Those Bones Are Not My Child (61 page)

Under the guise of admiring her gardens, two of the female guests had escorted Mrs. Webber to the doorway of the carriage house before she had time to indicate which pot held coffee, which tea. Supplies were
being unpacked, charts taped to the wall. She’d lingered, hoping the materials would clarify the nature of their business. But then one of the seated women burst forth to
épater la bourgeoisie
, so scathing the cups had rattled in the saucers. A burlesque, Mrs. Webber had thought, of all the hysterical clamoring aimed at the city administration. But far from regarding the tirade as either neurotic or satiric, the others had received it with high solemnity as apocalyptic in vision, some of them even feeling spurred to flex their vocal cords as well.

Such an exalted sense of themselves, Mrs. Webber was thinking. Egg white flaked down the front of her cotton duster. She rose on tiptoe to look over the workers’ heads. By all conventional standards those people out back would be deemed as lacking in influence. And yet it could not be denied, most certainly not by her, that they’d had the power to enlist the judge as an ally, further, to place him in a compromising position, and thus to hasten the Webbers’ departure from Atlanta amid the hue and cry of many acquaintances who felt sullied by association. It was something to ponder, this power, the very thing she would have wished to discuss with them had she realized who they were at the time. She would have been disposed, had they been receptive, to bring to bear on their behalf the impressive weight of her contacts, and this despite their rudeness. She was not a mean-spirited woman.

In the final analysis, Mrs. Webber admired their pluck. Watching, she felt that whatever their agenda, it would be more appropriate to the situation concerning the children than the morbid sensationalism that had rendered all discourse in the city insensible. The unappetizing sight of acquaintances who otherwise conducted their lives in a rectilinear manner huddled over the buffet tables exchanging murder theories and off-the-record remarks from officials as though trading in commodities had made Mrs. Webber demur at more than one invitation.

Mrs. Webber signaled Hazel, the new housekeeper, and tapped her watch. Without waiting to see whether the new woman moved on to complete the inventory or continued to talk with the work crew at lunch, Mrs. Webber weaved her way to the upper hallway jammed with barrels to be taken to the cellar and those to be shipped to the steamship company. A linen runner on the sideboard in the formal dining room looked so forlorn, she closed the door and moved on past the other rooms, half-empty now and desolate. Once the scene of convivial gatherings, her home of late had been the stage for ludicrous melodramas.

Cliques of officials and civilians of various persuasions had been entering and exiting, then doubling back hoping to catch the others in flagrante delicto, a sarabande that owed as much to the role the judge had been playing as to a general and rampant love of drama. Confidant, liaison, advisor, he’d taken to imposing on himself and on the others peculiar habits of circumlocution and idiosyncratic argot for the purpose of—and this made her laugh—sparing his wife any undue anxiety. As if she were the one who needed cosseting. Her husband’s faithful amanuensis seemed to think she did, all but resorting to sign language when she ventured to make conversation beyond the superficial amenities. Grown more and more furtive, the judge’s secretary spent less and less time preparing the judge’s papers for archival storage in favor of listening at doors, holding the household staff at bay, and monitoring the schedule of their house guest, a student from Morocco working on his master’s at Atlanta U.

One morning, for motives best known to the principal players, to whom Mrs. Webber gave wide berth, the research aide had staged an unseemly altercation with their housekeeper of the past six years, the stately, albeit eccentric Mrs. Walker. Mrs. Webber was given to understand that the source of the imbroglio was a violation of diet. More likely a spy-and-counterspy transgression. In any case, it was easier to concur that Mrs. Walker be replaced than to enter into the foolishness.

After the housekeeper’s dismissal, the judge, the secretary, and the macrobiotic aide remained cloistered behind the study doors for long sessions, as in the days when the judge was handing down the more notable opinions of his career. Then men in dark suits began arriving at odd hours of night to caucus, often till dawn, leaving the desks layered with memoranda of a confidential nature. Mrs. Webber took to wearing her glasses dangling on the beaded chain around her neck. She was not a stupid woman. She knew her husband was not being asked to preside at the trial. Criminal court had not been his bailiwick. And too, if the suspects were to be brought before the bar, neither his most baleful visage nor his most formidable robes could hope to produce the magic required for that particular mystery play. A black Black judge or a white white judge, not her ambiguously pale husband, would be necessary if they hoped to bring the affair to a satisfactory close using one or the other suspect groups as the villains.

She had made no attempt to extract information or to verbally censure.
Rather, she had selected an opportune time to propose a sabbatical. She had placed a bottle of digitalis to the left of her husband’s tray in his bathroom. And to the right, she had set down their passports and the ring he’d given her on their fiftieth anniversary. He had only to choose. She’d made her choice in their forty-fourth year together, a year spent consulting round-the-clock with physicians: with his for his heart, with hers for her ulcers.

Mrs. Webber stopped by the cartons near the study door. She pressed her cotton gloves down between each finger until the seams adhered to the cream caked on her hands. She folded back the flaps of a carton marked “Family Room Memorabilia.” From the various shapes of the heavily wrapped bundles, she could identify the items—plaques, statues, but mostly photographs. Trips abroad, graduations, dinner dances, friends. Educators, legislators, sportsmen, clubwomen. People who’d helped create a world whose center still held. Some, those alive, she was honored to call part of the circle. Others had passed on, leaving a legacy subsequent generations had had to stretch to merit.
Enfants terribles
, able from time to time to make reputations by challenging the Old Guard, could match the old in boldness but rarely in stature. Most certainly not the overnight orators admitting to no impediment—“by any means necessary” indeed—except the unglamorous dailiness of building a movement. Loudly they invoked “community,” “the people,” and other terms of sacerdotal function as they lambasted the very circles that had the “means necessary”—the money, the background, the knowledge, the courage.

“Ha!”

Ivy Webber tossed her head. Flakes of red mingled with white sprinkled her shoulders. Where would the race be were it not for the conscientious men and women who’d built the schools, the banks, produced the art, the wisdom, and saw to it that laws were passed that guaranteed continual progress? she wanted to say to the hysterical woman out back. She wanted to take that woman by the shoulders and shake her.

She tried to think more kindly of the woman, who’d apparently been in much pain. The center is holding, Mrs. Webber imagined herself saying to the poor distraught creature, whom a woman in a batik dress had drawn back to her chair.

Mrs. Webber touched the towel, felt at her face, then looked at her
watch. It had been her intention to retire to the carriage house immediately after church. A difficult passage in the Villa-Lobos piece she’d been practicing for her swan song needed perfecting. Removing her hat pins that morning, she’d been teeter-tottering about the piece, about the very idea of a swan song, not to Atlanta, but to the well-wishers who’d begun farewell preparations while the announcement of the Webber sabbatical was still on her lips. She’d been re-experiencing too a more troublesome tottering as she’d taken off her hat. She’d felt gloomier than she had in years. Then the cars had arrived and parked back of the carriage house. Her mother would have handed her the broom to dispatch the visitors. But Mrs. Webber saw in the situation an opportunity to resolve her conflict, not about the cello piece, but about a troubling split that, worse than aching joints, often woke her from sleep: duty to others versus duty to home. A woman of her capabilities should have been able to contribute something more vital to the crisis than a personal check, music lessons, a two-hour march with the widow King, and a call to the telephone company at the request of the real-estate agent. More painful than bursitis was the suspicion that in her haste to leave Atlanta she was removing herself from an arena in which to develop. Her mother had found her arena in the women’s department of the sanctified church. Mrs. Webber’s marriage had opened up a larger arena in which to test her capacities. What might her parents make of her choices?

Mrs. Webber resolved to put to rest thoughts that made her uneasy. Aboard ship, no land in sight to distract, she’d play backgammon should she experience any sense of loose-endedness. Strolling the deck, she could draw about her many pleasurable memories of the Atlanta years. For one, the Sunday musicales. How spirited things became once she’d taken on scholarship students. Those well-mannered and obligingly devoted young people had added pep to the performances at churches, auditoriums, and the High Museum.

All of which the crisis had drastically changed. Some of the pupils began bringing family members along to rehearsals. Then they brought classmates no longer willing to remain after school for music. As hysteria mounted in the city, caveats issued by her pupils’ parents had altered not only the scheduling—travel canceled and the ensemble confined to chambers—but the overall ambience as well. All through the winter,
they rehearsed in the carriage house in the presence of stony-eyed sentinels convinced that music could lure the participants, if unchaperoned, into erotic predicaments—the theory that had gained ascendancy for a while over cult killing, although Housekeeper Walker had held fast to demon possession, her all-purpose answer to any act of aggression she viewed as “senseless.”

By spring, Mrs. Webber herself had begun to play hesitantly, woodenly, in the end as badly as her most nervous pupil. No longer able to unself-consciously absorb the music, prevented from taking the wood’s vibrations in full through her lap, her rapture proof of a lewd disposition to which the young should not be exposed, she’d elected to bow out altogether from the Palm Sunday program and spent the day in bed fingering the pattern in her candlewick bedspread.

“May I?” The moving man’s huge hands were prying apart the doors of the judge’s study before she could answer. “Think we can finish up in here now?”

She stayed his arm and directed him to the memorabilia cartons. Holding her jaws as still as possible, she said, “Make sure they’re secured. The cellar is dampish.”

“Yes, ma’am,” he said before she had finished speaking, and hopped to it, yanking tape from the roller with a disagreeable sound.

She arched her brows at what she thought was a note of sarcasm in the big man’s manner, but not without a twinge of regret as she saw powdery white sift to the floor. She would have liked to converse with this gray-haired man who kept himself so fit. What was his regimen? And what did he make of the group out back? Might not the two of them take a moment out from their respective duties to explore over coffee what two mature persons such as themselves might do to offer solace and succor to the conferees? Did he have an opinion about the appropriateness of the unfortunate mothers’ decision to hold a rally in the nation’s capital? What did he think the city fathers might do at the prospect of a long, hot summer? What would this man, who’d obviously been around and was no stranger to the school of hard knocks, recommend a person such as herself to do, given her capacities? She truly wanted to do some one very important thing before leaving.

But his manner discouraged her. And too, his lip hair, and the Vandyke, visible once he lifted his chin. It was totally off-putting. Insufferable,
in fact. For if this man had the presumption to mimic the great Dr. Du Bois in appearance, then his obsequious shuffling was a mockery of both Du Bois and herself.

She hoped the family that real-estate agent Delia DeVore had found to lease the Webber home were as responsible as their references said. In less than twenty-four hours, she and the judge would receive the last of their inoculations in the Pan American hangar of Kennedy Airport. Only a masochist would persist in teeter-tottering having already decided on a course of action. Her mother had taught her, “Dammit, Ivy, don’t flounder, simpering like a ninny. Make a decision and be done with it.”

Mrs. Webber made out a card co place on the arm of the divan, a reminder to the packers that the piece should be crated with a generous supply of cedar chips to ward off moths and mildew. Moreover, they should refrain from wrapping it in that infernal bubbled plastic companies seemed to love so much these days. The plush would be rubbed bald in transit to and from the cellar.

Mrs. Webber capped her pen, shoved it deep within the pocket of her duster, and glided into the study. The room was a labyrinth formed by the drums of odds and ends not yet sorted. Mrs. Webber opened a length of unbleached muslin and spread it across the velvet divan. She sat down quietly and crossed her legs at the ankles. She clasped her hands on her lap and leaned back, straining to hear what her husband and his visitor were saying across the room.

The judge was seated in front of the fieldstone fireplace in a ladder-back chair, his slippered feet on a hassock they’d brought back from their trip to Cairo. Opposite him sat his visitor, an impatient young man kneading his fist and cracking his knuckles. The judge was presenting a short treatise on the legal conundrums of wiretap evidence. Had he been speaking with other than calm equanimity, his wife would have interrupted, but the flat, measured cadence of his voice never varied, despite the young man’s frequent interruptions. Content that her husband was honoring their pact, Mrs. Webber smoothed the muslin on either side of her.