Winter Birds (5 page)

As I sit at the table now, waiting for dessert to be brought, I hear Patrick and Rachel on the other side of my door. They are eating their supper in the kitchen, a menu which I assume to be the same as mine. Often I can catch the gist of Patrick’s supper monologue. Tonight he is discussing something he read in the newspaper today about the mayor’s wife and her work with black adults in a literacy program held in the evenings at St. Joseph High School. Patrick believes this is a fine project. He imagines the mayor’s wife, along with himself, to be a paragon of fair-mindedness, a kind and generous soul to whom racial discrimination is a foreign concept. Certainly a literacy program for blacks speaks for the magnanimous heart of the white mayor’s wife.

One evening last week Patrick arrived home late for supper due to a flat tire. I heard him tell Rachel that “the nicest black man” had stopped to assist him. He makes frequent mention of black doctors, black businessmen, and black politicians, the subtext of such references being “Just imagine—black people
can
make something of themselves!” When the newspaper ran a picture recently of a local boy who achieved a perfect score on the SAT, Patrick said to Rachel, “Did you see this black boy in the paper? Why, we might have us a black valedictorian at Greenville High come spring.” He spoke with great awe of the contestant on
Jeopardy
who won over $65,000 one week—“a black woman stock analyst!” he said to Rachel. A smart black woman—triple marvel! I imagined him drawing his chair up to the television, gaping wide-mouthed at the spectacle of a black woman rattling off correct answers. Patrick is not a stupid man; he simply cannot see or hear himself.

I sit at my table a few minutes before Rachel appears again with my dessert on the tray. Patrick stands at the doorway behind her. “Hello, Aunt Sophie,” he says as Rachel sets a saucer on my table. On the saucer are two frosted cookies sprinkled with small colored candies. “I guess Rachel told you the electrician is coming tomorrow to see about rewiring this end of the house,” he says. I nod. “He’ll have to get in here to work,” Patrick adds, looking around. “Hope he doesn’t disturb you too much.”

“Is he a black electrician?” I ask. The irony is lost on Patrick, though Rachel pauses, a dish of orange Jell-O in one hand, and turns to look directly at me. Perhaps I only imagine that a faint smile gathers in the corners of her eyes. I turn and look toward the window. It is dark outside now.

“No, he isn’t,” Patrick says. “Duncan’s folks used to run the taxi company. You probably remember them from when you used to live here—the Graves. They lived in that big stone house across from the library.”

“Well, good,” I say. If Patrick thinks I am relieved to learn that Duncan the electrician is a white man, I will leave it at that. I can’t see what difference it makes. Let him think what he wishes.

I have long since understood that fairness is a dream. Black or white, man or woman, rich or poor, life will do to you what it will. “DIED. MARGE SCHOTT, 75, controversial philanthropist and former owner of the Cincinnati Reds; in Cincinnati, Ohio.” This was reported in another issue of
Time
. As in Marge Schott’s case, unfairness may be coupled with efficiency. It is said that she once settled a dispute within the Reds organization by the flip of a coin. This, I believe, was economical in every way. As in Marge Schott’s case, also, unfairness may be coupled with generosity, for though she publicly made numerous offensive comments, her gifts to charity were well-known among the citizens of Cincinnati. Ask a dozen people in Cincinnati about Marge Schott, and you will get a dozen different opinions.

After Patrick disappears from the doorway, Rachel moves about, setting my supper dishes back onto the tray. I look at the frosted cookies and the dish of orange Jell-O in front of me, considering briefly which to taste first. I imagine Marge Schott flipping a coin, and I reach for a cookie. For now sweetness fills my mouth.

Chapter 4

Some Meteor That the Sun Exhales

From its home in the Canadian conifers and high mountains of the West, the evening grosbeak has migrated increasingly farther south and east over the years. Perhaps its wanderlust was first caused by a food shortage in its native regions, and, flying south, it found well-stocked bird feeders to supply its hunger
.

Greenville, Mississippi, situated on the eastern banks of the great river, has an impressive heritage of literary talent. Shelby Foote grew up here, and Walker Percy spent a good part of his youth here with an older cousin, William Alexander Percy, who adopted him and who was also a published poet himself. Hodding Carter Jr., long-time editor of Greenville’s
Delta Democrat Times
, won a Pulitzer Prize. Another of the town’s award-winning writers is Josephine Haxton, novelist and storywriter, who uses the pen name of Ellen Douglas in order to mollify her aunts, who appear as characters in her stories and who, for family honor, do not want to be recognized by the reading public.

More recently two Greenville women, Gayden Metcalfe and Charlotte Hays, have written a book titled
Being Dead Is No Excuse
, which claims to be the “Official Southern Ladies Guide to Hosting the Perfect Funeral.” Without the trouble of opening the book, one can tell that it is meant for humor. It is not a book I care to read.

The library in Greenville has a special permanent display of the town’s most well-known writers, close to twenty of them, while the local bookstore carries more than fifty books by Greenville authors. Greenville’s residents, though proud of their writers, aren’t greedy. They lay no claims to William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, or John Grisham, also Mississippians, though they might be quick to point out that Faulkner’s literary agent, Ben Wasson, was one of their own. Wasson succeeded in getting Faulkner’s first two books published, and it is said that Faulkner often visited him in Greenville and even did some of his best writing here.

Another of Greenville’s distinguishing features, of which I am daily reminded, is its brown water. When I lived and taught here some forty years ago, it was a long time before I could bring myself to take a bath. I could shower without distress, but sitting in a tubful of amber liquid was not compatible with my idea of cleanliness. Besides its unusual color, it is very soft water, also. Rub your hands together under soft water, and they feel slippery. After shampooing, you may rinse the suds out of your hair yet never feel the sensation of “squeaky clean.”

It is a joke in the state of Mississippi that the explanation for the high number of published authors per capita in Greenville has something to do with its soft brown water. Fewer new writers are coming along, they say, because too many youngsters these days are drinking bottled water.

Though I already knew some of these facts, I heard them rehearsed by Patrick during my visit last summer as he read an article to Rachel at the supper table one night. It was from a back issue of
Southern Living
. The page, called Southern Journal, is a regular feature of the magazine. All persons, places, or things southern are considered suitable topics for this page. It came to me as Patrick read the article aloud, this one concerning the brown water and the writers of Greenville, Mississippi, that he most likely had aspirations to be a writer himself. Since moving here, I am confident of this.

Patrick has written many letters to the editor of the
Delta Democrat Times
, several of which have been printed over the years. He has mounted them all in a scrapbook that sits on the coffee table in the living room. He often repeats stories his father told him about his paternal grandfather, who grew up in Southern California. “I’m going to write these all up in a book someday,” he says. No doubt Patrick thinks the publishing world is eagerly waiting for the manager of an office supply store to burst on the scene with a collection of apocryphal stories about a deceased relative.

The stories, the ones I’ve heard, sound like folklore. A dead armadillo on the side of a road in New Mexico figures prominently in one of them and a one-legged ventriloquist in another. Most of them are silly stories with no point except to illustrate the many ways a man can waste his days on earth.

Patrick’s grandfather was what his family called a character, a card, a pill. He was, at various times in his life, a minister, a barber, a bricklayer, a chauffeur for a judge in Lafayette, Louisiana, and a writer of advertising slogans, one of his best-known being for a brand of men’s hair tonic in the thirties and forties called Magic: “Want a magic wave? Wave the Magic Wand!” The picture on the poster showed a man in a business suit, his hair neatly slicked and waved, with three admiring women gazing up at him. In the thought bubble above his head was a bottle of Magic Hair Tonic with a wand touching it and multicolored sparkles shooting away like fireworks. One of the framed posters hangs in the hallway in Patrick’s house.

The white electrician arrives a little past eight in the morning. I have been awake since five. I am dressed, sitting at the window beside the bird feeder. Rachel has already come and gone with my bowl of oatmeal, slice of toast, and glass of orange juice. My television is on, but I glance at it only occasionally. It is tuned to a channel called TV Oldies, which carries programs such as
Gunsmoke, Bonanza, Green Acres, I Love Lucy
, and
The Waltons
. John-Boy Walton is on the screen now, talking to a man who is milking a cow. He says, “Aw, Daddy’s not that way at all, Mr. Logan.” Mr. Logan grunts and the cow shifts restlessly.

In the afternoon
Carol Burnett
comes on. I watch her every day, hoping to see the scene in which she wears the green velvet draperies as Scarlett O’Hara in
Gone With the Wind
. Hope has sunk to this—waiting for a television rerun.

The white electrician makes a few attempts at conversation. He speaks into the fuse box on the wall, however, so I feel no obligation to answer. Rachel stands in the doorway for a minute, then disappears. “Might get a little dusty in here,” the electrician says. “That plaster dust, you know—no matter what you do, it’ll find a way to get in.” He knocks on the wall that separates my apartment from Rachel’s kitchen. “Solid as a fort,” he says. “Far piece from how they build ’em today.” He moves around the room, counting electrical sockets. He writes something in a small notebook he takes out of his hip pocket. His boots are old, the leather crusty and cracked like a dirt yard in a drought.

He goes back into the kitchen, and I hear him tell Rachel that he’ll start the job on Monday, that he wants to move the location of the fuse box while he’s at it and change over to circuit breakers, that he’ll bring a helper with him and it will be a three-day job. He’ll try to be as neat as he can and will cover the floor with plastic.

After he leaves, Rachel stands in my doorway. John-Boy is back at home now, talking to his granny, who is pouring water from a bucket over the front porch steps and sweeping them. I can’t make out the words John-Boy says to his grandmother, but I wonder why he doesn’t pick up the bucket of water and help her, or take the broom out of her hands and tell her to go sit in the swing while he finishes up.

“Not as polite as they would like us to think he is,” I say.

“Well, I thought he . . .” Rachel pauses, frowning. “I’ve heard he’s good to clean up after himself.”

I decide that nothing is to be gained by explaining that we are talking about two different people. Rachel starts to say something else but doesn’t. She leaves, closing my door behind her.

Later
MacGyver
will come on and then
Love Boat
, followed by
Bewitched
and
The Cosby Show
. At one-thirty in the afternoon a courtroom program called
Judge Jack
comes on another channel. People sue each other over various offenses—ruined wedding cakes, crooked driveways, faulty transmission repairs. The judge sees through people’s lies and refuses to allow speculation as evidence. When somebody says something like “Well, if she’d of paid me on time,” or “If he hadn’t gone and busted my mailbox,” or “If he coulda give me some warning,” the judge replies with “Yes, and if frogs had wings, they wouldn’t bump their rumps when they jump.” This is one of his trademark witticisms. The judge is a large man with a mustache.

“DIED. PETER USTINOV, 82,” who “earned his greatest movie renown as Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot, as in the film
Death on the Nile
.”
Time
magazine goes on to say that Mr. Ustinov spoke six real languages “and a few others of his own comic invention.” His talents were many. He was a writer, a film director, and an actor, both on screen and stage, skilled in depicting both tragedy and comedy. Besides short stories and an autobiography, he wrote a hit play titled
Romanoff and Juliet
.

I have not read or seen Mr. Ustinov’s play
Romanoff and Juliet
, but I take it to be a comedy, unlike the play on which its plot is based. To write a play, one needs a good ear for the spoken word. Without this, the playwright may inadvertently turn his tragedy into a comedy.

Romeo and Juliet
is one of the few Shakespearean plays I have both read and seen. It is a story of ill-fated love. The last paper I typed for Eliot was to be read by him at a meeting of Shakespeare scholars in New York City. It was a tedious discourse comparing the five quartos of
Romeo and Juliet
with the first folio and pointing out the differences between Shakespeare’s handling of time in his play and that of Arthur Brooke in his long-winded poem
The Tragical History of Romeus and Juliet
, on which Shakespeare built his play.

It was not Eliot’s best writing, and we both knew it. But as Eliot said, neither was
Romeo and Juliet
Shakespeare’s best writing, some of the lines so falsely poetic as to verge on the absurd. “A writer cannot produce his best and brightest with each new work,” Eliot said. “The quality of a writer’s output follows the same ebb and flow of the tides, the same rise and fall of the seasons. Sometimes there is lush new growth and other times only bare branches.” At times Eliot could also wax poetic verging on absurdity.