The Truth Hurts

  “How could I? I didn’t even—I don’t even—know her.”

  Her gaze was a bit skeptical. “Well, I wouldn’t actually know anything for sure about what she did in that regard after she married your father, or what she didn’t. Perhaps we’ll give her the benefit of the doubt, even though it wasthe sixties and that kind of thing was going around like the flu.”

  Even though she was talking about my own mother, I had to laugh.

  “Maybe she behaved herself. She did love him. Your father, I mean. And besides, whether or not she had an affair doesn’t have a thing to do with the price of peas.”

  I laughed again. “Eulalie, if I had lived here all of my life, would I sound like you?”

  “Well, darlin’, we can’t all be sweet magnolias. At leasta few of our daughters have got to grow up to be prickly pears, or we won’t never make no progress at’all.”

  “Do you think I’m prickly?”

  “My dear, I think you’re northern.”

  Nothun,she pronounced it. I risked teasing her. “If I said ‘ma’am,’ would that help?”

  She looked amused. “It might, some.”

  She stubbed out her cigarette and then leaned back and asked me a question that gave me a little jolt. “And what would you most like to know about your daddy?”

  “Oh. Do I get only one question?” When she smiled at that but didn’t answer, I said, “All right. I want to know, did he love my mother? Did he love me?”

  “That was two. Maybe I’ll give you three. Don’t you want to know if your mama loved you?”

  “I guess I took that for granted.”

  “Yes, that’s right, that’s a verity. You may take your daddy’s affection for both of you for granted, too.”

  “Affection?”

  “He was a distant kind of man, my dear. Passionate, but perhaps not for people. More for causes, if you know what I mean. Always thinking big thoughts, which I suspect he had to do just to keep up with your mama. She was a pistol! No, that’s not quite right, she was a live wire, but of two different natures, such as you find on a car battery, do you know what I mean by that? One wire is red and the other is blue, I believe, and if you attach the wrong one to the wrong post, you get dangerous sparks and maybe even an explosion. That was your mama. Smooth and happy as a Rolls-Royce engine most of the time, but cross wires with her and you’d better stand back. I suppose you know where they met?”

  “No! Do you?”

  “I do, and it’s a funny story. Supposedly, they met right in front of a movie theater in Hollywood. It was thepremiereof one of those films your grandparents wrote. Your daddy was all dressed up in a tux, escorting his parents, whom I believe he could hardly stand, but toward whom he felt a certain filial loyalty one can only admire. Your mother was picketing the film.”

  I laughed.

  Eulalie was pleased at my reaction. “I thought you’d like that. It was some union question, perhaps, or it may even have been a question of employing women and minorities in the film. At any rate, they met straight out of a movie script, you might say. Your mama waved a picket in your father’s face and yelled something unpleasant at him, and he looked down and saw this darling girl who obviously agreed with everything he held to be important in life, so he asked her if she would go out with him and try to convince him of her views.”

  I laughed again, delighted with this story.

  Eulalie’s eyes twinkled, too. “I don’t know how long it took your mama to catch on that he didn’t need very much convincing.”

  “Wait a minute,” I ask her. “Are you saying that they were liberals to start with, but that they changed their minds?”

  “I don’t know what they were, darlin’. I’m merely passing on to you the stories they told on themselves.”

  “Why did they move here?”

  “To get away from there, I expect. And of course, your mama’s people had been here since the sands of time began to run. They were family, such as it was. A viper’s nest of segregationists is what they were, in my opinion, and about the only good thing that could be said of any of them was that they had never betrayed any of their friends to a Senate committee as your other grandparents had. Although knowing the Montgomerys, that was probably only for lack of opportunity.”

  “But if my parents started out as liberals, they must have hated it here.”

  “No, I don’t believe they did, child. No more than mercenary soldiers in a field of war. No more than spiders in a web.”

  “Affection,” I said, without realizing I’d spoken out loud.

  Her face took on a sympathetic but sardonic look. “They loved bigger things, dear. Truth. Justice. The American Way. We just never suspected the manner in which they defined that Way. Of course, it meant you came in second. But then, I suspect you understand that, don’t you? If you don’t mind my asking, ’cause I’m a nosy old woman, what comes first in your life, before your work?”

  “Nothing,” I admitted.

  “Hm. You are their child, it’s sure.”

  “Would I like them?”

  “Probably. Your mother could charm the honey out of hives and your father had a sweetness about him that none of his high-mindedness could ever quite disguise. On the other hand, they made enemies, and maybe you’d have become one of them, as they were enemies toward their own families.”

  She looked suddenly old and very tired.

  I said quickly, “I should go.”

  She merely nodded her head and waved a hand at me, seeming to have been overtaken by weariness, or possibly by hard memories. The movement of her hand had such a grandeur and grace that I found it impossible to take offense at her easy dismissal of me.

  26

  Marie

  “It isn’t much to go on,” I admit to Nate, after he finishes reading it. “But it’s the closest I’ve ever come to getting a sense of what they were like.”

  “Your mom sounds hot.”

  “Please! That’s my mother you’re talking about!”

  He smiles, and I know he’s only teasing me to make sure I don’t get maudlin on him. “You ever do therapy, Marie?”

  “You know I have, Nathan. Isn’t it required for every American born after, oh, 1940?”

  Nate laughs again and lays a hand on the scene he just read.“So, what’d your therapist think about all this?”

  “She wanted to talk about my abandonment issues.”

  “And?”

  “I told her, I don’t got no steenking abandonment issues.”

  My cousin appears ready to argue with that, but fortunately for me, just as he opens his mouth, there’s a knock on the door of our suite.

  I call out, “Come on in, Steve! It’s your room, too!”

  But when the door opens, it isn’t Steve Orbach who’s standing there, but Maureen—Mo—Goodwin, with a hesitant expression on her face.

  “I’m sorry to bother y’all.”

  “That’s all right, please come in.”

  She does, but just barely, and doesn’t close the door behind her. “I have been asked to extend an invitation to you from Miss Eulalie—”

  “Mrs. Fisher?” I glance quickly at Nate, whose face registers the sheer coincidence of this. “How in the world does she know I’m here?”

  An embarrassed look crosses Mo Goodwin’s plain face. “Probably because of me. I hope y’all don’t mind. I told my mother I had new guests and she asked me who, and I told her, and she told my dad and he mentioned it to Mr. Clayton and he told Miss Eulalie, and then she called me.” She shrugs apologetically, as if to say, What can you expect in a small town like this?

  “No, that’s fine, I don’t mind at all, I just wondered.”

  It’s odd to consider the strange connection between Mo Goodwin and me, of how our parents once were friends together in a dangerous enterprise. Her own parents’ sense of betrayal by my parents could well explain how awkward and uncomfortable she seems to be around me. Now she says, as if reading from a formal invitati
on, “Miss Eulalie and Mister Clayton kindly request the pleasure of your company at a light supper at their home tonight. She says she’ll be havin’ a few folks over to meet you. My parents. The Wiegans. The Reeses.”

  The white members of Hostel, I realize with a start.

  “Miss Eulalie asked me to beg your forgiveness for her not callin’ you personally, but she doesn’t believe in telephones anymore.”

  I have to smile. It sounds so like the woman I met.

  “Anymore?” I inquire. “What happened?”

  Lackley Goodwin’s middle-aged daughter shrugs again. “It was those telephone solicitors, you know, callin’ at supper time. Miss Eulalie finally got as how she just couldn’t stand them anymore, so she had the telephone company come and rip out her telephone lines.”

  “But what did Mr. Clayton think of that?”

  For the first time, Mo Goodwin can’t seem to help but loosen up and grin a bit. “Mr. Clayton got himself a cell phone that he likes just fine.”

  “A little more in tune with this century than she is?”

  “Oh, my, yes! I used to be his secretary at the bank—”

  “You did?”

  “Yes, ma’am, before my parents invested in this place and I got a chance to run it. At the bank, Mr. Clayton took to fax machines right off, and you’d have thought that computers were invented just for him. I taught him myself how to surf the Web. Mr. Clayton just loves new gizmos. I’ll swear, he takes to ’em like ham on beans.”

  I can sense my cousin’s inner amusement at the sound of that.

  “Since she doesn’t have a phone, will you pass on to them that we’d love to come?”

  “Am I included?” Nathan asks, sounding surprised.

  “Oh, yes, they mean to invite you, too,” Mo says politely to my cousin. “Miss Eulalie specifically said so, and when I told her—I hope you don’t mind—that y’all have another friend with you, she said, the more the merrier.”

  “That’s very kind of her.” I get a mental image of fierce-looking Steve mixing at a southern soiree. “What time?”

  “They eat early. Six o’clock.”

  “Will you be there?”

  “I’m invited,” she says ambiguously, and then leaves, quietly closing the door behind her.

  Nate looks thoughtful. “I guess we didn’t exactly sneak into town, did we?” Gently, he then asks, “Will you let me read the other thing now, Marie? The one that’s supposed to be about your parents’ deaths?”

  “Murders,” I correct him, and hand it to him.

  A few minutes later, he looks up and says, “I don’t know. Do you?”

  “It sounds pretty real,” I tell him. “It feels real.”

  “Yeah,” he agrees, sounding sad for me. “It does.”

  “Look on the bright side, Nathan.”

  “There is one?”

  “Sure. If this is true, at least I’ll know for sure they’re dead.”

  He just shakes his head, having no smart retort for that.

  Next, I let him have the other chapters I wrote before there was ever a Paulie Barnes to force me to do it. When he’s finished with all of that, we don’t even stop to talk about it. It’s as if it’s too much for him to absorb all at once, and I’m suddenly feeling far too restless to sit still. We go looking for Steve, and when we find him outside, the three of us get into my rental car and drive around the area to sightsee.

  On our way out of the inn, I see Mo Goodwin and pause to ask her a question. “Where could we go to get some copies made?”

  “How many do you need, Ms. Folletino?”

  “I wish you’d call me Marie.” I smile at her, but in her shyness she isn’t looking right at me, and so she doesn’t see it. “I need eight copies of three pages.”

  “We have a copy machine. I’ll do it for you.”

  I hesitate, thinking of what it is I want copied, but I realize that it might not be a bad thing if she were to read it. Maybe she knows something I should know, and maybe she’ll even decide to tell me so. “That’s very kind of you. I’ll pay for them, of course.”

  “What’s that all about?” Nate asks me, on our way out.

  “You’ll see,” I tell him. “It’s a surprise, for later.”

  I’d tell him what it is—I’d tell Steve, too—but I don’t want anybody talking me out of doing what I want to do.

  On our Magical Memory Tour, we make a stop in front of my parents’ old home, an impressive pile of architecture that’s vacant now and gone to seed. The “famous” parson’s chamber is not visible from the street, nor is the magnolia tree that the young black man saw from the windows of it. There’s a circle drive where Hubert Templeton would have kept the car running while my father ran in to get my mother. It’s easy to imagine the front door flung open and three dark people standing in the shadows of the hallway, watching. I’ll have to settle for imagination. I have no actual memory of this house or of the events that happened in it, just a recurring dream of myself as an infant riding in the backseat of a car, at night, with my daddy.

  After that stop along memory lane, the three of us park briefly in front of the house where Nate and I lived with his parents.

  “Want to ring the bell and ask for a tour?” I ask him.

  But he shakes his head vehemently. “No. Let’s go.”

  We drive the streets down which the white Hostel members of Sebastion were paraded on the evening of June 12, 1963, and I tell Steve about it.

  “You think Julia and Joe were in that crowd?” Nate asks me, referring to his own parents, my mother’s brother and his wife. “Throwing stones?”

  “I kind of doubt it, Nate. That would be too undignified for your mother, and your father wouldn’t want to stick his neck out. Anyway, don’t you think they’d leave that to the rednecks?”

  “As if they aren’t rednecks, themselves,” he says, with a derisive snort. “Just better dressed, with a few more years in school, not that it improved them any.”

  But these are old complaints, and we tire of them quickly.

  We circle the town, taking a look at all the roads that enter and exit from it, wondering which of them leads to a crossroads where two people might have been shot and killed on the night of the parade.

  It’s a small city/town, and our tour doesn’t take much time, at least not by the clock. In terms of our personal histories, however, it covers an awful lot of forgotten ground.

  When we return to the inn to change for dinner, we argue about whether or not to stay crowded into a single suite or to ask Mo for another one. It quickly becomes clear to me that neither man wants to leave me alone with the other one. To avoid nastiness, I capitulate: we’ll manage with just this one set of rooms. We divvy up the suite, with me assigned to the smaller back bedroom and the two men taking the front one. Steve insists that my cousin have the bed, and he takes the rollaway that somebody has placed in our suite in our absence. Although there’s only the one bathroom it has doors opening into each of the bedrooms, so we ought to be able to manage okay, though I wish they weren’t so stubborn.

  As per my request, I find a neat pile of stapled copies stacked on the desk in the front bedroom. Before Steve or Nathan can see them, I take them into my room and stash them in my suitcase. Then I grab my laptop and head out the door.

  “You guys can have the bathroom first. I’m going downstairs to work.”

  “By yourself?” Steve asks sharply. “I’ll go with you.”

  “No, I’m fine, remember what you said? I’m still safe until I finish his book.”

  Neither of them looks particularly happy at the idea of being left alone with the other, but they’re just going to have to get along. Nathan could get a private suite if he wanted, but he hasn’t shown any more inclination to leave my side than Steve has. I’m beginning to wonder if each one thinks he’s protecting me from the other.

  It’s a thought that has me grinning to myself as I close the door on them.

  On the wide stair
case I meet a surprise: Rachel Templeton.

  “Mrs. Templeton!”

  Her head jerks up, and she frowns at me. I’ve startled her, and she looks angry about it, as if she had been deep in her own thoughts and now I’ve interrupted them.

  “I didn’t mean to scare you. Do you remember me? I’m Marie Lightfoot? Marie Folletino? I was here in Sebastion five years ago, and we talked about my parents?”

  On that trip, I stayed in Birmingham and commuted here. Looking back at that choice now, it doesn’t make much sense. I can only surmise that I didn’t want to get any closer than I had to, didn’t want to spend any more time here than I needed in order to interview a few people.

  “I remember,” she says, without warmth.

  This black woman who once worked for my parents is in her sixties now. From the looks of the vacuum cleaner she’s lugging up the steps, she is still working as a housecleaner, only this time for the Old Southern Inn. It makes my heart hurt to realize that although many things have changed since those days, for a black woman with little education, some hard things never changed. Here is Rachel, still sweeping up the dirt from under the feet of white folks. Or, maybe I should say, wealthier folks, since surely some of the tourists who stay here now are black. She’s wearing blue jeans, with a man’s shirt hanging over them, and her head is wrapped in a white turban. I get a glimpse of the beautiful girl she once was, but the years have lined her face and deepened the shadows and circles under her eyes.

  “What’re you back here for?” she asks me, blunt as a hammer.

  She was a little friendlier than this the last time I saw her, but not much.

  “I’m just trying to find out a little more about them.”

  She shakes her head, as if she thinks I’m foolish to pursue it.

  “You’re working late,” I comment, kind of desperately, as if I think that if we stand here on the steps long enough she’ll warm up to me.

  “I work another job first.”

  Stricken at the idea of this sixtyish woman working two jobs—or more? —to make ends meet, I’m at a loss for any other words except, “How is your husband?”