This One and Magic Life (5 page)

“I'm too down in my back.”

“Then I'll do it.” Artie hovers above the beach, sprinkling sunflower seeds into furrows that open as the seeds fall.

“Why didn't you tell me you could do that?” Reese grumbles. “I dug up that garden for you every year.”

Should have known. That woman could do anything she set her mind to.

THE LAST THING SARAH HARVEY EVER THOUGHT SHE WOULD DO
was marry a Yankee. Not that she had anything against them. They just usually didn't know how to act.

Thomas Sullivan was a perfect example of this. She was sitting on a bench and waiting for her date to arrive with some punch when she heard a deep voice with the most awful Yankee accent say, “You are the most beautiful creature I have ever seen in my life.” She turned and there was Thomas, smiling at her, drunk. It was the only time she ever saw him drunk and the only time he ever said anything like that. But how was she to know?

Sarah, her sister Mary, and Emily Meadows had gone from Montgomery to Auburn University for the fraternity dances. The night she met Thomas was the third night of partying and she was exhausted.

“You should have seen me night before last,” she
said, slipping out of her shoes and rubbing her aching feet against the carpet.

Thomas scooted around in front of her, knelt, and began to massage both her feet.

“Have you lost your mind?” She tried to pull her feet away, to put them back into her shoes.

“Absolutely.”

“This little piggy went to market,” her date, John Edgars, said. He had come up with two punch cups and, like Thomas, he was feeling no pain.

“Who is this person rubbing my feet, John?” Sarah asked.

“Sarah Harvey, may I present Dr. Thomas Sullivan.”

“Please, God, let her be Catholic,” Thomas said.

“I'm Catholic all right, but you're a Yankee.”

The punch cups were leaning dangerously in John's hands. Sarah reached up and took them.

“That punch is spiked as a rail fence.” John looked down at Thomas who was still working on Sarah's feet. “Thomas, are you a Yankee?”

“Of course not. I am a citizen of the universe.”

“He's lying, Sarah. He's a Yankee. You want me and my brothers to ride him out of town on a rail? Hold him while you tar and feather him?”

Sarah giggled. “That's too kind.”

“It was an accident of birth.” Thomas squeezed Sarah's foot. “Something over which I had no control. Say I can live it down.”

“There's no way you can live it down. We'll just have to live with it.”

“Did you hear that, John?” Thomas tried to stand, but sank back on his knees. “Congratulate us.”

“Congratulations. Now hand Sarah her shoes. We're going to go dance.”

“Allow me, Cinderella.” Thomas put each shoe on gently. “Notice they fit.”

“Thank you.” Sarah got up and went with John toward the dance floor. When she looked back, Thomas was already asleep, his head on the bench she had just vacated.

“He's a doctor?” she asked.

“Some kind.” John grinned. “But not the kind he's going to need in the morning. A Ph.D. in Latin or something la-de-da.”

But the next morning when Sarah and Mary came staggering down to breakfast, there was Thomas, his dark blond hair parted in the middle and slicked down. In the morning light, Sarah could see how green his eyes were and how the green was touched with little golden flecks. He held out a cup of coffee, just as she liked it, a teaspoon of sugar and a dash of cream. “For you, Sarah.” He turned to Mary. “And how do you like yours, Mary?”

“The same.” She pressed her fingertips against her forehead and watched Thomas walk across the room. “Who the hell is he, Sarah? And how does he know who we are?”

“Some kind of Yankee doctor. I met him last night. Maybe you did, too.”

“It's possible.” Mary slumped in a chair. “I'm getting too old for this.”

Thomas was back with the coffee. “Toast? Oatmeal?” The sisters both shook their heads. “What time does our train leave this afternoon?” he asked.

Sarah took a big gulp of the coffee. It burned her tongue so bad her eyes watered. For days after, it hurt to eat.

Eight months later, they were married. Yankee persistence, Mary said.

Mama and Papa thought he was wonderful. So did the rest of the family though, at times, he drove Sarah crazy. She could never tell if he was teasing or not. Neither could anybody else, but they just assumed he was and laughed and winked at her and at each other when he would make some of his outrageous remarks. Like that first Sunday. Nothing would do but he must go home with the sisters though he had already said he was on his way to Mobile.

“I'll get the next train,” he said and he got off the train and squeezed right into the Yellow Cab with them.

“Over three costs fifteen cents extra,” the driver said.

“No problem.”

“He's cute,” Emily whispered. Sarah whispered back that she thought he was crazy.

They dropped Emily off on West Jeff Davis and then Thomas got in the backseat between Mary and Sarah. “Norman Bridge Road,” Mary told the cab driver.

“Fifteen cents more.”

“You ladies live in the country?” Thomas found some more change.

“Our father is a contractor,” Sarah explained. “He builds houses and we move into them until he sells them.”

“That sounds like fun. I've lived in the same house all my life.”

“And where is that?” Mary asked.

“Salem, Massachusetts.”

“I knew you were a Yankee,” the cab driver said. “I could tell in a minute.”

“No more,” Thomas said. “Last night I discovered what I have always been in my heart—a Southerner.
When I marry this young lady here, I will be granted all the rights and privileges that go with that title.”

“It don't work that way,” the cab driver said. Mary and Sarah both giggled.

“Scoff if you want, ladies, but that's the way it'll be. Mint juleps on the veranda. The whole bit.”

When they got home, Mary didn't even wait to help with the bags. “Hey, Mama,” she yelled into the hall. “Come meet Colonel Thomas Sullivan who says he's going to marry Sarah and turn Southern.”

Thomas went to meet the family, a big grin on his face. But Sarah went around the back and sat in the old porch swing. She wasn't sure what was happening, but whatever it was, she'd lost control over it. It gave her the same feeling as a dream she would have sometimes. She would be at a party and wouldn't know a soul. And she would realize she was at the wrong party. One she hadn't been invited to.

And she sat in the swing for a long time listening to the laughter from inside. And then Thomas came out and walked around the house toward her. It was late afternoon and the shadows of the pecan limbs were like bars between them. He stopped and looked at her and neither of them said a word. Who are you? Sarah thought. Who are you, Thomas Sullivan? And then she got up and went to him, holding out her hand, stepping over the shadows as if she might trip on them.

 

Years later she would tell her three children how it was that she married Thomas Sullivan, moved to Mobile and then around to the bay. “Tell us, Mama. Tell us how you and Papa fell in love and got married,” the children would beg. And Sarah would say, “Close your eyes and I will tell you.” And she would start with the dance at Auburn and Thomas following her home.
They liked that part best of all, their serious father acting silly.

As for the truth of the story, how could Sarah tell the children that were half hers and half Thomas's that marriage was something that just happened? That walking down the aisle of St. Jude's that June with her sisters and brothers waiting for her at the front and Mama smiling but already crying, she could hardly remember Thomas. She could feel Papa's heart beating in the hand that held her arm, or maybe it was her heart. She couldn't tell. And the bouquet of gardenias they had gone to the cemetery that morning to pick were the sweetest she had ever smelled. She wanted to bury her face in them they looked so cool. But if you touch a gardenia, it will turn brown.

“Speak to the Sullivans,” Papa whispered as they got to the front pew. And Sarah nodded and smiled at the couple who were Thomas's parents, who had come all the way down from Massachusetts to see their only child married. They were very old, both dressed in dark clothes, and with sweating flushed faces. Mrs. Sullivan had been so exhausted from the trip, she had had to go right to bed when they got to the Harvey's. “Death's stalking that woman,” Idabelle said, taking her some tea and aspirin. “ 'Bout to catch her, too.” And it was true. In six months they both were gone. But they had made it to their child's wedding. It was the only time Sarah ever saw them.

“It was hot,” she would tell the children. “One of the hottest June days ever in Montgomery. When Father told your papa and me to hold hands, our hands slid right apart they were so wet.”

Artie, Donnie, and Hektor would giggle and hit at each other. “Tell us about the food,” Donnie always demanded. And Sarah would lay a banquet before them
of a bride's cake with yellow flowers and a groom's cake, chocolate with chocolate icing, decorated with green grapes.

“That's the one I want,” Donnie said. “And punch and cheese straws and strawberries you dip in sugar.”

“Tell us about all the presents.”

“Crystal and silver goblets and trays, and the good china,” Sarah would list for Artie.

“And you and Papa promised to love, honor, and obey?”

“Of course.” But the truth was that Sarah couldn't remember a word of the ceremony. When Mary married Bo Hardeman several months later, Sarah was frightened to hear the vows she and Thomas had taken. The whole event had been like a big game you play with parties and presents and new clothes. And then everyone was following them to Union Station and Sarah was leaving home with Thomas. Going to live a life in Mobile with someone she hadn't even known a year before. She had a gardenia corsage pinned to the lapel of her pink linen suit and she held it to her face and cried. Even if it did turn brown. Thomas sat beside her on the drawing room seat which would soon be turned into a bed and tried to hug her. But she put her face against the window and watched the late afternoon sun winding up the Alabama River, turning it golden. She wouldn't look away or let Thomas open the window until the train crossed the bridge and there was nothing but pine trees pressing close to the tracks.

MARIEL SULLIVAN GETS THE
MOBILE REGISTER
OUT OF THE
azaleas where the boy has thrown it. Opening it, she sees a picture of Artie, her sister-in-law, taken when she was around thirty. The headline reads
NOTED LOCAL ARTIST SUCCUMBS
. Mariel, still in her robe, sits down on the steps to read it.

Van Gogh? Artie and van Gogh? Lord! Mariel folds the paper and rests her chin on her knees. The calico cat rubs against her. At least Donnie will be pleased at the “Donald.” That's easier to live with than “Adonis.” Whatever became of Adonis in the Greek myths, anyway? Did he live to be old with a potbelly and thinning hair? She has always meant to look it up, the whole story, not just what it says in the dictionary: “A beautiful youth loved by Aphrodite.”

At least he wasn't a parenthesis. She rubs her hand over the purring cat. She notices the skin at her wrists, loose, wrinkling; freckles are enlarging into liver spots. Artie looks up at her, thirty again.

“Hell,” Mariel grumbles. She gets up and goes inside where the phone is ringing. She takes it off the hook and goes to take a shower. Half an hour later, she's on her way to Harlow. She's tired and there's this whole day to get through before the funeral tomorrow. If they are having one. If her husband and Hektor can agree. She wonders if Donnie is in Harlow or at his office. She woke around dawn and saw him in the hammock. Then she went back to sleep. He was gone the next time she woke up.

Mariel could wring Artie's neck for causing all these problems. No funeral and wanting to be cremated! Hektor, she could tell, was as appalled as she was. She hopes he's sober today; she needs his help. Dolly won't do anything. Dolly will be sitting on the
bluff idle when Gabriel blows his horn. Mariel has spent half her life explaining to teachers, who complained that Dolly was a smart child who didn't pay attention, that spaciness was a Sullivan gene. And those teachers swearing such a thing as absentmindedness (they had smiled at “spaciness”) couldn't be inherited. But Mariel knows better; she's lived with the Sullivan family for over thirty years. Hektor, once, driving from New Orleans on the interstate, had completely missed Mobile and was almost to Pensacola when he (as Artie put it) came to himself. Everyone else had thought it funny. Donnie and Dolly would forget to eat if Mariel didn't put the food on the table and call them. “Supper?” they would ask, like she'd said something weird. It drove her crazy the way they'd look around as if they'd just found themselves in a strange place. Mariel knows this was the look Dolly gave her teachers: a polite, well-liked child—just spacey.

“They got it from Thomas,” Sarah Sullivan's shadow says. “It's what drove me crazy.”

Mariel turns on a tape; Beethoven's Sixth is much more soothing than Sarah's voice which she understands is in her subconscious. God knows her analyst has told her that enough. But it doesn't help.

Mariel turns the volume up and tries to relax. No good; she needs a cigarette in the worst way and she hasn't smoked in twenty years.

She hasn't planned to, but when she gets to the road that leads to her mother's house, she turns in. The road is rutted, and blackberry bushes threaten to scratch the car on both sides. Someone (Mariel wouldn't put it past her mother) has been dumping garbage at one spot. Plastic bags have split open and a trail of debris leads into the woods. She makes a mental note to call the sheriff's office again about the littering.
Let them catch her mother who's probably the one doing most of it. Serve her right. It would cost 500 dollars, though. Mariel sighs and thinks she'd better ask Reese if he'll go up there and help her for a spell. Her mother would be delighted at that; Naomi thought Reese was handed down. They would fry fish and watch television and the trash cleanup would take days. Well, it had to be done.

Mariel comes around a slight curve and pulls into her mother's backyard. Naomi Cates lives in what some enthusiastic real estate person might describe as a beach bungalow. The beach part is true, the bungalow imaginative. A square of concrete blocks, the house consists of a living room across the front, a bedroom, bath, and kitchen across the back. A screened porch overlooking the bay is much larger than the house itself and it's here that Naomi lives except in the coldest winter weather. Here are her couch and television and, to Mariel's dismay, her freezer, washer and dryer. Naomi Cates is well aware of her daughter's disapproval. At eighty, she doesn't give a damn. She eats when she wants to, sleeps when she's sleepy. After raising six children and putting up with an alcoholic husband for forty years, Naomi Cates is, in a word, happy. She comes out the back door to greet Mariel in some yellow boxer shorts one of her grandsons had left after a visit. Her legs are stick-thin and tanned; varicose veins wind up them like a road map.

Mariel gets out of the car and hugs her mother. At one time she had been only a couple of inches taller than Naomi. Now she looks down into thinning white hair, sees the pink of scalp

“Well, this is a surprise,” Naomi says. “Why aren't you over at Artie's?”

“I'm on my way. I just wanted to check on you.”

“Well, I'm fine. Come on in and I'll get us some coffee.”

Three concrete steps lead up to the back door. She needs a rail to hold on to, Mariel thinks, following her mother. What if she should fall down the steps out here by herself?

“Are you wearing your pager?” she asks.

“Right here.” Naomi pulls what looks like a small transistor radio on a cord from beneath her tee shirt. For the first time Mariel notices the shirt. Emblazoned on it is
HAIL MAUI FULL OF GRASS
and what looks like a cross between a palm and a marijuana plant.

“Where did you get that shirt, Mama?”

“Teddy. He brought it back from Hawaii. It's wild, isn't it?”

“Don't let Father Carroll see it.”

“He already has. Laughed till he cried. You know how he always cries when he laughs. Like Dolly. When she gets really tickled at something she just blubbers.” Naomi pours water into two cups and puts them in a small microwave on the counter.

“Have you checked your batteries lately?”

“What batteries?”

“In the pager.”

“They're fine, Mariel. Slip, slide, or twinge and every rescue squad in Mobile and Baldwin County will be beating on my door. Quit worrying about me.”

“But I do. You're so isolated out here.”

“Thank God.” The microwave dings and Naomi takes the cups out and spoons instant coffee into them. “Here's the sugar.”

Mariel should refuse. Instead she takes two teaspoonfuls as well as a generous amount of milk. “Cookie?” her mother asks. Mariel shakes her head no. At least she has some willpower.

“Let's go out on the porch.” Naomi takes a handful of cookies and leads the way. “Your brother Jacob called yesterday. I told him about Artie. He said he used to be in love with her when they were in high school. I never knew that, did you?”

“I couldn't keep up with everybody.” Mariel can't keep up with Dolly. She can't imagine what it was like for her mother with six children to feed and dress and try to teach some social graces to. Especially with so little help from their father.

Her mother laughs. “Neither could I. I remember that terrible crush Elizabeth had on Pete Spencer and that's about all.”

“I remember that one, too. She nearly drove us crazy. I wonder whatever happened to him.”

“I'll bet your sister knows.” Naomi bites into a cookie. “Here,” she says, pushing some magazines from the couch with her elbow. “Sit here.”

Mariel sinks into the soft pillows. A ceiling fan cools her face. She closes her eyes and thinks she has never been so tired in her life. She wants to stay here and let her mother take care of her, her alone; she wants to be her mother's child. She doesn't want her mother to be eighty years old and frail. She doesn't want to worry about her falling or having a heart attack.

“How's Donnie doing?” Naomi asks.

“Okay, I guess. He seems to be all right.”

“And Dolly?”

“I guess she's okay, too. She stayed out at Artie's last night. I'm surprised she's not over here to see you yet. She's getting the house, you know.”

“I figured she would. I wonder what she'll do.”

“I have no idea.”

“She's a good girl.”

“She's not a girl, Mama. She's twenty-seven years old and doesn't have a clue what she's going to do with her life. And she won't even talk about Bobby. All she'll say is that the marriage just didn't work out. Well, my Lord, Mama, how could it? The man was hooked on every pharmaceutical known to mankind. I mean I'm talking Elvis here, Mama. And Dolly knew it when she married him. That's what I can't understand. Why latch on to someone who's headed down the toilet?”

“People do it all the time, Mariel. They think they can rescue them.”

“I guess so. And like I was telling Donnie last night, in spite of his problems, Bobby is one of the most likable people in the world.”

“And it took strength for Dolly to put him out. Think of it that way, Mariel.”

“And dumbness to have let him in. Those Sullivan genes. No common sense.”

Naomi reaches for another cookie. “Well, they've done pretty good. Look at Artie, famous all over the world, and Hektor, rich as Croesus. Donnie's always done fine, too.”

“Hektor's pure luck. And speaking of being stoned out of your skull, you should have seen him last night.”

“Drunk?”

“I don't know what he was on. Probably something exotic his company is importing from Latin America.” Mariel moves a
Family Circle
magazine on a wicker table and places her cup on it carefully. “Sometimes I think he has better sense than Donnie, though. At least you can reason with him.”

“Donnie is a very sensible man,” Naomi says. “You know that.”

“He's taking Artie to Birmingham to be cremated.”

“Lord!”

Mariel is pleased at the expression she has caused on her mother's face. “I told you, Mama, the Sullivans don't have any sense. Artie wants to be cremated. Mr. Brock came out from Mobile yesterday afternoon with that neat little piece of news. Of course by that time we already had everything planned. The announcement's already in the paper this morning about the funeral. Everything.”

“What are you going to do?”

“I don't know. First I thought we'd just go on and have the funeral and then Donnie could take her to Birmingham. But he wants to go today like there was some hurry. And then I thought, Well, nobody would know the casket was empty. We could just go on and have it anyway.” Mariel looks out at the bay. “I don't know. It doesn't matter anyway.”

Naomi sees the deep circles under Mariel's eyes. “Pull your shoes and stockings off,” she says, “and let's walk down to the beach. I got it cleaned up from the jubilee yesterday.”

Mariel is alarmed. “You shouldn't be down raking that beach, Mama.”

“I waited till it was cool. Did you see that sunset last night?”

“We would have sent somebody.”

“Mariel, you worry too much. Reckon it's a Cates gene?”

Mariel bursts into tears. “Those damn Sullivans. None of them with a grain of sense.”

Naomi holds her middle-aged child. “Shhh,” she says. “Come on, dry your eyes now. Of course Artie ought to have a funeral. Let's figure out just what all we need to do.”