A Place to Call Home (15 page)

Great-Gran adjusted her hearing aid and arched a white brow. “I didn’t invite you,
Elizabeth
.”

“Mawmaw, I’ll take you next week,” Mama quickly assured her mother. “I promise.”

Grandmother Elizabeth dabbed her eyes with a napkin. She could turn her tears on and off like a lawn sprinkler. “How will I do my Christmas shopping if everyone shuffles me aside until it suits their mood? It’s all very well for the rest of you to make plans, but I can’t depend on my
strength to hold out.” A single tear trickled down her soft white cheek. “I suppose I’ll have to forgo proper gifts now that I’m old and frail. I’ll simply hand out cards with money in them. That’s what helpless, elderly women are reduced to. I hope you all forgive me.”

Great-Gran pursed her lips. “Quit sniffling and mind your own business.”

Grandpa held up both hands. “Mother,” he said to Great-Gran as if he were still a boy, “I’d rather cut off my own two paws than hear any more of this.”

“
She
started it, Joseph. And I’ve never backed down from a fight in my life.”

Grandmother Elizabeth snapped to attention. “I most certainly am going shopping with you today. I’ll take Claire with me to carry my packages.”

I felt like Marvin. Afraid to move.

“I’m taking Claire to carry my packages,” Great-Gran said.

Grandmother shot back, “Since you’re too ancient to drive us to Atlanta, Alice, I don’t see how you can be in charge. You don’t have any say over who accompanies me and carries my packages.”

“It’s my damn car. Carry your own damn packages.”

“I don’t wish to be cramped in your small, uncomfortable car. It reeks of that vile tearose perfume you wear.” Grandmother Elizabeth smiled around the table. “Now, who shall drive us? Whom shall we honor?”

Excuses gushed out. Daddy and Grandpa had to go to Gainesville and pick up a new belt assembly for one of the mowers. Mama had to get five bushels of overripe apples peeled and puréed for apple butter. Evan was too young to drive, and Hop wasn’t experienced enough to be turned loose on the Atlanta freeways. But Grandma Dottie was caught without escape. She knew it, too. I could tell by the trapped expression in her sharp blue eyes. She couldn’t think fast enough. “I, well, I … hmmm, have to—” she began.

“You’re not busy, daughter-in-law,” Great-Gran proclaimed. “You can drive us. I’m so sorry Elizabeth butted in. If you can’t stand her company, we can tie her to the luggage rack.”

“I’m not the annoying old
nanny goat
in this family,” Grandmother Elizabeth replied tartly. “We all know who that is.”

“All right, all
right
. Hush, both of you,” Grandma Dottie said. “I’ll go. I’ll drive. But hush!” She lit a cigarette and smoked in disgusted defeat.

Grandpa tried to rescue her. “Well, y’all can’t go to Atlanta today anyhow,” he said. “I’m not gonna let y’all traipse off down there without me or Holt or one of the boys to go along. It’s not safe anymore.”

Daddy nodded. “That’s right.”

“There’s our solution,” Grandmother Elizabeth announced, gesturing toward Roanie with her cane. “Not a soul will bother poor, decrepit Alice with that brawny young knight by our sides. He can go.”

“And when Elizabeth trips over her cane,” Great-Gran interjected smugly, “he can tote her like a sack of horse turds.”

Run
, I mouthed to Roanie. He looked at me with a puzzled frown.

But it was too late.

Grandma Dottie guided her big, gas-guzzling station wagon down the freeway with her right hand clenched, white-knuckled, on the steering wheel and her left hand propped by a narrow opening in her window, a cigarette burning constantly between her fingers. She was as stoic as the Statue of Liberty, torch raised.

Roanie was lucky. He got to sit in the front seat with her. I studied the back of his head, watching its slight movements as he silently absorbed the cluttered urban scenery outside his window. I wondered what he was thinking, what he saw in apartment buildings and skyscrapers,
warehouses and billboards, if the city promised him something I couldn’t fathom. I’d heard Daddy assure him, before we left, that he’d get paid the same as if he’d spent the day working at the farm.

“But this trip ain’t work, Mr. Maloney,” Roanie had replied.

“Believe me,” Daddy had answered drily, “it’ll be a chore.”

It certainly was, for me at least. I was the backseat buffer zone between Great-Gran and Grandmother, and I sat there in stiff misery, my hands wadded together in the lap of my pinstriped shirtdress, my feet sweating in knee socks and loafers, my shoulders hunched inside a thick blue sweater. I wished I were fireproof.

“And, of course, as secretary for the British Magnolias Association, I had a place of honor at the gala following the premiere,” Grandmother Elizabeth was saying. “So as she and Laurence Olivier—of course, he was only Mr. Olivier then, he hadn’t been knighted yet—as she and Mr. Olivier moved down the receiving line, I put out my hand and said, ‘Miss Leigh, it is so nice to welcome you to Atlanta,’ and Vivien grasped my hand and gave me the sweetest smile. ‘Oh!’ she said to me. ‘To hear a voice from home! How kind of you!’ ”

This was Grandmother’s
Gone With the Wind
story, which she told and retold at the drop of a mint julep. How she and Grandpa Delaney had attended the movie’s world premiere in 1939; how magical the Loew’s Grand Theater had been, fitted with an antebellum facade and klieg lights sweeping it; the crowds, the dignitaries, the flashing camera bulbs, Margaret Mitchell signing “
To Mr. and Mrs. Delaney, Best Regards, Peggy Mitchell
” on Grandmother’s theater program; and the silk-and-taffeta gown Grandmother had worn to the ball afterward, and Grandpa Delaney as handsome as Clark Gable in his formal evening clothes; how Grandmother had written two full pages for the
Dunderry Weekly Shamrock
about that glorious night; and how
everyone
, everyone, in town had
sworn that she, Elizabeth Delaney, had looked as beautifully English and Southern as Vivien Leigh, Scarlett O’Hara herself.

Grandmother finished her story and took a tortoiseshell compact from her purse, patted her coil of fake, brown braids, smoothed her red lipstick, and studied her soft, aged face as if Vivien and Scarlett still looked back at her.

Her story fascinated everyone except Great-Gran, who despised it. Grandmother knew Great-Gran did, too. As predictably as could be, Great-Gran stared out the passenger window on my right as if pretending that she’d turned her hearing aid off. But she muttered in a stage whisper, “Crazy as a damned bedbug.”

“I beg your pardon?” Grandmother said.

“Vivien Leigh.” Great-Gran snorted. “She went crazy as a bedbug before she died.”

“She most certainly did
not
.”

“And Margaret Mitchell was a mousy little toot who wouldn’t say peep to a pigeon. She stole the whole plot of that book from old war veterans who told her stories when she was growing up. And you, you old liar, you signed your own program and just
told
everybody she autographed it.”

Grandmother Elizabeth took a long, loud, quavering breath. “Stop the car, Dottie. Let me out. I’d rather walk.”

Grandmother always demanded to be let out at some point on a car trip with Great-Gran. In the rain, in the snow, in the middle of a city, in the middle of the mountains. We were zooming forward at seventy miles an hour on two lanes of the inbound expressway, surrounded by cars and tractor-trailers.

“Let me
out
, Dottie!”

Grandma Dottie took a drag from her cigarette and aimed a forceful stream of smoke out the window. “I’ll think about it,” she muttered, “when I get to the next exit.”

“Set the yakkety old flirt on the street,” Great-Gran ordered. “She wasn’t invited anyway.”

“I know when I’m not wanted,” Grandmother said, her lips trembling.

Great-Gran hooted. “Good. Get out.”

I was learning the art of distraction. I leaned over the front seat. “Grandma? How about we go to the bakery at Rich’s and buy some éclairs?”

“You betcha, sweet pea,” Grandma Dottie said.

I poked Roanie on the shoulder. He swiveled his head toward me. “They’re named after me,” I teased solemnly. “E-Claires.”

A tiny smile crooked one corner of his lips. He shot a glance at the sullen backseat grannies and opened his mouth to say something, but Great-Gran proclaimed suddenly, “They’re Jewish, you know.”

I looked back at her. “Éclairs are Jewish?” I asked carefully. I didn’t know much about Jewish people or their food, so anything was possible. At least it was a change of subject.

“No,” Great-Gran said. “The Rich’s department-store people are Jewish. Hungarian Jews from way back.”

“Oh? Okay.” I prodded Roanie’s shoulder again. “That doesn’t mean they were
hungry
,” I said in a droll tone. “It means they came from
Hungary
.”

“They’re real nice people,” Great-Gran added. “Real humanitarians. Good to everybody. You’d never think they used to be foreigners.” She paused. “Unlike some people I could name.”

“One of my aunts was Jewish,” Grandmother Elizabeth retorted. We all knew that. Some of the Maloney kin whispered about it as if it were some mysterious shame. I couldn’t connect this vague infamy with Grandmother. Aggravation, yes. Shame, no. “Polish and Jewish,” Grandmother elaborated. “A quite sturdy combination.”

Great-Gran sniffed. “Oh,
la-di-da
. In a minute you’ll claim you’re related to Jesus Christ Himself.”

“Don’t be sacrilegious.”

“Jesus and Vivien Leigh.”

“Dottie, stop the car.
I want to get out
.”

Grandma Dottie drove faster.

Rich’s department store in downtown Atlanta was a dream castle, a social touchstone for generations. You could furnish your whole house there. You could buy books and jewelry and linens and fine underwear. You could eat lunch in the tearoom. You could buy a cake. You could shop on credit, lots of credit, and if you came back, ten years later, with an outdated blouse in a dusty, faded-green Rich’s box and said, “I’d like to return this, please,” they’d take it back.

Black or white, rich or poor, city or country, we all had a Rich’s. The grand, massive, dignified downtown store was beginning to lose its luster when I was a girl, but it still had years to go before everyone agreed that no one shopped there anymore.

Grandma parked the car and locked it. We were alone in the shadowy, concrete womb of the store’s parking decks, a vulnerable troupe walking slowly, Grandmother Elizabeth tottering along with her cane and Great-Gran moving with the heavy-footed pace of sore knee joints. She planted a hand on my shoulder and leaned on me. I wished she’d give up a little pride and buy a cane.

A subtle but intense change had come over Roanie. I’m sure Daddy and Grandpa Maloney had told him that his job was to protect the family’s womankind. He scanned the long, dimly lit parking lanes relentlessly and walked as if balanced on the balls of his feet, his arms spread slightly away from his body. He looked gracefully threatening, so quiet and controlled.

A shiver ran down my spine. I wasn’t just scared of the parking deck, of muggers and rapists and all the other human monsters who lived in cities, according to every account I’d heard at home. No, I was a little scared of Roanie, or at least awed, and strangely giddy inside—it was a confusing mixture, somehow involved with being female.

When we were finally inside the store, breathing in its soft lights and scents, its safe, nicely dressed people and beautiful merchandise, I still watched Roanie and felt, somehow, that trouble was brewing.

We were in Men’s Accessories when it happened.

The Old Grannies tired quickly. They settled into their standard shopping routine, which meant that Grandma Dottie convinced a salesman to let us drag a pair of chairs from a dressing room so that Great-Gran and Grandmother could sit, like solemn judges, while we presented merchandise to them for their appraisal.

Grandma Dottie smartly stationed them at opposite sides of the department, then, sighing, she escaped to the restroom for a few minutes, leaving Roanie and me on duty. Back and forth we went, ferrying neckties, driving gloves, pullover sweaters, and bottles of cologne, which the grannies examined shrewdly. The goodies that passed muster were stacked beside their chairs; the others we carefully put back in place.

There were only a few other shoppers in the department; the ones I noticed most were a well-dressed couple with a skittish blond boy who was maybe four years old, who darted through the racks, skewing suits sideways on their hangers. His daddy had a squeaky-sharp, impatient look that set my teeth on edge. “Be careful!” I heard him snap at the woman as she helped him try on a tweed jacket. “You caught the lining on my watch. Pay attention.” The woman smiled too quickly and apologized. I couldn’t imagine Daddy speaking to Mama that way or her giving him a meek look if he had.

The harried salesman, who looked stern and prim to me but was probably no more than twenty-five, fawned over the man and followed the little boy around, straightening the clothes he dislodged, not once asking the kid’s parents to make him behave. And when the salesman wasn’t
trying to baby-sit, he dogged Roanie’s footsteps, frowning at him, even though Roanie wasn’t doing a thing.

Roanie’s expression grew darker every second. I positioned myself near him and made jokes and silly comments, trying to lighten him up, but a muscle flexed in his cheek and he didn’t answer. I couldn’t figure out what was going on until Grandmother Elizabeth crooked a finger at the clerk. He went over to her and bent down, oozing attentive charm, and I heard her whisper, “Dear young man, if you’re worried about shoplifting, I advise you to stop following my helpers and concentrate instead on that elderly lady across the way. She’s quite senile. She has a habit of hiding merchandise in her coat pockets.”

The salesman’s jaw fell open. He tightened his tie. I was furious. So he thought Roanie might steal something. He wandered toward Great-Gran, his eyes shifting uncertainly from her back to Roanie. I stepped in front of him and said in an angry whisper, “My grannies are crazy, but they don’t steal, sir. And neither does my … my boy. You leave him alone or he’ll beat your butt.”