By the end of that day, Mrs. Gully realized that her boy was missing. A great hue and cry went up. The other six boys, his friends, were questioned. Their teeth chattered as they spoke the lie, but each maintained he knew nothing at all. The missing boy’s clothing was found on the banks of the Perdido, and the Gullys were astonished that their son seemed to have gone swimming, alone, on New Year’s Day. The Gullys, who had lived in Perdido all their lives, knew how many children those red, muddy waters had swallowed already. They did not expect to see their son again. An old man with a grappling hook was sent out on the river for a few days, but that was only for form’s sake and the comfort of the grandparents in Mississippi. The Perdido, everyone knew, never gave up its dead.
. . .
New Year’s Day of 1948 was a Thursday. That evening at supper Frances Bronze had appeared troubled, and after the meal, when most everyone was in the front parlor, Elinor motioned to her daughter to follow her upstairs.
“What is wrong, darling?” said Elinor, as she ushered her daughter into her bedroom and closed the door. Frances sat on the edge of her parents’ bed and glanced out the window at the mass of water oaks.
“Little boy died today, Mama. Gully boy.”
“I heard they were looking for him,” said Elinor guardedly. “I didn’t hear they had found him.”
“They haven’t found him,” said Frances slowly. “They won’t.”
Elinor went to the window. “Nerita?” she asked.
“Yes,” said Frances.
When Elinor turned around, Frances was weeping softly.
“Darling,” said Elinor, “these things happen.”
“I told her not to do something like that! I told her never to go near people in the water. Why cain’t she just eat fish! She loves catfish.”
“Well,” said Elinor softly, “you can’t make a whole diet out of catfish.”
“Mama!”
Elinor sat beside Frances and put her arm around her. “Listen, honey, you’ve got to remember. Nerita’s not like you and me. You and I can get along pretty well on Dollie’s beef and pork and veal—and Malcolm’s venison when he goes out in the woods and shoots a deer. But where is Nerita going to get pork and beef and veal and venison? She’s a big girl now, but she’s still growing. She probably thought she needed it—”
“Mama! What if they started hunting for her!”
Elinor smiled. “They couldn’t find her, darling. Nerita would just sit at the bottom of the junction until they went away. I’d like to see somebody try to pull anything up out of there.”
“Aren’t you upset about the Gully boy, Mama? You know that boy’s parents, and they’re real sweet. Queenie is always buying a new car from that man, and he’s always so polite to us.”
“Of course, I’m sorry for them,” said Elinor. “But there’s nothing we can do. And what was that boy doing in the river on New Year’s Day anyway? It’s cold out there!”
“Nerita said there were a bunch of them down there, below town. She said”—here Frances grimaced—“that she could have gotten them all if she had wanted to.”
Elinor smiled, and there was something of pride in it. She said, “There’s no stopping that girl, is there?”
“No, ma’am.”
Mother and daughter were silent for a few moments.
“There’s something else bothering you isn’t there?”
Frances nodded.
“What is it?”
“I don’t think I want to tell.”
“But you’ll tell anyway, won’t you? Otherwise, you wouldn’t have come up here with me. You wouldn’t have told me anything, if you weren’t going to tell me everything. What is it?”
“Nerita didn’t eat all of the Gully boy.”
“No?” said Elinor.
“No, she saved me part.”
Chapter 69
Billy’s Armor
Since his return from Texas, Billy Bronze had noticed a change in his wife. “Distant” didn’t seem quite the word for it, “preoccupied” was more like it—and preoccupied with something besides their infant daughter Lilah. He wondered at first whether he hadn’t angered Frances by going away for two weeks with her sister. He asked her about this.
“Frances,” he said carefully one morning while he was dressing for work and she was changing the baby’s diaper, “you know what I wish?”
“What?”
“I wish I hadn’t gone off with Miriam to Texas.”
“Why not?” asked Frances. “Miriam said she needed you.”
“She didn’t, though. She did everything just fine all by herself.”
“Then she needed you for company. Deep down inside Miriam’s not as independent as everybody thinks she is. As she thinks she is. So you were keeping her company, and letting her know that she was doing things right.”
“Then it doesn’t bother you that I went?”
Frances looked up in surprise. “Were you thinking that it bothered me? Why should it bother me?”
“I don’t know,” returned Billy lamely. “’Cause you might have thought...”
“Thought what?” asked Frances in perplexity. Then suddenly she realized what he meant. “That something was going on?”
Billy nodded.
Frances laughed. “You and Miriam? What a thing to say, Billy!”
“Why is it such a thing to say?”
“Because if you had wanted Miriam instead of me, then you’d be married to her. You had your choice when you first came to Perdido. And if Miriam had wanted you, why you’d be over next door and Miriam would be the one changing diapers. That’s why it’s such a funny thing to say. Billy, you don’t really think I was imagining that something was going on between you two, do you? Wait’ll I tell Mama, won’t she laugh out loud!”
Billy was perplexed by his wife’s attitude. He hadn’t thought the thing quite so improbable as Frances was making it out to be.
“We slept in the same hotel room,” he pointed out.
“Everybody knows what Miriam is like when it comes to spending money. She wasn’t gone let you have a separate room—I knew that when you two took off. Lord, Billy, she’s my sister.” Frances pulled open her housecoat, and pressed Lilah against her left breast. Sitting down in the platform rocker in the corner of her room next to the porch window she began to rock. Lilah fed with her eyes closed contentedly.
“Well,” said Billy, “if that’s not what’s been bothering you, what has it been?”
“What are you talking about now?”
“You’ve been thinking about something else.”
“When?”
“All the time. Every time somebody says something to you, it’s got to be repeated, ’cause you’re never listening. You don’t think about Lilah until she starts to cry, or unless Zaddie comes up here and tells you it’s time to feed her. You’re always standing at the window and looking out at the levee, like there was something real important on your mind. Darling, I just want to know if there’s something I can help with.”
Frances was silent a moment, then turned serious. She responded in a quiet voice, that had something in its tone that indicated to her husband that this was not a lie, but an evasion. “It’s nothing, Billy. No, I tell you what it is, it’s being a mother. It’s new to me. It’s strange. I wasn’t prepared. I’m always thinking about my little girl.”
Billy laughed uneasily. “Then why does she always need changing every time I pick her up?”
“See?” said Frances hastily. “I’m not used to it yet. I’m not sure exactly how things are supposed to be done. That’s all. Pretty soon I’ll figure out exactly what I’m supposed to do.”
This exchange did not entirely satisfy Billy Bronze. And his unease increased when he returned to the house one afternoon and discovered Elinor on the porch with Lilah gently sleeping in her lap.
“Where’s Frances?” he asked, looking about the porch as if his wife might have been hiding behind the pyramid of ferns in the corn
er or crouching behind the glider.
“Oh,” Elinor replied vaguely, “she went off somewhere...”
“How long has she been gone?”
“Awhile.”
“She shouldn’t run off and make you take care of Lilah.”
“Lord, Billy, I don’t mind! I love this baby! I wish I had this baby all for my own!”
At that moment, he heard his wife’s footsteps on the hall stairs. He went to the porch door to meet her as she came up. He was astounded to find her wet and bedraggled, barefooted, her teeth chattering in the crisp February air.
“What the hell have you been doing?” he exclaimed.
“Swimming,” replied Frances.
“In weather like this? It’s freezing out there.”
“In the water I’m fine,” breathed Frances, trying to edge past her husband to get to their room. “It’s only when I get out that I’m cold.”
Billy followed her into the bathroom. Frances dropped her robe and ran hot water into the tub.
“I’m covered with mud,” she said, and that was the truth.
“How long were you out there, Frances? I called here right after dinner and Zaddie said you weren’t here. It’s four o’clock now—you were swimming in the Perdido for three hours?”
Frances shrugged, and stepped gingerly into the hot water. “You know how it is, Billy, you lose track of the time. And Mama loves taking care of Lilah. You want to wash my hair?”
. . .
In the following months matters only grew worse, as far as Billy could see. He was very busy with the oil companies; there was another visit to Texas with Miriam and then he went a third time on his own. Each trip lasted several days. Frances grew more and more distant from him and their daughter, even though she denied that anything had changed. Elinor denied it, too. Billy realized that Lilah had been placed in almost complete care of his mother-in-law and Zaddie. Frances weaned Lilah at eight months, and shortly thereafter Lilah’s bassinet was moved downstairs with Zaddie. “Her crying keeps me awake,” Frances explained. “There have been nights when I couldn’t get to sleep at all.”
Frances seemed to be developing an actual abhorrence to her daughter. She never talked about her, never picked her up, never played with her. When Billy spoke of Lilah, Frances changed the subject. When Billy picked Lilah up, Frances turned her head. When Billy played with Lilah, Frances left the room on a lame excuse. He mentioned these things to Elinor, but she as usual denied there was a problem. If Billy saw anything wrong, said Elinor, it must be that he was working too hard, or was experiencing the inevitable letdown that follows childbirth, or perhaps it was the effects of the bad winter weather. In other words, any cause that had nothing to do with Frances.
If ever Billy telephoned home in the afternoon, wanting to speak to Frances, she was never there. This was true whether he called right after he had returned to his office after lunch, or in the middle of the afternoon, or half an hour before he was to come home. Elinor always told him that she was out shopping, or at the seamstress’s, or delivering a pound cake to somebody who was sick. Whenever Billy sought to verify any of these stories, Frances said, “Oh, no, Mama was wrong. I just drove out to Dollie Faye’s to pick up some bacon. I walked in the door right after Mama hung up the phone.”
Sometimes at night, after they had turned out the light, Billy would turn on his pillow and beg Frances to tell him what was the matter with her, why she was acting in this way.
“Nothing is the matter, Billy, nothing at all.”
He had thought at first that hers might be a physical ailment and urged her to see either Leo Benquith or the new doctor in town. Frances wouldn’t go. “Nothing is wrong with me, Billy. I feel fine.”
And, in fact, Frances seemed to grow healthier by the day. Billy was startled almost beyond words to discover that she seemed to be growing—Frances was now almost as tall as he! He made her stand against the doorframe of their room and he marked her height with a pencil. Then he stood against the frame and she marked his. Her mark was only an inch or two short of his.
“I know,” he exclaimed, “that when we got married, you were a good five inches shorter than me.”
“I’m wearing my hair different,” Frances explained. “And I do stretching exercises.”
She seemed to be getting stronger, too. One morning after breakfast Billy had started out the front door on his way to work, but then spun around and went back inside, having forgotten some letters on his dresser. He went upstairs, walked down the hall, and was about to enter the bedroom when he was stopped dead in his tracks by what he saw. Frances was crouched at the corner of the bed, and with a single hand she was lifting the bed at the corner, reaching for something that had apparently rolled under it. He watched astonished as she retrieved a pearl earring and gently set the bed back in place.
“Frances!” he cried. “You are gone break your back doing something like that!”
Standing up, Frances merely remarked, “Oh, that old bed just looks heavy. It’s not really.”
Billy went over, placed his hand on the bedpost and attempted to lift it. For his pains he got a cramp in his upper arm.
. . .
Billy made a fourth trip to Houston, again with Miriam, in April 1948. This time Malcolm drove, while Billy and Miriam sat in the back of the new Cadillac that Billy had bought for the family, looked over papers and correspondence, and endlessly talked strategy. On each of the six days they were in Texas, Billy telephoned his wife. Three times she was not at home, once she was sleeping and Zaddie refused to wake her, and twice he was able to speak to her briefly. On this trip Billy and Malcolm shared a room, and Miriam had one to herself.
“Miriam,” he said to his sister-in-law over before-dinner drinks on the night before they were to return to Perdido. “I don’t know what I’m going to do.”
“About what?” Miriam asked. Miriam had decided that on this last evening, with everything accomplished that needed to be accomplished, she and Malcolm and Billy would celebrate by going out to Houston’s best restaurant. Miriam wore a new dress, and she had minutely supervised Malcolm into a new suit. She kept an eagle eye on his manners at the table, and had said, “Don’t bother looking at the menu, Malcolm, I’m going to order for you.”
“About Frances,” Billy went on, after the waiter had taken their orders. “Frances—haven’t you noticed—has changed since Lilah was born.”
“How?” asked Malcolm.
“How?” asked Miriam.
“Just...changed.” Billy shrugged. “Does funny things. Doesn’t pay any attention to Lilah. Zaddie and Elinor are raising that baby. I think the only time Frances even holds that child is when I’m home and I actually pick Lilah up and put her in Frances’s arms.”
“Maybe Frances doesn’t like babies,” suggested Miriam. “I don’t think I would.”
“I don’t think she likes Lilah,” said Billy. “It’s almost like she thinks she got hold of the wrong one, and this is a substitute and she doesn’t want anything to do with it.”
“Maybe she’s mad ’cause you’re always going off to Texas,” said Miriam.
“She says she isn’t.”
“Malcolm,” said Miriam, “get the waiter’s attention. And try to do it without standing up and waving your arms over your head.”
Malcolm nodded to the waiter. He came to the table and Miriam ordered another round of drinks.
The second drink loosened Billy’s tongue more. “You know what else she does?”
Miriam shook her head. “What?”
“She thinks I don’t know she does it.”
“What does she do?” asked Malcolm.
“She goes swimming every day in the Perdido. She swims in the Perdido for hours and hours.”
“She gets that from Elinor,” Miriam pointed out. “You ought to blame Elinor for that.”
“She did it even in the winter,” Billy said. “Even that one day it was so cold the pipes froze, Frances went swimming in
the Perdido. I call up in the afternoon, and she’s never there. Elinor always gives me some excuse or Zaddie makes something up about where she is, but I know where she is. She’s swimming in that damn river. I could go up to the top of that levee and look down and there’d be Frances, swimming round and round in water that would freeze a man’s...”
“...balls off,” said Malcolm, completing the thought.
“You’ve seen her swimming?” asked Miriam, while glancing balefully at Malcolm.
“No, but I know she does it.”
“I don’t see what difference it makes,” Miriam said.
“It makes a difference!” cried Billy. “And I don’t know why either. ’Cause she won’t tell me that’s what she does. ’Cause she won’t have anything to do with Lilah. ’Cause I’m afraid,” he said in a low voice, “that one of these days she’s going to up and get a divorce with a Mobile lawyer.”
“Divorce you!” exclaimed Miriam.
“Well, she obviously doesn’t love me anymore. If she loved me, she’d love our little girl. She wouldn’t always be lying to me. She’d tell me what the real trouble is. I thought she loved me.”
“I thought she did too,” said Miriam. “But what if she doesn’t?”
“Then she’ll want to get rid of me,” said Billy.
“Not necessarily,” Miriam pointed out. “Maybe she’d let you stay on.”
Billy shook his head. “Miriam, don’t you understand? I love this family. I don’t want to leave Perdido. See, that’s what I’m afraid of, that Frances will want to get rid of me, and will make me get out of town.”
Miriam laughed. “Billy, is that what you’re worried about? You really think we’d let you go? Even if you and Frances did get a divorce, Elinor doesn’t want to get rid of you. She’d just have you move into the front room. And if Frances doesn’t want you in the house, then you can come live with Sister and me, that’s all. We’re not gone let you leave town. That’s the silliest thing I ever heard a grown man say. Malcolm, don’t crunch your ice.”