Destiny (108 page)

One night, in their sitting room, while Cassie knitted, she suddenly decided to test this idea, even if she did so indirectly.

She drew in her breath, and counted to ten, and then she said: "Perhaps what is wrong is very simple. Maybe she is in love."

A long silence greeted this remark. Cassie's fingers stitched faster, then stopped. She looked up.

"Who with? Seems to me there's not many candidates."

Madeleine swallowed. She stared at her skirt with great concentration. "Perhaps," she said finally, "it could be someone from the past. Someone she doesn't see any longer. ..."

Cassie pursed her lips. "What kind of talk is that? If she's in love with him, she'd still see him, wouldn't she? Talk sense."

DESTINY • 659

Madeleine sighed. Sometimes, she thought, Cassie was a woman of very hmited imagination.

"It could be," she said obstinately. "I think so. If you love someone very much, why should this go away, just because you do not see them? What kind of love is that?"

Cassie gave a cackle of laughter. "The best kind, I'd say. Love? The French think far too much about love. Women think too much about love, in my opinion. Better off without it. What does love do, that kind of love? Turns everything every which way, inside out and upside down. Causes nothing but trouble, and never lasts."

Here Madeleine felt a little outraged. She set her Ups in a firm line. "This," she said, "I cannot accept."

"Makes no difference. That's the way it is."

"Weren't you ever in love, Cassie?"

"Yes. Sure, I was. When I was sixteen, seventeen, thereabouts." Cassie began to knit again, faster than ever. "And I got over it, same way I got over the chicken-pox and the measles. I never had them but once, and I never had that but once. ..."

She stopped knitting suddenly, looked up, and caught Madeleine's eye. She began to smile a little.

"Mind though—he was a fine-looking man. A real fine-looking man. And I still remember him. Little ways he had. You know. Just sometimes."

She returned to her knitting once more, and with that, Madeleine had to be contented.

Christmas came and went. Lewis mailed a Christmas card from San Francisco, but did not write, or telephone. At the end of December, James Gould reported from New York that Major Calvert had been late in his monthly loan repayments, had been warned, and had finally made the payment, a week late.

"I think," he said in his cool voice, "that it could be soon. Are you prepared for that?"

"I'm prepared." Helene paused. "James—when the notice of foreclosure is served, I want to do it myself. In person."

There was a small silence on the other end of the hne.

"That's not usual. It's not necessary, as I'm sure you know."

"Even so."

Gould sighed. "Very well. But don't be surprised if it's soon. I'll telephone you."

Helene knew it would be soon—she did not need James Gould to tell

660 • SALLY BEAUMAN

her. She sensed it with every instinct she possessed. Five years, and it was very close. She would start to feel the triumph soon, she told herself. All the old passionate hatred would come back, and she would feel the way she had years before, when she sat in Cassie's living room and emptied out all the dollar bills, watching them flutter to the floor while she let the loathing loose.

Gould telephoned at the end of January, on the same day she learned she had been nominated for an Academy Award for Ellis.

"Calvert has defaulted," he said. "He has until midday to come up with his repayment. If he doesn't—and I think he won't—I'll set the wheels in motion. You'll have the foreclosure notice tomorrow. It has to be served within a certain number of days—I'll let you know exactly how many. . . ."

"As soon as it's here, I'll fly to Alabama."

"You're going to regret this, you know," he said mildly. "It's not a pleasant job. Which is precisely why professionals are employed to do it."

"I still want to do it."

Gould sighed. He knew that obstinate voice.

Late the next day, the notice of foreclosure arrived from New York. Helene held the envelope in her hand, and waited again for the triumph and the hate to come back, and nothing happened.

Everything: exactly according to plan. It was all working out, Helene told herself, precisely the way she had arranged it. The plane, on schedule. At Montgomery airport, the black Cadillac, rented, hired in the name Mrs. Sinclair.

The Cadillac, chosen for Ned Calvert's benefit, had worried her a Httle. Not too many single women dressed in jeans and a headscarf rented a car like this at Montgomery airport. She had expected curious looks, and she received them; the filling in of forms took, perhaps, slightly longer than was necessary. But no more than that. She altered her voice; she altered her stance; she acted, and it worked.

When she drove away ten minutes later, she knew she had not been recognized.

The route she took to Orangeburg had also been carefully planned. First, she skirted the suburbs of the city, past the Howard Johnson's where Billy had taken her for her fifteenth birthday. Then around the edge of the recent housing development where she knew Priscilla-Anne now lived— alone with her three children, according to Cassie's informants. Dale Gar-

DESTINY • 661

rett, after years of cheating on his wife, had finally traded her in for a new and fancier model.

She stopped at the end of the road where she knew Priscilla-Anne had her house. It was called Bella Vista Drive. A line of small neat red brick houses stretched into the distance, each one of them almost identical. Houses for junior executives; each had a carport and a garage; each had bright white shutters; some, in an attempt to dignify them, had had pillared porches added in imitation of a plantation mansion. The porches were out of proportion, and period; they looked pompous and absurd.

Helene stared at them, and the green strips of lawn in front of them, intersected by short driveways, and thought of Priscilla-Anne, with her small-town blues, her ambition to move up in the world, to move here.

She wheeled the car around and headed for the Orangeburg road. There, once the strip of gas stations and used car lots had been left behind, the fields opened up, flat, on either side of the road. There were few houses, and fewer cars. The air was warm, and not yet humid, for it was still early in the year. The sky, cloudless, was the color of palest pewter. Helene looked at the sky, and slowed, some two miles outside Orangeburg. She had decided that before she saw Ned Calvert, she would go to the cemetery.

It was a large place, serving not just Orangeburg, but also Maybury and some of the smaller towns beyond. It was bounded by a wall, and shaded in places by clumps of cottonwood trees. She parked the car, and as she climbed out, the warmth of the sun touched her skin. The cemetery was empty.

She walked along a cinder path, flanked with crosses and stones and the occasional angel. Behind her, on the road, the Montgomery bus passed, its wheels throwing up a dust cloud.

Her mother's grave had a headstone of gray marble, which Helene had paid to have erected some years before, and had never seen. It bore a simple inscription:

Violet Jennifer Cuherton. Born in England, 1919. Died in America, 1959

Forty years. Helene looked at the inscription doubtfully. At the time she had ordered it, it had seemed right to use her mother's family name rather than the name of the husband she so rarely spoke of, and had dismissed from her life. Now Helene felt uncertain. Her mother had used the name Craig, after all. She might have preferred that. She might have preferred her stage name of Fortescue. She knelt down, the sun warm on the back of her neck, and pressed her hand against the short springy turf.

662 • SALLY BEAUMAN

It took longer to find Billy's grave. It was far over at the other side of the cemetery, and in the end she found it almost by accident, when she was about to give up. The ground there rose in a hillock, and was neglected, trailing with ivy and brambles. Billy's grave was in the extreme comer, marked with a wooden cross, the letters faded by the sun and only just legible. Beside it was a more recent grave, that of his father, and beyond it, one more—that of a baby bom to the Tanners the year after Billy died. Three months old; a boy, also called William.

Balanced between the graves was an empty coffee jar, and a bunch of immortelles, faded to the color of dry straw. Helene stood looking down at the three graves. She kicked at a trail of bramble with her foot. She was filled then with a painful anger, painful because she knew it to be futile. Anger against Ned Calvert, she told herself, but she knew that was not truly the case. The anger was directed at larger and less specific targets: at a God she did not believe in; at the briefness of life; at the random and casual way in which it was extinguished.

For a moment the anger, and its accompanying sense of injustice, were so strong, that her purpose in coming here faded in her mind. She saw it from a distance, a tiny speck, a small and pointless thing, an irrelevance that had distorted her life, wrenched it out of kilter, and dominated her thinking for five years to no effect. She was no longer even sure that this action was one her mother or Billy would have wanted.

She stood, staring fixedly at Billy's grave, and then quickly tumed away. She walked back to the car, stumbling a little on the mtted and uneven ground. Just outside Orangeburg, she pulled onto a patch of wasteland and changed her clothes. She made up her face with the quick skill of an actress, and arranged her hair. Then she directed the Cadillac into town.

Past the gas station and the new motel. Down Main Street. Past Cassie's old beauty parlor; past Merv Peters's drugstore and grocery; past the hardware store; past the men lounging against the shop fronts, and the groups of women shopping. Past the liquor stores on the far side of town; past the Southem Baptist church; past the Orangeburg crossing.

The world once. It looked smaller now, and shabby. Then, when she reached the point on the road, just past the trailer park, the place where Billy was shot, the hatred came back, quite suddenly. Hatred of Ned Calvert, hatred of the men in his car with him that day, hatred of the town and the people who lived in it, and the things they went on believing. Hatred of the South, and also hatred of herself, because she had been part of it once, and if she did not do this thing now, she felt she would never escape from it.

The gates to the plantation house were rusty, and hanging on their

DESTINY • 663

hinges. The long driveway was rutted. When the lawns in front of the white house came into view, she saw they needed cutting.

She stopped the car in front of the portico. Its paint was peeling; from the guttering above, weeds sprouted luxuriantly. It was a large house, but not as large as she remembered.

Above the roof a patch of color drooped in the still air. As she climbed from the car, she looked up at it. The Confederate flag, still flying; Ned Calvert, still keeping faith with his ancestors.

// has to change, Helene. It's wrong. It just has to.

She heard Billy's voice, as if he stood by her side. She felt an absolute sense of his presence.

She walked toward the house; from now on, it was going to be easy.

The butler and most of the other servants had left, some years before. She was shown into the living room by a young black woman she did not recognize, who shouted the name "Sinclair" in a singsong voice, as if the occupant of the house were deaf. She went out, and closed the door, and Helene looked at the room.

At first, she thought it was unchanged, that it remained exactly as it had been when she sat there, a nervous child. A rank of windows, their hoUand blinds half lowered; heavy dark carved furniture; palms in pots; walls crowded with pictures; a grand piano, every inch of its surface dotted with photographs in silver frames. Light slanting, and motes of dust dancing: it was the same, and it was diiferent. It was a moment before she realized that the change was in herself, and in her eyes: the room was ugly.

She thought at first that it was empty. She had imagined Ned Calvert would be sitting where he had always sat, on the couch; he would be smoking a cheroot, wearing a white linen suit, and watching her.

But the couch was empty; the chairs were empty. When she saw finally that a man—a man in a light tweed jacket—was standing by the windows, she could not believe it was Ned. She wanted to say. You're in the wrong place, and the wrong clothes. She stared at him as he slowly turned, and began to walk forward, hand outstretched.

"Mrs. Sinclair?"

He had stopped, and was looking at her uncertainly, screwing up his eyes, as if he were nearsighted. He hesitated, and then advanced once more, smiling.

"You're mighty punctual. You had a good flight? You were coming in from New York, I guess. ..."

The same easy charm she remembered; the rich lazy southern voice.

664 • SALLY BEAUMAN

which she had once found so attractive. She looked at him closely: he was so little changed. From Cassie's stories, from the Orangeburg gossip about his decline, she had imagined a man much coarsened; this, she had told herself to expect. It was not the case: he was perhaps heavier than he had been, but he still maneuvered his way across the room and between the pieces of furniture with the grace of a natural athlete and fine rider.

He still looked, almost to the point of parody, the army officer, the southern gentleman; he still looked, as she had remembered, like Clark Gable in Gone With the Wind, more correct, perhaps, but with the same slight suggestion of raciness, the confidence of a man who knew himself to be handsome, who knew he rarely failed to charm.

His skin was tanned; his hair had grayed a little but was still thick; the military moustache was neatly clipped, and his mouth was as she had remembered it, full and red. She could not look at his mouth; she lowered her gaze to his hand, which he was extending to her. A square, well-formed hand, perfectly manicured. He had come to a halt a foot away, and was staring at her. He glanced down, his gaze taking in her clothes, and the jewelry she was wearing. As she looked up again, he frowned, as if groping for something in his memory.

Helene, who had expected this, smiled. "How do you do?" she said in her English voice.

His mind at once made the connection. She could almost see the pieces of memory fall into place. A deep flush spread up from his neck to his cheeks; his eyes at once became wary; he let his hand fall.

"Ned. I'm so glad—you remember me, don't you? It's such a long time. Would you mind if we sat down?"