak home after they've started their cocktails and highballs.”

They built the dam—in the course of spring and summer they built a lot of dams, and they came home very dirty, and none of their parents ever minded, really. The children were happy and occupied; they were out of everyone's hair, as the phrase went—and that was the whole point of their knowing each other, wasn't it?

Many people were surprised that Liza Matthews—such a beautiful young woman—should also be so extremely shy. Those who knew something of her background attributed her shyness to that: an isolated, dirt-poor farm in the western, mountainous part of the state, a scholarship to Hilton, waitress jobs. And it is true that Liza felt insecure, always, with people from what she considered to be “good families.” (In the South, of course, there is always a lot of such talk, such distinctions.)

Liza was impressed that Carlton was a doctor, and for the most part she liked being married to him; as a wife and mother, she was generally happy and very busy. She was still shy around most other people, however, until they began to be friends with the Jamiesons and Dan introduced her to gin. Before that she had only tasted bourbon, which she hated, and beer—even worse. She had thought she just plain did not like to drink, and Carlton's drinking made her sad; he would drink a lot of beer and fall asleep, very early.

But “You just try this for size, Miss Liza,” said dapper, blond, green-eyed Dan Jamieson. “All ladies love pink ladies, I guarantee you.” And he handed her something pink and frothy and sweet, on an April night, down by the Jamieson pool. White dogwood bloomed all along the slope of woods leading up to the house, and around the pool a high privet hedge also bloomed, sweet-smelling. The shining, slipping surface of the pool reflected, in its wavering black, stars and a thin white moon.

No one had ever called Liza “Miss Liza” before, and Liza suddenly (crazily!) wished that she were a child, so that she could rush over to Dan and kiss him, like a very polite, very well brought up little girl. Little Miss Liza.

She liked the pink lady, and she began to like the party very much. It was such a beautiful, soft night, so warm for April. The sky was so starry, so richly thick with stars, and that sickle moon, and everyone there was so nice, such good, friendly people, everyone liking her, smiling. Carlton whispered that she was the prettiest woman at the party and, looking around her, Liza saw that this was true. She was the prettiest, and everyone knew that she was pretty—especially Dan Jamieson, who later brought out his accordion and sang some songs, mostly looking at Liza. “Oh carry my loved one home safely to me.…”

…

A few weeks later, Liza got up her nerve and asked everyone to a party at her house. Carlton bought some gin, and Liza made her special chicken salad and honey rolls, and their party was a big success. Everyone said what a lovely house, a good dinner, and how pretty Liza looked. “She can cook, too,” said Dan Jamieson, laughing at Liza.

Friends. It was wonderful to have friends like the Jamiesons, at last. Even their little girls seemed to like each other, to like staying over at each other's house.

Everyone gave parties, and they all drank a lot—everyone but Sophia Jamieson, who seemed pretty straitlaced. With lots of friends, all drinking, though, it seemed all right to Liza to say almost anything at all, and she even told a couple of stories about when she was a little girl and they were all so poor: she and her two older sisters had just one good dress between them, so one time they decided they would all go to the dance for an hour apiece. After her hour, the one in the dress had to come home and let one of the others change into it. Fortunately, the three of them looked a lot alike, and the lights were turned down low in the Legion Hall, where the dance was, so no one knew.

Everyone laughed at the story, even Sophia. “You're a natural storyteller, Miss Liza,” Dan Jamieson said, adding in his funny way, “too.”

A couple of the other women in town invited Liza to join them at Eubanks, the local drugstore, for Cokes: “Any morning about eleven, after you're done with your marketing.” Uncertain, Liza got a little too dressed up the first time she went, but it was all right; they all said how pretty she looked. A woman called Popsie said she had never seen such a pretty dress. And Liza had fun, although she did think a pink lady
would have been more fun than just a Coke. The other women, especially that Popsie, all laughed and talked a lot. And when Sophia's name came up (Popsie: “
She
never comes for Cokes,
she's
too busy”), Liza was relieved to hear the edge of malice in their voices, a little of the uneasiness regarding Sophia that she herself felt.