Homeplace (22 page)

DeeDee beamed after him and then turned conspiratorially to Mike.

“He’s a saint, just a saint,” she said in a loud whisper. “Not well, my foot. She was drying out again; everybody knows that. Sally Sewell has been a drunk for years. She’s dying by inches with her liver, and none too soon, I say. She’s mortified him in public a million times. Everything from drunk driving to public drunkenness, and the
men!
She’s been in and out of all the motels around here so often they don’t even make her sign the register anymore. Just wait till the man leaves and then call Bay, and he goes and gets her and takes
her home. Just a rabbit. But he’s never been anything with her but gentle and patient. It would break your heart to see them together. He hired her old nurse to come and stay full time with her, and he built her a great big house not long before the oldest little boy died. I guess Priss told you about that, didn’t she? They’d named him Win, after Daddy, and he drowned in the swimming pool. Nobody comes right out and says so, but everybody knows she was drinking when it happened. He’s never really gotten over it. She wasn’t fit to raise the other two children—and they’re outstanding, Mike, just like him—so he and old Opal did that. He’s trying to get the Department of Transportation to back off Daddy’s old house; he’s got lots of influence in the legislature, even though he’s so new. But I’m afraid he’s putting his career in jeopardy. There’s a powerful lobby for the DOT there.”

“I’m sorry,” Mike murmured, feeling the silly-child part of her vanish as if by magic outside the shell of the bell jar. “I’m sorry he’s had such a bad time. I’m sorry she has. Priss didn’t tell me that.”

But there was a tiny part of her, tiny and ratlike and biting, that was not sorry at all for the ruin and shame of Sally Chambers Sewell.

Duck came blustering into the den then, carrying a bottle of bourbon and two glasses, and Bayard came behind him with a stemmed glass, whisper-pale and frosted, in each hand. He handed one to Mike and lifted the other.

“To us, one and all,” he said. “And to Mike in particular. Home is really home again now.”

Mike nodded, suddenly shy, and they all lifted glasses, Duck slopping a little of his bourbon over his wrist and DeeDee taking a great gulp and squeezing her eyes fiercely shut in an effort not to cough.

“How’s yours?” Bayard said to Mike. “I didn’t even
ask you if you drank martinis. Hardly anybody does, anymore.”

“I do,” Mike said. “I always did.”

The evening that might have been such a strain wasn’t. That it was not, she saw later, was a triumph over the sheer awfulness of DeeDee and Duck’s mean little tinderbox house; tricked out in savagely yellow, shellacked Colorado pine furniture and ersatz varnished western artifacts, it reminded her of a plastic toy bunkhouse and stunted all feeling and nuance out of the air and the evening. It was simply not possible to sense subtleties, currents and eddies of resonance after an hour or so in DeeDee Wingo’s home. But in spite of the oppressive weight of the house, Mike realized gratefully and obscurely that what she felt at her sister’s dinner table was comfort. Looking around the round wagon-wheel table, she realized that DeeDee and Duck felt at ease, too, and under the ease there bubbled in each of them a sort of conspiratorial glee, the feverish excitement of sly children. DeeDee was even more arch and proprietary than usual, Duck even more gelatinously expansive. Bayard Sewell, on her right, was as loosely and dryly ironic with her as he was with DeeDee and Duck, as he had always been, and Mike knew that it was from him that the warm, fluid flow of the evening emanated. He generated good feeling like a fountain.

He spoke of Mike’s work with a real and obvious respect and admiration, untainted by the sliding envy that she was accustomed to encountering among certain acquaintances who had known her for many years. For a few minutes, warmed at the fire of his interest, her work became real again to her, as it had not been since the first tongue of fear seared her on the train to Bridgehampton, and she could feel the cool, preternaturally focused wash of pure energy that she always felt in the midst of an actual story or during an interview. Her fingertips could, for a moment, actually feel the light,
silky surge of the word processor keyboard under them; her eyes could see the liquid spill of the green letters and words across the black screen. Her whole being felt poised and concentrated again, as it did when a piece was going well.

“Sometimes,” he said, “reading some of your stuff, I get the feeling that you’re not so much the writer as a kind of …”

“… magnifying glass,” Mike finished the sentence for him, catching the thought from out of the air as she had done so often all those years ago. She stopped and stared at him, startled, and then flushed.

“You always could do that.” He smiled at her. It was, as was everything else about him, a natural and spontaneous smile.

Nothing else of their shared past was mentioned. They did not speak of John Winship or the DOT action, or of his life or her homecoming. He led the conversation like a dolphin leaping through warm seas, and DeeDee and Duck followed him with more grace and agility than they actually possessed, speaking and responding outside and above themselves. They talked of national and local politics, of the gossip of Lytton and the progress of Atlanta, of the rococo excesses and arabesques in the state legislature; his fund of anecdotes about his companions in the statehouse was extensive and bordered on the scurrilous, but he included himself in the dry japery and shared the laughter that he drew down on his own head, along with those of his fellow lawmakers. Mike said little, but laughed as heartily as the rest of them at his foolishness, and with the same honest savor. He was a genuinely funny man, and over the course of the evening, as DeeDee and Duck shone with a light brighter than either possessed under the sun of his wit, she began to sense the power of him.

He’s wasted here, she thought. He’d be sensational in New York or Washington. Why in God’s name does
he put up with DeeDee and Duck? He’s light-years out of their class.

For toward the end of the evening, after the Coca-Cola ham had been reduced to glistening scraps of clotted fat on the platter and a second and third bottle of Lancer’s had been produced and drunk, they began to behave embarrassingly badly. DeeDee’s proprietary manner toward him slid over into the grotesque; she was as offensively bossy and familiar as if he had been a gifted, precocious younger brother, or a brilliant young monarch and she a privileged peasant retainer, and she twitted him continuously and with obvious strutting pride about the hours he worked and the state of his health and his tendency to let his fellow legislators, and indeed, according to DeeDee, most of the human race, take advantage of his good nature and kind heart. Duck, heavy-lidded and bursting-faced with wine and pleasure in himself, dropped incident after incident from their apparent long association into the conversation, each time cutting his eyes at Mike to gauge her reaction to his intimacy with this golden lion who was a willing captive in his house. Mike grew more and more annoyed with them and more and more mystified by Bayard Sewell’s tolerance, and when DeeDee leaned over him from behind to drop a loud kiss on the top of his black head, her great breasts swallowing his ears on either side of his head and bobbling against his cheeks, and shrilled bibulously, “I could just spank him most of the time, he’s so bad, but I can make him mind,” Mike’s entire chest and face burned with embarrassment and irritation.

DeeDee and Duck rose to clear the table and sent Mike and Bayard back into the living room to “take your shoes off and get comfortable; it’s just the shank of the evening, and there’s some Amaretto and cream coming.” They obeyed. Mike dropped wearily into one of the La-Z-Boys, and Bayard sat on the end of the sofa
nearest her and rolled his eyes goodhumoredly at DeeDee’s vast, retreating back.

“It’s like being hugged by a 1947 Studebaker bumper,” he said, but there was no spite in his words. “She’s a little much sometimes, and he is pretty much all the time. But she’s been as faithful as a good dog to John—to your dad—and she hasn’t had a great life. I think of John as family, and so DeeDee and Duck are family, too.”

Mike nodded, ashamed of her embarrassment over her sister. The comfort she felt in his presence expanded to include simple, one-celled gratitude. Even though she was bone-tired, marrow-tired, with the new, all-pervasive weariness that had come with the cessation of the great fear and the dropping down of the bell jar, and though she detested Amaretto among all liqueurs within her experience, she was content to let the night bowl on, humming along to whatever conclusion it might take.

For a small space of time, they sat silently, and then he reached over and switched on a small, Stetson-shaped plastic radio. He fiddled with the dial until Bar-bra Streisand swam smokily into the room, and then leaned back and put his feet up on the coffee table and closed his eyes. Mike saw that there were transparent bluish shadows under them.

“I want to hear everything about you,” he said, eyes still closed. “What you think and eat and wear and laugh at, and what your daughter is like, and how you live. But right now I just want to sit here in this room with you and listen to that lady sing. There’ll be plenty of time for the other. At least, I hope there will be.”

“I expect there will,” Mike said. “Don’t feel that you have to chat. You look tired.”

“It’s been a godawful week,” he said. He did not open his eyes. It was the only time he came near to speaking of his life in Lytton.

An avian caw from some out-of-sight room pierced the taut, satiny voice from the radio, and Duck and DeeDee came back into the den.

“It’s your turn,” DeeDee said to her husband. “I did her before dinner.” Duck Wingo swore under his breath and went toward the sound, and Bayard Sewell rose, saying that he had to get home and let Opal get some sleep. Surprisingly, DeeDee did not press him to stay, but walked with him to the back door. Following them, Mike thought that he had probably long since stopped using the front one.

At the door, he stopped and looked at them with the first hesitation and uncertainty Mike had seen on his face during the entire evening, or, for that matter, ever.

“Do you think the three of you might come have a little supper with us toward the end of the week?” he said. “Maybe on Friday?”

DeeDee’s face leaped immediately into lines of exaggerated concern.

“Are you sure, Bay?” she asked solicitously. “You know,
really
sure?” Her lash-veiled look at him was avid with import.

“Oh, yes,” he said. “Sally’s much better this time, really. She can handle a quiet dinner; Opal and I will come up with something. Kill the fatted calf for you, Mike.”

“If you’re sure,” Mike said doubtfully. “I don’t want to cause a fuss.”

He looked at her intently for a moment, and then said, “My wife has an alcohol problem, Mike. I’m sure you’ve heard. She’s a pretty high-strung girl, and she never really got over our son, the one—who died. But she’s brave and a fighter, and she’s been going like gangbusters since she came home this time. I’m proud of her. I want to show her off. And she wants to meet you. She’s kept up with you, like we all have. She’s one of your greatest fans.”

He dropped his eyes and studied the meager shag beneath his feet with absorption, and then looked back at her.

“I’d be truly grateful if you’d come,” he said. “It would be a real favor.”

“Of course, Bay,” Mike said warmly. “Of course I’ll come. I think it sounds lovely.”

O
N THE SECOND
F
RIDAY EVENING THAT SHE WAS IN
L
YTTON
, Mike walked in the twilight around the corner from her father’s house and up the street to where Bayard Sewell lived with Sally Chambers Sewell.

There had been a fierce, brief thunderstorm earlier, and the heat and humidity had retreated momentarily, leaving Lytton washed and cool and fragrant. Leaves sparkled, and gutters foamed with muddy torrents, and earthworms wiggled in ecstasy on sidewalks, and the sweet, grassy earth breathed and sucked loudly as it drank in wetness and deliverance. Birds shouted and the wisteria and mimosa were near to heartbreaking. Mike slipped off her sandals and rolled up the cuffs of her linen pants and waded in the puddles, feeling lightheaded and on the verge of something huge and wonderful, just out of sight. She remembered the feeling from childhood. She had had it ever since DeeDee’s dinner party, but had refused to examine it.

She had not been up this street in the week she had been home. She had not even looked in this direction from her bathroom window. She remembered that she had once been able to see the roof of the Parsons house from there, but now the chinaberry tree that had been
young then was grown and full and shielding, and in any case she had not looked. Now she saw that the Parsons house and the three other old houses on the street were gone, and that the entire block was taken up with low, rambling colonials in soft, rosy brick, set on spacious green lawns and shaded by great old trees. These trees, apparently, had been undisturbed when the development was built. It was not an old development; from the look of the plantings, it might have been ten years old at the most, but it had about it the gentle, graceful patina of mellowness and maturity. On an old-brick gatepost at the beginning of the block, a simple bronze plate read,
LYTTONWOOD. A SEWELL COMMUNITY.
Mike walked past the post and three of the houses to Bayard Sewell’s house. It was, he had said, the last one on the block.

It was larger than the others, but not much, and like them, it sat far back on a velvet lawn under a canopy of gnarled, mossy old oaks. It, too, was of rose-flushed old brick, long and low, with black shutters and wrought-iron trim on the low pillars that supported the deep roof overhang, and a pierced-brick serpentine wall extended from each end of the house and back toward the denser trees at the rear of the deep lot. Perfectly pruned glossy rhododendrons softened the angularity of the wall, and in front of them, symmetrical hillocks of azaleas in a lighter, rainwashed green drooped wet, heavy foliage over to meet the lush grass. It was not the burnt white of the grass at the Pomeroy Street house, but the shimmering blue-green of good emeralds. Incandescent white clematis glowed from the wrought-iron mailbox that said only
142 CHURCH STREET
, and a double row of huge, vivid pink-and-green caladiums spread shining, ruffled leaves along the curving brick path to the front veranda. Mike stopped at the bottom of the path and looked at Bayard Sewell’s house, swinging her shoes in her hand.