Rock of Ages (7 page)

When the tithes and offerings are collected, by two deacons who are father and son, Georgia fishes around in her purse for something suitable. The father, waiting patiently at the end of the aisle, mouths “Thank you” and winks when she puts in a 10-dollar bill.

The sermon itself is mercifully short. Afterward, some of the church members come over to speak. She tells Alberta Horne how much she enjoyed the choir, and the old woman blushes. She compliments Reverend Weeks on his sermon.

No one is paying very much attention to Justin and Leeza, but no one is shunning her son or his pregnant girlfriend, either.

Georgia tries to make her way toward Forsythia Crumpler but is intercepted twice by older people wanting, it seems, just to squeeze her hand and tell her how pleased they are that she came again.

Justin and Leeza stay close to her. As they are all heading out the door, a woman Georgia doesn't remember, with snow-white hair and bright blue eyes, asks Leeza how long they've been married.

Georgia, in spite of herself, feels a little sorry for the girl.

“Ah,” Leeza says, “actually, we're not married yet.” She smiles and shrugs. There seems to Georgia to be a sudden stillness.

But the white-haired woman is not fazed.

“Well,” she says, patting Leeza's full front, “you've still got a little time.”

The woman totters off, and another, at least as old, and no more than 5 feet tall, reaches up and pats Leeza on the back. “Don't pay her no mind,” she says. “You get married if you want to. My grandson, him and his girlfriend didn't get married, and they got the cutest little baby you ever seen. I wouldn't take nothing for him.”

“Jesus,” Justin says, and chuckles. Georgia shushes him, and they slip away.

She sees her old teacher getting into a car three down from Justin's.

“Wait here a minute,” she says.

“Mrs. Crumpler?”

The woman turns toward her.

“Do you think … I mean, would it be all right if I came by your house sometime? I wanted to talk to you.”

Forsythia Crumpler shrugs.

“I'm usually there.”

The older woman looks at her for a second, then turns to get into her car.

After a roast-beef dinner, Leeza and Justin offer to do the dishes. Georgia thanks them and goes back to her bedroom to change. She wonders if getting a dishwasher would make the house more attractive.

There is a mantel across from her bed, above what once was a working fireplace. On the mantel is the old clock that goes back at least as far as her grandparents. She never bothered to take it with her to Montclair after her father died, and neither set of thieves bothered to steal it, perhaps because it hasn't worked for years. The last tenants did not even use this room, and Georgia appreciated the fact that Justin had it cleaned and ready for her when she arrived. Someday soon, she promises herself, she'll take the old clock to a shop in Raleigh and have it repaired.

Tunes get in her head and won't leave. Her mind seems to be completely indiscriminate. It could be a jingle on TV advertising toilet paper, or it could be Mozart on public radio—just whatever gets there first.

Today, the tenant is “Sweet Hour of Prayer.” She isn't conscious of having heard the hymn in the last 20 years, and perhaps she never really listened to the lyrics, just mouthed them impatiently when she was young, waiting for the final stanza to end.

Now the old hymn won't leave her alone: “In seasons of distress and grief,/ my soul has often found relief,/ and oft escaped the tempter's snare/ by thy return, sweet hour of prayer.”

Seasons of distress and grief. Well, she thinks, been there. Not since her mother's death and the breakup of her marriage in the same year, followed by her father's passing the next August, has she experienced such a season of distress and grief as has visited her in the last year of the century.

She supposes her tempter is the thing that whispers in her ear in the darkness, telling her to abandon all hope. Her monkey is a persuasive little beast. You've lost another husband, it says. You're going through the change. Most of what you loved is gone. It won't get better. You're probably losing your mind, too. Why fight it? Do a swan dive into your grief.

She envies anyone who can chase all that away with an hour of prayer. She remembers praying, as a little girl, and even then not being able completely to suspend the disbelief she could never admit to her parents.

The last time she tried it was on the frantic trip back to East Geddie that summer, after they had gotten home and learned that her father was in the hospital, near death.

She thinks she must have been delirious, because she let Justin, who had only barely gotten his license, drive part of the way. She sat there, in the passenger seat, closed her eyes and silently asked God to spare Littlejohn McCain's life. She was apologetic about having the gall to ask for anything after so long an absence, and she could not make herself really believe Anyone was listening. She wondered, after they got to the hospital and learned from a dispassionate nurse that he was gone, if more faith could have saved him.

The monkey talks to her about that, too. Faith and acts, it says. You're not much on either one, are you?

CHAPTER SIX

After Phil died, I soldiered on through the rest of the spring semester.

I was handling it well enough, I assured myself, even if I did sleep in our old bed only once in three months, preferring instead to curl up on the big leather couch, wrapped in the wool blanket we'd bought on our trip to Scotland. The couch was where he and I would half-sit, half-lie, and read or watch television. I would sink back into his big, comfortable body, and his sure, wonderful hands would caress my hair, massage the back of my head, rub all the knots out of my neck, and sometimes slip smoothly down my blouse and stroke me until his intentions were hard to hide, and we would adjourn to the bedroom or the floor. Fifty-one years old and borne away by lust for my husband. You never appreciate your own luck sometimes until it's too late.

For weeks afterward, I could smell him, or thought I could, when I buried my face into the couch's wrinkled leather. I'd leave the television on like a night-light, waking sometimes at odd hours in the middle of an infomercial or a movie so bad I'd have to check the listings later to make sure I hadn't dreamed it.

True, I was losing my temper more than before. There seemed to be no penalty attached. Everybody was either too kind or just plain afraid to deal with the bereaved widow. My graduate students in particular gave me a very wide berth.

I should have been thrilled when Justin asked if he and Leeza could move into the big house in early June, about the time summer school was starting. They had been living with her parents, in a three-bedroom Cape Cod on 15
^th
Street, and Leeza still had a younger brother in high school. We're talking five people, 1,600 square feet.

Truthfully, though, I was afraid. Didn't want company; didn't want to be alone. What a bitch.

As usual, I taught one summer school course, on short stories from
The New Yorker
. I loved that course and had taught it for eight years, in the fall and again in summer.

This time, though, I found I was tired beyond redemption of all the fine-boned, delicate stories I'd always enjoyed. Somehow, I got through, and then it was vacation time.

I turned down two offers from friends to spend a week with them at the beach. I was afraid to let myself be in a place where enjoyment was expected, where not smiling would have been ill-mannered.

By the Fourth of July, Justin and Leeza were giving me a lot of space. She was selling cosmetics at the mall, and he was doing manual labor, working with a construction crew building houses. I would mention to him occasionally how unbefitting this was for a summa cum laude graduate from the University of Virginia.

“I've got plenty of time, Mom,” he would tell me, and it reminded me of the way he used to put off homework.

And what to make of Leeza? She is a pretty girl, I'll grant you. Beautiful hair the color of a new penny, the kind most girls are trying to get from a bottle, eyes full of fun, bubbly personality, loves dogs and cats. She's probably great at selling lipstick and eye shadow. She certainly knows how to use it.

Maybe we would have gotten along better if she had more than a high school diploma and some random courses at Montclair, which was more college than the rest of the Calloways could boast, granted. Maybe if she hadn't had that unjustifiably confident Attitude of the Young, exuding certainty that her ideas and beliefs had to be superior to those of old hags like me.

Maybe, if Justin hadn't told me she was two months pregnant right after they moved in.

“What are you going to do about it?” I'd asked him.

“Do?”

“Yes, do.”

“Like get married? Or what?”

“I don't know.” He was itching for me to say the magic “A” word, I could tell. But I wouldn't.

“I'm not going to do anything right now but be there for her,” he said after a short silence. And we left it at that.

By August, they were back in Chez Calloway, in a 10-by-12 bedroom. We'd had an argument on Justin's 27
^th
birthday. My fault. Another crack by me about the sands of time and summa cum laudes doing grunt work, and then they double-teamed me, and I made some remark about matrimony. We all apologized, but the general consensus was that it was time for somebody to go.

The first day of fall classes, late August, I was standing in this room with 12 graduate students, most of whom I knew. We were going to spend a semester studying the short stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald. I was not really pumped for doing this, but it was good, I told myself, to do something other than sit around on the screen porch and alternate between reading and staring unfocused into infinity.

And it might have been good, for someone who wasn't already going as crazy as a shithouse rat.

The classroom we were in could hold 60 students. Combine that with its high ceilings, and our little group huddled near the front seemed lost, swallowed up.

I had just gotten into my spiel about how much Fitzgerald's short stories were bringing in the '20s, in 1999 dollars, and how much he was driven by the economics of this, when I realized someone else was in the room.

He was sitting in the back. I don't know where he came from; I never heard the door open. But he was there. He didn't look the way he did as an old man. As a matter of fact, he looked a little like Justin, and my first, split-second thought was that Justin had slipped into my classroom, maybe come over from the construction job he was on, still in his work clothes, although the bib overalls were a little over the top.

I must have been just standing there with my mouth open, and the looks I was getting indicated at least some of my class knew this had gone somewhere beyond quirky old English professor. They looked uneasy.

He didn't move, until I did. I started to walk slowly, past the little clump of scholars and toward the back of the room, where he was sitting with a slight smile on his face, his hands folded in front of him. By the time I'd taken four steps, though, he got up and was gone, before I'd come within 30 feet of him. He glanced back once on the way out, and when I looked out into the hallway, of course nobody was there. But I swear, I could smell him, some mix of sweat and Old Spice and the scent beneath that, which I always identified with the farm itself.

I did not go back into that classroom. Stella Greenleaf got my things later. I went directly to Hubert Lefall's office. It was Hubert's turn to play department head, and so he had to deal with my nervous breakdown on the first day of the fall semester. Poor Hubert: Nobody would have been less capable of dealing with my wild-eyed ravings and my tears. He'll probably use me in one of his novels someday, to get even.

We did finally get it straightened out. I cheated two classes of graduate students, although what I had to give them at that point was less, I am sure, than the gifts of the relatively enthusiastic doctoral candidates who took over for me. The good thing about academics: A certain amount of lunacy is expected, so it was fairly easy to set the wheels in motion and cover for one addled English professor.

I am now on sabbatical, supposedly wrestling with a scholarly paper on a set of short stories that the author never wanted read again, let alone dissected by English scholars. When I told Hubert Lefall in October that I was going to North Carolina for a few months, he just patted me on the shoulder, as if I might break, and told me to take all the time I needed, it being understood that “all the time I need” must not go beyond the start of classes next fall.

I didn't tell Justin about what I saw. What's the point? I just told him I needed a break. Hell, he ought to know about breaks. So I spent September alternating between my bed, the den and the screen porch, reading, drinking, staring into space, and, I suppose, waiting for something to speak to me.

The only trouble with seeing your dead father in the back of your classroom: You kind of half expect to see him again, most anytime. You know anything that happens once can happen again.

Part of the flight to East Geddie, I'm sure, was a realization that you can run, but you can't hide, not even from people who have been dead 11 years and are buried 200 miles away. Might as well come on down, Georgia McCain. (I kept the name, by the way, for my third marriage, because I'd changed it twice already without a hell of a lot of luck. Maybe I ought to get a rabbit's foot.)

By early September, Justin had made good on his offer to go down and help get Daddy's old place in shape to sell, and I'm sure Leeza was glad to have someplace they could at least temporarily call their own.

I am not sure my appearance, a month later, was the thrill of their young lives. But I've been trying to play nice. Really.