A Secret Rage (3 page)

‘Did my furniture get here okay, really?’

‘Very few scratches,’ she reassured me. ‘One broken bowl, one dented tray. Duly entered on the little form. They like to have never found the house, though. The driver told me that everyone he asked kept telling him it was “just down the street a little bit look for the big magnolia.” He’d never seen a magnolia, can you believe it? I went on and arranged all the furniture, so you’ll just have to tell me if it doesn’t suit you.’

‘I imagine it will.’ The thrill of saying ‘I imagine’ again! And Mimi had actually said, ‘They like to have never.’ I couldn’t stand it, I was so happy. Superficial, I know, but signs I was home.

I took a deep breath. ‘How are you all doing?’ I asked proudly.

Everyone in New York had felt obliged to say that to me. They had completely misunderstood the term, always using it as singular. I’d corrected people at first until I found they thought that was even funnier. After a few such laugh fiestas, I had omitted it from my conversation consciously.

‘We’re all fine,’ Mimi answered casually. ‘Daddy had a summer cold last month, but he’s okay now. Mama’s joined the DAR, which I should’ve expected, I guess . . . at least it keeps her busy and out of my hair. And Cully’s settled in okay. All he could find was a weentsy garage apartment, but he flat refused to move in with our parents. Which was smart of him.’

My smug contentment vanished. ‘Cully?’ I said stiffly. ‘Settled in where?’

‘In Knolls.’

‘You didn’t tell me.’

‘Well, with all my own news, I guess I just forgot. He’s been back about a month now, I think.’ Her voice was overly casual.

With an effort, I closed my lips on more questions. I would find out about Cully later. It was ridiculous of me to react so strongly.

Now, I wanted to look out the windows at the fields rolling by; cotton and soybeans. Some rice – that was a new development. I soaked up the sights like a sponge: the chickens loose in the yards of the tenant houses, the earthen sidewalks lined with Coke bottles or tire halves, the horizon unbounded by concrete and brick, the late-summer limpness of the foliage.

We whizzed by a grove of pecan trees that abutted a beautiful house. Its front yard would have contained my apartment building.

The landscape grew more and more familiar. I grew easier with every mile. Every sentence began, ‘Oh, there’s . . . !’ The John Deere place, the bait shop, the wonderfully named Maubob Motel (Maureen and Bob Pitts, proprietors), Grandma’s Sizzlin’ Steaks, Grace Funeral Home . . .

By the time we were into Knolls, any doubts I had had were gone. When we pulled into the driveway of Celeste’s old home, our new home, I had put them behind me, along with New York City.

* * * *

‘A girl got raped here this summer,’ Mimi said suddenly.

I looked over at her. I had been stroking the cats in perfect peace. She was sprinkling oregano into the pot of sauce bubbling on the stove.

‘Here?’ I was surprised.

‘Yes, here. On the campus.’

Since Mimi was a Houghton, no doubt the location of the attack seemed almost as deplorable to her as the fact that it had happened.

‘At night?’ I saw a snag on my index fingernail and rummaged in my purse for a file.

‘Yes, of course.’ It was Mimi’s turn to sound surprised. Knolls might endure the shame of an occasional rape, but certainly not in
broad daylight
, I gathered.

‘White girl?’ And I pinched myself, hard. I’d fallen right into the same old pattern. The first question, always the first question, when anything had happened to anyone, be it wreck, kidnapping, assault, sudden death, or a win in a sweepstakes:
Are they white? Is she black?

‘Yeah. A freshman student named Heidi Edmonds. She wanted to get in a few courses before the fall semester began.’ After tasting the sauce, Mimi added a pinch of salt.

‘I don’t know why a crime always seems so much more evil if the victim is virtuous,’ she said thoughtfully, ‘but it does, doesn’t it? Heidi was everything in her high school, Nickie. Valedictorian, Honor Society, National Merit Scholar. The kind of student we love to get. Since I’m on the admissions board, I’d seen her application. And I’d met her at one of those punch-and-cookies receptions.’

So Mimi knew the girl. Heidi Edmonds’s little tragedy began to have flesh. I shifted on the breakfast-nook bench to make more room for the cats; Attila and Mao praised me with purrs for my intelligence. Mimi, finally satisfied with the meat sauce, turned and propped one hip against the stove.

‘It’s so good just to see you sitting there,’ she said.

‘It can’t look as good as it feels.’

But the warm moment passed when Mimi’s face tensed again. She really wanted to finish her story. ‘She was on that sidewalk that meanders through the gardens. It goes indirectly from the library to the women’s dorm area – you remember? It’s been years since you were on campus; I keep forgetting.’

I did remember, vaguely. I nodded.

‘Then of course you remember how tall those camellias are? They’re old as the hills, and just huge, and they grow on both sides of the sidewalk there. She had a big armful of books, because she’d been studying at the library until it was about to close; nine or thereabouts. It hadn’t been dark that long – you know how long it takes to get dark in the summer. But it was dark.’

It was dark outside now at half past seven, with the season coming to a close. The secret night outside the bay window suddenly made me anxious. I got up to close the three sets of blinds covering the sections of the window. I didn’t want to hear any more. But Mimi, I decided, would think I was selfish and callous if I cut her off.

She had always been a good storyteller. Her thin hands and dark eyes worked together to illustrate her narrative.

‘. . . he was in the camellias, or just beyond. He came through the bushes and grabbed her from behind. She dropped all her books and papers, naturally. That’s how they found her – a couple looking for a place to smooch. They wondered why there were books all over the side-walk.’

‘She was
dead
?’ I thought of gray hair and red blood against a dirty sidewalk. The woman had not crossed my mind since Mimi’s phone call. I felt goose bumps tighten the skin of my arms.

‘No, no. Unconscious. Evidently, when he grabbed her, she fell and hit her head on the concrete. He’d dragged her off the sidewalk into the dark. And raped her. And slapped her around a little bit.’ Mimi’s voice had gotten crisper and crisper, as it does when she’s talking about difficult things. ‘Maybe – I think – he was trying to bring her to, so she wouldn’t miss anything. Her face was pretty badly bruised.’

The muscles of my own face tightened and pinched. Beaten in the face. What if someone had done that to me in New York, when I was just starting out?

‘I went to see her in the hospital – representing the college, you know. The dean of women was out of town. Jeff Simmons – you won’t remember him, he’s the college president now – he kept saying that since I’m a woman, it would be better for me to go than him.’ Besides pity and anger, Mimi’s mouth showed a certain distaste. ‘A dirty job he just dumped on me.’

I made a face, to show I’d registered the cowardice of Jeff Simmons. Yet I thought that he might have been right.

I started to ask Mimi what had happened to Heidi Edmonds afterward; if the police had been kind to her, and so on. I was curious, finally. But alerted by the hiss of the boiling water, Mimi had turned back to the stove to break up the vermicelli.

‘To tell the truth,’ she said over her shoulder, ‘I kind of wondered if her folks would sue the college for negligence.’

‘Did they?’

Mimi dropped in a handful of pasta. ‘Never even mentioned it,’ she answered absently. ‘Her father turned out to be a minister. I’ve gone over and over it, the whole incident, trying to see how Houghton could have prevented what happened. But I swear I just can’t think of anything we could’ve done, Nick. The sidewalk was well lit. The actual distance the girl had to walk wasn’t that far. And she could’ve called one of the security guards to walk her back to the dorm. That’s in the brochure for freshman women. Not that I think any of them have ever done that, because this has always been such a quiet town. But it is possible to have an escort if you want one.’

I mentally filed that fact. I would begin attending Houghton in a few days. Maybe I would be working late at the library some nights.

I had to ask one last question. ‘She couldn’t identify the guy?’

‘She never saw his face,’ Mimi answered tersely.

The goose bumps spread to my chest. Celeste would have said someone was walking on my grave. I lifted the orange tabby, Attila, and hugged him for the comfort of his warm fur. He wriggled indignantly out of my arms and stalked to the kitchen door, loudly requesting that Mimi let him out.

And I watched Mimi double-lock the door behind the cat’s retreating tail.

That one small act told me how much Mimi had taken to heart what had occurred in the late-summer darkness on Houghton campus. I could not remember a house in Knolls ever being locked, all the years I’d visited Mimi.

* * * *

We talked half the night. We’d faithfully written and called each other during all the years of separation; but even communication as constant as ours didn’t equal face-to-face conversation.

Mimi rehashed Richard’s defection. I decided that though she was sincerely grieved, mostly her pride had suffered. Mimi had always been the leaver, not the left, even when she’d had to scramble to get out the door first.

And naturally, I in turn rehashed the mortification of being an old face after a few years in the limelight; though I’d never exactly been a top model, I’d had my share of magazine covers.

Well, a few, anyway.

The second novel I’d shakily put together in my steadily increasing leisure time had actually gotten a very long letter of rejection from one publisher. As I explained to Mimi what a good sign that was, and she grew excited about that rejection, I realized how much I had needed her.

The evening was just a little cool, courtesy of a light breeze that puffed the curtains inward. My furniture had been arranged with Mimi’s sure hand around the huge (by New York standards) living room. Mimi had given me the ground floor bedroom I had requested. It lay off the hall running from the living room to the kitchen.

Celeste’s was not a grand house but a large old family home. All the rooms were big, with the original high ceilings. When Mimi mentioned having to turn on the furnace in a few weeks, we thought of the probable heating bill and exchanged grimaces of dismay.

Mimi yawned, crumpled an empty cigarette pack, and pitched it toward the wastecan. Siamese Mao intercepted the pack with a lightning paw and began batting it around between my rugs. Those rugs looked beautiful against the hardwood floor, I noticed with pleasure.

‘Want to hear about Cully?’ Mimi asked.

‘I guess so.’ I kept my gaze carefully fixed on Mao. ‘Rachel’s consented to live in little old Knolls?’

Cully’s wife had strong and strange ideas about the South and small towns. Rachel was from New York. I’d seen them a couple of times when they’d come up to visit her family.

‘He and Rachel just got divorced, too. The Houghton children don’t have a very good batting average when it comes to staying married.’

So Cully was divorced. I set my teeth against asking why she hadn’t told me before. But there were some questions I couldn’t repress.

‘Why did Cully come back here? Weren’t they living in Memphis? What happened?’

‘He was living in Memphis. And he came back here to lick his wounds, like me. Except I have so many, I have to stay here all the time.’ Mimi laughed halfheartedly. ‘There’s nothing like living in a town with a college, street, and library named after you. Anytime you have an identity crisis, you can just turn around and there’s your name. Your
generic
name, anyway.’

I pitched her a cigarette when she looked around to see if another pack was within reach. She caught it as gracefully as Mao. Mimi is always deft and quick. She is small-boned and dark, with black hair she wears like a lion’s mane. She looked fragile that evening, and vivid, in a brilliantly patterned caftan. Mimi has never been afraid of strong colors.

‘As to what happened, to answer your second – or third? – question. My theory about Rachel is that she was just doing an anthropological study about southern tribal customs. When she had enough material, she gave Cully the old heave-ho. I never understood that marriage, anyway. Of course I have a theory about that too. I think Cully was searching for Mother’s opposite.’ Mimi squinted at me through her smoke and jabbed the air to point out her own wisdom.

‘Expound?’

‘Oh. Well, Mother is still beautiful, resolutely unintellectual, committed to the social graces, and she’s as conventional as they come. Her religion is being gracious. Rachel was – plain, to put it nicely. She’d gotten heavy into stuff like
The Dialectics of Sex
. And her idea of fancy entertaining was to pour some wine in the spaghetti sauce.’

I laughed; I couldn’t help it. Mimi’s thumbnail sketches were an element of our intimacy. She had always sworn that no one else would remain her friend after hearing how nasty she could be.

‘What Cully
missed
seeing,’ she said, carried away by the flow of her theory, ‘was that they are
both
bitches.’

‘
Shame
on you, calling your mama that,’ I said out of duty, though my mouth was twitching.

Mimi tried to look properly ashamed. She had weathervane reactions to her mother. There would be truces, sometimes for months, during which the two thought alike and got along very well; but inevitably an explosion would come – always when the partisan in Mimi was ascendant. The warfare never came completely into the open; it was a suspenseful guerrilla variety.

‘By the way,’ Mimi said more soberly, ‘the college has hired Cully as a counselor for the students, and he’s setting up a private practice. Don’t holler nepotism, or at least not too loud, okay? A full two weeks before Cully decided he wanted to leave Memphis, our last counselor had some sudden health problems and told us he’d have to retire.’