“There’s no food outside New York,” he had said, not once but several times, even as he was eating Aurora’s delicious food, and eating it heartily, too. Rosie found that sort of behavior disgusting. If she had been the boss, and not the maid, she would have told him he ought to stop taking third helpings if he didn’t like the food. He could have run on back to New York any time, it would have been fine with her. But she had not been the boss, most of her kids were still at home in those days, and she needed the job. The Beecham dinners usually took place when Rud, Aurora’s husband, was away on one of his mysterious fishing trips—the mystery being why he never came back with even a single fish. It was plain that Aurora would have jumped in bed with old Sir Thomas in a minute, but he had soon moved away and Rosie had never been quite sure whether Aurora had or hadn’t been able to make matters up to him in that particular way.
“Pardon me, did I what?” Aurora asked.
“Sleep with that old white-haired fart?” Rosie said. Since Aurora had just asked her if she’d slept with Arthur, she thought she might get away with asking if Aurora had slept with Sir Thomas Beecham.
“Nope,” Aurora admitted. “Apart from some fumblings once, nothing came to pass.”
“Is that what you’re doing, sitting out there with all those old date books?” Rosie asked. “Trying to remember who you fumbled with and who you didn’t?”
“No, because I never fumbled—as you put it—with anyone very noteworthy in my whole life,” Aurora said. “As a seducer of the illustrious I have a very poor record—in fact, no record.”
“I wouldn’t lose no sleep over it, they’re probably just duds, like most men,” Rosie said.
“You’re probably right, oh sage,” Aurora said. “I would have liked to try just one celebrity, though, just to be sure, and Sir Thomas Beecham would have been high on my list. It’s unlikely that anyone of that caliber will come my way again.”
“Yeah, but you never know,” Rosie said. “I sure never expected Arthur Cotton to come my way, but he showed up, and now look what a jam I’m in.”
Later, in her little office, her hands dusty from stacking and arranging the many hundreds of concert programs—hers, her mother’s, and her grandmother’s—Aurora reflected that if nothing else her memory project would show how profoundly important music and the theater had been in the lives of the women in her family. The concert programs went back almost a century, and she still had, boxed, almost an equal number of playbills.
It occurred to her that if she cared to type every concert program into her computer, she would know, at the end, exactly how many times she and her mother and her grandmother had listened to a given piece of music, or been charmed by a given conductor or soloist. How much Debussy, how much Mozart, how much Haydn. Then, if she did the same with the playbills, she could also chart their dramatic loyalties: Shakespeare, O’Neill, Ibsen, Shaw.
It was a daunting mass of concert programs, though—they covered the floor, and so would the playbills, when she got around to unpacking them. It seemed to her that she might need an assistant—even two assistants. She thought of Teddy and Jane—they both had computers and also, both had time on their hands. They had quit their jobs at the 7-Eleven, where danger had increased to the point that they had to make change for the customers from behind a plexiglass shield.
“Sort of takes the fun out of it,” Jane said. At the moment they were both drawing unemployment; they seemed to do nothing except study dead languages and indulge their brilliant child. Aurora decided she might visit and offer them temporary employment on her memory project. Jane liked music—she could do the concert programs, and Teddy, who, despite his antidepressants, still showed signs of shakiness, could do the playbills.
What that left was eight shelves of social calendars, desk diaries, and other memorabilia, source of the raw chronological data from which Aurora hoped to extract a more or less day-to-day record of her existence. She realized that it was an eccentric hope: after all, she had lived twenty-five thousand days or more, and might not have time enough left in which to work back through the years and months, the weeks and days, to her unremembered beginnings.
The truth was that most—indeed, almost all—of those days were unremembered, and she knew already that the calendars and desk diaries stacked on her shelves were not going to bring many of them back in much detail. Like herself, her mother and grandmother had taken a severely minimalist attitude toward diary keeping. So brief were their entries—and hers, too—that the really odd thing was that they had felt the need to make even a faint scratch on the rock of time as it rolled past. Yet all three of them had scratched—they seldom missed a day, even though they seldom scratched even as much as a complete sentence.
A typical entry for her grandmother, Catherine Dodd, might simply read “Left Boston,” or “Got home, beds dusty.” A New England picnic, of the sort Renoir ought to have painted, might receive from Catherine Dodd only one brusque stroke: “Bad clam, Charley sick.”
Her mother, Amelia, was equally terse. One entry, made when Aurora was five, merely said, “Aurora spat on Bob.” Aurora could not even recall who Bob might have been—she had no cousin named Bob. Though she searched carefully through the diaries of that period hoping for other references to a Bob, she found none. Try as she might, she could not remember spitting on a little boy—though, she had to admit, it was well within her potential: she did recall being often angry with little boys when she was around six; she was violently jealous because they had so much more freedom and more fun than little girls. Probably she had spat on one—but why, precisely?
Her own diaries, she had to admit, were no improvement. She had rarely been moved to jot down more than three or four words about any day, often saying no more than “Trevor, lobster,” “Edward, wretched dancer,” or “Beulah overcooked the fish.” The majority of her jottings reflected her critical nature. She had always maintained that her critical nature was merely a by-product of high standards; but after leafing through a decade or so of her desk diaries she was forced to conclude that an impartial judge—a biographer, say—would probably conclude that she had been a woman with a very critical nature. Year after year, the three or four words she had allotted to a given day were words of complaint: overcooked fish, suitors who couldn’t dance, policemen who gave her tickets, concerts where the woodwinds were weak or the soloists unprepared.
Such records as she had left, viewed in the main, were sobering to such a degree that she wondered at times why she had ever supposed that she wanted to remember her life. She thought she had had mostly a happy, even an exuberant, life, and yet none of her esprit or her appreciation of human vicissitudes seemed to be reflected in her jottings.
It made what she was determined to undertake seem even more eccentric: Why spend months or years remembering a life if all it had consisted of were people who couldn’t dance or didn’t know how to cook fish or woodwind sections that weren’t up to snuff?
Tired of thinking about it, or of preparing to think about it, Aurora opened the drawer where she kept her little note from Jerry and her one photograph of him, a snapshot she had taken herself, of him sitting on his back step in a bathrobe, looking like a large, sleepy, slightly sulky child.
The little picture and the short note said more to her of her life—or, at least, touched her more—than all the memorabilia she had unpacked and arranged.
What the picture and the note made her feel was that it hadn’t after all been so wrong, her pursuit of Jerry. He had been, though a strange man, also a nice man. Better still, it had not been desultory—not from her side at least—and so many last loves were desultory, as she felt hers might have been had she had it with Pascal, or one of the Petrakis brothers.
At least her last real love had not been desultory. She had the feeling that one of the sadnesses of Jerry Bruckner’s was that all his loves were, in a manner, desultory. Probably he had simply been one of those passive men who accept all women, each in her turn, much as he might a
ccept the weather.
Then, out of nowhere, while she was thinking about Jerry—how comforting it had been that he had thought enough of her to write her the note—she remembered Hector Scott and the pointless quarrel they had had just before he keeled over in the booth at the Pig Stand. With the memory came a wave of weeping—there seemed to be no staying steady, in life, not really. Feeling better about Jerry led to feeling worse about her old soldier, who, after all, had struggled loyally with her for many years.
“I’m feeling better about Jerry but I just cried my eyes out thinking about Hector,” she said to Rosie when she was back in her kitchen, sipping tea.
“The General’s dead, it don’t do no good to feel bad about him and besides he didn’t have a lot of mercy himself,” Rosie said. “Why can’t you help me with some of my problems instead of just worrying about old dead and gone boyfriends?”
“I don’t know that I’m feeling that much better,” Aurora said.
“Do you wish you hadn’t done it?” Rosie asked—she had always been curious as to how Aurora justified sleeping with Jerry.
“No, I’m proud that I did it,” Aurora said. “It took true courage, and I don’t think I’ve done too many things that took true courage.”
She swirled her finger in the tea and licked it, a new, strange unladylike habit she had acquired.
“For a while I was wishing I hadn’t done it because it hurt so much,” she admitted. “But now I’m glad I did it, even if it does hurt.”
“Yeah, but the big question is, will I be happy if I marry Arthur Cotton?” Rosie said. “Or, if I do marry him, will I wish I hadn’t done it for the rest of my life?”
“If only Willie would have called, just once, it would never have come to this—at least I don’t think it would have,” she added.
“Do you really still think of Willie as much as you did?” Aurora asked.
“Every night—every single one, whether I’m with Arthur or not,” Rosie admitted. “I was in love with Willie, only I didn’t realize it until it was too late.”
“I doubt he realized how deep it cut, either,” Aurora said. “Willie was not greatly perceptive.”
“He was worse than that, he was just plain dumb,” Rosie said. “But it didn’t matter. Something about Willie touched me . . . do you know what I mean?”
Aurora thought of the boyish Jerry Bruckner, sitting on his back step in his bathrobe.
“Yes, dear, I know what you mean,” she said.
19
Tommy’s personal rule for surviving prison life was never to voice an opinion—any opinion, on any topic. Prison society was like a lake of kerosene, from whose surface fumes of rage and hatred rose continuously. An opinion that happened to strike someone wrong, happened to nudge some grudge or prick some prejudice, could ignite the fumes and leave one wrapped in flames.
Tommy’s problem, as he well knew, was that he was not quite the perfect master of his own disdain. Certain levels of repulsiveness or stupidity were apt now and again to tip him into sarcasm, or at least, cool rebuttal. Besides, though he didn’t much want to be human, he was, and he could not always resist voicing an opinion, nor could he easily conceal his total disdain for Mickey Cleburne, his cellmate Wilbur’s new disciple.
Mickey was, in Tommy’s view, the prototype of the Southern chain-saw massacre hulk—the word “hulk” could have been coined just for Mickey, a fact Tommy and Wilbur agreed on. Mickey was so far beyond mere redneck behavior, or even redneck beliefs, that the term could not accurately be applied to him. He was more the white trash swamp rat, size extra large. Besides being large, he was never clean, had bad breath and bad acne, and was an obsessive cracker of his own knuckles, across all ten of which he had Confederate flags tattooed.
Mickey Cleburne hated almost everything and almost everybody. He hated Tommy immediately because Tommy was educated, but even if he hadn’t been educated, he would have hated him because he was from the city. Mickey hated all people from the city, and was not much more tolerant of people from the small towns. The only good thing about small towns in his view was that they contained all-night convenience stores. Mickey liked to rob such stores; he also liked to hold his shotgun under the chins of the terrified clerks for a minute or two just to see them quiver, before heading back into the great piney woods and the safety of the swamps, where he could hunt alligators and coons. Before he discovered the pleasures of robbing small-town convenience stores he had made a living catching poisonous snakes—he would snare fifty or sixty cottonmouths or swamp rattlers, drop them in a barrel he kept in his pickup, and sell them to a laboratory in Lufkin, Texas.
The tattoos of the Confederate flags had been acquired on a trip to Texarkana—they had all still been bleeding a little when Mickey lost it, went on a hate rampage, and shot five people in one 7-Eleven, all because the young woman who was clerking that night asked to see his driver’s license when he walked up with a six-pack. None of the five people died, but Mickey Cleburne soon found himself in a place filled with all the kinds of people he hated most, black people and brown people being at the top of the list. In such a place it was not necessarily an advantage to have ten Confederate flags tattooed across one’s hands, but Mickey made no attempt to conceal his tattoos. The thing he would have been most proud of was to die for the South. Mickey could read only a few words, but he could listen, and the song he took as his battle hymn was Hank Williams Jr.’s “The South Shall Rise Again.”
Mickey Cleburne believed every word of that song and was ready to fight for its sentiments. The reason he had become a disciple of Wilbur’s, overlooking the fact that Wilbur was a town person and also an educated person, was that Wilbur, too, loved the South, and knew its glorious history. Wilbur was a Civil War buff, and had been, a little earlier in his life, a collector of medals. He liked to think of himself as the prison’s leading authority on Civil War battles, and he could spend hours describing to Mickey the glorious feats of all the dashing Civil War heroes, Forrest and Beauregard, Mosby and Jackson. Tommy, who listened with a more critical ear than Mickey Cleburne, suspected that Wilbur was making most of it up, but he kept his suspicions to himself and tried not to look at Mickey at all when Wilbur was doing one of his Civil War spiels. He knew Mickey hated him. In Mickey’s bloodshot eyes was the hatred of the despised—the not-good-enough southern swamper, more scorned even than Negroes in the small towns strung around the wetlands of the South.
Tommy didn’t feel that he needed to analyze Mickey’s hatred too closely. He had heard that a mad dog wouldn’t attack if you didn’t make eye contact with it, and he adopted the same principle toward Mickey. He didn’t look him in the eye. If Mickey wanted to worship Wilbur because Wilbur could bullshit about Civil War battles, that was fine. Tommy just avoided wanting to strike the match that might ignite the kerosene fumes of Mickey’s hatred.
But Tommy slipped. One day in the exercise yard Mickey was talking about his dream—he only had one, and Tommy and Wilbur had heard about it often. It was to escape from the prison, make his way through the woods to Idaho, and become a humble private in the army of the Aryan Nation.
“That’s noble,” Wilbur said. “You’ve got the right stuff, Mick. There’s one problem with your plan, though.”
“What?” Mickey asked.
“You’re gonna run out of woods long before you reach Idaho,” Wilbur said. “Isn’t that true, Tommy?”
“That’s true,” Tommy said.
“Lots of wide-open spaces out west,” Wilbur said. “Still, maybe you can hitchhike. If you could hook up with the right trucker, he might take you all the way. Some truckers are pretty sympathetic to the Aryan Nation.”
Mickey thought that over. He had never been out of East Texas—a world without trees was beyond his ken. But if he had to travel through a treeless world in order to enlist in the army of the Aryan Nation and help the South to rise again, he was willing.
“I could steal a pickup,” he said. He knew he didn’t w
ant to hitchhike. He had tried hitchhiking several times when one of his old cars broke down, but it hadn’t worked. People just ignored him. In one case, two of his own brothers passed him without even looking at him. If he tried to hitchhike to the Aryan Nation, it was possible he would never get there. His new plan, then, was to steal a pickup from somebody’s driveway and to drive all night until he reached Idaho.
“They might want you for a suicide soldier,” Wilbur said, looking at Mickey. He liked to test big Mick’s devotion to the Southland—the only thing he had any devotion to.
“I’ve never heard of the Aryan Nation having suicide soldiers,” Tommy commented. He didn’t really want to be in the conversation, but Mickey Cleburne was staring at him sullenly anyway, and he didn’t feel it was safe to be too conspicuously out of it, either.
“No, but they need a few,” Wilbur said. “They could wire Mick up with a little plastique and he could probably take out the whole Supreme Court, if he was willing. It was the Supreme Court that destroyed the South, when they started letting niggers into white folks’ schools,” Wilbur reminded them. He often treated Mickey to short civics lessons, letting him know what institutions had contributed most to the South’s decline.
Mickey hadn’t been thinking about blowing himself up in order to destroy the Supreme Court—what he had in mind was doing some shooting first. He hoped to kill some blacks or, failing that, some gooks or Mexicans. Just a few days before, a white man had lost it in some town in California and fired his machine gun into a schoolyard filled with children, killing several. Most of the dead children were Asian, which made Mickey think maybe the Aryan Nation had been behind the massacre. He had been told by several inmates that in California gooks were as thick as niggers were in the South—maybe the Aryan Nation had had a few gook children massacred in order to give the gooks warning that soon they would all have to leave America or die.