The Tree of Forgetfulness (2 page)

One of Laura Sudlow's letters pleads with him to pay some of the premiums owed to the Fireman's Fund; another reports that Lincoln Life has called for an accounting of delinquent payments. She is the perfect secretary, the ideal confidante. She knows everything and does not judge, except for Libba's spending, and then only in the mildest way. “Maybe Libba could do without a new coat this year?” That is one of the suggestions written in her small, flowing script. “Perhaps
you could shorten your trip to the beach this summer, or stay home in good old Aiken for a change?” But the idea of not taking Libba to Waveland, the house on Sullivan's Island that they rent for a month every summer, fills him with clawing panic. If they stay home, Libba will suspect that something is wrong, and Libba must not be suspicious; her faith in life's goodness rests on her faith in him, and he will not betray that faith. Besides, if they don't go to the beach, her mother and father might call out to her from their adjoining graves in Bethany Cemetery.
Castles in the clouds
, they'd say.
We warned you, Libba
. And this time she might listen.

Libba is forty-five the year Howard dies. Every morning before she leaves for the hospital, she dresses in a snug skirt and a freshly pressed blouse and fastens on the pearl necklace he gave her for their first anniversary. “To my pearl of great price,” he wrote on the tag in his elegant, beveled script. Three days earlier, coming up from under the anesthesia, he'd grabbed the pearls and held on so tightly she'd thought he would break them. It is one of the stories she will tell the grandchildren, who will know him only through stories: how she had to pry his fingers loose that day, else he would have broken her necklace, and that would have broken her heart.

Today, as every day, she tips a few drops of Chanel No. 5 onto her fingers from one of the bottles he tucks in her Christmas stocking every year and dabs the perfume behind her ears. She pins up her dark hair and spreads bright lipstick on her mouth and stops in the hall outside his room to pinch color into her cheeks before she sashays in and kisses him on the forehead. “Hello, my love,” she says, then pulls a chair up close to his bed, pats his arm and laughs her high sweet laugh that ripples in the air like a bright flag on the ramparts of happiness. She touches her pearls and chats about this and that—the back door hinges oiled and the driveway raked, their little flock of Barred Plymouth Rock hens laying eggs all over the yard, the branches of the hundred peach trees in her aunt's orchard so laden they have to be held up with forked sticks. She talks as if this sickness and the deepening gray shadow it throws over his face, the way he lies like a stone king on a
tomb, is a passing inconvenience. She will give him, as she has given him ever since the night she climbed out of her bedroom window and ran away with him in a borrowed car across the Savannah River and married him in front of a justice of the peace in Augusta, the gift of her complete confidence.

This morning he manages a word. “Lewis,” he says, and she's ready. No new letter has come from their son, so she opens the most recent letter again, unfolding the thin V-mail page and reading around the blacked-out lines. “Dear Folks, All is well and I am healthy and eating well. Yesterday, I ate my first coconut, which is surprisingly tasty once you figure a way to crack that doggone shell. I used the butt of my rifle, which is, I figure, about the most work it's going to get! The army is keeping me pretty busy, but I manage to get in a swim most days in this tropical paradise where they've sent me. Ha-ha.”

Hearing Lewis's letter, he remembers more reasons to live. To see Cecile married, to welcome Lewis home, to know his grandchildren, to love his wife through all her days, to make amends for his failures and lacks, to become, finally and completely, the man he meant to be.

As she does every day, Libba sits beside his bed and ticks off on her fingers the food that friends and kin have brought to the house. Ham and chicken and potato salad and succotash and custard, pickled peaches and deviled eggs. When he opens his eyes and sees her hands, he smiles. He loves her hands. Unlike the rest of her—her long slender neck and waist and legs—her hands are small and compact, with short blunt fingers and thick palms, hands made for work, not leisure. “My Lord, Howard, I'm going to turn into a butterball if you don't hurry up and come home to help me eat that food,” she says, running her hands over her hips to show him the danger. The sight of her hips makes him smile too. The smell of her perfume brings pictures: curtains stirring at their bedroom window, himself turning the lock on their door.

At noon Cecile looks at her father's hands that lie where they've fallen. “Please stop, Mother. He can't hear you,” she says.

“Of course he can, Cecile, don't be foolish.” Libba leans over and kisses his forehead. “Look at him smile when I tell him about the food.” As long as they both shall live, she will comfort him, and if
Cecile doesn't approve, she can go about her business and leave them in peace.

When his appetite comes back, she tells him, he can eat himself to sleep, and when he wakes up, she'll pop another tidbit in his mouth; she'll fatten him up until he fits into his old cheerful self again. They'll start with pecans, good old Gloria Grandes from their backyard trees, roasted in butter and salt, the way he likes them. Her aunt's peaches will ripen, and every Sunday evening he will churn peach ice cream on the back porch. “Look at him smile about that ice cream, Miss Doubting Thomas,” she says to Cecile, raising her voice so that he can hear. This is her last gift to him: trusting as she's always trusted that what seems to be happening is not.

“You won't believe it, Howard,” she says. “But Minnie's back. Just for the time being, of course, but never mind.” She has come out of the goodness of her heart, Libba says, to answer the door and keep track of the food in a notebook that Libba keeps on the table in the foyer. “Minnie's coming to see you, Howard. She promised,” Libba says.

Minnie. Hearing her name, he hears another—Zeke. Fear comes up in him like thick black smoke, and he runs through it, flailing and thrashing. “Help me up,” he shouts, but no one hears. He needs to get back to his office and start another fire and burn the papers he saved during the terrible autumn of 1926, when three colored people were killed and a New York reporter came down to accuse them all of murder.

Just before sunset Cecile calls the priest. She and Lewis have been raised Catholic, as their Presbyterian mother had promised their father's church they would be. Cecile knows every Holy Day of Obligation. She recognizes Satan himself, father of lies, in the snake crushed under the cool marble heel of the Virgin Mary's statue. She knows the meaning of all the vestments and bells and candles. She knows when and why they kneel and stand during Mass, why the bishop slaps your face at Confirmation, and how mortal sin destroys the soul. She needs no book to guide her through her examination of conscience before Confession; she has memorized the list of sins against every commandment. She knows when to call the priest.

When he hears the priest's voice, Howard opens his eyes long enough to see the purple stole, but he doesn't know where to start. A voice scribbles away inside him, but it speaks so quietly he can't hear what it's saying. How to confess that you were one man in a swarm of men whose time had handed him easier words than sin or evil to name what he had done or failed to do? How to confess to the silence in which he has wrapped himself for seventeen years? He closes his eyes, moves deeper inside himself, and from that place he sees the room and the bed and himself on the bed. It is strange to feel his body crumble while his mind stays clear and full of light. To feel time move as in a dream, where a day passes in an instant and a whole story flashes by.

At first he thinks the mockingbird has flown into the room. The light flutters as though disrupted by wings, but there is no bird, only a woman who sits beside the bed and looks at him calmly, her long, light hair scattered over the collar of a deep green coat of an unfamiliar cut. “Lewis?” he almost says. With her long, narrow face and imperial nose, she looks so much like his son. His sadness is in her face too, and also his brightness, the brightness of life. She has Lewis's eyes and chin, her grandmother's full mouth, but tugged down at the ends, unlike Libba's. She has her own way of holding her shoulders, but her hands, with their short, competent fingers and thick palms, are Libba's.
Hello, Granddaddy
, she says.

As though by remembering the autumn of 1926, then wishing it away, he's invited or conjured her. The curious grandchild, the one he'd feared, the one who might feel the pull of that history and believe she has the right to collect the fragments and scraps he should have burned and make another story from them about how it was, and who he was and what he did. And it won't do any good to say,
Why dwell on the ugliness of the past? A man has the right to some peace
. When the future comes to demand an accounting from the past, it will not be denied.

S
OUTH OF RICHMOND
, when he was sure the train had crossed the Mason-Dixon Line, he closed the door to the Pullman sleeper, uncapped his flask, and drank and watched the light of the setting sun flash through the dark trees beside the track. In his notebook he found the page of details he'd gathered for the last story he'd written for the
New York World
before leaving for the South. The lines there, written as he watched the police photographers fire their flashbulbs at the couple on the bed, crossed the page at a slant.
MR
.
AND MRS
.
THOMAS AUSTIN
one of them had printed in block letters in the ledger at the Waldorf's front desk. Then they'd gone up to the room, where he had cut her throat and his own. They were young, and they held hands on the blood-soaked satin bedspread, she in her slip, he in his drawers, the straight razor in his free hand and the look in their eyes that he'd seen in the eyes of corpses in France during the Great War: People always seemed startled to find themselves dead.

The boy was pigeon-chested, so thin his ribs showed. The girl's worn leather purse lay open on the nightstand next to a lacquered red Chinese stick, the kind that girls used to anchor twists of long hair. Hers was a rich chestnut brown, worn in the smooth, short bob that was in style now. Where it wasn't heavy with blood, her slip was still creased, probably just unfolded from the Bergdorf's box on the floor. “Fancier than either could afford,” he'd written. “Pale cream satin trimmed with lace. ‘Candlelight' the salesgirl might have called it.”

“Wedding gift?” he'd scribbled. They'd worn rings, so they were married, not necessarily to each other.

He'd been sent to the Waldorf because he was the
World
's crime reporter, but a note had been fished out of the blood, defiant, printed in the same hand as the names in the desk ledger—they'd chosen this way over the plans that others had made for them—so no crime had been committed, unless you called the willing forfeit of two young lives a crime. Looking down at the bodies on the bed, his pencil moving across the page, he'd found that he did not share the dead couple's surprise at what had happened to them; in fact, he felt nothing but a cold, steady pulse of anger at the fact that they had chosen what so many others had not chosen but what had been done to them anyway.

Home from the war too late for the big parades, he'd gotten off the ship in New York, walked from the docks to Grand Central Station, and bought a ticket to New Bedford, Massachusetts, holding in his mind, as he'd done throughout the war, the image of his father opening the door of the office that waited for him at the mill. Barrett was one of the smaller mills in New Bedford: five hundred spindles turning out a fine cotton lawn. Every one of his father's wartime letters had included a report on the mill's monthly output and an assessment of whether the total yardage met or exceeded or fell short of expectations. He'd closed every letter with the same words: “Son,” he wrote. “You must not worry about where you will go or what you will do to make a living when you come home. Do not allow yourself to be distracted or burdened over there by uneasy thoughts about your future here.” His signature had occupied the bottom third of the page.

Curtis N. R. Barrett returned to the States on a cool day, but as he walked along the platform looking for an uncrowded car, he started to sweat. Every window teemed with faces and hands pressed to the glass, and images of the mill came to him—flying spindles, steel fingers rising and falling, picking and twisting. He was still in uniform, the red cross of the medical corps on both sleeves, and whenever he looked up at the train, people smiled down at him or nodded solemnly, as though they knew him. In one car a woman held a little boy up to the window
and pointed. The boy waved and smiled and saluted, and when he only waved back, the child pouted and hid his face in his mother's shoulder. No doubt, once the train was moving, and the only way off was to jump, the woman and the boy would walk through the cars until they found him, and then they would stand there and wait for him to return the salute the boy was owed.

He could not trust himself to be reasonable if that happened, so he cashed in his ticket, rented a room. A few days later, reading the
New York World
in a coffee shop in Times Square, he'd come across Joseph Pulitzer's statement on the mission of his newspaper: “An institution that should always fight for progress and reform, never tolerate injustice or corruption, always fight demagogues of all parties, never belong to any party, always oppose privileged classes and public plunderers, never lack sympathy with the poor, always remain devoted to the public welfare, never be satisfied with merely printing news, always be drastically independent, never be afraid to attack wrong, whether by predatory plutocracy or predatory poverty.” The hard, clear certainty of it had moved him, and he'd realized it wasn't just the flying spindles he couldn't go back to; it was the piety of the Sunday dinner table as well, the prime rib and Potatoes Anna, his father's interminable prayer for the well-being of his business. A few days later he wired home: “Detained in NY. Don't wait up.”