Inside, the big blond man sat at the kitchen table. He looked drunk, the Mason jar empty in front of him on the greasy flowered linoleum. He looked like he’d been crying, but it was hard to tell. Boaty put a document in front of him, a piece of paper that gave Harrison Boatwright Glass the right to marry the girl, and ownership of the farm. The man didn’t even ask what the paper was. He just signed his name carefully and in full.
Boaty got out the cash and then hesitated. “You made it clear to the girl that this is forever? No running off?”
“She understands that.”
“It says so in the contract you just signed. So you better be sure.”
“I’m sure. She knows the deal. She’s yours, mister.”
Then, after Boaty had put the cash money on the table, without counting it the father handed over her birth certificate, yellowed and stained, and all he said was, “When do I get my tractor?”
CHAPTER SIX
WHEN THEY GOT to the cattle guard at the end of the rutted dirt drive that led to the gravel road that led to the blacktop back to town, Sylvan touched Boaty’s arm and said two of the only four words she was to say that day: “Please stop.” She said it in a gentle voice with an accent that was strangely refined.
She turned her head and looked back through the cloud of dust at her family gathered on the porch. The father had joined his wife, his hand in her hand, both shy and sad. Around them, the brothers and sisters, one boy with a baby of his own on his arm, stood and stared. Sylvan looked for two full minutes, still, not moving, like she was taking a photograph in her mind, the hot breeze from the road spinning blonde cobwebs of her hair around her head. Then the family all scattered, running off to do chores or play in the fields.
The father stood alone on the porch, and the light caught the tears in his eyes as he forlornly waved at his leaving child, and she waved back, although he could never have seen her. She seemed to want to call out, to cry some last thing to him, but she made no sound at all. After a time she turned back and looked straight ahead. There were tears on her cheeks. She did not brush them away, or try in any way to hide them.
“Now?” Boaty asked.
She nodded, and they rode the twenty miles back to town in silence. At Boaty’s house, a justice of the peace waited, along with Will Haislett and Alma, who had been called to be witnesses because Will was practically the only man around who would stand up for him. With them stood the foremen of two of Boaty’s farms, hired hands standing awkwardly in dirty shoes and clean white shirts, buttoned at the collar, their big red hands fumbling with handkerchiefs in the heat.
Sylvan signed some papers without even bothering to read them. What did it matter what the paper said? Then they stood in front of the justice, and he said all the words, and then she said her only other words of the day, “I do.” And that was that.
Louise, the colored woman, had put out some sliced ham and some potato salad and a coconut cake. Nobody ate much. Will and Boaty had nothing to say to each other any more, except to talk about the old days, and that didn’t seem right on his wedding day, so they kept quiet. Alma tried to get Sylvan to talk, but she just looked pretty and nodded her head, as though she had been hypnotized. The justice regretted his own hot dinner waiting at home, and the foremen were embarrassed, for their employer and for the girl, so they ate quickly what little they ate, and then they left. Will and Alma stayed a while longer in the awkward silence, with Sylvan, now Mrs. Glass, sitting still and pretty as a porcelain doll, but they were gone pretty quickly, too, and the colored woman cleaned up while Boaty and his new bride sat in the parlor, and then they were alone and Sylvan took off her shoes.
Boaty thought he should maybe talk to her, but he’d almost never been alone with a woman except for his mother, and he had no idea what to say.
“You need a bathroom?” was all he could think of, so he showed her the way, and stood outside listening while she was in there, noticing that she didn’t wash her hands after the toilet flushed. It kind of made him nervous.
When she came out, he looked at her, and, without a word, walked in and began filling the tub. He handed her some fancy French soap he’d bought, his only wedding present, and took her gently by the elbow and led her into the bathroom, then left her alone. There was silence for a long time, as though she didn’t know what to do, then Boaty heard her clothes dropping to the floor, and heard her slowly settling herself into the water.
He listened to it all. She was naked in the hot water. It excited him.
After half an hour, she came out, dressed, her hair clinging to her damp neck. They went back to sit in the parlor, but he could still smell it on her, or thought he could, the pig shit, the outhouse, the moonshine that had run in her family’s veins for generations. He got up, filled the bath again, and she seemed to know what to do, and he stood outside the door again, listening.
She never said a word to him all day. She didn’t smile, she didn’t look troubled, either. She was just blank.
He made her bathe three times that afternoon, until all the towels were damp on their hooks, and he finally could sit in his own living room with his own wife and not smell the stink of country on her. By the time she was done, clean to his satisfaction, her skin had the color of the sun setting outside, and it was time to eat again, so they sat down to two plates left out by Louise, covered in wax paper, and they ate a little, and then they went upstairs to bed.
She was so shy, and so inept, that he knew her father had been telling the truth. He hadn’t expected her to rush at him, but he also realized he didn’t exactly know what to do, either.
So he just took off his clothes, except for his boxer shorts, big, voluminous, patterned things, tented now, he noticed with some embarrassment. He laid his suit and tie and shirt neatly on a chair. Then he lay down on the bed, grunting with the effort to lower himself, a big, hairy melon on a chenille bedspread. After a while, she began to take off her clothes, but not before she drew down the shades, even though it was only half dark and even though it would serve to make the room even more stifling. She turned away from him, and, naked now, backed her way toward the bed. Just the way her mother had told her. She was just barely seventeen years old. She felt older than her own mother.
It caught her by surprise when the back of her knees hit the edge of the mattress, and she tumbled back against his belly, and he saw her for the first time, the first time he had seen any woman naked, in fact and, even though he knew what to expect, he was still startled, startled by the vastness of her, her expanse of skin, her breasts, her deep pink nipples, the shimmer of her skin, pale and powdery everywhere except her arms and her face. All the women from all the magazines under his bed were now lying on him, touching his skin with skin that was sweet but strangely frightening, unlike the girls in the pictures, whose skin was glossy and inviting.
He pulled her on top of him, and kissed her. She didn’t kiss him back. He rolled her over and lay on top of her as she closed her eyes, and he did what he was supposed to do, what he’d waited forty-eight years to do in his own bed. She didn’t respond, but she didn’t seem to mind, either.
It didn’t take long. When it was over, he lay beside her in the room that was now dark, neither of them even close to sleep. She got up and went to the bathroom and, when she came back, the blood was gone from her legs, and Boaty looked down and discovered to his horror that there was also blood on his shorts, so he pulled a clean pair from the drawer and went into the bathroom and put them on. He didn’t know what to do with the soiled ones. He didn’t want Louise to find them in the laundry basket, so when he came out, his new blue shorts replaced with his favorite green ones, the color of spring leaves, he rolled the blue ones up and put them at the back of his closet, underneath some shoes, to be tossed out later with the trash.
When he lay back down on the bed, grunting again, she didn’t even turn to look at him. He took her hand as they lay in the dark, waiting for sleep, his sweaty palm engulfing her dry one until she pulled it
away and rubbed it on the bedspread.
In the dark, afterward, listening to the night, he decided he didn’t think much of it. He didn’t see what all the fuss was about. Maybe he’d done it wrong, but he didn’t think so. It wasn’t the kind of thing Boaty would think about himself, anyway, and, besides, how many ways could there be to do it?
No, he didn’t think it was all that great, this thing he’d waited for and dreamed about for forty-eight lonely years, and he didn’t suppose that he would make it a regular thing. Maybe once a week. Maybe.
CHAPTER SEVEN
BUT ALL IN all, Boaty Glass was pretty pleased with himself. The next day, he drove his new wife into Lexington to get some clothes, the kind of clothes that might make the other women in the town turn their heads. They went to Grossman’s. Almost every Southern town has one clothing store run by Jewish people, and in Lexington it was the Grossmans who kept the ladies looking up to date. Boaty watched as Sylvan tried on the clothes, and he got more and more pleased with himself every time she came out of the dressing room. She had a nice figure on her, full and round, and the Grossmans looked her up and down and pulled out things that looked like they had been made just for her. It gave him a funny feeling in his heart, watching her, a rush to wrap it all up, the dresses and the suits and the hats and gloves she had to be taught to wear, and take her back home, dress her up, and just walk her up and down the main street in Brownsburg all day long.
In Arthur and Ginger Grossman’s hands, Sylvan became the thing he had driven all those miles on all those country roads to find, had sat in all those parlors in Staunton and Charlottesville, drinking cups of condescending tea under stony unforgiving glances so he could bring her home. She might be the fake version of that thing, but, like they say, when she stood on top of Boaty’s money, she stood pretty tall.
She had a natural grace to her, in the way she walked, in the way her hands moved up to rearrange her hair or smooth an eyebrow. And she seemed to take Boaty as he came, his hulking body with that faint smell of sweat, his age, whatever it was, and she didn’t know and didn’t seem to care—as long as he was older than eighteen, he might as well have been a hundred. He kind of loved her, but then, he loved his car the way he loved his money, and he had loved his sainted mother, but this girl was not his delicate mother. This was a flesh-and-blood woman. He’d seen her naked. He never got up the courage to ask himself whether she loved him, too.
Some things he had to teach her, like how to hold a fork and knife in the right way, how to put a napkin in her lap, but most things he only had to tell her once. She was that quick.
The first time he took her to town, to church on Sunday, she caused a stir. She turned some heads. She was by far the prettiest girl in town, and she made the other teenaged girls look unfinished, somehow. She was voluptuous where they were meager, and, of course, she was married to Boaty, and everybody knew the desperate and disastrous course of Boaty’s various courtships. Nobody knew who she was, exactly, except Alma, who remembered from her days of going out to Arnold’s Valley and trying to teach those children some few simple facts about the world, and Alma knew the girl wouldn’t remember her, or, if she did, she wouldn’t acknowledge their acquaintance, so Alma didn’t say anything, except to Will, later, at lunch, and Will laughed his head off. “Arnold’s Valley?” He laughed at the whole idea.
Then Will told just one or two people, and that was enough, so by the end of the week, everybody in town knew exactly who she was and where and what she had come out of. But still. But still.
She didn’t talk like a hillbilly, that was the remarkable thing. She didn’t talk like anybody in Brownsburg, anybody in the county. She talked like somebody you’d hear on the radio, which, of course, was where she’d learned to talk like that in the first place. She talked like Helen Trent.
Boaty liked showing her off, and so, once he felt Brownsburg had been suitably impressed, he took her back into Lexington, where they had supper at the Dutch Inn. Then they went to the movies. The movies cost a quarter apiece, but they also cost him—and Boaty didn’t know this at the time, how could he?—they also cost him much much more. The movies cost him his wife, because after the lights went down in the State Theater, and the first image flickered on the screen, and she saw those enormous, beautiful faces and heard them talking in that way that didn’t sound like any country except the country of the movies, Sylvan never belonged to him again. From that night on, she belonged, body and soul, to the movies.
The movie they saw was The Big Sleep. The plot didn’t even begin to make sense to Sylvan, but then there was Lauren Bacall, a girl almost her own age who had made herself up out of her own imagination, or so it seemed, falling in love with Bogart, a man who was totally and completely authentically what he was. She felt in her heart he wasn’t even acting; he was just that man who talked like that and smoked cigarettes and who was obviously old enough to be Bacall’s father. She knew right away that she was Bacall, and suddenly her black silk dress from Grossman’s felt drab and itchy on her skin, as though it didn’t fit her right, didn’t belong to her. And it was clear as a bell that Boaty wasn’t Bogart.
Sylvan took in every line of every dress Bacall wore, the drape of a suit, the flow of a gown, the sparkle of a brooch, the actual words the characters spoke flowing past her as though in a language she’d never heard before, all money and music. She imagined her own hair falling like that, in soft, gleaming waves around her face. She didn’t watch the movie so much as she watched the way Lauren Bacall moved her beautiful mouth, and heard the way she breathed sex and glamour into her every word. She imagined Lauren Bacall’s body moving beneath those clothes, and she could see in Bogart’s eyes that he was thinking the same thing.
The next day, Boaty gone, she stood in front of the mirror and lowered her chin and raised her eyes and looked at her reflection the way Bacall had looked at Bogart, trying to make with her mouth the sounds and syllables she had heard coming from Bacall. She practiced for hours, until she finally realized that she wasn’t Bacall, she didn’t have her body, and her neck got tired from keeping her chin on her chest all the time the way she did. She was somebody, but she wasn’t Bacall.
That night at supper, Sylvan said to Boaty, “Harrison? Will we go on a honeymoon?”
The question took him aback. He figured he’d already spent enough on her.
“It hadn’t occurred to me, baby.”
She got up from the table, sat on his lap and wrapped her arms around his neck, “Well, Harrison, honey, I’d like to. People do. Even my daddy and mama, they did. And I want to.”
He didn’t say anything. She kissed him on the neck, and he smelled the perfume he’d bought her at Grossman’s, Eau de Nile, by Elizabeth Arden. “I think it’d be nice.” She kissed him again, and he felt her tongue dart onto his neck, leaving a small wet spot he tried not to wipe with his hand, but he did, anyway.
“And where would you want to go? I’m not saying . . . where? Niagra Falls? I hear that’s popular.”
“I want to go to Hollywood, California.”
He laughed. “You say what? All that way? What in hell for?”
“I want to see where they live. Those movie stars. I want to eat in the restaurants they eat in. The Brown Derby. I want to go to Warner Brothers studio, if they’ll let us, and see where they make those movies. Is it far?”
“It’s all the way across the damned country. The whole country. Takes five days on a train.”
“I’ve never been on a train. I want to go on a train to Hollywood and see a movie star, face to face. Please, Daddy.”
He seemed confused.
“Will we sleep on the train?” she asked.
“Yes, if . . . yes, we would get a compartment and sleep on the train. And eat on the train and brush our teeth on the damned train.”
“All by ourselves?”
“Well, of course, by ourselves.”
“I’d be so nice to you, sweetie. I’d be just as sweet as pie.”
Boaty wasn’t quite sure what she meant by that, but his mind started working, and there were some things, some things he’d heard about, some things he’d heard girls could do, and while he wasn’t sure he wanted to do them, he knew he was supposed to want to do them, and if Hollywood was what it was going to take to find out, then he figured he might as well give it a shot. It began to seem like it wasn’t such a bad idea.
So, of course they went, five days there and five days back, in a Pullman car, and a week in a fancy hotel on Hollywood Boulevard, the Roosevelt, cost a fortune. He never talked about it, but whatever he found out about what women could do didn’t seem to make him any less cranky or mean.
That was pretty much it, for Boaty. He’d seen the world, he thought, although the limits of the world for him outside of Brownsburg were forever confined to Fort Bragg, North Carolina, and Hollywood, California, and that was just fine with him. When Boaty came home from that last place, a place so vile and filled with bad food and rude people and high prices for even the smallest things and too much skin on everybody and too many teeth in every mouth, he’d pretty much had it.
But Sylvan, that’s a different story. Sylvan Glass was just getting started. That’s why she needed Claudie Wiley.
CHAPTER EIGHT
CLAUDETTA WILEY WAS a genius. She was born that way. She lived in a falling-down old clapboard house way out on the edge of town with the other black folks, with an idiot daughter nobody had seen since she was a baby so maybe she was there and maybe she wasn’t, and maybe she was an idiot and maybe not. Claudie lived in the last house before the fields started, and her house was so crestfallen that even the other black people wouldn’t have gone there if they didn’t need to, and some people said it was green and some people said it was gray, but there wasn’t anybody who didn’t know that Claudie had a gift that was astonishing. Claudie Wiley could sew.
She was a short but majestic woman, pale-skinned and wild-haired and big featured “high yellow,” we called it in those days. She had a slender frame from the waist up, but from her hips down, she was big-limbed and thick. She had eyes that looked right into you, without hesitation or the shyness that most black people affected around white people. She never deferred, because she knew the genius that was in her long slender fingers, needle-threading fingers, and she was sure of herself in a way that didn’t need to say what it was she was sure of. There wasn’t anybody like her, and, like Sylvan Glass, the solid being of her character and her way was fashioned out of a fantasy that had come to her as a young girl, but with a gift that could only have come from God.