Homeplace (12 page)

“Dr. Gaddis said to tell you
specifically
that there was nothing to worry about,” DeeDee chimed in again hastily. “There’s nothing wrong with Daddy that a little time and not worrying so much about that darned old house won’t cure.”

“Nothing wrong but cancer, you mean,” Mike said levelly, looking at Duck and her sister. “Cancer and now a stroke. Why didn’t you tell me about the stroke, DeeDee?”

“I was afraid you wouldn’t come,” her sister said, reddening again. “I was afraid you’d think he’d be too much for you, with a stroke on top of the cancer. But he truly isn’t a burden, Mike, and he’s not even in any pain to speak of from the cancer yet. Dr. Gaddis says that sometimes they aren’t, even up to the end, and he’s a long way from that yet.”

“Yeah, he might even beat it, tough as he is,” put in Duck. “Why, you wouldn’t even know he had the cancer, and like DeeDee said, except for the wheelchair—”

“Are you sure he asked for me?” Mike broke in. She looked at DeeDee.

“Yes,” DeeDee said. “He did.” Her face was turned away.

Duck drove for a space in the silence that had fallen within the Pontiac’s cold blue interior and then switched on the radio. Crystal Gayle wailed forth. Mike flinched, and Duck glanced at her under his plushy, veined lids (Mike had thought of him immediately when she had studied nictitating reptilian eyelids in high school biology, she remembered) and turned the volume down. They were silent again.

“Are you mad at us?” DeeDee asked presently. Her voice fluted like a child’s, fearful of reprimand.

“No,” Mike said. “But you should have told me about the stroke.”

“We should have, you’re right,” DeeDee said sweetly. “I’m glad you’re not mad. You used to have an awful temper. I just didn’t feel like I could go through one of your spells right now.”

“I haven’t had a spell, as you put it, since I left here,” Mike said waspishly. “I can’t afford temperament in my work. You can take that off your list of burdens, Dee.”

“Well, you don’t need to snap,” Dee said tightly. It was a tone that reverberated with porcelain clarity in Mike’s mind. So did her own. DeeDee’s persimmony sufferance rang through their childhood, as did her own irritable response to it. She could not remember snapping at anyone in all of her adulthood. Even during the worst of the battles-with Richard, even during crises with temperamental cameramen and stupidly obstinate minor officials, even in those last charring moments of betrayal with Derek Blessing, Mike had not niggled or carped. She had either retreated into icy calm or, far more rarely, shouted. She prized her professionalism second only to Rachel. Her reputation for calm and absence of temperament were near legendary in a field ripe with swollen, glistening egos.

I sound like a bratty thirteen-year-old, she thought. I’ll be damned if I’ll turn into one just because I’m back at home.

“No snapping,” she said. “Truce. I’ll treat you like an adult if you’ll treat me like one.”

DeeDee smiled, mollified. Mike thought, unkindly, that in her vast petal blue and white, with the small, curly smile wreathing her stretched shiny pink face, her sister looked like something in Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade.

They turned off the access road and onto old Highway 29, the doughty, potholed old blacktop paralleling the Atlanta and West Point Rail Road tracks that had been the only link with the world beyond Lytton when Mike had left. Immediately the countryside sprang back into another South, one of fierce, eroded red-clay banks and sharp green second-growth pines; asbestos-shingled drive-ins selling Dr. Pepper and filling stations advertising red wigglers and tackle; sun-baked automobile lots running heavily to pickups and Kubota tractors. Mike knew it was the road to Lytton, but she could not place where they were on it. No familiar landmark loomed. They might have been in Alabama, Mississippi, North or South Carolina, Louisiana. They could not, however, have been anywhere but the Deep South. Mike could not explain this sharp particularity of place, but knew it to be true. Her journalist’s mind began to worry the concept and then dropped it, seeming to lose the sense of it in a dense, soundless blanket of fog. She realized that she could not think clearly. She realized also that she could not seem to feel.

I must be feeling something, she thought. If ever a situation was ripe for feeling, this has to be it. Coming back to all this, after all this time, after all that happened … My mind ought to be like some kind of chemical experiment with a cap on it, smoke and vapors
roiling around like mad in there. But nothing seems to register. How
do
I feel?

She made a heroic effort to peer into herself, past the Xanax. Anger? Surely, there must be anger in there. Long-festered anger at her father, anger at Priss Comfort; fresh anger at her editor, her landlord, at Richard, at Rachel; anger at Derek Blessing … Annie Cochran had said when she wrote the prescription for the Xanax pills that they were for short-term help only, that Mike needed to face her anger. Derek had said that there must be enough anger in her to power a continent. A normal person, then, would be feeling anger now. But she could detect nothing in herself except a rather perfunctory annoyance at DeeDee and Duck and a profound wish to be asleep, unconscious. Could you be angry, really angry, and truly not feel it?

Fear crawled again, and she rubbed wet palms together. Was that what it was about, then, this crippling fear that had dogged her for the past several days? Anger? Was she afraid on some deep level that this homecoming, this meeting with her father, would activate a savage, long-denied rage that would boil free and … what? Cause her to shriek? Weep? Do violence? The very notion of these was too absurd even to entertain. Mike Winship did none of these things, had not, in memory, done them. She could not imagine ever doing them.

Pain, perhaps, then. Fear of those near-mortal, long-ago losses finally welling up from their ice crypt and overwhelming her; fear of coming home to this place that had dealt her so much anguish? Fear of what this terrible, sunlit world might do to her again?

Mike was not accustomed to looking into herself. She had, instead, fine-tuned her ability to read other faces, other minds and hearts. She had always taken a workmanlike pride in the detachment and perceptivity that this skill demanded. Now, in herself, she met nothing
but the stale, faintly nauseous calm of the drug and beneath it, far beneath it, the leaping, impersonal viper tongues of the fear.

She closed her eyes and rubbed them hard with her forefingers, concentrating on the wheeling aurora borealis of dull red and flaring white against the blackness. She wished she could take another tranquilizer. She would do so the minute they got home …

“Well, here we are,” DeeDee said. “Welcome home, prodigal daughter,” Duck Wingo said. Mike opened her eyes and looked at Lytton.

At first glance it did not seem to have changed, sleeping in the spell of the early June sun. The stark, shadowless play of light on the red-brick store facades might have lanced out of another sky, a decades-old sky. The twin brick freight depots beside the railroad tracks, the phallic white thrust of the World War I monument, the beetling, lopsided old cedar with the wounded gap where the power lines went through, which had served through her childhood as a municipal Christmas tree, stood wavering with heat beside the highway that became, for the space of three blocks, Lytton’s main street. Taller buildings and new, alien shapes registered dimly in her sight then, and she got an impression of many more cars; of unremembered bustle and density on the sidewalks; of glass and plastic and neon and smart wrought iron where once there had been only dingy red or cream brick and tin awnings. But the essential Lyttonness of it was the first thing that struck her. In some indefinable way it had not changed; would not change, perhaps could not change. She would have known where she was if she and the town had been set down, unwarned, in the middle of Ohio or Kuala Lumpur. Duck slowed the Pontiac to a crawl, grinning broadly at her, and Mike stared at Lytton sliding by.

“Well, what do you think of it?” DeeDee caroled,
leaning on the front seat. “You wouldn’t even know it was the same place, would you? How does it feel, Mikie, after all these years?”

“It feels like I’ve always known about it but never seen it,” Mike said. “It feels like I’ve heard stories about it all my life, but never visited it before now. Or like something in an old children’s book. Somehow it doesn’t seem real.”

“Well, it may not be Paris or Rome or London, but we like it and it sure is real.” DeeDee sniffed, choosing to be offended. “I sure hope home is a little realer to you, because it’s right over there behind the church and the post office. If you remember those.”

“I remember,” Mike said.

Passing the old gray stone Methodist church where they had always gone on Sundays and sometimes on Wednesday nights, DeeDee said, “By the way, Mikie, what does Rachel look like?”

“Rachel?” Mike was startled out of her reverie. Aside from a perfunctory tongue-clicking at Rachel’s fatherlessness and urbanized state when they first met at the airport, DeeDee had shown little interest in her niece and had said only, when Mike had asked about her son John and her daughter, both now grown, or nearly: “Oh, they’re just grand. I’ll fill you in about them later, when we can sit down and have a regular old heart-to-heart.”

“Rachel,” DeeDee said again now with elaborate patience. “Daddy keeps asking.”

“Daddy asks about Rachel? What she looks like?” Mike realized she sounded stupid. The question was totally unexpected; John Winship had announced at her daughter’s birth, and DeeDee had relayed the proclamation, that Mike was to bring no little Jew child or big Jew husband home to Lytton while he lived. Mike had buried the comment deep, in the ice crypt with the rest of that time; she had not thought of it until now. The
fact that Rachel was John Winship’s granddaughter had not occurred to her since the day of the child’s birth.

“Several times,” DeeDee said. “Right after I told him you were coming, and again just last night. I had to tell him I didn’t know; you haven’t sent any pictures in years and years, you know. Anybody’d think you were ashamed of her.”

Mike did feel anger, then; a smoking curl of it, but it was not directed at her father. She felt a sudden, bright rage at DeeDee, at the utter banality and ordinariness of the unmistakable barb. DeeDee sounded like any affronted aunt whose beloved niece has been somehow withheld willfully from the benison of her attention and affection. The old irritation leaped and bloomed.

“Rachel looks like any little New York Jew, which is just what she is,” she said to her sister. “She has kinky hair and a nose just like Barbra Streisand. We hope she’s going to make us all rich doing impersonations.”

“Mikie! You don’t mean that! The idea!” gasped DeeDee, truly shocked.

“Oh, yes, I do,” Mike said silkily. “And you can tell him so for me. Too bad if he had his heart set on Brooke Shields.”

I’m sorry, Rachel, she said silently to her daughter, who did, in fact, look unsettlingly like Brooke Shields. And then she shoved Rachel away, deeply, back into that ice crypt inside her, where the pain of her image did not threaten to blow her apart.

“You all stow that stuff, now,” Duck said. “We’re here.”

Mike turned her head and looked through the blue glass and the endless years at the house on Pomeroy Street where she had been bom.

W
HEN
M
IKE WAS ALMOST SIX AND BEGAN
L
YTTON
E
LEMEN
tary School, she first heard the house on Pomeroy Street in which she lived called the Winship Mansion. This extraordinary appellation was offered to her by Fletcher Grubbs, ten years old, fat with the rubbery toughness of a squid, mean as a junkyard dog, and the undisputed dean of Miss Tommie Golightly’s first grade.

The name was proffered with no more intent to flatter than that of “Princess Chickenhead,” which was also the handiwork of Fletcher Grubbs, and seemed entirely appropriate for the downy-blond, wizened youngest inhabitant of that house. The jeering ring of seasoned elementary schoolers who had assembled to torment Mike cheered and laughed mightily at Fletcher’s creativity, and Mike sailed without hesitation into the first fistfight of her educational career. She did not know what a mansion was, but she did comprehend chickenhead, and with an embattled wisdom far beyond her tender years determined that they were going to earn dearly their continued right to call her and her home by the new names. The same wisdom told her that she could not win the fights, and she was right, but
she could and did give her tormentors a run for their money. Mike remained Princess Chickenhead until a palsied child from Valdosta moved to town and provided new fodder for nicknaming. The Pomeroy Street house remained the Winship Mansion to an entire generation of Lytton children.

The house was not a mansion, was not even particularly large, but it was possessed of a number of fanciful turrets and gables and ells and a great quantity of gingerbread, in the Victorian manner, and it sat far back in a dappled cave of overarching water oak trees. Great twin hydrangea bushes flanked the front porch, and the latticed side porches were hung with venerable, shaggy old wisteria vines, giving them in the late spring an incandescent lavender nimbus, a sort of enchanted purple milieu. All these embellishments, plus the trimness of the lawn and shrubbery … the handiwork of tyrannical, shuffling old John, from Lightning … made the house seem far more imposing than it was; gave it presence, a kind of charisma.

There were not many Victorian structures in Lytton, not even many two-story residences. The town had not the distinction of being a real suburb of Atlanta, being too far away, and so there were few of the large homes one sees in all suburbs, and none of the really grand ones evident in some of them. Conversely, Lytton did not lie in deep agricultural country, either, so there were few vast gentlemen’s farms and no surviving antebellum plantations. General Sherman had attended to what antebellum edifices there were around the little town, but in any case there had never been anything on the order of Tara or Twelve Oaks. One-story shotgun, or dogtrot, houses were the rule, painted white or sided in gray or pastel green asbestos shingles. The only two other genuinely Victorian structures in Mike’s childhood were a shabby old behemoth in the center of town with, always, a yard full of mournful automobiles and a
blue neon sign that said
TOURISTS
but that harbored only roomers, and the Reverend Ike Steed’s funeral home. This latter was shingled in funereal gray and sported black shutters like grief-closed eyelids; it was born to be, and said to be, haunted.