“Mainly the fact that Momma had a stroke.”
“It's a damn shame is what it is,” he said. “But I can't say it's a surprise. I saw this coming a mile away. She's been failing for the past year. I talked to the doctor this morning and he says she needs full-time care.” Faye had forgotten how much she disliked his voice, the lazy pace and occasional crackerisms. Neither of their parents had ever spoken like that. But despite the trips to Europe and four years at a boarding school in Connecticut, Jimmy had somehow managed to become a good old boy, the kind of guy who attended cockfights and tossed the N word around. Perhaps that was his way of rebelling against his heritage and upbringing.
“Well, I'm here now. And she's got Martha.”
“Well, sure, but what happens when you skip back to New York? I'm talking about professional care. What she needs is a real facility.”
“I'm not skipping back to New York. And Momma doesn't want to go to a home. She's already got one.”
“You're going to take care of her? Come on, now, sis. When did you get so damn interested? I can't even remember the last time you visited.”
“It was last Christmas, actually.”
“Well, we're deeply honored to have you back.”
“What are you doing with the clock?”
“Just going to have it fixed. Damn thing hasn't worked right in years.”
She watched as they wrestled the clock out the front door, feeling paralyzed and impotent, as if stuck in one of those dreams where speech wouldn't come. After all these years, she was still intimidated by her brother. He was twelve years older and had always treated her like a child, with a mixture of sarcasm and condescension. He had once, when Faye was seven, stuffed her beloved cat Twinkie in the dryer and turned it on, forcing her to watch as the terrified cat tumbled through what seemed to her like a hundred revolutions, until her screams finally brought Martha to the rescue. She watched now as the car rolled away down the long gravel drive, furious with herself for letting him steal the clock.
Over the years in New York, Faye spoke with her mother weekly and even more often with Martha, the housekeeper who had lived with the family for more than forty years and who had originally served as Faye's nanny. Sybil, she'd said, was living increasingly in the past, even before this latest stroke. The physical effects were blessedly minimal; she retained most of her mobility and speech. The doctors were less certain about her mental processes, though reluctant to speculate.
“But there's no reason we can't take care of her at home, is there?” “She needs to be watched pretty closely,” Dr. Cheek said. “I'd recommend hiring a nurse, at least for the first few weeks. But at this time I see no need for institutional care.”
“I'd be happy to stop by and check up on her,” the younger, good-looking doctor said. He seemed to be flirting, but she had to remind herself that this wasn't New York, that the mean temperature of normal social interactions was much warmer here. Quite possibly, Dr. Harrington was simply demonstrating the dedication and concern appropriate to his profession. Faye was so used to deriding the ritual politesse her mother so cherished, she had to remind herself good manners weren't necessarily insincere.
“Where are we going?” her mother asked for the third time, as they pulled off the interstate.
“We're going home, Momma.”
“As soon as we get there, I want you to march up to your room and change out of those horrible dungarees. You look as if you're reporting for work on a road crew.”
“They're called jeans.”
“I know what they are. And they're not appropriate attire for a young lady.”
“It's the eighties, Momma.”
“I don't want your father to see you in that outfit.”
Faye said nothing. She had decided to wait till they were settled in to address this subject.
But when they arrived home, Sybil wanted to see her roses. She seemed utterly lucid. “What's happened to the clock?” she said as soon as they walked in.
“Jimmy's taken it to be fixed.”
“It hasn't worked in twenty-seven years,” she said. “Why should he fix it right now?”
Her denuded dining room, meanwhile, was concealed behind pocket doors. Faye walked with her up to the master bedroom, which she hadn't entered in years. Everything was more or less as she remembered it from her childhood—the hand-painted wallpaper from Switzerland that offered up a series of fantastical Chinese vistas; the king-size bed with its upholstered headboard, the feather mattress and box spring ordered specially from the same firm that supplied Claridge's, which Hunt claimed had the most comfortable mattresses in the world; the white vanity where her mother had attempted to teach her the rudiments of makeup. On the other side of the room was her father's dressing table, with monogrammed leather stud boxes, a sterling cigarette lighter, an ivory comb, a tortoise-shell cigarette case, a souvenir ashtray from Augusta National, seven golf trophies and a small gallery of framed family photos. The silver was all bright and polished, as it had been during his lifetime. She wondered if the pearl-handled revolver was still in the top drawer.
“It's so nice to have you home,” Sybil said.
“It's nice to be here.”
“Have you been making friends at school?”
“More friends than I know what to do with.”
“You can never have too many friends, Faye.”
“Why don't you rest, Momma. I'll call you for dinner.”
Sybil reached out and took her hand.
“I know your brother wants to put me in a home,” she said.
To Faye, it seemed remarkable that her mother could have returned so rapidly to the present. “Don't worry. Nobody's going to put you in a home as long as I'm here.”
“You know the Yankees, when they invaded, put your great-great-grandmother Eliza out of her home.”
“I know, Momma.”
“For five years she and your great-great-granddaddy Isaac had to live over a dry-goods store on Broadway while the Yankee officers slept in her bed and spit tobacco juice on her rugs. She died of a broken heart in those rooms over the dry-goods store.”
No matter how many times Faye had heard this story, she'd never been certain what a dry-goods store was, or its significance in the story. Would it have been worse if it had been, say, a hardware store?
Sybil didn't mention her husband again until the following evening when Martha called her to dinner in the breakfast room.
“We can't sit down till Hunt comes home,” she said. She was perched in her favorite armchair in the sunroom, looking out across the lawn, beyond which the orange Mediterranean roof tiles of a gated community called Tuscan Acres rose over the privet hedge.
Faye sat down across from her and took her hand, which was almost translucent, and freckled with age spots in spite of the white gloves she wore so often. “Daddy's not with us anymore, Momma. He passed away three years ago.”
It was as if this was the first time she'd heard the news; tears welled in her eyes and her face contorted with grief.
Faye squeezed her hand as hard as she dared. “Don't you remember, Momma?”
She shook her head, the tears now rolling down her cheeks.
Faye had not been present when her mother learned of her husband's death, and she was witnessing now what she'd missed then. Her grief seemed utterly fresh and unbounded. She appeared to be almost literally melting, slumping lower and lower as the tears poured down her face, a woman devastated by loss. It was almost unbearable to watch.
“What will I do without him?” she finally managed to say.
“You've been doing without him for a while now, Momma.”
This scene repeated itself twice more over the course of that week, and each time Sybil was inconsolable. Faye finally decided just to say that Hunt was on a business trip. In fact, she herself had started tearing up whenever she broached the subject of her father's death.
Dr. Harrington came by, as promised, dressed for tennis. If his legs
were any indication, Faye imagined he was very fast on the court. He appeared to be in his mid-thirties, roughly her own age. He spent a good fifteen minutes with Sybil and then sat down with Faye in the library.
“Great room,” he said, admiring the leather-bound volumes and the hunting prints. Faye had always found it oppressively masculine and studiously old-world.
“How does she seem to you?”
“She seems to be improving.”
“She forgets things,” Faye said.
“That's understandable.”
“For example, that her husband is dead.”
“It could be vascular dementia from the stroke, which may reverse itself. I think we also have to consider the possibility of Alzheimer's. I gave her a Mini-Cog—that's a little test where you ask the patient to remember a list of common household objects and draw the face of a clock. She drew the clock, but she couldn't remember the objects. There's a chance she may improve, but it's more likely we're dealing with progressive dementia. I wish I could be more optimistic. On the other hand, I can say with certainty that she's better off here at home, as long as she's properly cared for. Forgive me for prying, but I gather you live in New York.”
She was reminded that there were no secrets here, and for a fleeting moment she was tempted to revise her plan and book the first flight back to New York. “I'll be here for as long as she needs me.”
“That could be a long time,” he said.
“I know.”
“Well, I'm sure your mother is very happy to have you back,” he said. “Although I imagine there may be some weeping and gnashing of teeth up in New York.”
“I think they're thoroughly sick of me. I stayed too long at the party.”
“I doubt that very much.”
“There're a few boys up there in New York who wish I'd never left Nashville.”
“Way I hear it, there're a few boys down here who wish the same thing.”
Now she knew he was flirting, but she wasn't really in the mood. Just now she felt like she'd dated enough men for the next five or six lifetimes.
Over the course of the following week, Sybil inquired repeatedly as to the whereabouts of her husband, and the business trip story was wearing thin. Faye's next idea was to tape Hunt's obituary to her mother's bathroom mirror, hoping that the shock of seeing it there every morning might be partly alleviated by seeing her husband's accomplishments enumerated and praised. But the first morning, Martha came down from Sybil's bedroom to report that she was sobbing uncontrollably in her bed.
“I don't know what I'm going to do without him,” she wailed when Faye went up to comfort her.
“Momma, you've been doing without him for three years.”
“He was the only man I ever loved.”
“There wasn't another like him,” Faye said.
“You know, it was your father who fixed things when the colored people demonstrated at the lunch counters. He was president of the chamber of commerce and he convinced everyone that the time had come to integrate. The only reason so many went along with it was the respect they bore for your father's opinion. He said it was just good business.”
The memory of her husband's civic heroism seemed to revive her spirits, and with Faye's help she dressed, then spent the afternoon tending her roses. That night they watched several episodes of Upstairs, Downstairs on video. But the next morning, Faye found her crouched on the bathroom floor, weeping. During the night she'd forgotten again, and the sight of the obituary had come as a shock. She spent the rest of the day in bed. Two days later, Faye removed the newspaper clipping from the mirror, and when Sybil asked about Hunt, Faye or Martha would reply that he was away on business, an answer that now seemed to satisfy her.
When Dr. Harrington came by a week after his first visit, Faye declined his invitation to dinner, suggesting instead that he join her for whatever Martha, an excellent cook, was rustling up. The dinner, chicken and egg bread with white gravy and collards, was a guilty pleasure, but the conversation seemed to flag whenever they veered off medical topics, and Dr. Harrington tended to chew with his mouth open, a memory that put her off the idea of kissing him at the door.
When Faye returned from the gym the next morning, she found Martha in a state of agitation. “Mr. Jimmy come by,” she said. “He tried to get your momma to sign a power of attorney. She's terrible upset. He try to sweet-talk her first, but she told him she wouldn't sign and he told her she was a foolish old woman and worse.” Faye was ahead of her on the stairs, racing for Sybil's bedroom. “She say she don't want to sell her house and she don't want to go to no nursin' home. So Mr. Jimmy storm out, and your momma, she's in a state.”
Sybil was a tiny dark figure in a great sea of linens, sitting upright against the headboard, her hands clenched on her thighs.
“I won't move to Broadway,” she said. “I don't care what he says. He can tie a stick of dynamite to me like he did with that stray dog, but I won't sign that paper and I won't move to Broadway.”
The next morning, a Saturday, Faye drove over to her brother's house, a sprawling ranch in a gated community called Elysian Hills, and rang his buzzer.
He came to the door wearing a shooting vest over a flannel shirt, his pink scalp glistening through the furrows of his brushed-back hair. “Sis, I was just about to call you. Come on in.”
“I don't want to come in. I just want to say don't you dare come round and bully Momma like that again. You can say what you want, but I'm not letting you lock her away. And I'm not letting you loot the house.”
He was taken off guard by this last remark; his face, always ruddy, turned a deeper shade of red. “You've really turned into a prime New York bitch, haven't you?”
“It's taken years, but I'm slowly getting there. I didn't say anything when you took Daddy's guns and his watch collection.”
“What the hell good were they to you?”
“I could have sold them just as easily as you did.”
“I've been taking care of Momma and that house for years while you were off gallivanting around New York with the beautiful people. Hell, I've even been paying your goddamn credit-card bills. Your Chanel and your ‘21’ Club.”
“Dad's estate pays my bills. And God knows what else the estate's been paying for. But if you persist in trying to lock Momma up, I'm going to send in a battalion of accountants and lawyers and it's all going to come out in the open. New York accountants and lawyers.”
That night, Faye went through the family photo albums and found herself revising her memories, as if her childhood were an undervalued asset, like an anonymous painting suddenly revealed to be the work of a master. The cumulative impact of so many smiling faces was impressive. The pleasure her parents so visibly displayed in each other's company seemed to contradict her grim recollections. Looking through hundreds of travel snapshots reminded her of just how many trips they'd taken when she was younger. Jimmy, having gone off to college and marriage, was largely absent from the later pictures, while Faye looked remarkably happy, until she started to develop a pout around the age of thirteen, a sulky expression that said, I can't believe I have to be here in Europe with my parents when I could be home with my friends. The picture that eventually made her cry was at first a mystery, a blurry shot of what appeared to be a mermaid in a Venice canal. The woman, a Botticellian blonde in a blue bikini top, seemed to be sitting or lying on a submerged stone step or platform. Below the waist, just visible within the murky water, was a blue-green fish tail. Faye had been in a mermaid period then, sometime around her eighth birthday, and this had been the highlight of her trip. Years later, she learned that her father had staged the tableau. She had long ago forgotten the incident, which along with so much else suggested she had been the happy, spoiled child of loving parents.
After finishing the better part of a bottle of Campari, she called Cal, a former boyfriend, to whom she hadn't spoken in months.
“Was I so awful,” she asked. “Was I just a total screaming
bitch?”
“You were wonderful,” he said. “The girl of my dreams.”
“But you said yourself I broke your heart.”
“You couldn't have broken my heart if you hadn't been so damn lovable.”
“How could I be so wrong about everything?”
“Not everything,” he said.
The next day she had dinner with Dr. Harrington at the club, and made a conscious decision to mute the critical inner voice that had found him wanting the last time out. She soon found herself telling him about her father, stories that she had told before, but never in such a fond fashion, his former flaws transformed now into lovable eccentricities. “He hated being alone,” she said, looking away as the doctor masticated his steak. “He used to insist that my mother and I watch television with him, shouting for us to come downstairs and sit with him. He always seemed to be shouting and cussing, but now it seems funny to me somehow.”
When he was driving her home after dinner, an ambulance flashed past with its siren screaming, and when they turned in, three Belle Meade police cars were parked in the driveway.
Faye panicked at the sight of the pulsing blue lights and the metallic, staccato walkie-talkie voices.“Oh my God.”
“Let's not jump to any conclusions,” Dr. Harrington said.
Not jump to any conclusions? She would have liked to have had the leisure to stay and ask him if he was fucking crazy, but instead she bolted out of the car and ran up the driveway to accost the nearest cop. “Please tell me what's going on. I'm Faye Teasdale.”
“There's been an accident, Miss Teasdale,” he said, taking hold of her forearm.
“Oh good Christ! Is my mother all right?”
“Your mother's fine. I mean she's not hurt. It's your brother. It seems your mother mistook him for an intruder.”
“Where is she?” Without waiting for an answer, Faye rushed up the steps and through the open door, brushing past two more policemen in the hallway. Upstairs, she found her mother in bed, attended by Martha.