Mrs. Darcy and the Blue-Eyed Stranger (32 page)

This chicken is perfect. Mrs. Pegram lifts it out of the frying pan and puts it on paper towels so it won’t be greasy. Suddenly she recalls Royal Pegram telling somebody, years ago, that he married her for her fried chicken. She blushes hot all over for a minute, remembering this. Then Mrs. Pegram takes off her apron and her house shoes and puts her good shoes back on. She goes in the bedroom to comb her hair, powder her face, and put on her little black hat. She looks nice. Anybody would know, just from looking at her, that she is a nice woman. That girl was
not
nice,
this certainly came out in the trial, ditto those other girls who came up to testify against him, just look at the way they were dressed. Look at the way
she
was dressed, of course he didn’t have to do what he did to her. Mrs. Pegram pushes these awful thoughts out of her mind. She never,
ever,
thinks about it. And today, she’s got places to go! People to see!

She goes back in the kitchen and lines a basket with more paper towels, then carefully transfers the chicken to it, piece by piece. The phone rings, startling her, just as she finishes putting tinfoil over the top.

“It’s Heidi Bright,” the cheerful voice says on the other end of the phone. This is that pesky social worker. “It’s such a beautiful Sunday afternoon, I thought you might like to go for a drive with me. Maybe we could drive out to the lake.”

“Thank you so much,” Mrs. Pegram says, adopting the tone Mrs. Calhoun always used when she wanted to get rid of visiting Mormons, “but I’ve already made plans.”

“Oh, you
have
!” Miss Bright sounds encouraging. She’d really like to know, wouldn’t she, just what kind of plans a murderer’s mother makes!

“Yes,” Mrs. Pegram says, “I’ve got an appointment. Thanks so much for asking, though.” Then she hangs up, before Miss Bright can say another word. An appointment! She likes the sound of it.

Mrs. Pegram takes her basket and her purse and steps outside, turning to lock the door behind her. It
is
a beautiful day, Indian summer they call it, lovely warm sun and the leaves just beginning to turn. Leonard never appreciated nature at all. Still, he was the cutest little boy, hair so blond it was white. Mrs. Pegram walks past the Baptist church, Lil’s Beauty, and the tanning salon, past Jitney Jungle, which is real busy now, on downtown past the bank and all the closed shops, past the Presbyterian church, which the Calhouns attend, past Hardee’s.

She goes into the big new Trailways bus station and sits on a bench to wait for the new bus from Charlotte, due in at three thirty. It’s three twenty-five. Mrs. Pegram peers around. She has never seen the man behind the desk, a good-looking young man with a mustache, she’s sure he’s not from around here. She doesn’t know him, he doesn’t know her, and he would never suspect of course that such a nice-looking little woman could possibly be a murderer’s mother. Not in a million years! Then the bus from Charlotte comes in, a flood of strangers. The young man calls out connections for Roanoke, for Atlanta. People go this way, that way. It’s exciting. Mrs. Pegram watches the crowd.

Finally she moves over to take a seat beside a tired-looking young blond mother and a squirmy little boy. Sometimes it’s a mother with several children, sometimes it’s a child traveling alone, sometimes it’s a whole family.

“Where are you going?” she’ll ask pleasantly after a while, and the young mother will say Atlanta or Norfolk or Richmond or Washington, even L.A., it could be anyplace, and then Mrs. Pegram will ask where they’re from, and the young mother will tell her, and then Mrs. Pegram will say, “My goodness, that’s quite a trip,” and the young mother, warming to her, will tell all about it, why they’re going and how long they’ll be there, and sometimes it will be a long story and sometimes not. The little boy will be climbing all over his mother, eyeing Mrs. Pegram’s basket. Finally she will say, “I’m just taking my son some fried chicken, it’s real good and I’ve got plenty, would you like a piece?” and when she takes off the tinfoil, the heavenly smell of fried chicken will be everywhere as she offers it to them. The mother will eat a breast, then a thigh. “It’s so good!” she’ll cry. The little boy will eat all the drumsticks. His eyes are as round as a plate, he’s so cute, he is the most important thing in the world to his mother, he is her whole life. The good-looking young man will call their bus. Mrs. Pegram will wrap up two more pieces in tinfoil and insist upon giving them to the mother as they hurry to get in line. It’s okay — she’s got plenty of chicken left. Plenty! Mrs. Pegram clutches the basket to her beating heart and waits for the next bus to come.

The Happy Memories Club

I
may be old, but I’m not dead.

Perhaps you are surprised to hear this. You may be surprised to learn that people such as myself are still capable of original ideas, intelligent insights, and intense feelings. Passionate love affairs, for example, are not uncommon here. Pacemakers cannot regulate the strange unbridled yearnings of the heart. You do not wish to know this, I imagine. This knowledge is probably upsetting to you, as it is upsetting to my sons, who do not want to hear, for instance, about my relationship with Dr. Solomon Marx, the historian. “Please, Mom,” my son Alex said, rolling his eyes. “Come on, Mama,” my son Robert said. “Can’t you maintain a little dignity here?”
Dignity,
said Robert, who runs a chain of miniature golf courses! “I have had enough dignity to last me for the rest of my life, thank you,” I told Robert.

I’ve always done exactly what I was supposed to do — now I intend to do what I want.

“Besides, Dr. Solomon Marx is the joy of my life,” I told them all. This remained true even when my second surgery was less than successful, obliging me to take to this chair. It remained true until Solomon’s most recent stroke five weeks ago, which has paralyzed him below the waist and caused his thoughts to become disordered,
so that he cannot always remember things, and he cannot always remember the words for things. A survivor himself, Solomon is an expert on the Holocaust. He has numbers tattooed on his arm. He used to travel the world, speaking about the Holocaust. Now he can’t remember the name of it.

“Well, I think it’s a blessing,” said one of the nurses — that young Miss Rogers. “The Holocaust was just awful.”

“It is not a blessing, you ignorant bitch,” I told her. “It is the end. Our memories are all we’ve got.” I put myself in reverse and sped off before she could reply. I could feel her staring at me as I motored down the hall. I am sure she wrote something in her ever-present notebook.
Inappropriate
and
unmanageable
are some of the words they use, unpleasant and inaccurate adjectives all.

The words that Solomon can’t recall are always nouns.

“My dear,” he said to me one day recently, when they had wheeled him out into the Residence Center lobby, “what did you say your name was?” He knew it, of course, in his heart’s deep core, as well as he knew his own.

“Alice Scully,” I said.

“Ah. Alice Scully,” he said. “And what is it that we used to do together, Alice Scully, that brought me such intense . . . oh, so big . . .” His eyes were like bright little beads in his pinched face. “It was of the greatest, ah . . .”

“Sex,” I told him. “You loved it.”

He grinned at me. “Oh, yes,” he said. “Sex. It was sex, indeed.”

“Mrs. Scully!” his nurse snapped.

Now I have devised a game to help Solomon remember nouns. It works like this. Whenever they bring him out, I go over to him and clasp my hands together, as if I were hiding something in
them. “If you can guess what I’ve got here,” I say, “I’ll give you a kiss.”

He squints in concentration, fishing for nouns. If he gets one, I give him a kiss.

Some days are better than others.

This is true for us all, of course. We can’t be expected to remember everything we know.

I
N MY LIFE
I was a teacher, and a good one. I taught English in the days when it was English, not “language arts.” I taught for thirty years at the Sandy Point School in Sandy Point, Virginia, where I lived with my husband, Norman Scully, and brought up four sons, three of them Norman’s. Norman owned and ran the Trent Riverside Pharmacy until one day he dropped dead in his drugstore counting out antibiotic capsules for a high school girl. His mouth and eyes were wide open, as if whatever he found on the other side surprised him mightily. I was sorry to see this, as Norman was not a man who liked surprises.

I must say I gave him none. I was a good wife to Norman, although I was initially dismayed to learn that this role entailed taking care of his parents from the day of our marriage until their deaths. They both lived long lives, and his mother went blind at the end. But we lived in their house, the largest house in Sandy Point, right on the old tidal river, and their wealth enabled us to send our own sons off to the finest schools, and even, in Steven’s case, to medical school.

Norman’s parents never got over his failure to get into medical school himself. In fact, he barely made it through pharmacy school. As far as I know, however, he was a good pharmacist, never poisoning anybody or mixing up prescriptions. He loved to look
at the orderly rows of bottles on his shelves. He loved labeling. Often he dispensed medical advice to his customers: which cough medicine worked best, what to put on a boil. People trusted him. Norman got a great deal of pleasure from his job and from his standing in the community.

I taught school at first, because I was trained to do it and because I wanted to. It was the only way in those days that a woman could get out of the house without being considered odd. I was never one to plan a menu or clip a recipe out of a magazine. I left all that to Norman’s mother and to the family housekeeper, Lucille.

I loved teaching. I loved to diagram sentences on the blackboard, precisely separating the subject from the predicate with a vertical line, the linking verb from the predicate adjective with a slanted line, and so forth. The children used to try to stump me by making up long sentences they thought I couldn’t diagram, sentences so complex that my final diagram on the board looked like a blueprint for a cathedral, with flying buttresses everywhere, all the lines connecting.

I loved geography as well — tracing roads, tracing rivers. I loved to trace the route of the Pony Express, of the Underground Railroad, of De Soto’s search for gold. I told them the story of that bumbling fool Zebulon Pike who set out in 1805 to find the source of the Mississippi River and ended up instead at the glorious peak they named for him, Pikes Peak, which my sister, Rose, and I visited in 1926 on our cross-country odyssey with our brother, Clyde, and his wife. In the photograph taken at Pikes Peak, I am seated astride a donkey, wearing a polka-dot dress and a floppy hat, while the western sky goes on and on endlessly behind me.

I taught my students these things: the first sustained flight in
a power-driven airplane was made by Wilbur and Orville Wright at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, on December 17, 1903; Wisconsin is the “Badger State”; the Dutch bought Manhattan Island from the Indians for twenty-four dollars in 1626; you can’t sink in the Great Salt Lake. Now these facts ricochet in my head like pinballs, and I do not intend, thank you very much, to enter the Health Center for “better care.”

I never tired of telling my students the story of the Mississippi River — how a scarlet oak leaf falling into Lake Itasca, in Minnesota, travels first north and then east through a wild, lonely landscape of lakes and rapids as if it were heading for Lake Superior, then over the Falls of St. Anthony, then down through Minneapolis and St. Paul, past bluffs and prairies and islands, to be joined by the Missouri River just above St. Louis, and then by the Ohio, where the water grows very wide — you can scarcely see across it. My scarlet leaf meanders with eccentric loops and horseshoe curves down, down, down the great continent through the world’s biggest delta, to New Orleans and beyond, past the huge fertile mud plain shaped like a giant goose’s foot, and into the Gulf of Mexico.

“And what happens to the leaf
then,
Mrs. Scully?” some student would never fail to ask.

“Ah,” I would say, “then our little leaf becomes a part of the universe” — leaving them to ponder
that
!

I was known as a hard teacher but a fair one, and many of my students came back in later years to tell me how much they had learned.

H
ERE AT
M
ARSHWOOD, A
“total” retirement community, they want us to become children again, forgoing intelligence.
This is why I was so pleased when the announcement went up on the bulletin board about a month ago.

Writing Group to Meet Wednesday, 3 P.M.

Ah, I thought, that promising infinitive “to meet.” For, like many former English teachers, I had thought that someday I might like “to write.”

At the appointed day and hour, I motored over to the library (a euphemism, since the room contains mostly well-worn paperbacks by Jacqueline Susann and Louis l’Amour). I was dismayed to find Martha Louise Clapton already in charge. The idea had been hers, I learned; I should have known. She’s the type who tries to run everything. Martha Louise Clapton has never liked me, having had her eye on Solomon, to no avail, for years before my arrival. She inclined her frizzy blue head ever so slightly to acknowledge my entrance.

“As I was just saying, Alice, several of us have discovered in mealtime conversation that in fact we’ve been writing for years, in our journals and letters and whatnot, and so I said to myself, ‘Martha Louise, why not form a writing group?’ and
voilà
!”

“
Voilà,
” I said, edging into the circle.

So it began.

B
ESIDES
M
ARTHA
L
OUISE
AND
myself, the writing group included Joy Richter, a minister’s widow with a preference for poetry; Miss Elena Grier, who taught Shakespeare for years and years at a girls’ preparatory school in Nashville, Tennessee; Frances Weinberg, whose husband lay in a coma over at the Health Center (a euphemism — you never leave the Health Center); Shirley Lassiter, who had buried three husbands and still
thought of herself as a belle; and Vern Hofstetter, retired lawyer, deaf as a post. We agreed to meet again in the library one week later. Each of us should bring some writing to share with the others.