Net of Jewels Read online

  NET OF JEWELS

  BY ELLEN GILCHRIST

  In the Land of Dreamy Dreams

  The Annunciation

  Victory Over Japan

  Drunk With Love

  Falling Through Space

  The Anna Papers

  Light Can Be Both Wave and Particle

  I Cannot Get You Close Enough

  Net of Jewels

  NET OF JEWELS

  A Novel by

  ELLEN GILCHRIST

  Copyright © 1992 by Ellen Gilchrist. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from Don Congdon Associates, Inc.;the agency can be reached at [email protected]. A portion of this novel was previously published, in a slightly altered version, as "1957, A Romance" from In the Land of Dreamy Dreams. Copyright © 1981 by Ellen Gilchrist.

  Cover design by Barbara Aronica Buck.

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to quote from copyrighted material:

  “Dedicated to You” by Sammy Cahn, Saul Chaplin, and Hy Zaret. © 1936 CAHN MUSIC CO., CHAPPELL & CO., and ARGOSY MUSIC CORP. All Rights Reserved. Used by permission of WB MUSIC CORP., CHAPPELL & CO., and Hy Zaret.

  “Moonglow” by E. Delange, W. Hudson, and I. Mills. Copyright © 1934 by MILLS MUSIC, INC. Copyright © renewed 1962 by MILLS MUSIC, INC. and SCARSDALE MUSIC CORP. All Rights Reserved. Used by permission.

  “I’m in Love Again” by A. Domino and D. Bartholomew. Copyright © 1956, copyright © renewed 1984 by UNART MUSIC CORPORATION. All Rights Reserved. Used by permission.

  Excerpt from Sun Signs by Linda Goodman reprinted by permission of Bantam Books, a division of Bantam, Doubleday, Dell Publishing Group, Inc.

  Excerpts from “Fountaine, Je Ne Boirai Pas De Ton Eau!,” “Second Fig,” “Siege,” and Sonnet xlii from Collected Poems by Edna St. Vincent Millay, edited by Norma Millay. Copyright 1917, 1921, 1922, 1923, 1928, 1931, 1933, 1934, 1936, 1937, 1938, 1939, 1940, 1941, 1950 by Edna St. Vincent Millay. Copyright 1945, 1946, 1947, 1951, 1952, 1953, 1954, 1956 by Norma Millay Ellis. Used by permission.

  “Inventory” copyright 1926, renewed 1954 by Dorothy Parker, and “The Flaw in Paganism,” copyright 1931, renewed © 1959 by Dorothy Parker, from The Portable Dorothy Parker by Dorothy Parker, Introduction by Brendan Gill. Used by permission of Viking Penguin, a division of Penguin Books USA Inc.

  Excerpts from “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” and “The Snow Man” from The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens by Wallace Stevens. Copyright 1954 by Wallace Stevens. Reprinted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. and Faber and Faber Ltd.

  Excerpts from “Wild Peaches” and “Parting Gift” from Collected Poems of Elinor Wylie by Elinor Wylie. Copyright 1932 by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. Copyright © renewed 1960 by Edwina C. Rubenstein. Reprinted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.

  For Hoyt Hughes Purvis

  “Like a war between magicians it can last a long time, and even then the outcome may not be what it appears to be.”

  Tom Robbins

  NET OF JEWELS

  Preface

  My name is Rhoda Manning and I am a writer. I’m not a great writer like my cousin Anna Hand, but I’m not bad either. I make a living at it and that’s more than I can say for most writers. I want to get this straight at the outset, before we set up camp for three hundred and fifty-nine pages.

  I meant this as a book of short stories and I started writing it that way. Then the stories started to bleed into each other and I decided to go on and let them bleed. I should have known when I decided to call a book Net of Jewels I was going to be in trouble. Well, I’m the one who did it, so let’s start with me.

  I was cathected by a narcissist. That’s how shrinks put it and it means, my daddy is a vain and beautiful man who thinks of his children as extensions of his personality. Our entire lives were supposed to be lights to shine upon his stage. We were supposed to make him look good. We were supposed to be better than his brother’s children, smarter, faster, more accomplished. Then his mother would like us more than she liked them. And so on and so forth. You have to know that to understand this story, which is about my setting forth to break the bonds he tied me with. It took a very long time and almost destroyed a lot of innocent people along the way. In the end I got free, so it sort of has a happy ending. That’s what this country is about, isn’t it? Getting free. Freeing people from their pasts. Creating our own crazy dazzling lives.

  This story is also about Charles William Waters, who was along for part of that journey and sparked or inspired me into telling about it. Charles William spent his whole life making things beautiful and building houses for people to live in that made them view the world in different ways. He liked cathedral ceilings and lots of glass and creeks running into living rooms and people playing Ravel on the record player and girls wearing handmade cotton underwear trimmed with lace. He lived and died for beauty and was scarce adjusted to the tomb when one who died for truth was lain in an adjoining room. That will be me.

  About Charles William’s tomb. When he found out his heart was failing him, he went straight down to the Dunleith Funeral Parlor, the black funeral home that he designed and built after the old brick one burned down, and picked himself out a coffin. It has The Last Supper in raised figures on the inside of the coffin lid and he is resting in it now. “I’d had my eye on it, Dee,” he told me when he called me with the news. “I told Spavineau, Spav, you know I’ve been wanting it. How much do you want down to hold it for me? So, of course, she burst into tears. Don’t cry on the lining, please, I told her. Unless you want to come down on the price.”

  Part One

  DUNLEITH

  Chapter

  1

  “We’re moving to Dunleith, Alabama.” It was my momma on the phone. I was a freshman at Vanderbilt and I had just completed my next-to-last swimming meet of the spring semester. I was sitting in my room letting my roommate cut my hair when my mother calls me up to tell me this dreadful news. “Why?” I screamed. “What is he doing now? What are you going to do?”

  “He wants to move to Dunleith. He wants to go back to the South. I want it too.” There was something strange in her voice. My mother was never forceful, but this was forceful. “Wait a minute. He wants to talk to you.”

  “I’m getting my hair cut. Lilly’s cutting my hair.” She had followed me out into the hall and was standing beside the phone booth with the scissors still in her hand. At that time there were not many telephones in the world and people had to go out into the hall to answer them.

  “Sister.” It was my father. “Sister, don’t go starting one of your fits now. Your mother and I want to move back to the South. We went down to Dunleith last weekend and bought a house. I’m going to bring you a car so you can drive down there when school’s out. When do you get through up there?”

  “Don’t you want to know about the meet? I came in first in three events. Don’t you read the papers? You didn’t even call to see if I had won.”

  “Of course you won, Sweet Sister. Now settle down. Dunleith’s only twenty miles from Aberdeen and we can be near your grandmother. Your mother bought a fine big house and you can help her fix it up.”

  “I don’t want a house. I’ve lived in five towns since I was five years old. I don’t know where I live. You drive me crazy, Daddy. You should have told me. You should have asked me if I cared.”

  “Well, Sister, I’m not going to ask any little half-baked girls if they like what I do with my life. Here’s your mother, talk to her.” He handed the phone to my mother and she tried to calm me down. “Your father will bring a car and leave it for you. Bring some friends home if you like. You’re going to love the house, d
arling. It’s really a wonderful old place. We’ll have fun restoring it.”

  “I have friends in Franklin, Mother. Val thinks I’m going to write for him all summer. I can’t believe you’d do this to me. It’s the end of April. You should have told me. How could you do this without telling me?”

  “He did it, darling. You know how he is.”

  So they had done it to me again. Uprooted me without notice. Destroyed my life. Ended everything I had worked to create. Always before I had been dragged along without complaining, but this time something snapped. I went back into my room and let Lilly finish cutting my hair. She had created a new hairstyle for me. It was very short, as short as a boy’s, a little cap of reddish gold curls that would not be in my way when I was swimming. Where would I swim in Dunleith, Alabama? Where would I go? Who would I talk to?

  When Lilly finished my haircut I went back into the hall and called my parents back. “Did anyone tell Val I won’t be back to write my column? Did anyone think of that?”

  “You can call him and charge it to our phone. I’m sorry you’ll be inconvenienced, darling, but this is going to be the best for everyone.”

  “Sister.” It was my father again. “Our old friends the Hallidays own the paper in Dunleith. As soon as you get there we’ll go down and tell them you want a job.”

  “I don’t want a job, Daddy. I want my own newspaper. I want my own desk next to Mr. Valentine’s. How could you do this to me? Why didn’t you tell me you were doing this?” But he had hung up. He always hung up if you tried to yell at him. Criticism rolled off him like water off a duck’s back, he told my brothers or me or anyone who didn’t like anything he decided to do. But then, he was the oldest son of a woman who thought she could walk on water. So maybe it wasn’t his fault either.

  “Are you okay?” Lilly asked. She was a tall blonde Atlantan who had stuck by me through sorority rush and all the other assorted horrors of our freshman year in college. She had pledged the best sorority on campus but she hardly bothered to notice it. She just kept on cutting my hair and going to breakfast in the dining hall with Cutter Mayberry, a tiny nondescript banker’s daughter from a small town in Tennessee who later turned out to have an exotic secret life downtown with a sailor. Lilly and I always ate breakfast with her because her room was next door and no one else in the residence house liked her. “What are they doing to you now? Come back here, Rhoda. Come sit down and tell me what they said.”

  “It’s done. We’re moving away from Franklin this week. I won’t even get to be there. I won’t even get to tell my friends goodbye or pack the things in my room. They always do this to me, Lilly. They’ve been doing it forever. Both of them were born in places where they always lived. They think it’s fun to move around. But I think I’m going crazy. God, I think I really am.” I went back into the room I shared with Lilly and fell down on a bed. Lilly sat beside me and rubbed my soft still-wet hair. “Let’s go over to the pool and swim,” she said. “I love to watch you swim. And then we’ll go to the Waffle House and eat waffles. You want to do that? There’s a bloodmobile at the Kappa Sigma house. We can eat up everything in sight and then go and give a pint of blood and we’ll come out even. Remember the last time we did that and Doc McElroy fainted in the hall? Please don’t be sad, Rhoda. We can’t do anything about the things they do. They’re our parents. They get to run our lives.”

  “They won’t run mine. I won’t go. I’ll stay in Franklin and live with Val. He’ll let me. I won a state contest with my column when I was a junior in high school. I won it two years in a row. A contest for grown people. They’re waiting for me to come back and write for them. I was going to work there all day in the summer. I was going to make three hundred dollars a month. I can’t believe they’d do this to me, Lilly. No one could do this to someone else.”

  “Our parents can.” She began to stroke my back and neck. “They can do anything they want to do. Let’s go swimming, Rhoda. I love to watch you swim. Please don’t stay here. If we stay here, we’ll only end up crying.”

  “Okay. Find a bathing suit. I’m getting up. Let’s go.”

  We went over to the indoor pool and put on our bathing suits and began to swim. There were only two or three different kinds of bathing suits back then. I had a pretty blue Jantzen for swimming in meets or outdoors in the summer where people could see me and a two piece baby blue Catalina for when I was feeling especially thin. But the suit I liked to practice in was made of dark gray wool. It was very old and my mother had worn it the first time she swam in the Atlantic Ocean. When I was small I had used it to make Catwoman outfits. I had swum a million laps in it but it was still as thick and good as new. No one now would swim in such a heavy wool suit, but I had been wearing it for different things since I was ten years old and it was my lucky suit. I was wearing it the day I broke 1:06 in the hundred-yard butterfly and the day I swam the five-hundred-meter freestyle in 6:52.

  “Where’d you get that suit?” Lilly asked. “It’s so fuzzy looking. It looks so professional. Is that what real swimmers wear?”

  “No, it’s what I wear, for luck. It’s my lucky suit. I don’t race in it. I practice in it. It’s real heavy so when I take it off I think I’m a lot lighter. It’s like taking off a starched dress. Did your mother used to make you wear starched dresses?”

  “Yes. I hated them. I used to cry if I thought about it.”

  “I wouldn’t wear them. I tore them off. I tore one right down the middle one day when my uncle was visiting from medical school. It’s a good thing he was there. My dad might have beat me to death.”

  “Did they beat you?”

  “They hit me with a belt if I was bad. They beat the boys. Daddy beat them anytime he wanted to. He still beats Dudley. Dudley lets him do it. Dudley does anything my daddy wants him to.”

  “My daddy just talks to me.” Lilly leaned against the ladder going down into the hot chlorinated water of the pool. The water rose up in clouds and curled her light blonde hair, which was cut off as short as mine, but not as well, since she did it herself and couldn’t do a good job in the back. “He’s a baby doctor. He doesn’t believe in beating children or even spanking them.”

  “My daddy’s daddy used to beat him too. In Aberdeen, where he comes from, they think you have to beat children to make them mind. Well, that’s where we’re moving back to. Back to Alabama where he knows the governor. My daddy’s family owns the whole county where they live. So now he’s rich and he can go back there. So now they’re going to pack all the stuff in my room without me even being there.” Tears were beginning to run down my face into the dark blue chlorinated water. “Lilly, do you have that stopwatch I gave you?”

  “I’ve got it.”

  “Well, start watching it. Tell me when it gets to the top.” I took a position in the second lane and lay my arms back behind me and began to count into my stroke. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight.

  “Now,” she said, and I dove into the water and began to swim. Like the wind, I told myself, like wind in a canyon, tear the rocks off the wall, turn the stone to pebbles, goddammit, Sister, swim.

  Six minutes and forty-two point three seconds later I pulled myself up on the side and Lilly told me the time. “Oh, you’re kidding. No one can swim that fast. You didn’t time it right.”

  “I pushed it when you touched the end. It was so beautiful to watch, Rhoda. You look like you don’t even move. I can hardly see you move. The water moves all around you.”

  “Let me see the watch. You timed it wrong. Of course, there wasn’t anyone else in the pool. When you’re making the only waves it helps. Goddammit, if I did that. If I really did.”

  “Try it again.”

  “Okay. Let me catch my breath and get a drink of water and I will. God, if I did that. If I did it once. See, if you can ever do it once, you can do it again.” I went out into the hall and drank from a water fountain. I thought about the swimming pool I had helped build in Franklin, Kentucky. I had written
column after column in the paper about how much it would help the town and how much fun we’d have and had vowed to teach swimming to little kids if they built it. A promise I had kept. Well, that was all behind me now. I would never see Franklin again. Never see the newspaper office or the swimming pool or our white frame house or the roof where I slept beneath the stars on summer nights or my room that I had decorated to look like a newspaper office or Sue Beck Bailey or Betty Clinton or Stanley Walther, status genius, age fourteen, or my brother’s baby goats or Mr. Mobly, the mayor of Main Street, or the Sweet Shop or the park where Joe Davis had taken me swimming on the third of May or the train station where they shipped me off to a girls’ school in my senior year in high school and where I had wept uncontrollably when the train delivered me home for Christmas. I stopped with my hand on the water fountain and tried to suck up my guts. Suck up your guts, Sister, my daddy always said to me. Act like a man.

  “Rhoda, what are you doing? I thought you were going to swim the five hundred again.”

  “I can’t right now, Lilly. Let’s just swim laps, okay? I’m really feeling bad. I’m tired. I’m really tired. I don’t know why. Let’s swim some laps and then we can go eat a waffle. I’m tired and starving.”

  “Try it one more time. You broke your record. Please try it. I want you to.” She stood in the door to the pool area with her soft wet hair and her long skinny legs and her amazing kindness and praise and I went back in and swam the five hundred again. But this time the time was fifty-four, so I supposed the other had been an accident or a mistake after all.

  Back in Franklin, Kentucky, the movers were hauling my bed and desk and books and clothes out of my room. The next morning they would be on their way to Alabama with my parents and my little brothers in two cars behind them. My mother had the baby, Johnny, who was four, and my father had my brother Alford, who was seven. They drove down to Aberdeen first to see my grandmother and have tea and biscuits on her blue-and-white china and talk about me.