Cementville (20 page)

“And you are
Anonymous Donor
, aren't you.” Wanda felt thick as a stack of bricks.

“Wanda, I have money, and there's no question it belongs to you. Now you can make this easy or you can make it difficult. When the time comes, you're to go and see my attorney, Alden Wilder.” Evelyn Slidell busied herself with what remained of her afternoon snack and seemed to forget Wanda was in the room. A smoky draft wafted from the fireplace. Could the blood in ancient veins really slow to such a pace that a person needed a wood-burning fire in the middle of summer? A mantel clock ticked away at lost time, it too apparently unable to keep up with its immediate surroundings. Wanda looked at her wristwatch and was about to make an excuse to leave when her grandmother became aware again of her visitor.

“Or—” the old woman squinted at Wanda for an uncomfortably long spell. “You can rot out there on Johnny Ferguson's sheep farm and keep that stick up your you-know-what.”

“What is it you want from me exactly?”

“Get the hell out of this place, Wanda. Surely there are places you've always wanted to see. I married your grandfather when I was eighteen, and your father came squalling out from between my legs nine months later. I've been withering in this mausoleum ever since.”

“So I'm supposed to live the life you didn't.”

“But not for me, of course. You're not a hopeless case.”

“Well, thanks. I think.” Wanda chewed on the inside of her right jaw, screwing her mouth to the left. It was a habit that drove her mother crazy. “What about Mother? She can't get along without me.”

“You'll be able to afford a nurse. Martha's schedule will open up before long.” Evelyn Slidell laid her head against a tatted pillowcase in practiced exhaustion. “Think of Paris, London, the moors
of—where was it the Brontë girls were shut up at—you were a goddamn English major, weren't you?”

“Haworth.” Wanda took some needles out of her handbag. “Yorkshire.” She cast on twenty-seven stitches in a pink elasticized cotton, soft, not itchy.

“What's that?” The old lady feigned disinterest in the activity in Wanda's lap.

“Creaky house—probably gets drafty,” Wanda said. “I can whip out a pair of fingerless gloves for you in no time. Keep your hands warm and still let you hold your tea.”

“So. You'll take me up on my offer?”

“This sort of decision requires thought. Knitting helps me think.” She was aware of her grandmother studying her. Wanda wondered if the old woman was searching her profile for some trace of her beloved and worthless Stanley.

They let the silence settle around them for a while.

“Hunh. You didn't get
that
from my son. Only kind of thinking he did was with the Little Head.” If she was waiting for a reaction from her granddaughter, she got none. “You're not saying you would actually walk away from a fortune that's rightly yours.” The old woman appeared to be growing smaller in her bed.

“I'm not saying anything particularly. You haven't paid me any attention for almost thirty years, so it won't kill you to give me a while to chew this over.” Wanda finished off the cuff ribbing for the first glove.

“It might,” Evelyn Slidell said, and laughed hard enough to make herself cough.

W
ANDA VISITED THE
S
LIDELL MANSION
several times a week after that. Their chats grew less combative with every meeting. She put off making an answer to her grandmother's offer for as long as possible. The idea of any quantity of money—much less the blurry nightmare images of Wanda herself wandering the dark and winding streets
of some medieval city across the ocean—engendered in her chest a sort of breathless excitement and caused a patch of eczema that crept from Wanda's bony ankle to her knee.

But each time she drove down the hill into town, Wanda met with less anxiety. She thought about the mocking dream of the blackcaped scarecrow, a specter she almost wished would come back. She wanted him to see her walk right into the grocery store on a whim now and then to pick up a surprise dessert—one of multiple odd little things she found herself doing to placate Loretta, who had grown even more laconic, if that was possible, as Wanda's visits to the Slidell mansion became more frequent. She tried to ignore her mother's pouting, not wanting to be drawn into an impossible quarrel in which she rambled on defensively while Loretta got by with a few precious syllables.

One morning, this was probably after she'd been to visit Evelyn Slidell six or seven times, her mother stopped her as Wanda was heading out the door.

“Leaving?” Loretta said disinterestedly.

“I have some errands in town. Do you need anything?”

“Taking the Fury again?”

“It's the only car we have, Mother.”

“I might need it today.” Loretta shuffled over to the stove and lit a burner.

“You haven't driven in over three years. Is this about Grandmother Slidell?”

“You're calling her grandmother now?”

“Sometimes. Most of the time I don't call her anything.” Wanda waited, one hand on the doorknob, the other on her hip. Her mother didn't respond, and when Wanda raised her eyebrows in question, Loretta waved her out the door. Wanda went out and turned the key in the Fury's ignition. The engine grumbled, then hummed.

Wanda turned the car off. She couldn't drive away knowing Loretta was more than a tad hurt by what must have felt like disloyalty, what with the two of them skinning by on practically nothing
all these years while the old dragon sat there in town on a pile of God only knew how much cash—money she intended to leave to them someday anyway. Wanda crossed the side yard and poked her head in the kitchen door.

“Do you want to come with me?” she said as Loretta broke two eggs into a skillet.

Wanda jumped when her mother spun around. “Fetch my sweater,” Loretta said.

M
ARTHA
G
OINS WAS THRILLED AT
the sight of Loretta crabbing up the front steps of the mansion. “Loretta Ferguson! If you aren't looking beautiful as always!” Martha took Loretta's hand and pulled them both toward the huge kitchen that spanned the back of the house. “I have been meaning to get up there to see you all, but it's one thing and then another—oh! But you haven't heard, have you—”

Martha paused and fussed nervously with the pans on the stove, clearly ready to burst. She grabbed a tea towel and hid her face with both hands, weeping quietly into the cloth. “Mrs. Slidell took a bad turn yesterday evening . . . oh, I should have called . . . but I was here until late with Doctor Carruthers, and just dead on my feet when I got home . . .”

“Martha.” Loretta put a hand on the woman's arm. “Martha, we don't have a phone.”

“I ought to know by now, this happens to old people—I mean, what are you going to do?” Martha shook out and folded the tea towel. Women like Martha were raised to believe there was always something you could do. You got out of bed in the morning and put the best face on the day.

She patted her hair and straightened her skirt, her voice still tremulous when she said, “We lose people . . .”

Loretta rubbed her shoulder. Martha covered her mouth and looked away.

“A bad turn, as in . . .?” Wanda set on the kitchen counter the jar of apple butter Charlene had given her to take to Evelyn. Everyone in Cementville seemed to know about the town granddame's sweet tooth.

“Doctor Carruthers thinks it may have been a stroke. Mrs. Slidell has given us strict orders—” Martha paused again, her face pinched and red, “—no hospitals. The only other trip she intends to make out of this house is feet first, straight to the Duvall Funeral Home. You all won't mind carrying lunch up to her, will you? She has to be encouraged to eat. Tell her I've got chores . . .”

She let Wanda take the lunch tray. Upstairs, the old lady's reaction to Loretta was more restrained than Martha's had been. Seeing her daughter-in-law's face after so many years seemed to cause Evelyn Slidell to lose her bearings. She allowed Wanda to feed her a few bites, then glared at her to stop, and in minutes nodded off without a word of acknowledgment to Loretta. When she woke, her eyes wandered between Wanda and Loretta.

“You're Stanley's Loretta, aren't you?” she asked Wanda. Her speech was halting, soft and faraway, as if she were trapped inside a box.

“No, Grandmother, I'm Wanda.”

Evelyn stared at Loretta vacantly. She looked at Wanda again. “You're Stanley's Loretta, aren't you?” she repeated.

“This here is Loretta, Stanley's wife.” Wanda nodded to Loretta, and her mother stepped forward. “You remember her. She's my mother.” Wanda had noticed Evelyn repeating herself more lately but had not seen this kind of helpless disorientation.

“Maybe I shouldn't have come,” Loretta said.

“No, I think she just needs to sort things out.” Wanda took her usual seat on the skittish Queen Anne chair and motioned her mother to its mate on the other side of the bed. The two sat for a long while that afternoon. It was a mostly silent visit, but not unpleasant.

E
VELYN
S
LIDELL LINGERED, MUTE AND
still, through July and August. Her eyes roved the room, lighting on her few visitors, flashing a startled recognition and just as quickly blinking out. Doc Carruthers said her body had probably been peppered with tiny strokes and grape-like tumors that orchestrated a gradual cutting off of thought and air and blood. Loretta came often with Wanda on her now daily visits to the mansion. Her mother sat on the side of the bed, rubbing lotion into the liver spots on the wrinkled hands, her ancient nemesis rarely conscious in that last week. Several times Wanda came into the room, having gone downstairs to make sandwiches, and found Loretta deep in a one-sided conversation.

The night before her grandmother's death, Wanda dreamed she was standing in the cupola atop the Slidell mansion watching Evelyn's last stroll with her gaunt companion. The two were fading down the street when Death looked over his shoulder at Wanda, his lips contorted in the expression she understood as friendly, perhaps even kind. His long fingers gave a toodle-loo wave. More a gesture of familiarity than a real goodbye.

When Evelyn passed away, Loretta Ferguson Slidell buried choking sobs in the tatted pillowcase next to the old lady's head. Wanda could only imagine that her mother's grief was for unsaid things—not the things Loretta had never spoken to her stone-cruel mother-in-law, but the other way around—that she had come here longing for a few words from Evelyn that would wash away the years of bitterness. In the gulf between the two women hung the memory of a dashing young man with brilliantined hair. Wanda stared out the window while her mother wept for him.

Most of the town turned out for the funeral, not for a surfeit of affection—and certainly not to enjoy the weather, as the August heat had settled into the valley, the long, rain-drenched spring having morphed into a muggy summer—but to pay respects to the end of a line, the last of the small-time robber barons, as close as Cementville was likely to come to having a tycoon of its very own. Led by O'Donahue's patrol car, the cortege snaked its brief way
from the Duvall Funeral Home to Holy Ghost Church for the Mass. Malcolm Duvall and his wife and son moved silently about the sanctuary, beckoning in turn to various speakers who rose to the podium to besaint the town's First Lady. Then with a few deft hand motions, Mac herded the crowd to the walled cemetery beyond the church doors.

The cemetery lawn, carefully tended for a century or more by the Knights of Columbus, had been trampled to within an inch of its life by this summer's melancholy parade of traffic. There'd been the seven Guardsmen. Danny Ferguson was buried in the southwest section that nobody called the Potter's Field, though that's what it amounted to, where the poor and the non-Catholic and the unplaceable were given their rest. Jimmy Smith's wife, whose attacker had not yet been found, had been allowed burial in the main cemetery only after Vera Smith, Giang's outraged mother-in-law, threatened to write the
Courier Journal
to expose the town's treatment of her. Even last night, at Evelyn's wake, Wanda heard the whispering, that everybody knew the Vietnamese woman was a Buddhist.

It's 1969!
Wanda wanted to scream. Perhaps there was something to her grandmother's wish for her; maybe getting out of Cementville, at least for a while, would do her some good. Under a dark green canopy Wanda, in the dress she'd worn beneath her college graduation gown eight years before, sat in the front row of folding chairs draped in black sashes. The heft of Martha Goins's thigh buttressed her on one side, Loretta's brittle frame on the other. Evelyn's coffin lay before them on the contraption that would lower it into the hole, a green cloth tastefully draped over the mound of excavated dirt. Several men who did odd jobs around town had been engaged to fetch the flowers from the funeral home and now the earthen mound was buried in great heaps of gladioli, lilies, and roses. Wanda's unweeping face bloomed crimson then blanched ghostly pale then went to crimson again with the dawning awareness of her new position as official heir. Father Oliver's somnolent
voice was reading to them about ashes and dust. The priest seemed to have been rendered listless by the summer's repetition of tracts from the Books of Wisdom and Job and Lamentations. Wanda let her eyes drift over the cemetery lawn studded with stone tablets in shades from white to deep onyx.