Out in back, beyond the terrace and the black swimming pool, like a rebuke to the whole gigantic enterprise, stood a small, unpainted hut—an exact replica, Taleesha explained, of a teahouse on the grounds of a Zen monastery in Kyoto where Will had once stayed.
“I think I like this little house the best,” she said. The bright, spare interior was indeed a relief after the baroque excesses of the main house: mud-colored stucco walls, crisp yellow tatami mats with black borders, a small copper-lined pit for a fire, an alcove displaying a pen-and-ink landscape scroll. Taleesha knelt down and ran her finger across the textured surface of the tatami. “I like that there’s this part of him, even if I don’t understand it yet.”
Searching for Will that night we went to the Bitter Lemon, a tiny coffeehouse full of hippies where the ancient bluesman Furry Lewis was playing. Will had been there the night before and had made a strong impression.
“He was cooking,” said the doorman.
“Even for Will,” someone chimed in. No one knew where he was now.
As Taleesha’s escort, I oscillated between anxiety and a strange vicarious pride. She was a celebrity in this world.
In the steamy red-carpeted murk of another club, I was accosted by a raging drunk. While Taleesha signed an autograph, a frosty-haired black man rose from his stool like a rocket, lifting off slow, in stages, and stuck his face in mine. “What you think—you special? You better than me?”
“It’s turned ugly these last few months,” Taleesha said, after she’d rescued me.
Returning finally to the two-bedroom farmhouse beside Will’s castle in progress, we found it uninhabited.
That night I was awakened by the threatening phone call intended for Will. Unable to sleep with that parched voice in my ears, I lay in bed and watched the sun come up over the roof of Will’s new palace.
“We get a lot of those calls,” Taleesha said, over breakfast. “Some folks get the welcome wagon, we get the Shelby County chapter of the Ku Klux Klan.”
“Do you think they had anything to do with Elbridge’s death?”
She paused, her coffee cup halfway to her lips. “No, I don’t think so.” She took a sip from her cup and put it down on the table. “But I don’t think Will is crazy, either. I know—sometimes he seems paranoid to you.”
I was willing to accept this characterization of my views.
“But if you were me …” She paused. “White people been telling us for years there ain’t no fire where there’s smoke, even when we’re burning. If you were black, his theories might not seem quite so crazy. You know what I’m saying?”
Actually, despite my essentially empirical cast of mind, I could never dismiss any of Will’s ideas completely. Certainly, it was more interesting to imagine the Mafia in bed with the CIA than it was to accept the findings of the Warren Commission. I envied him the power of his convictions—the conspiracy theories as well as his messianic belief in music—even if I couldn’t quite suspend my own disbelief.
Taleesha had to stop by her father’s house and asked me if I wanted to come along.
“Dad’s real CME,” she said as we drove into town. Seeing my bewilderment, she discoursed on the Colored Methodist Episcopal Church. The ministers tended to be light skinned, she said, and the parishioners formed the heart of the black middle class, the merchants and business leaders whose churchly comportment was self-consciously more dignified than the highly emotional revival-meeting behavior of the African Methodist Episcopalians. It was at one of the latter churches that I’d heard her sing. Her father, when he found out about it, was furious at her for attending the African service, and especially for singing—behaving, as he put it, like “some crazy field nigger.”
Taleesha’s family lived on Southern Parkway, a broad boulevard lined with substantial, middle-aged, self-important houses in diverse states of repair. “Used to be a white street,” she noted, as we turned into the driveway of an immaculate Tudor.
We entered through the garage, emerging into the kitchen. Taleesha’s sister, Daisy—an older, thicker version of herself—was flattening dough on the counter. After dusting the flour from her hands, she embraced Taleesha. “Fixing chess pie,” she said. “I know you’ll want to stay for a piece.” To me she said, “Hah! She don’t hardly eat enough to keep a hummin’bird alive.”
Taleesha introduced me as Will’s best friend and explained that she had to drop me off at the funeral.
Mr. Johnson marched in, stopping short when he saw his youngest daughter. A tall, stately, light-skinned man with a severe expression and military posture, he was wearing some kind of uniform—a ceremonial outfit with gold buttons and braid, insignia and epaulets. What appeared to be a tricornered hat was pinned under his arm.
“I wasn’t aware that we were expecting company,” he said to Daisy.
“I just came by to corrupt my siblings,” Taleesha said. “This is my friend Patrick Keane.”
“How do you do, sir,” I said. “I’m a friend of Will Savage.” I extended my hand and held it in midair.
“Music business?” he inquired coldly.
“We went to school together.”
“Patrick goes to Yale,” Taleesha noted. Indeed I looked the part in my rep tie, blue blazer and gray flannels.
He finally took my hand, engulfing it in his own large palm.
“I knew Yale would do the trick,” Taleesha said blandly.
“You’ll excuse me, Mr. Keane. I’m on my way to a meeting. A benevolent society which I have been associated with for some years.” He turned and left.
“You two are like to break my heart yet,” Daisy said. “I wish you’d try to get along.”
“I wish he would,” Taleesha said. “He looks at me and thinks I’m Mama.”
“Hush, now.”
A lanky young man sauntered into the kitchen, as if he had been waiting for the cue of his father’s departure, and opened the refrigerator.
“Ain’t you got nothing for me?” Taleesha said.
He shambled across the floor into her embrace, then stared at the linoleum as he shook my hand.
“Bud’s shy,” Taleesha said.
“Am not,” he said, looking up defiantly.
“I been his mama over ten years now,” she explained in the car. “He’s the only one who comes to visit Will and me. My father—we haven’t gotten along since I was thirteen.”
We crossed Beale Street where a crane assaulted a brick storefront with a wrecking ball—in pursuit of what was then called urban renewal. “A benevolent society which I have been associated with for some years,” she mimicked. “That’s how he actually talks. And how about that outfit? Spiffy!”
“Looks like something Will would wear.” We were both briefly diverted by this notion.
She dropped me at the church, making me promise to call immediately if Will showed up. And, in fact, all through the service I expected him to crash through the door at any moment and commandeer the organ that groaned and shrieked above us. Sweating liberally in my blazer and flannels, I kept glancing over my shoulder as the minister and the high school football coach eulogized Elbridge as a team player, a natural leader, a true Christian, a son of the South. The reader of subversive literature and psychic explorer, beloved of his younger brother, was never mentioned.
The service at an end, Cordell Savage nodded at me as he led his wife, hunched and rigid, out of the church. I was riveted by the sight of Cheryl Dobbs in a black dress, struggling down the aisle on the arm of one of the ushers. Grief had only refined her appearance, and I couldn’t help but be dazzled by the thought that she was no longer spoken for. Dizzy and torpid from the humidity, I was looking across the street at a civic building of some sort, its Doric entrance flanked by alabaster figures—fluid feminine LIBERTY on the one side and stern patriarchal JUSTICE on the other (well, which is it going to be?), like the household deities of Savage fils and père respectively. Was it possible, after all, to have one nation with liberty and justice, co
nflicting ideals that they were? I was pondering this when Joseph, the Savages’ houseman, tapped my shoulder and said Mr. Cordell would be much obliged if I would come on to the cemetery and then along to the house where a few friends were gathering.
By the time we reached the Savage residence it was evening and slightly cooler. I’d driven back from the cemetery with Lollie Baker, who’d come down from Bennington. She’d gained weight—if not quite the proverbial freshman fifteen—and her hair was shorter, à la Twiggy. If anything, her self-possession was greater than ever. “Don’t worry, Will’s always disappearing,” she assured me. “It’s one of his defining characteristics. You go to a party and somebody says, ‘Where’s Will?’ ‘Well, hell, he was here just a minute ago.’ ”
“The mortality rate for Savage sons is running kind of high,” I said.
“He’ll turn up.”
I asked her about Bennington.
“It’s not bad,” she said. “Everything’s elective, except the lesbianism requirement. I could do without that shit. How’s Yale? White bucks and blue balls? I suppose you go to mixers and all that?”
“If I ever hear ‘Whiter Shade of Pale’ again I will be forced to kill myself.”
“I want to hear all about it,” she said, in that wonderful tone unique to southern women, attentive and dreamily dismissive at the same time, as we pulled into the driveway. “I might could do about ten minutes here, tops.”
We joined the subdued gathering inside. Nearly concealed behind a thick mask of bright makeup, Mrs. Savage nodded stiffly at my mumbled expression of sympathy. Cordell took my hand in both of his own. He looked haggard, but there was a hard, undefeated resolution in his bearing and expression. “Thank you for coming, Patrick. It means a great deal to us to have you here. Are you staying for any length of time? Of course you’re welcome to lodge with us.”
Without going into my lodging status, I explained that I had to hurry back for exams. A young soldier in uniform came over to express his sympathy, one of several; their shaved heads and Deep South accents made me nervous. And I didn’t like this talk about the enemy, suddenly conscious that my hair was longer than any man’s in the room. Seeing Cheryl Dobbs languishing on a sofa, leaning back on her chignon, I sidled over to express my sympathy.
“I remember you,” she said thickly. “You were the boy who passed out at that party.” She seemed similarly inclined at the moment. “You were really sweet.”
“Thank you,” I said, the heat rising in my cheeks.
“No, I mean it,” she insisted, touching a finger to her lower lip. “You were just so, I don’t know … sweet. You know? Some people just aren’t very nice. You get a bad feeling from them. But you … you’re … sweet.”
“That’s really … kind of you to say that,” I said, ringing a slight variation on the adjective.
At that moment Lollie tugged on my sleeve. “Hey, sweetface. You ready to blow?”
“I think maybe I should stick around awhile,” I said.
“What are you, a necrophiliac? These people are stifter than Elbridge.”
I put a censorious finger to my lips. “I really think I ought to stay.”
“Suit yourself, Aeneas. I’m heading for the surface.” I watched her leave with the sinking feeling that I was making a mistake. Anything might happen if I joined her now. I might even lose my virginity. At the very least I’d have a ride and a familiar companion. I was throwing this away, for what? I told myself I’d come all this way for Elbridge’s funeral and it behooved me to spend time here, with his family, though in fact I found myself riveted by the presence of Cheryl and entertaining a ridiculous notion of impressing myself upon her. Just then she was speaking to an elderly couple. They all seemed to be crying.
I went to the bar and got a bourbon from Joseph. Cordell introduced me to the relatives, boycotting Will’s name—I was “a friend of the family.”
By the time I escaped an uncle with an obsessive interest in gardening, I couldn’t see Cheryl anywhere. After getting another drink, I found myself holding a defensive position against the fireplace, pinned down by heavy artillery: a pimpled soldier was discoursing on the Southern Military Tradition. Stonewall Jackson holding the line at Manassas … Jeb Stuart riding again, dashing across the Chickahominy on his roan mare in plumed hat and silk cape, mocking the ponderous Yankee behind his own lines … A wounded Bedford Forrest at Shiloh, musket ball lodged against his spine, scooping up a hostage under his arm as he gallops off to fight another day … All the beaux sabreurs of the South.
“It’s in the blood,” he insisted. “From that day to this—the military man is respected and honored in Dixie. I’ll tell you what—we don’t have no damn peaceniks down here dishonoring the flag and burning their damn brassieres.” Though his arm was draped fraternally around my shoulder, his tone was becoming increasingly strident, his face dangerously red, the slits of his eyes narrower. Afraid I might at any moment be accused of brassiere burning or worse, I claimed to need the bathroom and retreated to the back of the house.
Hearing a feminine sob from one of the guest rooms, I nudged the door, which was slightly ajar, and found Cheryl lying on her back on the bed, feet on the floor. Mascara had run down her cheek, and her hair was in disarray, but she was no less beautiful for that. She lifted her head and smiled wanly. “It’s you.”
I walked over and stood beside her. “Will you hold me,” she asked. “I want you to hold me.” Unable to believe my ears, I sat down gingerly on the bed beside her. She opened her arms. Slowly, incredulously, I lowered myself slowly into her embrace. All at once she was kissing me wildly, probing my mouth with a furious tongue. I knew she was drunk, and I knew that this had everything to do with a boy lying in a coffin a few miles away and nothing to do with me, but I didn’t pause to worry about that. Suddenly she took my hand and thrust it into her blouse, under her bra and into possession of the miraculous swelling of her breast. Even as I tried to abandon myself to the moment I felt almost frightened by her morbid intensity. I have never been kissed, before or since, with such swallowing greed. It was as if she were trying to perform resuscitation, bring me, or someone else, back from the dead. I rolled on my side to help her rip the clinging blouse away from her flesh.
Something caught my eye: Mrs. Savage was standing in the doorway. I froze as Cheryl continued to struggle with her shirt. If I’ve ever been more mortified I can’t remember. “I think that’s quite enough,” Mrs. Savage commanded.
Cheryl turned slowly, mechanically, toward her ex-mother-in-law-to-be. I sat up on the bed.
“I believe it’s time for you to be leaving, Patrick,” Elbridge’s mother said, her face an impassive mask.
Cheryl appeared to be in a daze, slack-mouthed and glassy-eyed, Sleeping Beauty arising from her coma. I took her hand. “Will you be okay,” I asked.
“That’s none of your concern,” said the mask.
I staggered down the hallway and let myself out the sliding door in back, emerging into a dark garden spangled with fireflies. The setters in their kennels began to bark, scenting my fugitive anxiety. Out on the road I tried to hitch a ride. Sometime after midnight a guy in a pickup truck brought me to a gas station where I called a cab.
“What the heck?” exclaimed the cabbie, as we rattled through the fields past the invisible horses: although it was only a little past midnight, dawn appeared to be glowing over the ridge to the east. A few minutes later we saw the flames, stark and beautiful against the blackness of the surrounding countryside. Will’s castle was burning, throwing flames a hundred feet into the sky. The cab pulled to a stop beside Taleesha, who was standing in the driveway a hundred yards from the conflagration. The cabbie and I stood beside her and stared at the flames. Finally she said, “They waited until we were just about finished.”
“What happened,” I asked.
“What do you think?” she said impatiently. “Loose wire, maybe? Is that a plausible explanation?”
The fire engines
arrived a few minutes later, almost an hour after Taleesha had called. No one was surprised when the police investigators concluded that arson was involved, nor was anyone particularly amazed that no suspects were ever apprehended.
XIII
The summer that men walked on the moon, Edward Kennedy drove his car off a bridge and I drudged for my father in his store, selling washers and dryers, yearning to be a young oligarch—a loafered lizard sunning on a rock in Bar Harbor … guzzling south-siders in Southampton.
Taleesha sent a postcard from India. “Hot, dusty and dirty—just like home. Will is collecting weird antiques and auditioning holy men. He says to tell you don’t be fooled—the moon landing was staged in a TV studio in the Nevada desert to distract people from the real problems. Jes’ thought you’d like to know.” She concluded by inviting me to meet them in August for a big music festival in upstate New York, but for reasons I can’t remember now I didn’t attend what was later regarded as the seminal event of my generation.
To alleviate my boredom that summer, I interviewed Nana Keane, who told me among other facts that two of my immigrant forebears, newly escaped from the famine, arrived here just in time to help fight the Civil War. Her grandfather, my great-great-grandfather, was wounded at Gettysburg. A blacksmith, he had lived with a gangrenous leg wound which his wife washed and dressed every day for twenty-six years. His brother had died somewhat more rapidly from a bayonet wound suffered in the battle of Franklin, Tennessee.