Homeplace (19 page)

“Evenin’, Miss Mike,” he said, touching the baseball cap again, not stopping.

She sighed. “Good evening, J.W.,” she said, picking up his cue. “Doing a little watering?”

“Yessum,” he said over his shoulder. “Ain’t had no rain since the end of April, practically, and the grass done burnt right up. Look like we gon’ have a long dry spell.”

“You can say that again,” Mike said, turning her back on his tall figure and walking across the wide, echoing old boards of the porch. But she said it softly, so that he could not hear.

O
FTEN DURING THOSE FIRST DAYS IN
L
YTTON, ESPECIALLY
when she passed one of the old cloudy, speckled mirrors in her father’s house, Mike had the feeling that just behind her fluttered the incorporeal figure of a young girl with flyaway hair and light-drowned gray eyes. The girl was not distinct, and her image became no sharper behind Mike’s own reflection, but she was unsettling and oddly heartbreaking. This swimming glimpse of her … or impression, rather, for Mike never actually saw her plain … sometimes brought a salt swelling to her throat.

The girl was herself, of course; Mike knew that, and knew that her appearance was not at all strange in this house of submerged memories and waiting death. Indeed, the absence of any such phenomenon would be stranger than its materialization. Nevertheless, she caught herself looking quickly sideways whenever she passed a mirror, and soon abandoned looking into them entirely except to brush her hair and dab on lipstick in the mornings. She did not want to meet her long-dead self in any mirrors or on any stairs; wanted no intercourse with that vulnerable apparition in the hot, thick nights. She was afraid that despite the bell jar, that
wounded ghost would creep back to haunt the woman who had sealed her, brick by brick, into the crypt of her own pain. She was afraid that in the face of her father’s diminishment and obsession, staring daily at the death that stood behind him, she would revert to childhood as John Winship himself was doing. Priss Comfort’s words about pentimento went with her through the first weekend in the Pomeroy Street house.

Lavinia Lester proved to be a godsend. She came the Monday morning after Mike’s visit to Priss Comfort, arriving at the front door promptly at eight o’clock, before John Winship was awake and while Mike was still mooching around the kitchen in her housecoat and bare feet, drinking coffee. She answered the door bell with teeth bared jocosely, prepared, she realized later, to find a pillowy, beaming Rusky or a contemporary facsimile thereof, and finding instead a tall, angular, impassive black woman with designer Polaroid glasses on her generous nose. The woman wore a white nylon pantsuit and white nurse’s oxfords and carried an enormous clear plastic tote in which Mike could see a pair of rubber flipflops, a yellow bouclé cardigan, a neatly rolled
USA Today
, a plastic thermos, a white McDonald’s sack, and a startling auburn pageboy wig. Mike had unconsciously prepared a warm, gracious, and girlish little speech of welcome that included fulsome praise for Lavinia Lester’s promptness, an avowal of intention to “stay out of Lavinia’s kitchen and out from underfoot,” and winsome gratitude at the woman’s agreeing to accept their employment. “You are mighty sweet to take us on like this at such short notice,” was hovering on her lips, but the phrase died, fortunately and naturally, under the appraising stare from the green Polaroid lenses. It was the sort of phrase that people had once used unconsciously with the Rusky-women of the South; the sort of words that had not passed her lips since she had left, and Mike cringed, appalled at her
recidivism. She held out her hand and said, “I am Micah Winship. I’m glad you could come.”

“I’m Mrs. Lester,” the woman said. She was an inch or so taller than Mike, and almost as thin, but she gave no impression of gauntness. She carried herself very erectly and held her small head high and straight on its long neck. Her shapely head was cropped into a skullfitting cap, and there was no hint of age or loosening along her jawline. She was by no means a beautiful woman, but she was an arresting one, and Mike thought that she must be the kind of nurse who healed her patients through sheer presence and authority rather than warm, sprawling loving-kindness. Her voice was neutral and clear, and though it was impossible to tell her age, you knew immediately that she was no longer young. That sort of self-possession did not spring from the country of youth.

“Please come in,” Mike said. “I’ll show you where to put your things, and then I’ll take you over the house before Daddy gets up. I’ve opened the little bedroom next to my father’s for you, in case you’d like to have a place to change and rest when he’s asleep or watching TV; there’s a bath that connects with his room that you’re welcome to use.”

“I know this house,” Lavinia Lester said. “And I know Mr. Winship. I’ve been here several times when he was practicing. He handled my husband’s will and estate for me, and helped me set up a trust for my son.”

“Oh,” Mike said, profoundly surprised. This was a formidable woman, but … black? A black client in this house? “Well, then, come and have a cup of coffee while I get him up. I’ve just made fresh.”

“I brought my own thermos, thank you,” the dark woman said, but she sounded only composed, not forbidding. “I brought my lunch, too. I will do that every day, so you won’t need to bother keeping food for me. I’ll be happy to get Mr. Winship’s breakfast and lunch,
and leave something for the two of you for supper, like Mr. Canaday said, but it suits me better to bring my own and eat it after Mr. Winship has had his. I eat later than most people.”

“Well … if you’re sure,” Mike said. She supposed she should have demurred, protested that the extra groceries would be no trouble, but she sensed that this dignified personage meant just what she said, and would not in any case have relished dining with John Winship any more than he would have enjoyed sharing his meal with her. Business was one thing, the intimacy of meals quite another. Mike breathed an inward sigh of relief. She had been afraid that something about the woman would provoke her father to one of his easily aroused, weak, abusive rages, but she could see nothing, no snags or roughness, on this flawless surface that might catch his temper.

“I ought to warn you that my father is probably not like you remember him,” she said. “I’m afraid his state of mind and temper aren’t too good these days.”

“Most people who’ve had strokes undergo personality changes,” Mrs. Lester said. “And cancer almost always causes depression. Don’t worry, Miss Winship. I’m used to both of them.”

“Call me Mike,” Mike said. “I won’t know who you’re talking to if you call me Miss Winship.”

“Mike,” said Lavinia Lester with a small, formal smile. But she did not ask Mike to call her Lavinia, and so Mike didn’t. She left the kitchen feeling oddly bested in some contest in which she had not known she was engaged, but also relieved that no contrived jocularity or kitchen-sink camaraderie was going to be required of her. She knew as if she could see into the future that Lavinia Lester would be efficient, dependable, quiet, competent, and unobtrusive, and that she would go out from the Pomeroy Street house when she was no longer
needed as much an enigma as she had come into it this morning.

“Good,” Mike said to herself, going to wake her father while Mrs. Lester began, as smoothly as if oiled, to prepare his breakfast. “I’ll have all the time in the world to myself, and I won’t have to watch
Wheel of Fortune
with her. She probably watches
MacNeilLehrer
, anyway. And she sure as hell won’t tote.”

Her father’s bedroom was the same one that he had used all during Mike’s childhood and adolescence. It was a large square room with a high ceiling and crown moldings at the back of the first floor, directly across the long hall from his study. A rudimentary bathroom joined it and the smaller room behind the large living room that Mike had opened and put in order for Lavinia Lester. Her own childhood room was as far away from it as it was possible to be in the house; she did not know if this was by his long-ago design or simple expediency. Hers was at the top of the house and looked out over the front yard and Pomeroy Street, above the dining room. DeeDee had had the room opposite hers, above the living room and on the same side as her father’s. Now it and the other rooms upstairs, except Mike’s, were closed and, Mike found when she tried a knob, locked. She was not particularly curious as to why.

She rapped softly on her father’s closed door and, getting no reply, opened the door and went a cautious step or two into the room. It was curtained and dark, and the old air conditioner made a weary cave sound in the high-ceilinged room, as hers did upstairs. She looked around hesitantly. She could have counted on both hands the times in her entire life that she had been in this room. Not even DeeDee had frequented it, though she had come in and out more often than Mike had. Somehow, in childhood, it had been unthinkable to disturb John Winship in the room where he slept and
dressed and undressed and kept his clothes. What if she should see him naked? She would, she had thought, be blinded if she did. Mike did not like entering the room now; she moved, unconsciously, on tiptoe, and when she called him, she did so in a whisper. He was not in his bed.

“What do you want?” he replied in the thin, peevish voice of the new-old man, and she started, and turned toward the sound. He was sitting in his wheelchair in the corner of the room, fully dressed, in the dimness … not reading, not looking out of the window into the back garden, not drowsing. Simply sitting there, looking straight ahead at her as she came into his field of vision.

“Well, look at you,” Mike said heartily, as if to a child. “You’re all dressed and everything. I didn’t know you could do that by yourself. How long have you been up?”

“Since five o’clock, like I always am,” he snapped. “Of course I can get myself dressed. Did you think I had to have somebody come in here and dress me like a baby? Did you think you were going to have to do that, too? Wonder you came down here at all.”

Mike bit back a curt reply and walked over to the window behind him. She drew aside the curtains and light flooded in. In it, she saw that where once there had been near-monastic spareness and linear order, a dismal jumble of clothes and shoes and piled magazines and newspapers and books now prevailed. Among them sat empty plates and cups and glasses, and bottles and medicine vials covered nearly every flat surface in the room. It was as bad as Priss’s house, except that Priss’s clutter had the richness and resonance of a vital, living personality about it. This was simply mess, old and stale and dying, or dead. She could not suppress an involuntary gasp, and her father grabbed the cord to the drapes
from her hands and jerked them savagely together again.

“If I’d wanted light, I’d have opened the goddamned curtains myself,” he spat. “Leave my room alone, Micah. You and that high-falutin’ nigger in there can scrub the rest of this house till your knuckles bleed, but leave this room alone.”

“I wouldn’t touch it with a ten-foot pole,” Mike said distantly, and put her hands on the back of his chair to wheel him into the kitchen. From the good smells that crept into the room, Mrs. Lester had his breakfast ready. Let her have him, and all the joy of him.

“And I can get around by myself,” he added.

“Fine,” Mike said peacefully and turned to leave the room. She was not about to risk the ringing purity of the bell jar on this petulant old man. She intended, from then on, to leave him as completely and politely alone as occupancy under this roof allowed.

“Wait a minute,” he said. “What’s she calling herself these days … that nigger you’ve got in there to ride herd on me?”

“Mrs. Lester is what she’s calling herself,” Mike said equably. “And if you call her a nigger in her hearing, she’ll probably hand you your head. On her way out the door. And then you
will
be in the soup, because I’ll get you somebody so much worse than her that you’ll rue the day you opened your mouth. And while I’m at it, I’ll get somebody deaf, so you can’t run them off. Now. Are you ready to go out, or shall I tell Mrs. Lester that you’ll be staying in here until lunchtime?”

There was a long silence, and then he laughed, the sound of powdering old eggshells that she remembered from the day before.

“Tell her I’ll be out terreckly,” he said. “And that I want the crusts cut off my toast
before
she puts it in the toaster. Goddamned crumbs all over the place if you cut ‘em off after. And tell her I’m obliged to her for
Coming
. She’s not so bad for a
nigger
. Pretty smart. I did a little work for her a while back, and she seemed to understand what I told her, and paid me right off. First time I can remember that a nigger ever did either one.”

Mike ignored the apology implicit in the little speech and went out of the room, her mouth stiff with distaste. She knew that it was useless to challenge her father’s obscenely prejudicial speech, or even to protest it, but she did not intend to listen to it. As she shut the door, just barely refraining from slamming it, she heard the eggshell cackle again.

She dressed in white pants and the striped fisherman’s jersey from L. L. Bean that Rachel had given her for her last birthday
(“Oh, Rachel!”)
and went out of the still-cool house into the June sun. She had pocketed the keys to the clifflike old Cadillac, and thought to drive around a bit before the morning shoppers appeared in the streets. Her spirits shrank restlessly from the thought of confinement in the house with her father, and the day loomed emptily ahead of her. Walking seemed suddenly unthinkable; she did not feel, yet, like meeting and talking to anyone she might have known before.

Mike was certain that the whole town knew by now that John Winship’s prodigal daughter, the New York writer, the defiant child, was home again after her long exile … home in that house on which she had brought such shame, and without her Jewish husband and child, or any visible means of support. She remembered how she had felt about Lytton in those last days of her senior year, when she was so eager to leave it in its sucking insularity and smugness and get on with her life … hers and Bayard Sewell’s. All those people, the ones whose parochialism and stricture of vision had roused her to such a passion of impatience, whose meager hands and minds had made as if to hold her … all of them, she thought, would be waiting avidly for
some new explosion in the Winship house, some new Winship drama for their delectation. Mike knew she could not avoid them, but, as with her father, she did not intend to seek confrontation. She would, she thought, looking at her watch, be safe. It was not yet nine o’clock. If she recalled correctly, no one and nothing stirred on the streets of Lytton until after ten.