She was putting on her shoes when John said, “You know what I said about difficult women?”
“That you’re drawn to them, sure.”
He said, “You’re worth whatever trouble comes my way.”
She relaxed a little, and then happiness made her sloppy and she said what she was thinking. “Not that there’s any such thing as an easy woman.”
“Sure there is,” John said, and a small line appeared between his brows. Normally Angie liked arguing with him about this kind of thing, but it would be foolish to let the conversation move in that direction just now.
“Okay,” she said.
“I would call Rivera . . . not easy, but straightforward. You don’t have to guess what she’s thinking.”
“Hmmmm,” Angie said.
“I don’t know Jude Parris very well, but I’d say the same of her.”
“I better get gone,” Angie said, but she could see that it was hopeless, because he was pacing now.
“Even Meg, if you think about it—”
Let it go,
Angie prayed.
Let it go, let it go.
“Of course all three of them are—well, maybe not all three are lesbians, but almost.”
She waited, breathless, to see if he could dig himself out.
“Okay, so that’s a generalization that deserves to be shot down,” John said, as if she had objected aloud. “But there’s something there.
Maybe it’s just that women who are openly gay don’t worry about impressing men. Meg sure wasn’t worried about what the men at the table thought of her last night.”
“Wow,” Angie said. “Look at the time, it’s getting—”
“Though she went over the line when she got going about Miss Zula,” John finished.
“—late,” Angie said. She took an imaginary sip from her empty cup. When she looked up, John was watching her.
“Come on,” he said slowly. “You don’t buy into that garbage Meg was spouting.”
“That Miss Zula is a lesbian?” Angie shrugged. “I don’t know one way or the other, not for sure. Does it matter?”
John blinked at her. “Of course it doesn’t matter,” he said. “But it isn’t true.”
“And if it were true, would you be upset if we pursued the subject with her?”
“The question is moot,” John said. “Because she isn’t.”
Angie closed her eyes briefly, and then opened them. “This is something we have to talk about,” she said. “But not just now. We don’t have time.”
John said, “There are things you don’t know.”
“I forgot how stubborn you can be when you get your teeth into a subject that interests you.” Angie tried to grin, and failed.
“Nice try, Mangiamele.”
“Okay,” she said. “Sure, there’s a lot we don’t know. We’ve only been working on this for a month. So what exactly is it you’re talking about?
“There are family tragedies I’m not sure Miss Zula would want you digging around in.”
Angie said, “That’s between Miss Zula and Tied to the Tracks—as you pointed out last night. So far she hasn’t refused to answer any question we’ve asked.”
“Is that so?” John said, looking more than a little agitated. “So, how much has she told you about her mother and her brother?” And, seeing her expression, he said: “That’s what I thought.”
“We haven’t really pursued the subject,” Angie said, feeling suddenly defensive and intrigued, too. “But why don’t you go ahead and tell me this big secret. Unless you don’t trust me with it.”
He shot her a disgusted look. “You know that’s not the issue.”
“Could have fooled me,” Angie said. “Look, we should leave this—”
He cut her off with a shake of the head. “Listen. The reason Anabel Spate moved to Savannah had nothing to do with Zula,” said John. “Or only indirectly. What happened was, she got on a train one summer day and without telling anybody went up to Oberlin. Abe Bragg was there, on leave, waiting for her. And they got married by a Catholic priest.”
Angie tried to make sense of the words. “Anabel Spate and Abe Bragg?”
“I don’t know the details of what happened next, except that Miss Louisa brought enough pressure to bear that the marriage was annulled within the week. The next time Abe came home on leave he married Lavinia, and then he was gone again. After that I don’t think he was back here more than three times before he was killed in action.”
“Christ,” Angie said.
“I told you, it’s explosive stuff.”
“What in the hell could his mother have said to him?”
“Your guess is probably better than mine. It must have been pretty ugly, the whole thing, but at least Abe didn’t have to stick around and face the consequences.”
“So Anabel had to handle it on her own.”
“There wasn’t much to handle, Angie. We are talking about Georgia in the fifties. I can’t claim that things are perfect now, but back then, black on white? It must have been hell for her. Of course she couldn’t stay. She moved to Savannah and made a name for herself as an activist.”
“That’s what Jude was talking about last night.”
“Part of it,” John agreed.
Angie closed her eyes and tried to put it all together. She saw Miss Anabel’s crowded parlor, the pictures on the wall. There had been friends and family and students, but she couldn’t recall Abe Bragg among them, and she thought she would have noticed. She said as much to John.
“Do you have any photos of me hanging on your walls at home?” John said, and Angie had to give him that point, though there was something else, something so small and quiet that she had to close her eyes to try to make sense of it. She saw Miss Zula in Anabel’s parlor and the tenderness in her expression when she touched the older woman’s hand, dark skin against the almost translucent white. The fragile skin of a true redhead, something she had seen in another photograph, not so long ago.
And it came to her: Abe Bragg in civilian clothes and the young woman standing in front of him, the way the camera had caught the movement of her hand as she lifted it to touch his fingers where they rested on her shoulder. White on black. Anabel Spate, Abe Bragg.
“You don’t believe me,” John said.
“Oh, I believe you,” Angie said. “I believe you about Anabel and Abe.”
He threw up his hands. “What does that mean? Miss Anabel isn’t a lesbian, but Miss Zula—” He broke off and his expression stilled.
He said, “You think Miss Zula was in love with her brother’s wife. The brother who abandoned his wife when she needed him most. You think Miss Zula is—”
“Harvey Carson,” Angie finished for him. “Miss Zula buttoned herself.”
“Wait,” John said. “You can’t draw conclusions on such—” He stopped. “Shit.” He ran a hand through his hair. “That’s a trick she teaches in every introduction to writing class—switching genders in a story you want to tell to get some distance from it.”
Angie felt a huge wave of relief, and of appreciation, too, that he had taken this jump, though she could see what it cost him.
“If it is true, is that so horrible?” she asked, more gently. “Maybe she decided to go ahead with the documentary because she’s ready to . . . to . . .” She couldn’t make herself use the cliché, and so she stopped.
He said, “This is what you wanted to talk to me about, that night after the train.”
She nodded. “I saw a connection, and Tony saw it too. I wanted to ask you about it, what you thought.”
“I’ll tell you what I think. I think, if it’s true and you’re right—and if Miss Zula does want the story told—that things are going to get really messy. In every way. At every level. I think the board of regents is going to look for somebody to blame, and it’s most likely to be me. I think we’re in for a couple years of major problems. Christ, Angie,” he said, pushing out a breath. “Is it really necessary?”
Angie looked at his face, at the expression that was half-angry, half-desperate, and she felt those same things rising up in herself. Anger that he should ask such a question, and desperate for a way out of this. “Is what necessary? The documentary? I think you know the answer to that.”
He ducked his head and looked at his shoes. “I’m wondering if you need to go into this whole business. Do you have to set out to prove that every woman who never married is a lesbian?”
“You jerk,” Angie said, her voice wobbling and cracking, but that was better than shouting, certainly, wasn’t it? The look on his face said it wasn’t, but she couldn’t keep the words from spilling out anyway. “That is the most ignorant thing I’ve ever heard you say, and the most insulting, to me as an individual and as a professional, to Rivera, to Miss Zula, to—”
John had the good sense to look guilty, but he didn’t sound that way. “I didn’t mean it like that, and you know it. You aren’t some third-rate shock journalist.”
“You’re right, we’re not. That’s not what we do. Miss Zula knows that. I assumed you did, too.”
John looked as miserable as she felt, but they stood on opposite sides of the kitchen and neither of them moved.
He said, “I’m just suggesting you don’t need to go looking for a scandal. I’m saying that not everything has to be about sex.”
“It is not about sex,” Angie said. “It’s about love. And what you
are
suggesting is that we look the other way.” She heard herself slide over into the realm of too far, too much but was unable to stop it. “You don’t like messy, John, you never did. You want pretty and presentable, but that’s not us. That’s not me. It wasn’t me five years ago and it isn’t me now, and guess what, it isn’t—”
She stopped herself. All the color had left his face, but his eyes were unnaturally bright. “Go on.”
Angie shook her head.
“Go on,” he said calmly. “Say it.”
“I don’t know what I was going to say,” she lied, near tears.
He was looking at her steadily, his expression unreadable. Angie turned and left, and he said not one word to stop her.
The screen door had just slammed behind her when Angie saw a car pulling up to John’s garage. It was beautiful and sleek and expensive, as was the older woman who was getting out of it. She saw Angie and raised a hand to wave, her perfectly made-up face breaking into a genuine smile. As if Lucy Ogilvie saw nothing odd in the fact that her son’s old girlfriend was coming out of his door early on the morning of the day before he was supposed to be marrying somebody else.
“Why, Angeline, is that you? Love becomes you, sugar. You are all aglow. Now come here and give me a hug.”
John stood at the kitchen window with the phone in his hand listening to it ring.
“Chair’s office.”
“She’s here. I’m looking at Mama and Angie at this very moment, and I don’t think they’re talking about me getting married tomorrow.”
Rob drew in a sharp breath. “Okay, let me explain.”
“You caved.”
“I caved. You know Mama, she’s half bloodhound when it comes to affairs of the heart. But listen, she was delighted to hear that the wedding’s off. She was never so crazy about Caroline.”
“Rob, the wedding isn’t off, not officially. Not yet.” He almost said,
not for sure,
and stopped himself.
There was a small silence on the other end of the line. Finally Rob said, “She might be a help, if you let her. Things could be worse.”
“It could also be a hell of a lot better,” John said, and hung up the phone. Angie had managed to extract herself and disappear, and now his mother was coming toward the porch. His mother, his beautiful, impossible mother, looked up at him standing in the window and threw him a kiss.
EIGHTEEN