“Dwiggins.”
“And your first name?” She’d never heard it, she realized; nobody called Mrs. Brill anything but Mrs. Brill.
“Eula Bernice.”
“Tell where you were born and so on, Mama,” Dolores said, “don’t make her drag it out of you.”
“Alamance County, North Carolina, a little town called Ossipee.”
“And you were the seventh of nine children,” Dolores prompted, “and your father was a preacher. The fire-and-brimstone kind.”
“He was a minister of the church,” her mother corrected, with a frown. “We were all in the choir, all nine of us. Papa farmed, too; not tenant land, either, he owned his own plot and raised vegetables and chickens. We all went to school and were expected to do well, and we did.”
“Except for Uncle Clay. And Aunt June.”
“I won’t hear ill spoken of the dead.” She put one hand on her walker, as if to remind everybody she could get up and go anytime she wanted.
“Well, shoot, Mama, you’re the last one. If we can’t speak ill of the dead, we can’t speak ill of anybody.”
Keesha giggled.
Mrs. Brill turned her intimidating scowl on her granddaughter, then smiled.
“You lived in Ossipee till you were ten,” Dolores prodded, “then what?”
“Well, it was the Depression, people couldn’t make a living doing what they used to do, so we moved, all of us except my sister Martha and my brother Tom, who were both married and had families by then. The rest of us moved up north to Wilmington, Delaware, and Papa gave up preaching and found work in a factory that made ready-to-install windows.”
“Was it hard to leave home?” Caddie asked. “Or exciting?”
“It was hard, because I dearly loved that farm. Seemed to me like everybody was happy there and living a godly life. I think back on that time now and it feels like paradise.”
“And Aunt Calla,” Dolores said softly.
“My sister, the nearest in age to me, the one I was closest to, she got a lung disease the first year we were in Wilmington, a dirty, filthy city, and she passed away. Twelve years old. So you could say it was hard leaving home.” She pressed her wrinkled lips together and reared her head back further.
“Mama, tell about the time you saved the little white girl on the pony.”
Keesha, who’d begun to fidget, sat up at that. “You saved a white girl, Neenie?”
“You didn’t know that about your old granny, did you? No, I’ll tell that story later, honey, it’s not the kind of thing I want for this history Caddie’s doing.”
“Oh, Mama, why not? It’s just exactly the kind of thing I want for it.”
“Maybe, but it’s not your history. Besides, if Caddie wrote down every little thing that happened to me, we’d be here a week.”
“But this wasn’t a little thing. Caddie, when she was eleven, she saved a little girl’s life—the girl fell off her pony and Mama found her and carried her two miles to the hospital in a wagon. She got a reward from the family, and it was even in the newspaper. It’s a wonderful story—”
“Which I will tell my granddaughter one of these days when I’m feeling up to it. Now, the next event that happened was my first marriage, and the less said about that the better.”
“What? But you haven’t even mentioned being in show business yet!” Dolores’s hair beads rattled in protest.
“In show business,” Caddie said in amazement. Mrs. Brill?
Even Keesha knew about that. “Neenie, tell about the lady you used to sing with.”
“Oh, well, that’s nothing much. I had a brief singing career with my friend Ruth Nash. It was the early 1940s and we called ourselves the Melody Sisters. The most famous place we ever played in was the Sweet Club in Harlem, which of course nobody ever heard of nowadays. Then in ’44 I got married to K. C. Meecham, a bass player, and had my first child the next year. End of my singing career. We had three more children, and then we had a parting of the ways. Ruth got sick and died of TB in 1948.”
Dolores folded her arms. “This is the most—discreet, the most boring—”
Mrs. Brill gave a loud, threatening cough that silenced her.
“I worked as a maid for three different white women while I raised my children, and in 1952 I got married to Lewis Johnson, a milkman, who had two young children of his own. We moved to Baltimore because he had people there, and I had my last child in 1953.”
“Me,” said Dolores.
“That was another marriage that didn’t work out, my last—”
“Meaning I never saw my father after I was five years old,” Dolores said with some bitterness.
“My last, I swore, and I went through the sixties and seventies very happily without benefit of male companionship.”
“Did you have any other jobs?” Caddie asked.
“Well, since I had five children under the age of thirteen plus Lewis’s two, I guess I did. Different things, I sold Avon, magazine subscriptions, once I sold Kirby vacuum cleaners.” She started counting them out on her fingers. “I was a cashier at a lunch counter, I worked at a dry cleaner’s. Salad girl in a restaurant till my feet gave out, then I did phone solicitations. Then in 1963, I went on disability.”
“At least tell her how that happened,” Dolores said.
“An accident.”
Dolores sighed. “She was working as an elevator operator in an old office building downtown and the elevator dropped from the second floor to the basement.”
Keesha came back from examining a spiderweb behind the glider. “Did you get hurt?”
Mrs. Brill’s prominent black eyes softened behind her glasses. “Little bit, mostly my knees.”
“Were you scared? Was anybody else with you?”
“I was all by myself and scared half to death. One thing I learned, it doesn’t do any good to jump up and down—you remember that if you’re ever on a falling elevator.”
“Did it hurt when you landed?”
“Goodness, child, what do you think? It hurt like about if you jumped off the top of this building.”
“Did you pray?”
“I surely did. Not a very long prayer.” She winked at Caddie. “Like this: Oh, Lord—bam!” She chuckled and rubbed her knees. “Well, then time went on, and I met my third and last husband, Mr. Marcus A. Thompson.”
“A for Aurelius,” Dolores contributed. “Time went on? You left out seeing Martin Luther King Jr., you left out Lloyd’s death—that was her second child—”
“I’ll come back, just let me get through to the end first.”
“She has a plan,” Dolores said to Caddie, making a sarcastic face she was careful not to let her mother see.
“The third time’s supposed to be the charm, and when you get married again at sixty-two, it better be. Mr. Thompson was a retired bus driver—”
“And she called him that,” Dolores said in a soft voice, so as not to interrupt the flow, “ ‘Mr. Thompson,’ the whole time they were married.”
“A retired bus driver, a very handsome, sharp-dressed older man I would not have given the time of day to if he hadn’t been a deacon at my church.”
“Where you taught Sunday school,” Dolores put in.
“Yes, I certainly did, for nineteen years. Didn’t retire till 1989. What was I saying?”
“Mr. Thompson was a deacon,” Caddie said.
“Yes, and so when he invited me to come have coffee after service and school was over one Sunday, I said why, yes, I would, although ordinarily I would not have had any truck with a man who looked like he did or took such care with his dress.”
“Why?”
“Red flags to a bull. I had married two good-looking men, and I did not want a third, not at my age. But Mr. Thompson, who had recently lost his wife of fifty-one years, was sewed from a different cut of cloth entirely. Mr. Thompson was a gentleman.”
“And he was seventy-six,” Dolores mentioned.
“But fit and spry, not
decrepit one bit,” Mrs. Brill defended, “and a hardworking man to boot. Dedicated. Saw his wife through her last illness like a saint. We courted very slowly—well, for our age it was slow, half a year—and when he finally popped the question I said yes.”
“Where were you?” Caddie thought to ask. “When he proposed.”
Mrs. Brill reared her head back. “Where were we? Well, gracious, we were in the graveyard, if you want to know. The man put flowers on his wife’s grave every Sunday, and I’d taken to going with him.”
“He proposed to you in front of his wife’s grave?” Dolores said, round-eyed. “You never told me that.”
“I didn’t think a thing of it. Didn’t seem peculiar to me, seemed natural. We got married on May the eleventh, a raining-cats-and-dogs day, and took the train up to New York City for a honeymoon weekend. That was a time, oh my.” She got a hankie out of the sleeve of her dress with fumbling fingers.
“We had three good years before his health began to fail. Peaceful, soft time. I’m blessed for that, and still grateful. But his heart, his lungs, his blood, they all let him down, seemed like all at the same time. He had a sister in Michaelstown, Juanita, who’d just lost her husband, and she said come on out here, the two of us women could take care of Mr. Thompson better than me alone with my knees in Baltimore, so that’s what we did. We lived in her house on Acorn Street, me and Mr. Thompson on the first floor, until he passed away in 1994. His sister two years later. I ended up here, and there endeth the story. Just in time,” she said, blotting her cheeks with the handkerchief, “because I am about parched dry. Lamb, run inside and get me a big, tall glass of ice water.”
Keesha stared at her with wide, worried eyes, as if she’d never seen her grandmother cry before.
“Run, child.”
Keesha ran in the house.
“Are your other children nearby?” Caddie asked after a respectful moment. “Or scattered all over?”
“Mostly scattered. That’s the way it is with children nowadays.”
Dolores looked like she could say something about that.
“Lloyd, my second child, passed away over thirty years ago. He was only twenty-three. That’s still my life’s biggest sorrow, to this day.”
“How many grandchildren do you have?”
She worked her lips, thinking. “Eight.”
“Nine,” Dolores corrected. “Clarence and Virginia had another girl two months ago.”
For a moment Mrs. Brill looked shocked. Had she forgotten? Or had she never known? Then her face went stony.
“Mama was awfully strict,” Dolores said softly, quickly. “I was the baby, so I missed most of it. Compared to the others, I was spoiled.”
“What? Speak up, I can’t hear what you’re saying.”
“I was just—I was trying to explain why there’s some friction, you know, Mama, between you and Clarence and you and Belinda—”
Mrs. Brill took a sharp breath and drew herself up. “That is family business. I won’t have that written down. I won’t have it.”
“I won’t write it,” Caddie said quickly.
“She could just put ‘estranged,’ ” Dolores said. “She should put something in to explain why you’ve hardly seen your own—”
“Dolores, now, that will be enough.”
Keesha came out on the porch, holding a brimming glass with both hands. “It’s nice and cold, Neenie.”
“Thank you, lamb pie.” She took a few gulps and set the glass on the arm of her chair.
Caddie sensed the silence might go on forever unless she broke it. “What sort of songs did you and your partner sing? You and—” she looked at her notebook—“Ruth Nash.”
“All kinds. People think all black people can sing is blues or gospel, or nowadays rap, but we sang beautiful, tuneful songs, some written by black people, some written by white people. Ruth played the piano and I played the banjo and the ukulele, and our theme song was ‘Goodnight, Sweetheart.’ We loved all kinds of music. People would tell us we’d never get anywhere if we didn’t specialize, but we didn’t want to settle down to one style. We liked jazz, country, pop, swing—blues, yes, and gospel. We liked a barbershop quartet, and you can’t get much whiter than that.”
“No,” Caddie agreed. “But then you gave it all up for a man,” she said, hoping Mrs. Brill wouldn’t take offense.
“Yes and no. I knew Ruth from the time I was sixteen; we were best friends, just did everything together. Such dreams we had, oh my goodness. For a couple of years, 1941 and ’42, smack in the middle of the war, of all things, it seemed like they were all coming true. But Ruth took up some bad ways, habits she didn’t have it in her to shake, and we started to lose what we had. Innocence or whatever you want to call it. We were so young.”
She sighed and slipped her arm around Keesha’s waist. “Well, wasn’t anything else to do then except marry K.C.—who was not altogether a bad man, I don’t mean to say he was, and we had four wonderful children together. But he came from New York City and I came from Ossipee, North Carolina, and never the twain shall meet. Lord help us, Caddie, aren’t we about done?”
“Life lessons,” Caddie said hastily. Mrs. Brill was rubbing her knee as if it ached. “Words of wisdom to pass on to your descendants. Or—what would you change if you had it to do over again?”
“Gracious me, just because you get old doesn’t mean you get smart.”
“You’ve always been smart,” Keesha said.
“Child.” She laughed and gave her granddaughter a squeeze. “What are you angling for, another candy bar?”
“Life lessons.” Dolores eyed her mother with interest. “I’d love to hear what you’d do different.”
“I’d raise me some more sweet grandbabies like this one.” She and Keesha put their foreheads together and mashed noses.
“What else?”
“Hmm.” She sipped some more water. “Let me think.”
“Would you skip Lewis Johnson entirely?” Dolores asked, arching an eyebrow.
“Sakes, of course not. First of all, then I wouldn’t have you. Or Belinda or Lewis Junior—those are my stepchildren,” she reminded Caddie. “But second of all, just because they didn’t last doesn’t mean I wouldn’t marry both those two men again. But I don’t hold with thinking up things you’d do different, anyway. The Lord gives us just the one life, and we do the best we can with it. Which to me means living by the commandments and trying to put a distance between us and sin. Faith, hope, and charity, and the greatest of these is charity—that’s my favorite teaching. I suppose my papa didn’t preach it often enough in his church all those years ago, but they were different times. You learn it over your life, and the closer you come to the end, the clearer it gets, all the rest just fades away. Love and forgiveness, that’s what it comes down to.”
“I’ll tell my stepsister,” Dolores murmured.
“What’s that?”
“I said, tell about seeing Sonny Liston. And Martin Luther King—Mama took the bus down to Washington to hear him give his ‘I have a dream’ speech, Caddie.”
“Indeed I did. Gave me the chills. If you want to talk about famous people, I once saw Eleanor Roosevelt, too. Do you know who that is, Keesha?”
“No, ma’am.”
“A great, great woman. Unappreciated woman.” She wiped the condensation from her glass with her handkerchief. “I always felt in tune with her, myself. Connected under the skin, even though Mrs. Roosevelt was a white lady.”
12
Soon after their return from the weekend in Washington—which was idyllic, magical, rapturous as far as Caddie was concerned—Christopher stopped calling.
She didn’t think much of it at first, didn’t even particularly notice, because he’d already told her he was in a crazy time at work; a lot of things that had been in the planning stages were coming to a head all at once, and he was the only one who could deal with them. Caddie sympathized and admired his dedication all the more. His office was crim
inally under-staffed. Except for Phyllis, the woman she’d met that night at the softball game, Christopher was the only paid employee at the Michaelstown office of CAT, and he was already doing the work of at least two people.
One of the nicest things that had happened over the weekend was that Christopher had let his hair down, so to speak, and confided to her what he really wanted to do with his life. It was their last night, and they were having dinner in a restaurant near the hotel when he told her: he wanted to be a national spokesperson for the CAT cause.
“You mean, not work with dogs anymore?” What a waste, she’d thought, what a loss! But she was thinking too small. He’d explained it to her, how much broader his influence could be and how many more people he could reach if he put his energies into public relations. Headquarters was all for it; in fact they’d been grooming him for a bigger role for some time. They wanted him to spearhead a new public awareness campaign that would be nationwide and start next year. It would mean a lot of media exposure, and not just print interviews but radio and TV, too.
Caddie was impressed, then enthusiastic. “Absolutely, you’d be fabulous. You’re so articulate and smart. And passionate and committed. I can’t think of anybody who’d be a better spokesman than you. Oh, I can just hear you on NPR. Christopher, you could be famous.”
“The point isn’t to be famous, Caddie, it’s to draw attention to issues of fund-raising and grant money and grassroots educational programs. Growing the organization.”
He might disapprove of being famous, but he was ambitious, she knew from his intensity when he spoke of his prospects. In fact, that was what they’d mostly talked about while they were in Washington, approaching it from different angles and perspectives, but always coming back to the subject of Christopher’s professional future. He’d had a good time—she was sure, because all weekend she’d monitored his happiness and well-being like an ICU nurse. So when it first began to sink in that he wasn’t calling or returning her calls, she knew it wasn’t because of the weekend. Good, because if it wasn’t the weekend, it wasn’t them. But then, what?
Wednesday turned into Thursday. Could he be out of town? No, because late in the afternoon, thank goodness, she finally reached him at his office.