The Right Thing (23 page)

Too tired to cry, I shake my head and look away, hopelessly sliding the rough length of Troy's hay rope through my fingers. “I buried them so no one, especially not
you,
would know I was still trying to have a baby,” I say with a short laugh, arid as the dirt of the rose bed. “I gave that up for good yesterday morning. After nearly thirteen years, I've finally had enough. I'm a failure at getting pregnant,just like I'm a failure at everything else.”

“Darling,” my mother says. “You're not a failure, not really.”

“No?” I drop the EPT test on the ground. “Look, you don't have to be kind to me. I know it's true. All those goody two-shoes over at the Ladies' League act like I'm the last person on earth they want on that stupid committee, and I can't really blame them because I'm positive rocking those babies just gives them gas. Oh, and at the firm? The other partners' wives always stop talking when I come in the room and give me these
looks,
like I just ripped open a big bag of ripe garbage and dumped it on the carpet. And . . . and it seems like Du's done with me, so I guess it's sort of a blessing, me not being pregnant. A baby would only make this situation even more complicated.”

I still can't believe it: after thirteen years of a maybe-not-so-bad marriage, Du's gone and perhaps not ever coming back. He left without knowing the worst of it. The hell of it is, he left because of
Starr
. Coiling the hay rope and putting it in the jean jacket's pocket, I consider the EPT tests piled like grimy finger bones on the dead grass. There're fifteen of them so far, and Troy's still digging.

“I swear to God,” I mutter hopelessly. “It's always been like there was some big-ass, super-important rule book that got passed around, only I was out of town the day everybody else read it.” I put my face in my hands, rubbing my eyes, gritty from lack of sleep. “And don't try to tell me I haven't been this crashing disappointment to you all my life. I already know.” My joints protesting, I get up off the cement bench, wrapping Ted's jacket closer around me. It smells like him. The heady scents of night and leather and the faintest trace of cologne bring me almost, unaccountably, to tears.

My mother takes my hand. “Come on,” she says. “Come with me to the house. I'm sure that dog needs to eat, even if you won't. I'm so cold I feel like a freezer-burned catfish.”

“Okay,” I say. She's right: her hand is like ice in mine. “I'll make coffee, and we can have some pumpkin pie, at least. Oh, and I should call Aunt Too-Tai to tell her Thanksgiving's off.”

“Besides, there're some things I need to tell you.”

Curious now, I whistle to the dog. We really should go back inside before we all catch pneumonia. The three of us walk across the lawn to the flagstone terrace together, silent, my mother and I thinking our own thoughts. Reaching the back steps, I open the screen door to go into the kitchen.

“I didn't love your father, you know,” my mother says, looking back over her shoulder at the rose garden, shivering. “Not at first.”

“O
h, Annie,” my mother begins, “your father was the bright, golden dream of a near-destitute girl growing up in Lannette, Georgia. That was me.” With a sigh, she then falls silent.

We're sitting at the kitchen table, cups of steaming coffee in front of us. After all the coffee I've had in the last twenty-four hours, my cup is supremely unenticing, but I take a sip anyway. My eyes are burning with fatigue, but I need to hear this.

“You've never talked about your childhood very much,” I say. “I always wondered.”

She nods. “It's not hard to understand why. God knows, I've never wanted to call attention to my upbringing. You see, my parents worked in the West Point Pepperell towel mills—lint-heads, they were called. My father, a Black Irish immigrant from County Mayo, could only find work in the bleachery, and my mother was a folder on the third shift. We were tenants in the mill houses then, cheap little four-squares with no insulation but only the bare clapboard siding between us and the weather. The winter wind whistled into those cramped and drafty rooms like a southbound freight, so my father used to stuff old newspapers into the leaking window frames, but the wind found its way inside anyhow. In the wild ravine behind those houses, the mill creek ran gray and greasy with foam curds of soap and factory chemicals. My father's hands were scarred a permanent fish-belly white from the bleach, and my mother coughed all night long, a racking cough so labored that it woke me up in the dark. In those houses, the walls were thin as glass, and you could see the ground through the holes in the floors.”

She takes a sip of her own coffee, watching me over the rim of her cup as if to see how I'm taking this.

Thanks to my Grandmother Banks's relentless, corrosive disdain for my mother, I always knew she came from nothing much, but this is a revelation. I mean, I never knew it was that bad. After a quiet moment, my mother goes on.

“It was a hard life. Many times, Annie, we didn't have much to eat, but my parents made sure that I had oranges, milk, and meat while they'd make do with bacon drippings on stale bread. Mother lined their own shoes with cardboard when the soles wore out, but every fall she always saw to it that I had a new pair of sturdy oxfords for school. I was a lonely, studious high school senior when my parents died within six months of each other. My father went in a machinery accident at the mill, and my mother from the emphysema—brown lung, the mill workers called it—that she'd gotten from breathing in all that lint, year after year.”

“How old were you?” I ask.

She looks away. “Eighteen, just two months shy of graduating. Far away in North Carolina, all of my mother's people had turned their backs on her when she'd married a bog-trot Irishman, and my father's kinfolk were only mysterious names in the family Bible, so when I had to quit the mill house after they died, I rented a miserable little room in town with the hundred dollars Mother had managed to leave me.

“But you should know that although I was an only child, I wasn't left completely alone in the world. The women at the Reform Methodist church in the next valley got together and held pancake suppers, paper drives, and bake sales to raise money for me. Those good women. They must have known that after my mother passed I would have died, too, if I could. I only knew I wanted out of Lannette. The memories of my parents were too strong there.”

This explains so much—the thundering silence about my maternal grandparents, their utter absence from my life. I've always known they died young, but not how miserably they died, how alone my mother had been. Having to rely upon the kindness of strangers must have galled like acid.

“But I thought you and Daddy met at Tulane, where you were both in school,” I begin. “How . . .”

My mother looks out the window and compresses her lips. “I'm getting there. My scholarship from Newcomb College came through three days after we buried my mother. I worked in the mill myself all that summer, but in the fall, when I set my cardboard suitcase on the gleaming wooden floor of my new dorm room in New Orleans, I couldn't believe it. I'd never lived anywhere as fine as that small, unassuming space. There was a clean, bare mattress on the iron bed frame waiting for the hand-pieced quilt my mother had sewn from her old dresses, a sunny window overlooking the college's front lawn. I had my very own desk, too.

“I'd be sharing the closet, though. My roommate's wardrobe was already hanging there, and my clothes, so proudly made by the churchwomen, were shabby things compared to her beautiful frocks, walking dresses, and suits on scented, padded hangers. She had hats and pumps, court shoes and handbags, and the most darling matched set of luggage—caramel-colored leather covered with luxury liner stickers. Her bed was made up with lovely pink sheets and a matching comforter, and I was just touching the silk bathrobe thrown across the end of it when my roommate walked in the door with a friend, both of them dressed all in white. They were laughing and windblown, while I was wrinkled and worn out after the fourteen-hour bus ride from Lannette.

“ ‘You must be Colleen,' the tall, blond one said, holding out her hand for me to shake. ‘I'm Tess. Do you play tennis?' Of course I didn't—the solitary court in Lannette was at the country club, and only the executives and their wives played there. I was so embarrassed before those two graceful girls in their tennis dresses, embarrassed that I'd been caught out touching something that wasn't mine.

“But as the semester wore on, Tess became my best friend. We were roommates for three years, and from her I learned how to make my poor clothes look their best and was thrilled to have her barely worn castoffs since we were almost exactly the same size. I bought a secondhand copy of Emily Post and copied Tess's table manners, trading my hick Lannette accent for her cultured one. And though I was pitifully shy at first, I learned soon enough how to talk to boys because they all flocked to her like bees to a branch of pear blossom. She had the knack of making everything seem so, so . . .
easy
. Tess was the best thing that had ever happened to me, until I met your father.”

My tired ears perk up. I've heard at least this part of her story before. “You had a terrible cold. When you went to the infirmary, that's when you two met.”

My mother smiles. “Your father was the handsomest man I'd ever seen that wasn't in a picture show—tall and slender, with thick silver-gilt hair and perfect white teeth. When he smiled and shook my hand, his cool hand was clean, with long fingers and even, trimmed nails.

“ ‘I'm Dr. Banks,' he said.

“ ‘You seem awfully young,' I blurted, and then wanted to crawl under the examining table for being so forward.

“ ‘Third-year resident,' Dr. Banks said. He was unwrapping a tongue depressor. ‘Doing a little moonlighting before I finish my last stint in pediatrics. You just might be the last grown-up head cold I treat before I'm up to my eyeballs in diaper rash and whooping cough. Now, let's take a look at your throat.' ”

My coffee cup's empty, but I don't move to get up and get another. “So it wasn't love at first sight, the way Daddy used to tell it?”

My mother shakes her head. “Oh, no, Annie. You see, back in Lannette, I'd walk to school as the sun came up. I'd cross over the railroad tracks with the folks working the second shift, but then, even though it was out of my way, I used to turn and take North Street so I could get a glimpse of all the big, beautiful houses where the mill executives, the banker, the doctor, and the owner of the car dealership lived. Their houses were built of bricks or smooth plaster, surrounded by oak trees, dogwoods, and maples, boxwoods and English ivy, set high above the street on green hills with lawns tended by armies of yardmen. I'd walk up North Street in my cheap skirts and blouses, in the awful shoes my mother had sacrificed for me to have, and clutch my books to my chest while I imagined that one day I'd own a home like this one, or that one, dreaming of having a maid and a closet full of pretty clothes to wear. I dreamed of children—well-behaved children who'd go to good schools. I dreamed of the professional man I'd marry, a banker or a lawyer, or best of all a doctor. Oh, before the end of my visit to the infirmary that afternoon, I knew your father was the one I'd been dreaming of, the man who could be the door to that life. Lord, he'd hold the door open for me, and we'd walk through it together with me on his arm.”

This comes as less than the revelation I thought it was going to be, but inside I ache for the girl she was, longing for what she'd never had. My mother, however, smiles and goes on.

“The only problem,” she says, “was that Dr. Banks hadn't acted like he was interested in me at all, except for having the worst head cold he'd ever treated. He even got out a fancy camera and took pictures of my red, swollen throat to show his department head.

“ ‘Take these pills,' he said, ‘and if you don't feel better in a couple of days, come back to see me. I'll check you for strep.'

“I wasn't about to give up, not when I'd just met the man of my dreams, and so I was looking my best when I went back to the infirmary two days later. That morning, I was wearing my favorite of Tess's sweater collection—a cherry-red cashmere—and a fawn-colored wool pencil skirt, imitation lizard pumps, and had brushed my hair until it shone like black glass. My string of pearls could have passed for real unless you looked too closely. When Dr. Banks walked in the examining room, his eyes widened.

“ ‘You seem to be much improved, Miss O'Shaunessy,' he said.

“ ‘Oh, but I'm not,' I said earnestly. ‘My throat's still scratchy.' He seemed unconvinced, but once again, he shone a light down my no-longer-scratchy throat.

“ ‘Hmm.' Dr. Banks's eyes met mine, and at once I understood that he knew I was only pretending to be sick. He turned away and threw the tongue depressor into the wastebasket. ‘You're doing fine,' the man of my dreams said, sounding depressingly cheerful. ‘When you get back to your dorm tonight, gargle with warm salt water. That should fix you up.' He smiled, but I shook my head in denial.

“ ‘Tonight? I can't go back to my classes, not feeling like this.' I fluttered my eyelashes, pouting like Tess did when she wanted a boy to sit up and take notice of her.

“Dr. Banks's smile turned serious. ‘No,' he said. ‘Of course you can't. I'm taking you downtown to Tujague's for dinner and then to the Joy for the double feature. You can have that salt-water gargle after I drive you home.'

“Well, he didn't try to kiss me good night after our first date, nor on our second, but by our third date I'd realized he was a little shy when he wasn't wearing his white doctor's coat, so I kissed him instead. I still don't know what would have happened if I hadn't, but I had nothing to lose and everything to gain.

“ ‘Hubba, hubba,' Dr. Wade Banks said to me, his eyes wide. Then he kissed me back. Thoroughly.”

Her face is soft, almost dreamy with that memory, but then she looks at me and her gaze is sharp. “We were engaged four months later.”

I've never heard any of this. When Daddy talked about their meeting, he always made it sound as though he and my mother were wild about each other from the start. What bravery my mother had, risking everything to capture the man of her dreams. She was also, I realize, more than a little cold-blooded about it, and this makes me look at her with new eyes.

Coffee finished, we move to the living room, where it's more comfortable. I curl up on the sofa with Troy, and my mother goes to the window, looking out at the afternoon.

“He asked me to marry him when we were parking in his Jaguar under the oaks in City Park,” she says, her expression faraway. “Your father had considered giving me a ring that had been his mother's, but he said, ‘I want you to have your own, one that's never belonged to anybody but you. Let's go to Adler's on Canal Street and you can pick it out.' I was thrilled and more than a little scared of the high-wire act I had to perform now that we had wedding plans, but when I wasn't studying or waiting for envious girls to call up and say Wade was waiting for
me
downstairs, I began to let myself think about floor plans and gardens, of my three beautiful children, my doctor husband. My dream was so close I could almost taste it.

“ ‘You want to watch out for his mother,' Tess warned me one afternoon. We were lying on my bed, looking at her movie magazines together, leafing through the pages. ‘I'll bet you a nickel she's not going to be thrilled about her darling baby boy getting hitched.' ”

My mother glances at me and raises a sardonic eyebrow. For sure, I can imagine Grandmother Banks blowing a gasket at the news. “Don't I know about that!” I say, rolling my eyes.

My mother smiles grimly. “Well, at the time I didn't. It was spring in New Orleans, the window was open, and the scent of jasmine and the trill of mockingbird song floated into our dorm room on the warm breeze. That morning was too pretty for me to worry about anything except where I was going to get the money to pay for a wedding gown.

“ ‘Why, I'm sure we're going to get along famously,' I said to Tess, feeling confident. ‘To hear Wade tell it, she's an old-fashioned southern lady with loads of friends. She's supposed to throw these great parties. In fact, Wade says she wants to meet me soon, that she's going to give us an engagement party when we visit up there after he's finished his residency.'

“Tess, wiser to the ways of the world of my dreams than I was, shook her head. ‘Still, Collie. That southern charm has teeth and claws. I bet she's a mean old thing.' ”

My mother sighs and turns away from the window. She walks back across the room to sit down beside me.

“When Tess said that, I wanted to put my hands over my ears,” she says. “In my mind, I could see Mother Banks greeting me on the porch of her mansion with a kiss, sliding her arm around my waist and telling me how
thrilled
she was that Wade and I had found each other. That's why when the invitation came in the mail a week later, I felt no apprehension opening the heavy, cream-colored envelope, my name written on it in an exquisite cursive. Besides the handwritten invitation—which, according to Emily Post, was the living end in refinement—inside the envelope was a short note from Wade's mother, asking me to come up to Jackson a day before the party so we could ‘get acquainted.'