Net of Jewels Read online

  The heat that summer was like a force. During the night it invaded you and fluffed you up. Dared you to move your legs out from underneath the sheets. All sheets were white back then and bleached and ironed and applied like poultices to beds. It was cooler underneath those sheets than on top of them. I do not know what physical theory explains this. Perhaps it was connected to the fans. My father was a passionate believer in fans. He had ceiling fans in every room, tall fans to blow the air through the doors, short fans to cool our feet and legs, oscillating fans which he would bring into a room and continually adjust to blow on whoever was around. “I don’t want that fan on me,” I was always saying, but he would ignore that and fix it so the oscillation was a constant breeze, six inches to the left, then six to the right, blowing my hair into my eyes and back again. I would get up and move to another part of the room. He would follow me and adjust a fan to blow on my legs and feet.

  I did not know yet that I was made of light, of star carbon and molecules. But I gravitated always toward my source. I was always hurrying outside in the early morning to watch the light filter down through the trees. Birds would call, robins and raucous blue jays, and, always, the long low notes of the mourning doves. People died suddenly back then, without warning, quickly left us, heart attacks, pneumonia, snakebite, drownings. We were aware of our mortality and the suddenness of leaving. The finality, the possibility of loss was always with us, even in the hot heart of summer. North Alabama, 1955, as the century took shape and began to grope toward its meaning. As the World Turns was all the rage. We stared into the fat thick television screens and began to imagine the world spinning through space, began to sense our daily lives meant something, were full of drama, illusion, change. Up until then our main metaphor had been the cross. A man nailed up to die on wooden two-by-fours.

  I was reading Durrell that summer. I had read a review of Mountolive in a British newspaper my English teacher showed me and gone immediately downtown to a bookstore to find out how to get a copy. There were quotations in the review, brilliant descriptions of interior states. I drew in my breath while reading them. I had never encountered such writing, except in poetry. A month later the bookstore owner called me.

  “You’re in luck,” he told me. “I had a friend coming this way and he brought them to me. Come and pick them up.” I cut my afternoon lab and went downtown to pick up the books. Justine and Mountolive. That had been in April. Now at last it was summer and I had time to read them. I started Justine one morning right after breakfast. It seemed very complicated and turgid in the beginning. Then I got to a sentence, almost an aside, in which Durrell mentions that Justine is looking for her lost child in the brothels of Alexandria. Then I was reading like mad, caught up in the drama of the search.

  At ten that morning I was still reading as I drove to the country club to go swimming. Keeping the book on my lap and reading at stoplights. There was so little traffic back then and we were innocent of cars. As soon as I got to the country club I settled myself on a chair to read. “These are the moments which possess the writer, not the lover, and which live on perpetually. One can return to them time and time again in memory, or use them as a fund upon which to build the part of one’s life which is writing. One can debauch them with words but one cannot spoil them.”

  I was upside down on a lawn chair, the book underneath my head, turning the pages as fast as I dared, reading breathlessly. I looked up. The woman from Massachusetts was watching me. She had arrived at the pool without my noticing it and was settled down in a chair, her legs in their elaborate braces, the cane leaning on the chair, the bright saddle oxford shoes on the footrest. Her fabulous brown eyes were watching me. When I looked up, she smiled.

  “I’ve read that book,” she said. “Where did you get hold of that around here?”

  “I got it in Nashville. Someone brought it from England to a bookstore I go to.”

  “What do you think of it?”

  “It’s fabulous. I want to go to Alexandria. Where is it anyway?”

  “In Egypt. On the Mediterranean and the Nile.” Her beautiful brown eyes smiled into mine.

  “Oh, I should have known. I was reading so fast, trying to find out what happened to her daughter who was stolen.” I pulled my legs down from the back of the chair, got up, went over to stand near her. “I love your shoes. You look wonderful in them.”

  “They’re Spaldings. Spalding saddle oxfords. I can tell you where to order them if you want.”

  “Oh, God, could you?” I leaned near her. She was holding a cup of coffee. She was reading the New York Times. I had never been to New York City. The very sight of the name excited me. “I want to go to New York someday. My cousin lives up there. She works for Time magazine. She went to Sweet Briar.” It was all I had to offer. I sat down on a chair beside her beautiful withered legs, her braces and cane, her New York Times draped across her knees.

  “I’ll write down the name of the place where you can order the shoes. You can use my name if you like. They make them and send them to me.” She smiled at me again. I was still holding the book. My forefinger stuck between pages to hold my place.

  “What is your name?” I asked.

  “Patricia Morgan. What is yours?”

  “Rhoda Manning. It’s nice to get to meet you. I see you out here every day. I wanted to talk to you.”

  “And why is that?” She was smiling widely, leaned back in her chair, placid, at peace. Her soft light hair swung around her cheekbones, held in place by a bobby pin carelessly stuck in the side. Her skin was freckled and tanned, her clothes fit loosely on her body. She was a Chinese mandarin at the Dunleith Country Club. The world seemed to revolve around her chair.

  “Because you’re different. Are you Jewish? I had a lab instructor at Vanderbilt who was Jewish. He’s the only Jewish person I ever met except for the Rothschilds in Clarksville. And the boy I used to love. Well, I still love him. He’s a grown man really. His father was Jewish and his mother was a Catholic and they got a divorce when he was two.”

  “I’m an Episcopalian from Massachusetts.”

  “Oh, God, I’m sorry.”

  “Please don’t be. I really am flattered. You’re looking for your peers, Rhoda. Anyone with a good mind does that at your age. What happened to your boyfriend, this boy whose parents got a divorce?”

  “He got cancer of the thyroid gland. He’s in the hospital half the time. He has another girlfriend, anyway, a girl his age. I was just his little kid friend. I think he would have loved me if I hadn’t had to move away from Harrisburg. If I could have stayed there until I was older. Well, I shouldn’t talk about myself. I wanted to know what those papers are you bring out here. All that stuff in folders. Are you a lawyer or something?”

  “I’m working on a plan to feed breakfast to children in the public schools. Many of them can’t study because they’re hungry. Their blood sugar is too low to concentrate. We’re putting together a plan to put before the legislature. Here, you can look at these if you like.” She pulled some papers out of a folder and handed them to me. “These are studies we did in Meridian, Mississippi, last year. To see how many children in grades one to six had eaten breakfast before they came to school.”

  “I hate to eat breakfast. They used to have to beg me to eat when I was little. My momma would cut the toast up into eight pieces and pretend to be feeding it to a bird to get me to eat it. Oh, God, I can’t believe I’d tell you a crazy thing like that. I just mean, maybe those little kids don’t want to eat it.”

  “They want it. Many of them didn’t eat supper either. We’re going to start a study here in the fall. If you’re around you might want to help with it. We pay people to do the field work. Not much, but their expenses.”

  “I’ll be going back to school. I go to Vanderbilt. Well, I told you that. You know what happened?” I slid the copy of Justine up onto my lap. I held it in my hands like an offering. “I won the freshman writing contest at Vanderbilt last year. My professor c
ame out and told me right after my last exam. I can’t stop thinking about it. They were supposed to send me some books but they haven’t come yet. I think they lost my new address. But I shouldn’t tell you that. It’s bragging on myself.” I looked up into her face and met her eyes and for a minute neither of us spoke.

  “Who told you not to be proud of your accomplishments?” she said at last.

  “Well, they mostly want me to stop being fat. It embarrasses them if I’m fat.”

  “You aren’t fat. Who told you you were fat? Why are you listening to such a thing?” She leaned forward. I was sorry I had started the conversation. And somehow I knew not to tell her about the pills.

  “Well, I’m not now. But I was when I first got home from college. I weighed a hundred and forty-three pounds. I was fat as a pig and my mother took me to a doctor and put me on a diet. I’m glad she did.”

  “I don’t mean to say your mother did anything wrong. Well, let’s see what time it is.” She looked at her watch. “It’s eleven-thirty. I really should be starting home. It’s nice to talk to you, Rhoda. It’s very heartening to see a young woman reading a real book. It gives me hope for the future. Come and talk to me whenever I’m out here.” She began to gather up her things. She had a way of abruptly ending conversations that disconcerted me. I felt that I had said the wrong thing, made a wrong response. I think now that it was only her way of being cautious. She didn’t know what was appropriate in Dunleith. How far she could go with a nineteen-year-old girl. The Chemistrand Corporation had had seminars for its northern employees and their wives to prepare them for moving to the South and warned them against stepping on the toes of the natives until the plants were firmly established.

  She gathered up her bags, stood up on her braces, put the crutches under her arms, the bags on her shoulders, made a series of small adjustments.

  “Let me help you. Can I help you carry things to the car?”

  “No. I have a system. I get it all balanced, then I can manage. If I start letting people carry things for me there would be no end, would there? I’d get in the habit, then I’d have to wait on them to move. You could put that folder back in the brown bag. There, that’s it. Thank you. Well, I’ll see you soon then.” She smiled down from her structure of braces and crutches and bags. The placid peaceful look had returned. She had a journey to make and she was about to make it.

  “I’ll be back tomorrow. Will you be here then?”

  “If it doesn’t rain. If nothin’ happens.” She laughed out loud. She had made a joke in a black dialect. If nothin’ happens. It was what the maids said when they left the white houses in the evenings. It was a phrase that struck terror in the white women’s hearts. It meant, maybe I’ll be back tomorrow to clean your house and nurse your children and iron your clothes, and maybe I won’t.

  “I hope you do. I’ll be waiting for you.”

  “Well, here I go. I’ll see you soon.” She began to move very slowly and deliberately across the flagstones and down the path toward the parking lot. It was exciting to watch her. Each step weighted and planned. To find my peers. What did that mean? Who is telling you such a thing and why are you listening to what you hear? I went back over to my pile of books and towels and suntan lotion and found the bottle of diet pills and took one and then dove into the pool and began to swim laps while I waited for it to take effect.

  I think now what it must have been like for her to come to Dunleith from Massachusetts. To be dumped down into a sleepy little Alabama town with instructions to be careful of what she said. A town where the ladies spent the mornings getting dressed and the afternoons playing bridge. Whose intellectual food was the Dunleith Daily and the Birmingham News and the main selections of the Book-of-the-Month Club. Who thought New York City was where you went to spend the day at Elizabeth Arden and the evenings seeing Broadway musicals or carefully selected plays without any dirty language. Where everybody went to church and sent money to Africa to save the heathen but took it for granted that the black people in Dunleith couldn’t read. A few of them could read. My father’s cousin Martha Ann taught her servants to read so they wouldn’t make mistakes giving medicine to her children.

  “Do you believe in God?” I asked her the next day.

  “No, but I go to church. I go to the Episcopal Church. I think I met your mother, by the way, but I haven’t talked to her. I was introduced at a tea for the new rector.”

  “They make me go. I’ve never believed in God a day in my life. I don’t believe in hell and I don’t think you stay alive after you’re dead. Why do you go if you don’t believe in it?”

  “Because it’s a force for good. I was raised by devout people. I don’t know. I suppose I go out of habit. Especially since I was in the iron lung. I want to keep on doing everything. I don’t want to get into the habit of staying home. Max, my husband, is a very busy man. He works sometimes twenty hours a day so I can’t depend on him for amusement. I have to stay active. Of course, it’s solace too.” She was quiet for a moment. “One of our children died. In a car accident. Our oldest son. Our other boy, Clay, is at Brown. He’ll be coming home soon. He’s never been to Dunleith. Maybe you would show him around the town and introduce him to people.”

  “I’d love to. I have this friend, Charles William. I bet Clay would love him. He’s studying architecture at Georgia Tech. He reads as much as I do. We have this literary society.” I smiled and looked down, starting to get tickled. “It’s just a joke. We use it for an excuse. Anytime we want to go somewhere we tell our mothers we’re having a meeting of the Literary Society. Isn’t that stupid?” I was sitting next to her now. I had pulled a chair up beside her. I had taken Mrs. Morgan for my property. I was as close to her as I could get. I had been at the pool when it opened, waiting for her to arrive.

  “Don’t wait for Clay to get here. Bring your friend out to Fairfields anytime you like. Do you ever go out there? On the way to Huntsville?”

  “Oh, sure. That’s where Imogene Uzell lives, the society editor for the paper. She comes to our house in the afternoons for a drink. Everyone comes to my parents’ in the afternoons to have a drink. They sit on the porch and drink. Would you like to come? Oh, you wouldn’t like it, though, I bet. I bet it would bore you to death.”

  She smiled at that. I could just imagine her sitting on the porch listening to my daddy and his cousins talk about politics and football and Big Jim Folsom and keeping the Negroes in their place and which church was the best, the Episcopal or the Presbyterian. “You wouldn’t like to come there. I shouldn’t have said that. They have all these boring people there. These old cousins of theirs from Aberdeen. Sometimes they stay until after supper. You can’t get away from them and they ask you all these questions and talk about the past.”

  “Nothing is boring if you know who you are, Rhoda. If you have autonomy. Try not to judge the world. Judge not, that ye be not judged. That’s one thing the church got right. I like truisms and time-honored clichés. I’ve thought of making a collection of southern ones while I’m here. I could make a book of them, or at least a Christmas letter.” She began to laugh at that. She seemed to think it was divinely funny. “So you think I might be bored by the parties on your mother’s porch, do you?” she added, still laughing, squeezing the very last giggle out of her amusement.

  “I think you’d be sorry you were there if my Aunt Hattie Manning got hold of you about General Joseph Wheeler and the Civil War. She digs her fingernails into your arm while she talks to you. I can just see your husband listening to that.”

  “Oh, Max likes the South. He’d probably be fascinated. He might even agree with her. He’s very broad minded about history.”

  “I’ll come out to Fairfields and see you. I’ve been out there to a tea at Imogene’s. Do you know her?”

  “She gave me some plants for an herb garden I’m starting. If you’ve been to her house you can find ours easily. We live at the end of her street, in the old brick farmhouse. Please come out. And
bring your young architect. He might be able to give me some ideas. We’re still working on the place.”

  “I want to meet your son when he comes. What’s his name?”

  “Clay. He’s very nice. I’ll write and tell him I’ve found him a friend. He’s hesitant about coming here. It was difficult for him to think his home would be in a different place when he finished school. Of course, he can always go back to Woods Hole, where we’re from. He has friends there and Max has a brother in the area.”

  “They did that to me. They moved last year when I was at Vanderbilt. They didn’t even ask me about it. They just did it. All of a sudden we were here.”

  “I thought you had always been here.”

  “My father’s family are from Aberdeen. They built Aberdeen. Aberdeen belongs to them. So now we’re home.”

  “And are you happy with that? Are you adjusted to it?”

  “I guess so. I went on this diet, I told you that, so at least I stopped being fat. And I have these new friends, Charles William and Irise. And I met you.” She was watching me with an intense serious look. I don’t believe I had ever talked to anyone who entered into what I was saying with such intensity. I started to tell her about the pills, how wonderful they made me feel. How sometimes they made me want to run around the yard. How once, the first week I took them, I had run around the house twenty times while my father stood on the porch and roared with laughter. “I better go back to my book,” I said. “I think I’ll go lie down by the shallow end and quit talking your arm off and read my book.”

  “Come out to Fairfields anytime. Come see the garden I’m making.”

  I went down to the shallow end and spread a towel in the sun and added suntan lotion to my arms and legs and got out my book. I called the dining room to bring me a glass of iced tea so I could take my pill. I lay down on my stomach and began to read.