I trooped to the second floor, but baulked at the transom of the master bedroom. When we were kids we were warned to knock before entering and if we were ever discovered here without permission we got into trouble. The room retained an off-limits quality, but I forced myself inside.
It was a big, attractive room, with an arched double window in the pavilion whose antique glass rippled the scalloped slate porch roof below. Late afternoon sun glinted in the dresser’s jars and little boxes that had entranced me as a girl.
The bureau drew me, and at first I touched things—unscrewed the blush, patted foundation on my cheek to discover it matched. I sniffed the cold cream, shook talc in my hands and spanked it off. When I opened the frayed red jewellery box, it tinkled brightly with Brahms’s lullaby; I silenced it hurriedly, as if I might be discovered.
Just as on the cat’s-away nights I’d disobeyed and crept in here anyway, I played through beads, humming. I coiled her wedding pearls in my palm, worked the neat closure on the rhinestone choker, sorting necklaces not into troves to keep and give away but putting all the green ones in a pile.
After piddling fruitlessly with Mother’s jewellery, I slumped back on the bed, surrounded by the nosegay of her jars. I didn’t cry; I might have liked to.
I reached forward and pulled open a drawer, rifling scarves, until my fingers hit a bundle of rubber-banded correspondence. I unfolded a letter: ‘Dearest Eugenia…’ It was from my father on a trip to Washington when they were parted. ‘I met Archie Ellman at the SCLC yesterday, and he thinks Mark Coe is the best candidate for the fundraising position—’
I couldn’t finish reading it. Because I was prying, because I was afraid of unearthing hurtful secrets better left interred? No, I was bored. The events he described were meetings, and I found no mention of me at all. Nothing would have delighted me more than to locate a smutty passage, or to wrestle a girlie magazine
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from under the mattress, but the most depressing of my parents’ secrets was that they didn’t have any. I sure hoped at my own death there would be something shocking in my chest of drawers.
I resolved to be disciplined. I marched to the closet and flung open the door.
The hangers were jammed. She had lots of clothes, being fond of bargains and mortified by throwing anything away. I reached to the far end to screech two hangers apart, revealing a floor-length white cotton with a Nehru collar.
You should keep that.
Ten years before when I’d been home from New York with nothing but bluejeans, my parents had been giving a dinner that night. Ordered to this closet to find something ‘nice’ to wear, I’d been confronted with this same array of big buttons and tie-bows. Looking for something simple, I’d tried on this white Nehru. As I examined the fit I saw my mother’s expression battle behind me in the mirror: rancour flicked to admiration, back to rancour again. I was her daughter; she should want me to be pretty. But I looked better in the dress than she did.
‘You should keep that,’ she’d said harshly.
I hadn’t. I’d hung it back here as a malicious reminder of what I looked like in it. I doubt she ever wore it again.
I unhooked the dress, pleated from hanging. Curious, I dragged off my jeans and tried it on.
The straight-cut snagged on my hips, which had settled a bit. Frankly, I looked dumpy. I wondered if my mother would be gratified. So this is inheritance. Mother, you no sooner pass on your looks than take them back.
Behind the Nehru was a smart brown check with pert white collar that I couldn’t remember seeing her in since I was in third grade; no doubt she had years before ceased to fit into it. I remembered the dress because she had worn it one day when I’d forgotten my lunch (again).
She poked her head into my spelling class, whispered a few apologetic words to my teacher as she delivered my Yogi Bear lunchbox, and waved to me. I know children are chronically embarrassed by parents, but that morning I basked. The girl in the next desk leaned over and exclaimed, ‘Was that your mother?’
I nodded.
‘She looks like a movie star!’
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For the rest of the day I was myself a celebrity. They couldn’t believe that I, a klutzy schoolgirl with thin hair, crooked teeth, and psoriasis on my ankles, was related to that.
Going back even further in time, at the very end of the rack was my mother’s wedding dress, preserved in clear plastic. Though the satin had yellowed a bit, the gown held its form, the delicately puckered bodice cinching to a petite waist, gently flaring to accommodate the next slight, seductive curve. That by her wedding Eugenia Hadley Hamill had been one staggeringly attractive woman became a bone of contention when I was in university, when on the phone with a classmate I referred to my mother’s good looks. Anna, who had met my mother, scoffed, ‘Get off it! Your mother’s fat!’
My ear had tingled at the receiver. ‘She’s put on a little weight. But she used to be a knock-out.’
As Anna abjured that I must let go of this sad mythology, my umbrage rose. Off the phone, I rummaged for my copy of my mother’s wedding picture, with that inhalation of a smile and a figure to stop your heart.
I cycled to Anna’s flat, said nothing when she opened the door, and presented the photograph. Diffident, she glanced at the portrait casually and handed it back. ‘Not bad,’ she said with a shrug.
Not bad?
I might have felt chagrined that to friends I exalted my father’s heroics for the underprivileged, but only flaunted my mother’s waist.
Yet she was valedictorian in both high school and college; she founded a local day care centre and was president of the NC Consumer’s Council—
No use. The most important thing about my mother to me was that she was beautiful.
But look, I observed, shrieking hangers across the rail: the newer dresses had gathered elastic waistbands; sizes were no longer sixes and sevens. The eights and nines were knits, expanding to encompass a generous self-deceit. I didn’t want these dresses. I was too terrified that, sooner or later, they would fit me.
For if my mother lived ‘beside herself’, there was no one where she actually was; an elusive sensation of emptiness at last manifested itself in her diet. Deep inside, my mother was hungry. Her amplitude cruelly coincided with the in-house competition getting stiff. As her fourteen-year-old in a first pair of high heels
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twirled in the mirror, my mother had snapped, ‘I used to have legs like that!’ and stalked off to cut shortening.
My triumphalism was brief. The flake-by-flake larding of her ambro-sial pies soon weighed as heavily on me as on my mother. I’d declared more than once in public, ‘My mother was much better looking than I ever was,’ and I said that with pride. My waist had never been that tiny, my cheekbones weren’t as high. My feet were a size larger; my toes splayed; though I had her olive skin I also freckled. I’d clung to these shortcomings; I craved handicaps. Of course I’d won the contest. At twenty-five years her junior, I was cheating.
Now she was dead I could defend her: fine, she got heavier, but it wasn’t fair, Anna, to call her fat. She was forever slimming, and until the accident delivered her half-eaten pie wedges to my father’s lap. Past forty she drew wolf whistles; at fifty she qualified as handsome. When my father died she had a choice: to pine away to nothing, or to balloon.
If, no drinker, she hit the chocolates, who could blame her? Siren for forty years, she may have handed the baton of family fox to me with some relief—she was tired of salad. The weight hurried her heart attack, but she wanted to die. The real accident, I had heard her claim more than once, was that she wasn’t in the car.
I nestled my face between Eugenia McCrea’s scratchy over-washed synthetics and sagging expanded knitwear. Oh, Mother. My alarm at your spreading backside was too much on my own account. But any man’s head I ever turned was turned for you. Any sway of my hip, every gleam of my good white teeth came from your fine saddle. At my most magnetic moments I h
ave most resembled you. I might offer as consolation that lately my own elbows dimple, my neck is creased, my stomach has an ominous curve, except you were far too generous a woman despite single moments of understandable bitterness to take satisfaction from my weakness for linguini. No, I think you would only mourn for my thighs as I mourned for yours, only forgive my pasta as I failed to forgive your pies. It was a tawdry woman’s prayer. And I repented that I had not put my striking inheritance to its most redempt-ive use, by ducking into the classrooms of nine-year-old girls over a lunchbox to make their day. But I would not apologize for carrying that icon of nacreous satin and lush brown eyes from house to house, pointing: that was my mother. Doesn’t she look like a movie star?
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Several garments rumpled to the floor. I sighed and picked up the dresses; all this emotionalism was no help. I had a chore to do, and was torn between binning everything and retaining the lot. Yet if there was anything to be gained from this larger exercise of death and transference, it was to acknowledge that no inheritance need be absolute—that each generation wields partial power over what to keep and what to discard.
In the end I developed a system: I would rescue the exotic, the dream—her kaftan from Ghana, kimono from Tokyo, sari from Delhi.
I would salvage my mother’s alternative lives, what she might have looked like born elsewhere or at another time—as me, for example. The more matronly frocks, with their belts pulled first at the third, then fourth, fifth holes, notching the progress of her dejection, I folded for Goodwill, for it does a generation a disservice to save the tarnish on its glory.
I’m not sure what got into me, but when the closet was cleared, I retrieved a floral sleeveless from the Goodwill bag—an older, smaller dress she had worn at the opening of her day care centre. I put it on. I was daring myself. It fit. On the back of the shoe tree were white pumps just broken down enough for my feet to squeeze in. Inside a top shelf hatbox I knew I’d find a curly brunette wig, for when her permanent was waning. I shoved my browning blonde straggles under its net.
Seated at the dresser, I unzipped the make-up kit, smearing my face with foundation, tightening my lips in an O to apply pink gloss, and dusting my cheekbones with mauve blush. Clip-on earrings pinched me to consider that maybe this prank was nasty. A string of aqua beads completed the effect, which was—as I stood before the full-length mirror and recited, ‘I thought you liked my pie!’—gobsmacking.
I crept down to the kitchen, feet swelling over the shoes. The table was deserted. Rooting through three storeys to locate that overly private, inexplicably contrary youngest, I felt possessed. Back upstairs, I tapped on the dovecot entrance with the same tentative don’t-mind-me and I’m-coming-up-anyway that had driven him to the tower deck in December hail.
‘Twooo-maaannn!’
‘Corlis?’ came from above, with a touch of puzzlement. By the old rules at least, his sister could just walk up.
I perched the prim white toes on the tips of his refinished stairs, wondering if he’d pulled up the carpet so he could hear 131
her coming. Pigeons warbled warning from the roof. I tucked at the wig for errant sandy hairs. My step was timid, hands clasped at my waist in the posture of a woman who does not want to be a bother but has had far too many cups of coffee on her own today.
Truman was in his living room on the Victorian couch, frowning over a philosophy text. I poked my head in the doorway, hands pawed on the frame.
When he looked up his face drained of colour, as if a dusty window shade were pulled from brow to beard.
I’d an opening line ready: ‘I made you and Averil a rhubarb cream…!’
but uttered nothing. It seems not only had I made a thin joke, or one in poor taste—I hadn’t made a joke at all. As my too-perfect performance of my mother’s slamming kitchen cabinets suggested, maybe you can’t disguise yourself as what you already are.
‘That’s amazing,’ he said leadenly. ‘Take it off.’
My face heated until I could feel the make-up melt. I tried to grin, but my mouth curled up falsely so much like the latter Eugenia McCrea that the smile made matters worse. I stuttered, ‘Sorry,’ and clattered downstairs, to rub off the Almay Natural Cover with Kleenex after Kleenex sopped with cold cream. Though traces of foundation streaked my cheeks all night, the vision from that doorway would linger longer.
I expect Truman Adlai has never thought of his sister in quite the same way since.
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10
We were notified the will was out of probate. Hugh had expedited the title search and asset liquidation, I hoped, out of consideration for the fact that Truman and I were skint, but I later suspected extra pressure was brought to bear from a third party known since a colicky infancy for getting his way and fast. The Fourth Child, however, was still not paid off, and Hugh had received another letter, pointedly less polite, demanding the legacy be resolved. Smug in its assurance of our father’s favour, the ACLU was the spoiled and peevish sort of sibling all children detest.
The very next day the doorbell rang. It was 19 December.
A functionary pumped my hand. Bobbing in an ocean of navy poly-sester, he flapped his papers and grinned as if I had just won the Publisher’s Clearing House Sweepstakes. That’s North Carolina for you—even a Wake County Sheriff comes on like your long lost buddy.
‘Troo-man!’ I sang up the stairwell, capturing the infuriating gaity with which my mother had roused her sullen children for Sunday school. ‘We have a visitor!’
Truman was not by nature well disposed towards strangers of any kind. I had suggested to him that everyone starts out a stranger; if you don’t get past that hurdle you don’t make friends ever, but then that was Truman, he didn’t make friends, ever. He could be so warm and garrulous, I didn’t understand how he’d gotten through all of high school, a ten-year job whose only conceivable redemption was chatting up clients, and five semesters of university without once bringing anyone home. I think he was scared other people wouldn’t like him and so beat them to it by disliking them first. This particular yuletide pop-by was unlikely to break him of the habit.
‘What’s the problem?’
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‘This is Mr Benson, Troom. He’s a—?’
‘Process-server. Just need you two to John Hancock these here papers, and then I’ll run them back to the courthouse. Won’t take but a jiff.’
‘Would you like to come in?’
Truman gloomed.
I drew Benson into the parlour. ‘Does this have to do with the probate?’
‘No, ma’am. A Mr, ah—’ he checked his folder—‘Mordecai D. McCrea is filing suit for partition. These forms here are just a formality. Say you’ve been served and know to appear at the hearing and all. Nothing to get het up about.’
‘What if we don’t sign?’ Truman jutted his chin.
Benson looked embarrassed. ‘That’d just put me to the trouble of writing out an affidavit swearing you’ve been served. Somebody must have connections, though. Court’s backed up to kingdom come, but ya’ll’s hearing’s next week. Twenty-fourth.’
‘We have a hearing on Christmas Eve?’ asked Truman.
‘Just another day, where I work. Get Christmas off, New Year’s, that’s it.’
‘Maybe you could show us where—?’ I asked.
The sheriff spread his documents on the coffee table.
‘You don’t have to be so damned cooperative,’ Truman growled.
‘Well it’s not his fault, is it?’ I whispered back.
‘Say, ya’ll aren’t related to Sturges McCrea, are you?’
‘A.k.a. Dad.’ I smiled; Truman rolled his eyes.
‘Heckuva guy. That explains how this moved up on the docket. Terrible shame about that accident. Can’t say I agreed with him on that bussing folderol—caused more trouble than it was worth and now it’s the African Americans putting up a stink about riding across town. But Sturges start in a direction, he keep going, yessir.’
‘That’s for sure,’ I said, thinking Benson could as well be describing my older brother. I added to Truman, ‘Wouldn’t even stop at a Texaco.’
‘Texaco invest in South Africa or something?’ Benson gaped at the cornice and chandelier. ‘Never would have pictured Sturges McCrea in a place like this.’
‘Sturges McCrea didn’t picture himself in a place like this 134
either. Mammy’s out back making Scarlett a dress out of drapes, but we try to keep the tenant farmers’ jump-down-turn-around-pick-a-bale-of-cotton sotto voce so the neighbours don’t complain.’
‘Old-fashioned and the dickens to heat, I bet. But this house is a prize, it is.’
That’s exactly what Heck-Andrews was, a prize. But I had not yet discerned whether the reward was for the best behaviour or the worst, nor if it had any real value or was merely an oversized trophy.
‘Sign here, and here, too…You sure don’t have much of a tar-heel accent, do you, miss?’
Having established my paternity, I couldn’t pull off English origins this time. ‘I never did, much,’ I said.
‘Sure you didn’t, Corlis,’ said Truman. His signature was a jagged scribble; his capital C tore the page.
‘You two have a merry Christmas now—’
‘How likely is that?’ said Mr Friendly.
Benson had decided to leave, and I think he made the right decision.
The veins in Truman’s temples were beginning to pulse. ‘Take care now. Gotta scoot.’
‘This is ridiculous!’ Truman shouted when the man was gone. ‘Why is this going to court?’
For once I didn’t quiet him with collusive disparagement of Mordecai’s character by concurring that our brother was a bully and simply wanted to watch us cower and scramble to keep our ancestral home. I had some dawning appreciation for why Mordecai would bring the ownership of this house to a head, for when I considered telling Truman right then, Troom, I know you and I have talked about buying this house together, but I’m not sure that would be the best thing for you and…(I’d have sounded so unpersuasive already, like such a shyster, and he would stop me and say what do you mean Corlis, and I would stutter…) Truman, I’ve talked to Mordecai about maybe buying the house with him instead, and you and Averil could—Gentle as he seemed, I had a feeling that Truman was wholly capable of socking me in the jaw.