A Secret Rage (7 page)

Mimi introduced me to white-haired Mrs Harbison, our next-door neighbor, who immediately assured me she’d ‘just dropped in for a minute.’ Mrs Harbison’s minute stretched to twenty as she filled me in on the details of her widowhood. Her house was as large as this one. I wondered how the old lady managed by herself. As I listened, I found out. Mrs Harbison had few free moments. She gardened, kept the house up, canned, embroidered, played mahjong, and was active in the church. And she took some pains to find out what church I belonged to.

It had been so long since anyone had asked me that, I hardly knew what to say. I’d forgotten that this was always one of the first questions to be settled in the South. I remembered I’d been an Episcopalian once upon a time. I breathed a sigh of relief when Mrs Harbison turned out to be a Baptist. She couldn’t enlist me in any of her church organizations, and she was a little disappointed about that. To my dismay, she told me she’d be sure and tell a mysterious Mrs Percy that I was in town. I assumed Mrs Percy was Mrs Harbison’s Episcopalian equivalent, and I shook in my shoes. Church-minded ladies are as incontestible as gravity.

Mrs Harbison finally wandered off home. I made my way back to the makeshift bar where Cully presided. We’d borrowed two sawhorses, laid some planks over them, and covered the whole with a tablecloth now sadly stained with spilled cola and bourbon.

‘Got any Blue Nun left?’ I asked.

‘Coming right up,’ Cully said, and poured me a glass. He looked at me a little doubtfully, and I thought he was remembering that long-ago rehearsal dinner when I’d had too much to drink. I looked him straight in the eye and gave him the smile that had formerly cost so much per hour. For a gratifying second he looked stunned. I decided to leave while the going was good.

‘See you later,’ I called gaily, and wriggled through the crowd to join Barbara Tucker and Stan Haskell by the mantelpiece. They were standing close together and alone, looking like a pair of shy sheep. It was obviously my duty as a cohostess to cheer up this corner of the party.

I bellowed at Stan and Barbara over the noise of the room and got them livened up. Soon another Houghton professor wandered over and began to deliver a neat character assessment of his department head. I fixed my face in attentiveness, but my mind drifted. I listened to the party booming all around me. This was my first southern party in years, and I began to notice a difference in it. The voices were certainly as boisterous, the throats as dry. Of course these voices had a different cadence, for the most part; some Houghton people from the North and Midwest added variety. But many of the topics of conversation I could hear were the same – the president, the economy, children, personalities.

But there was a difference. Finally I had it. Most of the people I’d known in New York were on their way up or already there, in one of the most competitive cities in the world; a city in which making the grade locally meant making the grade all over the world.

Incredibly, these people at this little party in Knolls, Tennessee, were more assured. They had a place; and by God, they knew it. With the exception of the imported college people, the crowd in Mimi’s living room was interrelated, interbred, and interdependent. And with rare exceptions they would always be accepted in the place they’d been born to, no matter what any one of them did.

That had its advantages and disadvantages, like any other given condition. But this evening, in the flush of successful party-giving and the warmth of homecoming, that assurance seemed almost divine. In this society I felt an incredible safety that I’d felt nowhere else. I sank back into it as if it were a soft couch. Back in the fold. No need to prove myself. My struggle in New York seemed ludicrous.

Barbara shouted something in my ear then, and I snapped to. I couldn’t make out what she was saying, but I did hear enough to tell her she was acquiring a southern accent. Barbara laughed so much that I realized she was certainly appreciating the liquor. She was flushed with the heat of packed bodies and a good dose of bourbon. Stan, her Chaucerian lover, looked mildly embarrassed by Barbara’s noisy good cheer, but it appeared he was matching her drink for drink. Maybe later in the evening I would get to see shy Stan Haskell let his hair down. What a prospect.

Right now he was gesturing wildly to someone beyond my left shoulder. I twisted to see who it was. My rescuer from the cloister of the English and Administration building was making his way to our little group.

‘Nickie Callahan, Theo Cochran,’ Barbara introduced us. ‘Nickie, Theo is our registrar at Houghton.’

I beamed at Theo. ‘We already met, in the dark,’ I told Barbara. Barbara laughed immoderately again.

Theo smiled and nodded to me, then craned toward Barbara. He was looking rather handsome this evening, in his Roman senator/well-fed way. ‘Congratulations, Barbara! On the tenure!’ he said. ‘I haven’t seen you since I heard.’

‘Thanks, I’m celebrating! Where’s your wife?’

Theo pointed toward the farthest corner of the room. His wife seemed to be the intelligent-looking woman wearing a dress that would have made any designer throw up.

‘How’s Nell?’ Barbara asked. I must have looked blank. Stan bent over to tell me that Nell was Theo’s little girl. I nodded. There was that special inflection in Barbara’s voice that signaled a delicate subject, so I sobered my expression appropriately.

‘She’s doing as well as we expect,’ the registrar told Barbara through stiff lips.

And that was the end of Theo’s stay in our company. He stood there the second longer required for courtesy, then nodded curtly and moved off to rejoin his wife.

‘You shouldn’t have asked,’ Stan told Barbara. I got the feeling that perhaps I should edge away. Stan was obviously more than a little aggravated with Barbara.

She accepted his irritation as just. ‘You’re right, that was dumb. Nell’s his little girl, Theo’s only child,’ she explained to me. ‘She has leukemia.’

‘Oh, that’s horrible!’

‘He doesn’t like to talk about it at all. It was really stupid of me to ask. But I
do
want to know how she’s getting along and show some concern. It’s okay to talk to Sarah Chase about it – that’s his wife’s name – oh, didn’t you go to Miss Beacham’s?’

Bewildered by the abrupt change of subject, I nodded.

‘Theo’s wife is Sarah Chase Beacham.’

‘Miss Beacham has relatives?’ I said in amazement.

‘Well, a brother anyway,’ Barbara said. She was beginning to smile again. Stan took her glass and his own to get a refill, but I shook my head when he gestured toward mine. ‘Sarah Chase’s father is Miss Beacham’s brother. He’s in education too. I think he’s dean of men at Pine Valley Methodist College, and Sarah’s brother is a high school principal somewhere, and she herself used to teach. But with this illness of Nell’s – well, Sarah Chase just had to quit work. She’s changed beyond recognition. She’s older than you, so I doubt she was at Miss Beacham’s when you and Mimi were.’

I peered over at the woman again, trying to recall her face. Now that I knew her story, I thought I detected the lines of care, the grayness, that marked her features prematurely. But I didn’t think I’d seen Sarah Chase Cochran, née Beacham, before. When Stan returned with two full glasses, I took my leave and began circulating through the crowd. Mimi made her way toward me with a man in tow. He was tall and solid, with heavy blunt features and a sensuous mouth. Her face looked more alive, more animated, than it had since I’d come home.

‘Nickie, this is Charles Seward, young lawyer-about-town,’ she said lightly. ‘Charles, Nickie Callahan, my oldest and dearest.’ But I noticed that while one small hand lay relaxed on his arm, the other hand at her side was clenched in a tight fist. She was afraid I’d judge him as harshly as I’d judged the others.

She fluttered off immediately after the introduction, a technique of hers with which I was familiar. I called it (very much to myself) ‘Make Them Seek,’ and I’d never been sure if the practice was conscious or unconscious on her part.

‘I’ve heard a lot about you, Nickie,’ Charles Seward said pleasantly.

He couldn’t know that was my least-favorite conversation opener, of course. I ordered myself to overlook it and find some pluses in a hurry.

The young lawyer was tall, even taller than Cully, so I knew he was a recent arrival. (Late for Mimi’s party – a minus, unless he had an acceptable excuse.) He was quite an attractive man, I thought. His brown hair was prematurely thin on top, but that gave him an air of gravity becoming to a man of law. His light-blue eyes looked even lighter against his deep tan.

‘Have you known Mimi long?’ I asked cautiously. I can converse in platitudes as well as the next person.

‘Long enough to wish I was living here with her, instead of you,’ he said. Right to the heart of the matter.

‘Whoosh,’ I said, and rubbed my stomach.

‘I’ve been waiting four years for that creep Richard to leave. Before that I waited for Gerald to leave. What do you think my chances are?’

‘There’s nothing like getting down to brass tacks,’ I muttered. Why hadn’t he stuck to platitudes? ‘Well, do you think you could hold off until I finish college?’ I asked half-seriously. ‘I just moved in, and I hate the thought of changing addresses so soon.’

‘Sorry,’ he said, without a trace of sincerity. ‘I tried to catch hold of Mimi after she divorced Gerald, but I bided my time, since I thought she needed some breathing space. That bastard Richard hopped in and whisked her off before my eyes. I told myself then that if I got a chance, I was jumping in with both feet. And I have. And I’m sticking.’ He looked unnervingly determined.

Mimi’s bruised ego made her a pretty susceptible woman right now. I hoped Charles Seward was the right man for her – because with his looks and his flattering determination, I figured Mimi might be a goner.

Charles grinned at me suddenly, and I blinked. If he wasn’t so set on Mimi . . . I could see the young lawyer’s attraction, yes indeedy.

‘Well. Moving right along, are you a native son of Knolls?’ I asked.

‘Born and bred. Good family: father, mother, two sisters married to good men. Went to law school, joined my father’s firm. All set. Now all I need is a wife just like Mimi.’

Now
that
was a fixation. The Houghton children seemed to inspire them, I observed to myself. I glanced involuntarily across the room to Cully.

‘Good luck,’ I said. I didn’t know if I meant it or not. At least Charles Seward came from Mimi’s world – a plus. He saluted me and plunged into the crowd, surely in search of Mimi.

Make Them Seek.

I stared thoughtfully after him and wished my wine glass was full.

‘What do you think?’ asked a voice somewhere over my head. Cully stood very close behind me. How had he gotten here so fast? He handed me a full glass and took my empty one. He must have taken a mind-reading course for his doctorate.

‘I think his chances are good,’ I said soberly. ‘Do you like him?’

‘Fairly well. He’s a little too hearty for me. I haven’t been impressed with Mimi’s husbands so far . . . Charles is several degrees better than Richard or Gerald. Mimi didn’t much like my wife, either. It looks like a pattern.’

It was fortunate that someone hooted for Cully to return to the bar, since I had no idea what to say to that I’d already opened my mouth to try, though; and it wasn’t wasted effort. Alicia Merritt flew up to me, and we shrieked at each other for a while. I also got to visit – a little – with her husband, Ray, whom I dimly remembered as the boy who’d called Alicia every night long-distance while we were at Miss Beacham’s.

Ray was a light-complexioned, sandy, solid type: Alicia’s paperweight, I thought, inspired by the wine, He didn’t seem overwhelmingly glad to see me. He’d always been one to mistrust the different, I recalled.

After the Merritts joined Jeff Simmons’s coterie, I went back into general circulation, from time to time going down the hall to the kitchen to get more munchies for the table.

About midnight, the crowd seemed to be thinning out. Time for the babysitters to go home, I guessed. Cully had abandoned his post to talk to his father and Ray Merritt. Elaine was being mooned over by a youngish bachelor coach from the college. Mimi’s red dress wasn’t hard to spot; but Charles Seward wasn’t looming over her, to my surprise. When we met by chance in the kitchen, Mimi told me rather proudly that he’d be working all weekend on a court case for Monday, and had left to plunge back into his preparations; so I mentally excused Charles for being late. Stan and Barbara said a slightly tipsy goodbye, and it seemed that Theo and Sarah Chase Cochran had already left. I’d never gotten over to her corner to meet Theo’s wife, and I chided myself. As I was totting up the remaining guests, I saw Elaine neatly detach herself from the young coach and collect Don.

My facial muscles were aching from my hostess smile. I rubbed my cheeks as I surreptitiously began to check nooks and crannies, tracking down the glasses that people leave in such odd places. I took a few back to the kitchen as unobtrusively as possible, and there was trapped by a professor who wanted to talk about the Romantic poets, apparently with a view to getting my mind on the general subject. After I smiled him out the front door with a hearty handshake, I found a few more glasses and plates and exchanged chatter with a few more people.

So when I considered it later, I decided it was about forty-five minutes after the Houghtons left that the phone rang. I happened to be blotting up a ring on the hall phone stand, an old-fashioned arched one built into the wall. I lifted the receiver automatically and said hello.

‘Nickie? Nick?’

Elaine Houghton. ‘Yes, ma’am?’

‘I have something kind of nasty to tell you, now. You and Mimi lock up extra careful tonight, you hear? A friend of mine who rents her garage apartment to Barbara Tucker just called me, and the police are over there. Barbara Tucker got raped tonight.’

‘But she was just here,’ I said stupidly.

All the party drained out of my system. I found myself staring at the ring on the painted wood as if it were proof the news wasn’t true. ‘Maybe she just got burglarized?’