Net of Jewels Read online

  Pompai finds much of this banal and even dull; but who, knowing Justine, could fail to be moved by it? Nor can it be said that the author’s intentions are not full of interest. He maintains, for example, that real people can only exist in the imagination of an artist strong enough to contain them and give them form. Life, the raw material, is only lived in potentia until the artist deploys it in his work. Would that I could do this service of love for poor Justine. (I mean, of course, “Claudia”). I dream of a book powerful enough to contain the elements of her—but it is not the sort of book to which we are accustomed these days. For example, on the first page a synopsis of the plot in a few lines. Thus we might dispense with the narrative articulation. What follows would be drama freed from the burden of form. I would set my own book free to dream.

  I read on, keeping one eye on the page and one eye on Patricia. I didn’t want to be a part of the life around the pool. I even forgot the lifeguard in the presence of her strange Yankee power. After a while the waiter brought my iced tea and I drank it and took the pill and then I dove into the pool and began to swim laps while the Dexedrine moved through my blood and into my brain. Everything became more intense, the feel of the water, the color of the water, the color of the sky. I pulled myself up at the deep end and saw Patricia gathering her things into her bag. I climbed out and held it for her while she adjusted her legs and took up her cane. “I’ll see you again, Rhoda,” she said. “Don’t forget to come to see me.”

  “I won’t,” I answered. “I promise you that.”

  * * *

  After she left I swam ten more laps, then gathered up my things and drove home in my bathing suit. Three cars were parked in the driveway. Everyone was always at our house. People came and went at all hours. My friends, my mother’s friends, my father’s friends, my grandmother, my great-aunts, my aunts and uncles and cousins. I cannot imagine how my parents had the energy to deal hour after hour, day after day, with such a crowd of people.

  “Is that you, Rhoda?” It was my mother, hurrying into the kitchen to find me. I had parked the car beside the basketball hoop and come into the kitchen through the back door. “Where are you, honey? Is that you?” She came into the kitchen, her pale green and white flowered dress cinched at the waist with a belt. Her legs and feet encased in nylon hose and high-heeled shoes. It was almost a hundred degrees outside but she was completely dressed. “Oh, darling, put some clothes on. You really need to cover up. You can’t drive around like that. Here, put this on.” She picked up a towel that had been lying on the dryer and draped it around my waist.

  “I have a shirt on, for God’s sake. Leave me alone, Mother.”

  “Did you take a pill? We have your lunch ready. It will only take a minute to grill the steak. Fannin, put Miss Rhoda’s steak in to cook, will you?” She turned to the woman beside the stove. I pulled the towel off my waist and threw it on the washing machine.

  “I’m not hungry yet. I want to take a shower first. Tell her to wait. Don’t do it yet, Fannin.”

  “You didn’t get anything at the pool, did you?”

  “No. I didn’t eat anything at the pool. It’s my diet, Mother. I’m on the diet. Not you.”

  “Well, I’m only trying to help.”

  “I’m not hungry yet.”

  “Doctor Freer said you had to be sure and eat thirty minutes after you take the pill. You have to eat on time. He said it was very important.”

  “Well, I don’t care what he said. I’m not hungry right now. I’ll eat when I come down.” I turned and walked up the back stairs and left them there.

  * * *

  I took off my clothes and got into the bathtub. “Rhoda.” She had followed me up the stairs. “Darling, I want you to go on and eat. Fannin has other work to do. She can’t stand around the kitchen all morning waiting for you to eat lunch.”

  “Then tell her not to. I’ll fix it when I come down. I know what to do.” She was in the bathroom now. Picking up my clothes from the floor. She put the clothes in the hamper and straightened up the bathmat and sat down on a little painted chair to watch me bathe.

  “Mother, stop looking at me.”

  “You look wonderful, Rhoda. Your body looks very beautiful.” She reached out a hand, touched my shoulder, caressed my arm. “I can’t believe you’re getting so grown up. My little baby girl. Darling girl.”

  “I met this fabulous woman at the pool, Mother. She’s from Massachusetts. She wears these darling shoes because she had polio. She’s going to give me the catalogue so I can order some. Can I have some?”

  “I guess so. What kind of shoes?”

  “Saddle oxfords. Like we used to have for cheerleading. Only these are so beautiful. They are the most beautiful leather.”

  “Who is she?”

  “Mrs. Morgan. Her husband works for Chemistrand. She goes to Saint James’s.”

  “Oh, I know who she is. She’s a friend of Imogene’s. Well, that’s nice that you met her.”

  “Can I have the shoes?”

  “We’ll see. I have to see how much they cost. I’ve been spending so much money on the house. Don’t you think it looks nice? Don’t you like the carpet downstairs and the drapes?”

  “Oh, yeah, they’re great. Well, look, get out of the way so I can get out, okay?” I stood up. She watched me as though I were the archangel Gabriel. She worshipped me despite my faults. She handed me a towel.

  “I’m going down and get your lunch ready. Come down as soon as you get dressed.”

  “All right. I will.”

  * * *

  I ate my diet lunch. Then I went back upstairs and shut the door to my room and turned on the ceiling fan and read myself to sleep. “Somewhere else, in a great study hung with tawny curtains, Justine was copying into her diary the terrible aphorisms of Herakleitos. The book lies beside me now. On one page she has written: ‘It is hard to fight with one’s heart’s desire; whatever it wishes to get, it purchases at the cost of the soul.’”

  I sank down into my cherry four-poster bed. The heat of summer penetrated the thick board walls of the house. The force of heat, the passion of heat. Even the Dexedrine could not fight it off forever. I sank my face down into a satin pillow. The sounds of the house moved up and down the hall, footsteps, a maid ironing in a bedroom, a radio playing in the kitchen. My baby brother Johnny was being bathed in the bathroom I had so recently vacated. Charles William and I had removed the old wallpaper from that bathroom—six layers of flowered papers. We had spent days at our task, stripping off layer after layer of roses and yellow forsythia and ivy on trellises. Then the paperers came in and covered the walls with a pattern of Williamsburg blues. It was my favorite room in the house, a testament to my native if untapped industry. We had worked feverishly; it was the first week I took the Dexedrine and Charles William had been caught up in the tide. Now the room was finished and my baby brother was in there throwing water and toys at the Williamsburg pattern.

  It smelled like heaven that summer in the chocolate-colored house on Wheeler Street. Smells stayed in their places. Even Daddy’s fans could not move those smells. The smell of furniture polish on the dressers and chairs and tables. The smell of new carpets made of the miracle fiber being spun from oil out at Chemistrand which was going to save Dunleith from extinction. The smell of ironed clothes hanging in the closets, ironed starch, soap powder, and bleach. Wallpaper paste and hair spray with plenty of fluorocarbons since we had not even named them yet and certainly didn’t know they did anything but turn our hairdos into helmets.

  The kitchen smelled of toasted bread and fried chicken and green beans cooked in melted fat. Of whiskey sours and scotch and water and sweetened tea. Of biscuits baking and bacon frying and coffee being endlessly percolated in the old aluminum percolator that later Dudley and I would press into service as a martini shaker. The smell of Daddy’s and Dudley’s mud-covered boots and dust-covered work clothes. The pickup truck covered with the red clay of roadbeds.

  It was a
rich life. Even I, the most selfish and least satisfied and most sensitive and wary one, even I knew I was living in a blessed time. I would wake from sleep in that chocolate-colored house and stretch my legs down between the ironed sheets and caress my nightgown with my fingers. I slept in old-fashioned white cotton nightgowns made on a foot-pedal sewing machine in my grandmother’s house in the Delta. Every few months a new nightgown would arrive, packed in scented tissue paper in a box from Nell’s and Blum’s in Greenville.

  I would rise from bed and go stand by the window, which looked out upon ancient trees full of birds and squirrels and spiders and crickets and tree frogs. In the stand beside my bed were the journals of my imaginary love affairs and the notebooks of my imitation Emily Dickinson poems and the copy of One Arm and Other Stories, by Tennessee Williams, which Charles William had given me to read. I had gotten as far as “Desire and the Black Masseur,” then put the book away.

  I would open the drawer and look inside, then quickly close it and take off my gown and go over to my dresser and open my underwear drawer and find my underpants and bra and put them on. I would add a pair of pink corduroy shorts and a cotton off-the-shoulder blouse and find my sandals and go downstairs, following the smell of bacon and coffee. Perhaps the kitchen would already have begun the work of dinner, filé gumbo or vegetable soup or the famous Aberdeen stew, which took three days to prepare. It was made of fresh tomatoes and new com, okra and chicken and ground black pepper. It had to cook for forty-eight hours to reach the desired consistency. Only the descendants of Highland Scots could have invented a way to make stew the exact consistency of oatmeal, but they had triumphed, and it was my father’s favorite meal. Tears would come into his eyes at the thought of Aberdeen stew and when my mother’s kitchen was at work creating that wonder he looked at her with disarmed, tender eyes. It must have been in such a mood that my unexpected brother, Johnny, was conceived.

  Not that conceived had any meaning to me except in reference to the Gettysburg Address. I was looking up the wrong words in the dictionary in my continuing attempts to find out something about sex. Why didn’t I ask Charles William? I wonder now. Why didn’t he volunteer some information? Maybe he thought I knew. I was so innocent, I didn’t even know what to ask.

  All I knew of sex was menstrual blood. I loved the sight of it upon my panties. Sometimes I would wash the blood off in the sink, scrubbing and scrubbing until the last trace of it was gone. Sometimes I just dropped the panties down the clothes chute. The panties floated down the wooden chute, landing atop my father’s dusty work clothes on the basement floor. A hidden tribute to Electra, Sophocles, Freud. Ah, my poor innocent father. Indra’s net, the net of jewels, in which each jewel contains the reflections of all the others. A universe of life is a drop of dew at any intersection. Every morning one of the maids would go downstairs and collect all the clothes and bring them up into the kitchen and sort them out and stuff them in the washing machine. Into the white tub they would go, there to mix their blood and dust and eggs with bleach and lye and water and emerge like vestal virgins to hang out on the clothesline. Later, they would be submitted to the ritual of the iron. A week later I would lift them from my dresser drawer and put them on and wear them off to spend my daddy’s money or drive his car. He, meanwhile, would be off somewhere in his khaki pants, wheeling and dealing to buy a road grader or a coal mine, never knowing his pockets contained the last vestige of a packet of his genes. Ah, sweet mysterious, boundless feast at which we so often wander blind and bound and starving. If we could understand one thing entirely, we might understand it all.

  There were four servants in the chocolate-colored house. Fannin, the cook, a maid named Adeline to clean the bedrooms, a maid named Edith to sweep the parlors and the porches, and a gardener to keep the yard and run errands. Later, when I came home with my babies, my father would add another servant for each grandson I delivered. I certainly never imagined taking care of them myself. They had come unbidden into the world and they were welcome to it but somebody else would have to keep them amused and fed. Babies bored me to death.

  All of that was waiting for me, presaged by the blood on my underpants, but I did not know or sense it. It was the golden summer, the summer we came home to the South to live among our people.

  In the days following my conversation with Mrs. Morgan I made every effort to be at the pool when she came. I would sit across from her reading. I finished Justine and moved on into Mountolive. I pictured Mrs. Morgan as Lelia Hosnani, the tragic heroine who gives up the beautiful Mountolive. Later when he returns to Alexandria as the British ambassador it is too late. Lelia’s beauty has been ruined by smallpox and she will never leave her summer-house. In one terrible scene she covers herself with veils, gets into her carriage, and goes to see him one last time. I was weeping all over the book as I read. “Where are you now?” Mrs. Morgan asked.

  “Where she goes to see him covered with veils.”

  “Oh yes. Well, adultery nearly always turns out badly. But it makes good fiction, doesn’t it? By the way, Rhoda, Clay is coming this weekend. We want to have dinner to celebrate. On Saturday night. Will you come out and join us? Nothing elaborate. Just the four of us.”

  “I’d love it. Sure I’ll come. How old did you say he is?”

  “He’s twenty. He’s a junior. I think you’ll like each other. I talked to your mother the other day, by the way. Did she tell you?”

  “No, I don’t think so. She said she met you though. Oh, God, she’s so boring. I hope you don’t think I’m anything like her.”

  “I thought she was charming. It isn’t good to hate your mother, Rhoda. It’s like hating part of yourself. Our parents create us. We have to make our peace with that, you know.”

  “I just mean she drives me crazy. She’s always watching me.”

  “She adores you. She was praising you to the skies. She told me about your newspaper column. She said people read your pieces on the radio.”

  “Oh, well, that was a long time ago. That’s over now. I don’t think about it anymore. I’m a lot more interested in making sure I don’t gain back any weight. But I forgot, you don’t think people should go on diets.”

  “I have too many opinions. Don’t take them to heart.”

  “I’m sorry I said that about my mother. It doesn’t mean I don’t like her. I like her a lot.”

  “Well, I’m glad you’ll come on Saturday. Come at six so I can show you the place. I want to show you the root cellar and the gardens. Are you sure you know the way?”

  “Of course. I’ll be there. I’ll show him everything about Dunleith that Charles William has shown me.”

  “On Saturday then. At six.” She sat back in her chair and I went over to the diving board and showed off doing half gainers and back dives for a while and then swam my laps. I was half thinking about giving up swimming entirely. I had always done it to keep my body thin, but now I didn’t really need it anymore.

  On Saturday afternoon I dressed up in a blue and white flowered dress and drove out to Fairfields, a small community ten miles from Dunleith with three streets of restored houses and a post office and a store. The place the Morgans had bought was an old farmhouse with brick chimneys and porches with brick floors. Patricia was waiting at the door when I drove up in the yard. Her son, Clay, was beside her. A tall, happy-looking young man with brown hair and soft brown eyes. Dr. Morgan, the mad scientist, was nowhere in sight. I walked up onto the porch.

  “Your dress is very pretty,” Patricia said.

  “Mother told me all about you,” Clay added. I looked him over. I liked him. There was no way anyone could help but like him. There was something childlike about him. He seemed so young compared to the young men I knew. The young men I knew drove cars fast and talked fast and moved in fast to put the make on me. This young man kept standing beside his mother. He kept waiting for me to do something.

  “Clay’s been in summer school at Brown,” Mrs. Morgan said. “He’s going to be at Woo
ds Hole when he goes back, to study marine life.”

  “It’s pretty silly,” he said. “It’s just a lot of work.”

  “Nonsense,” Patricia said. “Of course it’s not.”

  “Is your husband here?” I asked. “I’d really like to meet him if I could.”

  “Oh, Max. Of course. I think he’ll be out soon. I wanted to take you around first and show you what I’ve been doing.” We began to walk through the house. Patricia leaned on Clay’s arm. talking gaily as she showed us things she had been restoring, bricks that had been stripped, boards that had been uncovered and revealed, old artifacts she had found in the yard and was polishing. We went out to the root cellar and looked at that awhile. Every now and then I would meet Clay’s eye and he would smile at me. He seemed perfectly content. He seemed to think nothing else was supposed to happen but walking around looking at old junk his mother thought was worth polishing and hanging on the walls. “Clouds are gathering,” she said, pointing past the root cellar to the west. “It might rain later.”

  “I doubt it,” Clay said. “They’re stratocumulus. They’re too high for rain.”

  We moved up onto the porch again and were inspecting some cowbells Patricia had soaking in acid when Dr. Morgan appeared on the porch. He was a small stoop-shouldered man with a smile that made me move to his side. “I heard you were in Chicago when they made the first atom bomb,” I said. “I’ve never met a physicist. I’ve been hearing all about you.”

  “It was a nuclear reaction. Would you like to come into my study? Would you like to see the photographs?” He smiled the fabulous smile again and I forgot all about Clay and Patricia and followed him into a small office off the kitchen. It was very plain. Pads of yellow paper were on a steel desk. Books were on bookcases along the wall. There was a modern-looking light fixture hanging from the ceiling. The floor was covered with woven mats. He went around behind the desk and took a framed photograph from the wall and held it out to me. It was of three men standing in front of a cement bunker. “Enrico Fermi,” he said. “And one of the young assistants and me. This is where we did it, but it began in the minds of men. Many minds down through the years contributed to this moment. Flashes of intuition and years of thought. I was lucky to be there. I was in a lucky place.” He held one end of the photograph while I looked at it. I was too lucky, too fortunate. What was I doing in this room with this great man? This man was far away from anything I had ever known. This man was a quantum leap away from my reality. Why was he letting me stand here? Why was I being allowed to touch his picture? I looked up at him. He was smiling at me. He was very still. Did he know what he was giving me? Did he know how thick life was in that room at that moment, how distilled and thick and brilliant and translucent that moment would always be for me? Did he know what he was offering?