The Tree of Forgetfulness

THE TREE OF
FORGETFULNESS

Michael Griffith,
Series Editor

A Novel

PAM DURBAN

Published by Louisiana State University Press
Copyright © 2012 by Louisiana State University Press
All rights reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America
LSU Press Paperback Original
FIRST PRINTING

DESIGNER
: Mandy McDonald Scallan
TYPEFACE
: Adobe Garamond Pro
PRINTER AND BINDER
: McNaughton & Gunn, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Durban, Pam.

  The tree of forgetfulness : a novel / Pam Durban.

        p. cm. — (Yellow shoe fiction)

  ISBN 978-0-8071-4972-0 (pbk. : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-8071-4973-7 (pdf)—ISBN 978-0-8071-4974-4 (epub) — ISBN 978-0-8071-4975-1 (mobi)

 I. Title.

 PS3554.U668T84 2012

813′.54—dc23

2012017588

Though this novel was inspired by actual events, all characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources.

For Peter, always

Where blood has been spilled, the tree
of forgetfulness will not flourish.
—
BRAZILIAN PROVERB

Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good
and evil passes not through states, nor between classes,
nor between political parties—but right through every
human heart—and through all human hearts.
—
ALEKSANDR SOLZHENITSYN

THE TREE OF
FORGETFULNESS

Y
OU DON
'
T MEAN IT
, people will say. Fifty is too young to die. He was such a good father, they will say. Such a good man. Remember Howard at the piano at Christmastime, singing “Joy to the World” with Libba and the children? What a beautiful tenor voice he had, it fit so well with Libba's sweet soprano. Did you ever see him dressed for an evening out? In that white silk scarf and the long, ivory cigarette holder tipped up at a dramatic angle, didn't he look like FDR himself? Remember how, when anyone stopped him on the street to ask, he could talk for ten minutes about how Lewis was getting along over there in the Pacific, fighting the Japanese? You'd think God in His mercy would have spared a father's life until his son came home from war, but as we have been taught so long and so well: God's ways are not our own.

Howard and Libba owned a movie camera, of course, a Bell and Howell, the newest thing, and no matter how he moaned and groaned about that camera, you could tell he was proud that it cost so much; they both were. In a home movie shot in April in the backyard of their big, fine house, he followed his daughter Cecile along a winding path through the azaleas, holding up the long train of that white gown she wore when she was crowned May Queen at St. Angela Academy. Bent like an old man, one hand on his aching back, he mimed the faithful servant hobbling along behind the young monarch; you could tell he was joking by the way he mugged for the camera. Howard was a
cutup, a practical joker. And
dance
. That man could do it all—foxtrot, jitterbug, even the Charleston.

In early June the
Aiken Standard
carried an item on the social page: “Mr. and Mrs. Howard Aimar attended the graduation from St. Angela Academy of their daughter, the delightful and charming Miss Cecile Aimar.” A week later he was rushed to the hospital in agony, his appendix about to burst. After the hurry-up operation, blood poisoning set in, and three days later, in spite of all the love, the singing, the dancing and clowning, in spite of his son's absence and all the other objections raised against his dying, Howard Aimar was gone.

In the story handed down through the family like an heirloom, negligence, possibly malfeasance, caused the fatal infection, because the sudden death of such a good, generous, fun-loving family man, a man with everything to live for, cannot happen for the simple reason that people are struck down sometimes; there must be a villain, a mistake. They didn't have to look far to find both.

A few months after his death, a nurse who'd been in the operating room that day hinted to Cecile that the doctor might have wiped the scalpel on a not-quite-clean towel. A sponge might have gone into Howard Aimar's body and not come out, though she wouldn't put her hand on the Bible and swear to either fact. They had to get that appendix out, and abdominal surgery was always fraught with the danger of infection, especially in 1943, when penicillin was needed overseas and there was a shortage at home. But over time the dirty scalpel and the lost sponge would become enshrined as the cause of his death and of the mistrust and resentment that still lead Howard Aimar's kin to give the doctor's kin the cold shoulder if they run into them at Sunday brunch at the country club or in the crowd lining Laurens Street to watch the Christmas parade.

But now it is the first of his last three days, and as he lies dying, Howard Aimar goes on making plans, as though planning for the future will save his place there. Doesn't everyone feel too necessary and unfinished to die? Faced with catastrophe, how often do we say,
Wait, stop, there's
been a mistake
, and trust that we will be heard and allowed to finish the work we've started or to start the work we're always about to begin?

A cedar grows outside the open window of his hospital room (open because his wife, Dr. Hastings's daughter, insists on fresh air in a sickroom), and early that morning a mockingbird lights in this tree and scribbles a long complicated song in the air. It sings as though singing his plans back to him, the way his secretary, Miss Laura Sudlow, reads the letters he dictates from his desk at Howard Aimar Insurance and Real Estate. Reads them with such spirit that she makes his ideas sound fresh and full of possibility, even in that dim, narrow slot of an office with windows set so high in the walls they frame only sky. His place of business, where no matter how fresh and clear the weather, the air always smells of fuel oil and carbon paper and the ink of typewriter ribbons.

The place would be completely drab if it weren't for the pictures on the walls, like the painting behind Howard's desk that depicts the moment at Waterloo when the British repulsed Napoleon's cavalry and the battle was lost, splashed with the blood of dying men and dying horses, a swarm of red and blue uniforms. That painting had hung above his father's desk in the pharmacy in Augusta where he'd toiled his life away, and he'd felt a special kinship with one dying French soldier. Howard finds the picture appropriate to his situation too, though he sees himself as a British soldier, not a French cavalryman, and he believes that this way of thinking makes him the victor in the battle against despair that his father lost.

Waterloo is framed in gold, more gold surrounds the prints that advertise the insurance companies whose products Howard Aimar sells. From Lincoln Life there is the haggard Lincoln of the war's middle years, and the Fireman's Fund is represented by a scene of a sooty fireman carrying a small blonde angel of a girl out of a burning house. Every morning as he walks past that picture on the way to his desk, his own wife looks back at him out of the child's untroubled blue eyes.
Life is good
, she whispers.
And you, my love, are provider and protector of that goodness
.

Not that Libba's childhood home had ever been threatened by fire.
She grew up in a house with four chimneys, surrounded by a yard full of azaleas and sweet-smelling shrubs, the town's first automobile parked under the porte cochere. She grew up with a brother and a father who petted and spoiled her and a mother who hosted ice cream socials and sang in the First Presbyterian Church choir. A woman who kept the home and served as president of the Choral Club, the Civic Club, and the Little Garden Club, whose yearly flower show she had founded and nurtured into statewide fame.

A woman who contributed her opinions to a column in the
State
newspaper called “As a Woman Thinketh.” “For years I have been using a face lotion that my grandmother used before me. She paid fifty cents for it, and it is made by an old chemical concern in New York. I have never been able to find it in a South Carolina drugstore, though she used to buy it anywhere in the state. They will order it for me but charge me a dollar and a quarter for it. I can order it from a retail drugstore in Georgia for seventy-five cents. Shall I pay a druggist fifty cents to write my letter for me? Not while I've got a perfectly good typewriter and don't suffer from rheumatism!”

Her more serious reflections appeared in the
Keystone
magazine published by the Federation of Women's Clubs: “The heart must be developed as well as the head. This necessarily reverts to the home, where the youth must be taught control of the instincts and the obligations to society stressed.”

“Spirited,” people called Libba's mother, but not so spirited as to be thought hysterical or difficult.

Libba grew up believing she would marry a boy who came from one of the two or three families that Dr. and Mrs. Henderson Hastings judged to be on a par with their own. She hadn't known she needed rescuing until Howard came along. One cool morning in late September the year she'd turned eighteen, she'd been enjoying a walk among the sweetly flowering tea olive bushes in the front yard of her father's house, when she'd heard footsteps on the brick sidewalk outside their fence. A man walked up to the fence and stopped. “What is that heavenly smell?” he said, and she broke off a sprig of tea olive and gave it to him, and in that moment she saw that compared to the man who
had stopped at her fence, the boys who walked with her to church and came to her ice cream socials wore the soft, unformed faces of children, and she felt as though she'd stepped into a bright maze where every path led to the same radiant place. Her mother tapped on the front window, but she didn't turn. If the ground had opened at their feet, she would have gladly tumbled with him into the crack.

When I get well
, Howard Aimar sings along with the mockingbird,
I will go down to my office and burn those files
. He should have done it long ago, and as he imagines it now, his hands rehearse the tearing and wadding of paper. From somewhere nearby Libba whispers, “What is he doing? Howard, stop.” Her hands capture his, but the planning continues. He will collect all the long yellow sheets covered with numbers and sums and dump them into the burning barrel in the alley. He will light a fire and stir it with the scorched rake he keeps beside the barrel, catch each drifting cinder and return it to the flames until he is sure the pages are burnt up and not just charred. He will burn all the pale blue pages of Laura Sudlow's personal stationery as well, the ones with her address embossed at the top, and then the trail will disappear that leads from his office to her small white house behind the camellias, and no one will ever know or be tempted to make up a story about the net they've woven to hold the money that is always tearing, or threatening to tear, in a dozen places or the hours he's spent at her dining room table with his head in his hands, looking for a way to balance the money trickling in with the money gushing out.
When I get well
, the mockingbird sings,
I will pay my just debts and clear my name so that years from now, when I am an old man and dying in my proper time, no one will be ashamed of anything I've done
.