Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood (19 page)

Through her tears, Vivi gazed at the moon. A silent prayer for Jack issued from her body.

Moonlight in the summer sky, look down on my love from up on high. Shine on him now while he is safe and shine on him when he flies through enemy skies. Let his journeys into the sky bring him closer to you, so that while he is away from me, he will he safe. Tell him I love him, tell him I am longing for him, tell him I will always wait for him. Your milky brilliance can protect him from all enemies. He is a tender boy, do not let him suffer. Moonlight over the only town I know, bring my love back home so we can live and be happy.

Turning her head to look at each of her friends, Vivi saw Teensy and Caro and Necie as she had never seen them before. They seemed to glow from within, like there were lanterns inside their bodies. They looked very old to her, and very young all at once. They looked both invincible and
utterly, utterly fragile. Their bodies were the density and weight that anchored her, that made her more real. She looked at them and loved them and was flooded with gratitude.

Officer Roscoe Jenkins didn’t know what to think when he saw the four pajama tops lying on the ground. He’d been making his regular rounds when he spotted the convertible at the side of the lane, and had wondered if someone had run out of gas. The night was so bright he hardly needed his flashlight, but when he shone it on the pajama tops he saw monograms and grew more perplexed. When he spied the panties, he became alarmed. Holding the shirts in his hand, he looked around, but saw nothing out of the ordinary. Then he heard the faint sound of splashing water. He swung his flashlight up in the direction of the water tower, and that’s when he thought he saw a naked woman.

Once the Ya-Yas agreed to come down from the tower, Officer Roscoe Jenkins was every inch a gentleman. Averting his eyes, he handed each one of them a pajama top before climbing up to the tower himself to make sure they had indeed closed the lid back tightly over the water. He knew these young ladies. He’d known the Whitman girl ever since she managed to get a pecan stuck up her nose when she wasn’t but four or five. Blowing out the side of his lips and shaking his head, he was more embarrassed than angry. The fact that he let the gang follow him to the station in the convertible rather than shuffling them into his squad car was not a sign of trust. Actually, he was a little nervous about sharing a car with the four of them.

In Genevieve’s convertible, there was some controversy about whether they should actually follow him, or gun it and head for the hills (of course, there were no hills).

Teensy finally prevailed. “Come on,” she said, “I’ve never been in a lockup before!”

* * *

When their fathers arrived at the station, rumpled and hot, they conferred among themselves.

“Too bad we can’t harness their energy. It’d be an asset to the Allies,” Caro’s father said.

“It’s their utter lack of regard for appearances that astounds me,” Teensy’s father said. “My son has done something praiseworthy, and now my daughter turns into a common criminal. Those four have been a quartet of embarrassments ever since they humiliated my family in Atlanta.”

“I wonder how the water department might go about purifying that holding tank,” Necie’s father said.

“Cool em off in a cell for a night,” Mr. Abbott said. “Maybe that’ll clip their wings.”

“Book them?”
Roscoe said, not believing.

“Book them,” the fathers agreed. Then they turned and left.

“Book them!”
Teensy said, her hands dramatically clenching the bars of the cell. “Aren’t those
marvelous
words!”

“The
pokey!
” Caro said.

“Jailed for our convictions,” Vivi said.

“Oh, my,” Necie said.

The cell the girls were escorted to was possibly one of the coolest spots to sleep in all of Thornton. At basement level, with windows on both sides and a side door propped open (not to mention the fan that Officer Roscoe Jenkins moved from his desk to a card table just outside the cell), the space was downright pleasant. Their hair was still wet, their bodies still cool from the water, and Roscoe brought them sodas from the station’s icebox, for which they thanked him politely.

“Roscoe,” Vivi told him, “when I write my memoirs, you will be
much
more than a marginal character.”

The Ya-Yas drank their sodas and lay on the bunks.

“My
père,
” Teensy said, “hasn’t a shred, not even a
shred,
of human understanding. Jack is lucky to get away from him.”

“We are
not
common criminals,” Caro said.

“There is nothing common about us,” Necie said.

Vivi stared up at the low ceiling of the cell. Sometimes higher laws than Thornton’s must be obeyed, she thought. Too many people hide in their rooms when the light of the moon is strongest, when she’s bouncing light back to us whether we want it or not.

As the Ya-Yas slept that night in the Thornton City Jail, the moon loved them. Not because they were beautiful, or because they were perfect, or because they were perky, but because they were her darling daughters.

17

I
f Sidda Walker had been able to witness Vivi and the Ya-Yas in the light of that summer moon in 1942, their young bodies touching, their nipples luminous in the light, she would have known she came from goddess stock. She would have known that a primal, sweet strength flowed in her mother like an underground stream, and that the same stream flowed in her. Whatever scars Vivi had inflicted with her unhinged swings between creation and devouring, she had also passed on a mighty capacity for rapture.

Anxiety hijacked Sidda as she walked down the steps to Lake Quinault. Even as the moon strutted, prissed, and swelled into a gorgeous globe, Sidda was aware only of her own confusion and rattled determination to get to the bottom of things. But a summer moon will put up with inattention for just so long. Just as Sidda was about to place her foot down onto the step in front of her, moonlight tapped her on the shoulder and forced her gaze skyward. She took a long, deep breath, and when she exhaled, she felt a spaciousness that had not been there before.

Beholding the moon in its chalky wonder, Sidda thought, Our Lady of Pearl! That moon is why the word “comely” was invented.

Sitting down on the wooden steps, she reached her hand down to Hueylene’s long, curly ears and began to rub
gently. Sidda rubbed and the dog sighed, producing funny little off-key sounds, like the cockeyed music a child might blow on a harmonica. Sidda could feel her heart beating and could hear crickets around the lake’s edge.

Crickets, she thought. They’ve serenaded me since the day I was born. Breathe in, breathe out. Right now I am sitting in the light of the moon. Right now my dog is beside me and we are taking a moon bath.

Softly, unexpectedly, she began to sing. Something she had not done by herself in a long time. First off, she launched into “Blue Moon,” singing the alto part that her Aunt Jezie had taught her many years ago. When she finished that, she moved on to “Shine On, Harvest Moon,” accompanying her singing with light foot tapping when she came to the line, “I ain’t had no lovin’ since January, February, June, or July.”

Lightly thumping her tail against the wooden steps, Hueylene watched her mistress. Sidda might as well have been singing dog lullabies. In fact, Sidda was singing a sort of lullaby, songs to calm the baby girl who’d lived inside herself for forty years. Sidda rubbed the crown of the dog’s head, where tufts of white fur sprouted like feathers against the otherwise buff-colored coat. As Sidda stroked, she began to roll her own head around in gentle circles, feeling the tightness in her neck and shoulders. How much does a human head weigh? Twenty, twenty-five pounds? She considered the tender stem that connected her head to her heart, and for a moment she experienced a trickle of gratitude. She wondered if it was possible for gratitude to replace anxiety.

From Sidda’s pondering grew a hum. It drifted along until it blossomed into the song “Moon River.” She sang the words, remembering how for a period in the early sixties, after
Breakfast at Tffany’s
came out, that song had been her parents’ favorite. She remembered how it was to step into
Chastain’s Restaurant with Vivi and Shep, and blush with delight as the piano player would stop whatever he was playing, and switch to “Moon River” in honor of her parents. How royal it made her whole family seem. Say it was a Saturday evening in what—1964—say it was end of summer, say they all wore a summer glow on their faces. Say Vivi wore a beige linen sheath; Shep wore a sports coat over a pair of khakis; Sidda and Lulu wore new sundresses; Little Shep and Baylor wore crisp polo shirts. Say the meal was lobster; all went well. Say they used finger bowls, Shep gave his old saw: “Lovely meal. I’m
elephantly
sufficed.”

“Two drifters,” Sidda sang as she sat on the dock, “off to see the world. There’s such a lot of world to see.” She continued singing all the verses of the song, which Vivi had taught her.

“My huckleberry friend,” she whispered in Hueylene’s ear when the last verse was finished. This made the cocker spaniel lay her blonde furry head on Sidda’s lap and give a great sigh. Sidda’s chest was opened, her head felt tingly and good. The singing had given the inside of her body a little massage.

I learned to love singing from Mama, she thought. These days nobody sings the way Mama and the four of us used to do.

What Sidda did not know was how much more singing there was when Vivi was growing up. That’s the kind of thing the history books don’t tell. How people sang outdoors all the time. How it was impossible to walk down the street in Thornton, Louisiana, in the thirties and forties and
not
hear somebody singing. Singing or whistling. Housewives singing while they hung out the clothes; old codgers whistling while they sat in front of the courthouse on River Street; gardeners humming while they weeded and hoed; children lilting and yodeling while they tore through the neighborhoods on their Schwinns and Radio Flyers. Even
serious businessmen whistled on their way in and out of the bank. These were people with pianos, not TVs, in their living rooms. Their singing didn’t always mean they were happy; sometimes the tunes were dirges or the old hymns. Often the music flowed from black people whose songs touched a sadness inside Vivi that she herself had no words for. In those days, it seemed, everybody sang.

When Sidda was growing up, Vivi led her four kids in song as she drove them to school on mornings they missed the bus. She taught each of them to whistle before they could spell, and she made sure they knew all her old camp songs and chosen favorites from the forties. Sidda and her siblings knew all the verses to “Pennsylvania 6-5000,” “Can’t Help Lovin’ That Man of Mine,” and “Chattanooga Choo-Choo” before they knew how to tie their shoes by themselves.

On good days, Vivi would sit at the baby grand that Buggy had given her, and pretend their living room was a piano bar. Sometimes even Shep joined in on tunes like “You Are My Sunshine” or “Yellow Rose of Texas.”

At those times, Vivi would turn to him and say, “Great Scott! You have a
marvelous
voice. You should sing more often! Don’t hide your light under a bushel!”

That would embarrass Shep, who would mumble, “You’re the performer in this family, Viviane,” and wander off to the kitchen to freshen his drink.

Sidda loved the moments when her father joined in the free-for-all rambunctiousness her mother encouraged. These occasions were rare, as were any moments with him. Shep loved his children; he loved his wife. But he knew a lot more about farming and duck hunting than he did about being part of a family. Mostly he stuck to what he was good at. Sidda can count the number of times she was ever alone with her father, and most of those were after she was grown. He was a man with his own brand of rural poetry, but its expression
was gruff with bourbon and unarticulated melancholy.

Shep Walker did not fly as high as Vivi, but every so often, unpredictably, he was capable of unbounded whimsy. Like the Christmas Eve he came home with cowgirl and cowboy outfits, complete with hats and boots, for each member of the family, including a ridiculous little bitty cowboy hat for their cocker spaniel. He was so delighted with himself that he managed to charm Vivi into allowing all of them (except the dog) to wear the getups to Christmas Mass. After Mass, as friends gathered round the Walkers, who looked like a wild offshoot Western singing group gone wrong, Vivi laughed and said, “Saint Shep the Baptist thought Our Lady of Divine Compassion Parish needed a kick in the butt.”

As a young man, Shep Walker had been a good-looking lady-killing sleeper of a gentleman farmer who married Vivi Abbott because he coveted her irrepressible vitality. He never stopped to consider why he needed such vigor. Nor did he suspect that Vivi’s animation had a dark side. It never crossed young Shep Walker’s mind that Vivi might, as the years passed, wear him out. The physical attraction they shared when they were courting was almost overpowering, and it had a way of resurfacing over the years, unbidden and sometimes unwanted, after long droughts of blame and abstinence.

For her part, Vivi married Shep Walker because she adored the sound of his voice; because she loved how he looked so confident after she kissed him; and because—at first—he made her feel like a star. And because she no longer believed, at age twenty-four, that it mattered all that much whom she married.

Vivi once told Sidda, “I meant to marry Paul Newman, but Joanne Woodward got him first. After that, I didn’t give a damn.”

It was this devil dance between Shep’s quiet melancholy and Vivi’s frenzied charm—all of it oiled with an endless stream of Jack Daniel’s—that sculpted Sidda’s impression of marriage.

Later, back inside the cabin, Sidda made a glass of Earl Grey iced tea, and pulled a floor lamp and chair out onto the deck so she wouldn’t lose sight of the moon. The minute she sat down with her mother’s scrapbook, Hueylene flopped a cloth toy against Sidda’s leg, announcing that it was time for a game of tug-of-war. Looking at the dog, Sidda had to laugh. The dog’s huge eyes, slightly elongated nose, and curly flaps of ears were so familiar and lovable. Sidda got down on her knees and pulled on the toy and growled. The dog was delighted, and they played till Sidda gave up and let Hueylene win.

Picking the scrapbook back up, Sidda took a deep breath and closed her eyes for a moment before she opened it again. Unfold to me. Let me unfold.

When she opened her eyes, she beheld an invitation. Engraved in script on a card of white bristol board, the invitation read:

Mr. Taylor Charles Abbott

requests the pleasure of your

company at a dance in honor of his daughter

Miss Viviane Abbott

Friday the eighteenth of December

One thousand nine hundred and forty-two

at eight o’clock

Theodore Hotel Ballroom

Thornton, Louisiana

December, 1942. It must have been some sort of sweet-sixteen ball. Had they really carried on with such grand
events even during the war? Sidda turned the card over. Where in the hell was her grandmother’s name? The omission took her breath away. Was it an oversight? If this blackballing of her grandmother was intentional, then what did it mean?

Once again, she longed to be able to pick up the telephone and simply ask her mother. But Vivi had made her feelings clear: do not call.

Sidda looked at her watch. Nine o’clock. Eleven o’clock Louisiana time. Caro would still be awake. She’d just be gearing up, downing the thick black Community coffee she adored. The one true Ya-Ya night owl would still be receiving phone calls, unless her life had radically changed. Up until
The New York Times
interview, Caro still called Sidda every couple of months and always after midnight. But they had not spoken since the offending article. Not since Vivi had handed down the
fatwa.

Grabbing a flashlight and Hueylene’s leash, Sidda and her cocker spaniel struck out for the phone booth at the Quinault Merc. The road was deserted, all the happy campers bedded down for the night. When Sidda passed the Quinault Lodge, she saw the warm lights in the lobby still burning, and felt a little comfort knowing that she could wander in there anytime she wanted, if she grew tired of being alone. She liked the late-night buzz she felt; she liked the
frisson
she experienced as she set forth to sleuth out information about Vivi Abbott, age sixteen.

“Eatin’ cheese biscuits and playing with the damn-fool CD-ROM, that’s what I’m doing,” Caro said, drawing in a ragged emphysemic breath. “How about you, Pal?”

“Caro,” Sidda said, “I’m out here on the edge of the United States, trying to figure out what to do with the rest of my life.”

“That is a filthy habit for such a lovely girl,” Caro said in a near-perfect Groucho Marx voice.

Sidda laughed, picturing the way Caro’s shoulders shrugged when she tossed off a comment like that. “I can’t help it, I’m an addict.”

Sidda sat on the narrow shelf of a bench inside one of the few 1950s vintage public phone booths left in North America. She unhooked Hueylene’s leash, and gave her a command to sit.

“Don’t corrupt that word ‘addict,’ Goddamnit,” Caro said. “I’m fed up with everybody claiming they’re addicted. You’re just a
ponderer,
Sidda, that’s all. Have been since you were four. It’s your nature. What else is new?”

“You don’t sound very surprised to hear from me.”

“Should I be?”

“After—well, all the mess with—”

“With that fat-ass New York reporter? Come on, what do you take me for?”

“My mother’s best friend.”

“That’s true,” Caro said, then paused. “I’m also your godmother.”

“You’re not upset with me?”

“No, I’m not.”

“Then why didn’t you call? Why didn’t you write?”

“Well, to quote that pointy-head idiot, George Bush, it wouldn’t have been prudent.”

“Caro, when have you ever been prudent?”

“When it comes to my friends, I have been known on occasion to be prudent.”

There was a silence while Sidda thought of how to respond.

“I sent Blaine and Richard up to see your play,” Caro said. “You know that, don’t you? I sent my ex-husband and his boyfriend up there to see your
tour de force
and report back to me.”

Sidda never stopped marveling at Caro. Growing up, Caro’s husband, Blaine, had always turned heads in the
French Quarter. But when he finally left Caro for the man he’d been secretly seeing in New Orleans, it had rocked the whole Ya-Ya universe. That was eight or nine years ago. After threatening Blaine with an unloaded gun and tearing up an entire portfolio of architectural drawings for a house he was designing, Caro had finally forgiven him.

As she had explained things the last time Sidda had been home two years earlier, “It’s a shock, but it’s not a surprise. And the fact is, I really
like
Richard. The man can
cook,
for God’s sake. Nobody has cooked for me since Mama died.”

Blaine moved to New Orleans to live with Richard, but they were always driving up to Thornton to stay with Caro, especially since she’d been diagnosed with emphysema.