News of the Spirit (10 page)

I was the youngest bridesmaid in Caroline’s wedding. I got to wear a white organdy dress with a pink satin sash, a picture hat, and pearl earrings. I got to carry a bouquet of pink rosebuds and baby’s breath. I even got to wear Cuban heels—my first high heels ever—over my grandmother’s objections. She said I was too young. My mother said, “Oh, Ernestine, I’m sure you’re right,” and let me wear them anyway. I looked perfectly beautiful at Caroline’s wedding, much prettier than Caroline herself, who was a bit too wholesome for white. Caroline looked like a nurse.

But her groom, Thomas Burlington, looked like Troy Donahue. He was the handsomest boy I’d ever met, and the nicest, possessing all of Daddy’s sensitivity without the aloofness.

I had been predisposed toward him anyway, after Mama’s discussions about him on the telephone: “Well, he doesn’t have a penny to his name, but he’s real
smart
, he’s gotten all these scholarships…. Oh yes, we like him. You can’t help but like him…. He’s got a master’s degree in English literature, have you
ever
?…Well, I don’t know. Teach school, I reckon.” Mama’s tone betrayed what she thought about teaching school, and I was sure Caroline held the same opinion. A schoolteacher would never be able to support Caroline, not even the cutest schoolteacher in the world, which
Tom was. He didn’t know what he was getting into. (Though they did receive so many wedding presents that they could have sold them off and lived for a year or two on the proceeds, it looked like to me.)

The wedding reception was held at our house, under a huge white tent set up in the backyard. In the house, the wedding presents were displayed in the family room and the downstairs guest suite, a sea of silver, china, and crystal. I had earlier pocketed a nifty jade paperweight sent by one of Tom’s relatives that nobody had ever heard of, to keep as a souvenir.

I started loving Tom Burlington at the wedding reception, and never stopped. The party was all but over. Tom and Caroline had cut the cake, made the toasts, and everybody was dancing to terrible music (Percy Faith). Caroline had gone upstairs to put on her “going-away outfit.” My feet were killing me. I shifted from foot to foot to keep my heels from sinking into the grass as I waited in the front yard, clutching my net package of rice, wishing I hadn’t gotten so grown up all of a sudden, so I could run down the road playing tag with my little cousins.

“Why don’t you just take them off?” There was Tom at my elbow. He pointed to my shoes.

“Oh, I’m fine,” I said. “Just fine. I wear heels all the time,” I said.

“I was just thinking of taking my own shoes off,” Tom said. “In fact, I believe I will.” He stepped out of his loafers
and leaned down to peel off his socks. He had changed to a seersucker suit with a white shirt and a striped tie.

“Me too, then.” My feet sank into the cool thick grass.

“And now, Miss Jennifer, I wonder if you would do me the honor of accompanying me to get another bite of that cake,” Tom said formally. “There’s plenty of time. You know how long it takes your sister to get dressed.”

He held his arm out to me the way people do in movies, and I took it. We walked off, leaving our shoes where they were, and went over to the huge delicious complicated cake on its own table, attended by a waiter. “Which layer, Miss?” the waiter asked, and I said, “Chocolate, please.” There was a white layer, a yellow layer, and a chocolate layer. Trust Caroline to have a fancier cake than anybody in Lewisville had ever had before.

Tom chose chocolate, too. “Now how about a drink?” he asked.

“I’d love some champagne,” I said.

Tom didn’t bat an eye. He disappeared and came right back with a glass of champagne for me and one for himself. He clinked my glass in an elegant toast: “To the lovely Miss Jennifer.” This is the exact moment I fell in love. Then he quoted a real poem, which began: “A sweet disorder in the dress…” It was very long and very beautiful.

I held my breath the whole time. At the end of the poem, I raised my glass and drained it. The champagne went straight up my nose. I started crying, and couldn’t stop.

Tom was not at all disconcerted by my tears. He did not say “Don’t cry” or “There now.” Instead, he wiped at them gravely, scientifically, with a linen napkin. Then he took my arm again and escorted me gallantly across the grass to the front yard, where the whole crowd had gathered, with Mama up on the steps in her billowing satin gown, her hand to her forehead like an explorer, anxiously scanning the crowd.

“
Here
he is!” she called inside. “Okay, dear!” And then Caroline emerged in a beige suit with a corsage, carrying her bouquet. Before I knew it, Tom had moved to her side, and flashbulbs were popping, and then she threw the bouquet straight to me. Everybody cheered. I clutched it tight, forgetting to throw my own rice, while Tom and Caroline ran the gauntlet out to their waiting limo and were rushed away to the Mountain Lake Hotel, where they would
do it
all night long. (Do
what
? I had no idea.) I saved that bouquet, though. I have it still.

When the wedding pictures came, everybody was amused to see that Tom had gone off on his honeymoon
barefooted
. Nobody but me knew why. Nobody but me ever knew that he had toasted me with champagne, and said a poem to me.

From that day forward, I loved Tom with a rapt, fierce, patient love. Sometimes I even talked myself into believing, for an hour or so at least, that Tom had married Caroline only to get closer to
me
, to wait for me to grow up. Other times, even I had to admit that their marriage seemed to be going okay.

Tom got a job teaching English at a boys’ boarding school outside Charlottesville, which afforded them a nice free bungalow on campus, which Caroline immediately fixed up like a doll-house version of Mama’s house. Tom got a promotion, then another promotion and a raise. Caroline taught second grade and joined the Junior League and gave little dinner parties using all her wedding presents. When Mama and I drove up for a Saturday visit, Caroline served us shrimp salad on bone china plates with a scalloped gold edge. She told us that she and Tom were very happy, which I had no reason to doubt.

Yet unrequited love is the easiest sort of love to hang on to, and I’d cherished mine for three years now, until it had become not only a passion but a habit. Whenever I heard Debbie Reynolds’s hit recording of “Tammy,” for instance, I’d change the words to “Tommy” in my mind:

with
me
! His bare feet in the wedding pictures provided all the proof I needed. Of course I also liked the wedding pictures because I was in them, looking terrific.

However, I hated looking at Mama and Daddy’s wedding pictures because I was
not
in them, because I hadn’t even
existed then, a fact which threw me into as much terror as the thought of my own death. I had tried to explain this to Jinx, but she didn’t get it. Nobody got it.

I saw myself as an island with time stretching out before me and behind me, all around me like a deep lake, mysterious and never-ending, like Lake Nantahala, where I lost my ring, where a person might lose anything. This precarious view made everything that happened to me seem very, very important. I had to see as much as I could see, learn as much as I could learn, feel as much as I could feel. I had to live like crazy all the time, an attitude that would get me into lots of trouble later. So it didn’t matter, not really, whether or not Tom loved me back. Sometimes—I knew this from observing Mama and her baby brother, Mason—you’re bound to love most the one who loves you least, and least deserves it.

M
ASON WAS JUST NO GOOD
. E
VERYBODY KNEW IT, SINCE
he had come to live with Mama and Daddy when his parents—my grandparents—died unexpectedly in the same year, many years ago. Seventeen years older than I, Mason was grown and gone by the time I was born. He had graduated from our local high school by the skin of his teeth, distinguished by nothing—no sports, no clubs. Nice girls would not date him. College was out of the question. Mason wore T-shirts and the same old leather jacket all through high school; his swept-back hair was long and greasy. Even
Daddy could not get a button-down shirt or a sports jacket on him.

Mason had been a
juvenile delinquent
. This thrilled me. Of course, I would have adored him if he’d been nice to me at all, but his interest in me was confined to ruffling my hair at infrequent intervals throughout my childhood and mumbling “Hey now” out of the side of his mouth. That was
it
. And now, after some awful fight, he and Daddy had had a “parting of the ways,” as Mama put it. Daddy was a man who stood on principle, though the rift broke Mama’s heart. I wasn’t sure what the final straw had been. I knew that Daddy had bailed Mason out of debt numerous times and had set him up in two businesses, which had, however, failed. Somewhere along the way, Mason had married “disastrously,” Mama said, a much older woman of no consequence, with three children. Her name was Gloria, but I had never met her, or even laid eyes on her. I hardly ever laid eyes on Mason, either. He lived someplace near Norfolk and worked in the shipyards, I think. He no longer showed up for holidays, and had not attended Caroline’s wedding.

So by the time of this story, a sighting of Mason was as rare as a comet, taking place only during the daytime when Daddy was not at home. On those few occasions, Mason scared me a little—he’d grown fat and scruffy, and needed a shave. He didn’t look like a juvenile delinquent anymore
but like some guy you’d see on the side of a road hitchhiking. He looked older than he was, down on his luck.

Daddy was still officially waiting for Mason to “come around.” In the meantime, Mama gave him money. That’s what these visits were all about: money. I knew it, though Mama never said so. She received Mason privately—in her bedroom or the Florida room or the living room—anywhere I was
not
, which she made sure of by closing whatever door existed between me and them. When Mason left, looking shifty, Mama always seemed to have her purse nearby—on her bed, or the coffee table, or the sofa. Wherever they’d just been. I could put two and two together. She didn’t have to tell me not to tell Daddy, either; I already knew that. Just as I knew that Mason never came to see her unless he needed money, and this must have hurt her deeply.

Mama always had a good cry the minute he left. “Oh, Jenny, honey, come here and hug your mama,” she’d call, and I would go do it, patting her plump shoulder ineffectively while she sobbed into her pink Kleenex. “That poor soul,” she’d wail, “that poor, poor soul!”

I didn’t even like Mason by then, and couldn’t understand why Mama would waste her tears on him when she had such a brilliant and adorable daughter right there on the premises. Now, so many years later and a parent myself, I understand that there is no anguish like the anguish of not being able to make a loved one become the person you think he ought to
be. It can’t be done, of course. But they had not given up on him yet, not Mama and not even Daddy. Why, Mason was barely thirty years old! Surely he’d come to his senses. Surely he’d shape up.

In the fall of 1958, Mama and Daddy were still expecting this to happen.

J
INX AND
I
WERE IN MY ROOM LISTENING TO RECORDS
when the call came. It was a Saturday afternoon, bright and blowing outside, leaves flying everyplace. We lay stretched out flat on the shag carpet trying to figure out what in the world “
Nel blu, dipinto di blu
” meant, and sighing over “Fever” by Peggy Lee. We knew what that meant. I had just put “Love Me Tender” on when the phone rang. Jinx jumped up. She was hoping to hear from Stevie Burns, who had said he’d call her this weekend; I knew Jinx had made her mother promise to give him our number before she’d agree to come over to my house at all. Since summer, Jinx had, one, started her period and, two, gotten popular, just like that. She wouldn’t go spying with me anymore.

I had a phone in my room, and Jinx grabbed it on the first ring. “Hello,” she said. Her new poodle cut gave her a heart-shaped face, eager now.

I sat up, too, vicariously excited, thinking I might pick up some useful pointers for handling future dates. So I was watching closely as Jinx’s smiling mouth went into that
frozen O, as she shut her brown eyes for a long moment before carefully replacing the receiver on its cradle.

Downstairs, Mama started to scream.

“Oh, Jenny.” Jinx finally spoke. “Your uncle is dead.”

“What?” I had to think for a moment to figure out who she was talking about.

“Mason,” she said. “Isn’t his name Mason? Mason’s been shot.”

“Shot,” I repeated.

“Murdered,” Jinx said.

The word hung in the air in my bedroom, quivering along with Elvis’s voice. I turned the record player off just as Mama rushed through the bedroom door, swooping me up, smothering me with her sobs and tears.

The story, what we could learn of it, went like a country song. Mason’s wife had left him for another man, and Mason had gone out looking for her. He’d found them at last in some bar in Norfolk, where things had turned ugly fast. Mason had pulled a knife and cut the man’s face. Then the man shot him.

“Shot him dead?” I asked Mama.

“No, honey. Shot him
four times
before he died.” Mama collapsed on my canopied bed, wailing. “He was the most adorable little boy,” she cried. “I was just a newlywed myself when he came to live with us, you know. Just a girl. Your daddy was always working, always gone. So it was just Mason and me. We grew up together. He was the sweetest
boy, you can’t imagine. Maybe he was
too
sweet, maybe that was the problem, he just never could get along. And then all that drinking, oh Lord, it started so soon. If only—if only we—” Mama went on and on.

Jinx sneaked out, looking panicked. She waved from the door. I sat on the side of my bed hugging Mama for what seemed like hours, until Jinx’s mother arrived. I was never so glad to see anybody in my life. Then suddenly my wild aunt Judy was there, too, serious for once; and our minister, Mr. Clyde Vereen; and then Dr. Nevins, who gave Mama some pills which shut her up all right but made her
too calm
, I felt.