Guests on Earth (18 page)

Dixie wouldn’t tell them, then or later, not ever, who the father was. She could not say why exactly, except that seemed to be the one thing she might keep out of this whole experience, the secret of the father, and the sound of the little waves, and the moonset over the water.

So instead of Agnes Scott, she went to the Florence Crittendon Home outside Columbus. Her parents made her duck down in the backseat as they drove out of town, and no one said a word. They smoked cigarettes on the long ride, all three of them. It was nearly dark by the time they turned down a long unmarked drive that led to a tall Gothic building with heavy pointed doors, like church doors.

One of the matrons opened the door. She was large, mannish, and grave. It all happened very fast. Her father handed the matron an envelope, and the matron shook hands with him. Dixie’s father kissed her on the cheek, while her mother sobbed into a handkerchief. Then they were gone. The matron pointed down at Dixie’s small suitcase, and Dixie picked it up.

“Come on, then,” the matron said.

“I don’t want to stay here,” Dixie said.

“You should have thought of that earlier then, shouldn’t you, dear? Instead of opening up your legs to any Tom, Dick, or Harry who came around. But at least you have made the right choice now, at least you will be giving your baby to good people, decent people who want it, who will love it and take care of it since there is no way you could ever provide for it yourself,” the matron said in a voice that was neither mean nor nice. “Too late now,” the matron said.

Dixie followed her up two flights of stairs, dark woodwork everywhere, to the third floor dormitory where the girls slept four to a room. Finally they stopped before room number 303; through the cracked door, Dixie could see three girls moving about within.

The matron put a restraining hand on Dixie’s arm. “Wait. Pick a name for yourself,” she said.

“What?” Surely Dixie had heard wrong.

“A name. Everyone assumes another name here. You’ll be glad about this later. No one will ever know who you were—it will be as though this dark chapter never happened in your life. You may choose your new name now.”

“Annabelle Lee,” Dixie said immediately.

“Oh. Ha, ha. A little joke, I see. We shall go with Anna, then,” the matron said, pushing the door open to clap her hands and announce, “Girls! This is your new roommate, Anna.” They gave Dixie a cautious greeting, then a real welcome when the matron had left, closing the door behind her.

All the girls had to do chores, such as washing dishes, cleaning, and helping in the kitchen, Dixie’s permanent job as soon as they realized she knew how to cook. “Biscuits,” she said. “They all loved my biscuits, I had to get up at the crack of dawn to make them.”

“Wasn’t that hard?” I asked. “Didn’t you mind?”

“No.” She shook her dark curls. “I didn’t care. I was just so glad to be away from home, away from Mama and Estelle. I didn’t want to be Mary Margaret anymore. And I was sick of being Dixie, too—I didn’t even realize that until I left.”

So Dixie liked being Anna, who was nobody, measuring out the flour and the buttermilk in that great big shadowy kitchen at dawn. She taught the other girls to fox-trot and waltz, all of them laughing at how hard this was because of their big stomachs, and helped them with their schoolwork, for she was far beyond them all. Some could scarcely read, and these became Dixie’s special challenge. To her surprise, she liked being pregnant, too, feeling her stomach stretch and pull, feeling the swell of her breasts.

“The first time he kicked, I got so excited I almost died,” she told me. “I used to lie awake with my hands on my stomach so I could feel him moving around in there, which filled me with the strangest, strongest feeling. It was like a deep, deep joy. The baby still didn’t seem exactly real to me, but he made me feel real.”

When Dixie’s water broke (in the kitchen of the Florence Crittendon Home, while she was making biscuits) they rushed her to the hospital and then shaved her and gave her an enema, which was a horrible shock. Nobody had told her anything about having the baby, what it would be like. By then the pain was so bad, she asked the nurse for something to take, but while the nurse was gone the baby started coming, and then they were wheeling her out of that little room. into the delivery room with its big blinding lights in her eyes. When Dixie woke up, she had already had the baby, a boy they said, and he was already gone.

A social worker came in and said, “Here, sign this paper. It’s your choice—do you want to see your baby or not? We advise against it.” Dixie said no and signed the paper giving him up to his adoptive parents, giving up all rights. And the social worker said, ”Good. That’s the best. Your parents will be coming for you in a few days.”

But then Dixie cheated. In the middle of the night, she walked out to the baby room and saw him. A young nurse was giving him a bottle, right in front of the window. Then an old nurse noticed Dixie, and went into the baby room and whispered something to the young nurse, who looked up and then on some impulse held the baby straight out to Dixie, right on the other side of the glass, so that she could see him up close, his long head, his funny squashed nose, and dark fuzzy hair. Then the old nurse grabbed the baby up and whisked him away to the back of the baby room where he turned red and started crying and then Dixie couldn’t see him anymore.

When Dixie’s parents came for her, she started telling them what the baby had looked like, but her mother said, “Hush. You never had a baby. That never happened. You went off to college, but then you got tuberculosis, and so you have been staying with your aunt Julia, in Thomasville, to recuperate. In fact you are still recuperating. We are going there now.”

Dixie had never met her father’s younger sister, since Daisy Belle had always refused to have anything to do with his family. Julia, a plump, blowsy blonde, handed Dixie a glass of whisky the minute her parents left. “Well, you’ve been through hell, haven’t you, honey?” she said. “I know all about it, believe me. You can stay here as long as you need to. First thing you’d better do is lie down.”

When Dixie began to feel better, she didn’t want to go back home. So Julia got her a job at the candy counter up at the front of the dime store where Julia herself worked in the office; she had been the proprietor’s mistress for twelve years. Here Dixie thrived, talking to everybody who came in the store, especially the boys from the nearby military academy who came in droves to buy her candied orange slices and nonpareils. Soon she was out every night with one or another, “dancing up a storm, and drinking . . . Lord! Seems like I was drunk half the time. I didn’t care. I didn’t care what I did, I didn’t care about anything. And Julia didn’t care, either. She was a drinker herself. Her Mr. Gordy was sneaking in and out all the time, Ernie Gordy, I got used to him. Hell, I liked him! Mr. Gordy was real nice.”

Some of the cadets were nice boys, and some were not nice boys, and one of these had tried to do something bad to her one night and she had jumped out of his car in a clearing in the woods and he had roared off, furious, and that’s when she met Frank Calhoun, who came along and stopped his car and was such a gentleman. He never even asked her what she was doing out there barefooted on that road in the middle of the night, wearing a party dress. A light rain had just begun to fall. He got out of the car and took off his seersucker jacket and put it around her shoulders before settling her into the passenger seat and asking her where she needed to go.

Frank Calhoun had been a soldier himself, it turned out, stationed in San Francisco, but then his father had died suddenly of a heart attack and he had been released from the navy and sent back home to run the farm. “And I’m still here,” he said, smiling at Dixie, who was desperately trying to sober up enough to take all this in. She liked what she could see of him, the big square pleasant face in the dashboard lights. “Where is the farm?” she asked, and he said, “Here. Right outside of town here,” and when she asked, “Is it a big farm?” he just grinned at her. “Yep,” he said. He drove her back to Julia’s, then got out and went around the car to open the door and hold an umbrella for her in the rain, which was pouring down like crazy by then, but this didn’t matter because Dixie was a mess anyway, and all of a sudden she was crying so hard she couldn’t see. Frank Calhoun was the perfect gentleman, escorting her up on the porch to the front door.

“Are you going to be all right now, Missy?” He lifted her chin to look into her eyes in the porch light.

She swallowed, tasting gin. “Yes. But nobody has ever been so nice to me.”

He grinned, touching the tip of her nose. “You ain’t seen nothing yet.”

Which turned out to be completely true. Frank Calhoun was the nicest young man in the world, capable and calm, running El Destino, his family’s plantation, which covered 400 acres and contained his embittered mother, who became furious when Frank dropped his childhood sweetheart, Raynelle, on the spot and married Dixie who came from trash whether she had actually made her debut at the Gone with the Wind Ball or not. Big Mama Calhoun turned out to be the only person in the world who didn’t like Dixie on sight, and she never liked her, not even in the early years when Dixie was trying so hard and learned to ride the horses that Frank loved and joined the Junior Woman’s Club and served on committees and gave big parties and had such a hard time with her first pregnancy, toxemia, that she had to be on bed rest the last three months. Dixie felt like an impostor in this life, and she always felt like Big Mama knew that she was an impostor.

But nobody knew her secret except Frank, who loved her to distraction anyway, and always called her “Missy,” and adored the little girls, too, riding first Margaret and then Lissa everywhere on his horse with him. Soon they both had little ponies of their own. Dixie had all the household help in the world. But none of that mattered. And somehow, having children of her own didn’t matter, either. Somehow, that made it worse. Dixie knew what she had done, and she knew that she didn’t deserve Frank, or her beautiful daughters, or her wonderful life. She was not worthy of any of it. She suffered from migraine headaches, colitis, and neuralgia. She stopped riding, she stopped seeing friends.

And then came the day when she just couldn’t get out of bed.

CHAPTER 9

T
HE FIRST DAY OF
N
ovember dawned unseasonably warm and sunny. Somehow, the moment I woke up, I remembered to say “Rabbit, Rabbit” out loud, a superstitious practice taught to me by Mrs. Hodges years before, these words to be spoken first thing in the morning on the first day of each month to ensure good luck for all the days of the month ahead. And I even felt lucky as I skipped out after three sessions of playing piano for Phoebe Dean’s groups and ran down the hill toward the greenhouse, looking for Pan.

“Where is he?” I asked, finding Mrs. Morris doing her crossword in a wicker chair she’d dragged out into the sunshine.

She looked up to smile at me. “Listen,” she said. “You can hear him.”

I followed her gaze up the hill toward the Central Building, then followed the music to the wide-open kitchen door, where a group of apron-clad workers had spilled out onto the lawn, some on wooden chairs and stools, some kneeling or seated on the cold, wiry grass. Most were singing along. Pan’s harmonica wailed out above the voices. And there he sat, knee to knee with a blonde girl who was playing a small, handmade, and very old guitar. I could not see her face for the fall of her white-gold hair, but her high voice vaulted and arced over all the rest, sending a sudden chill to my heart, for I knew that voice somehow, as I knew the song, which I had learned from Ella Jean Bascomb years before. I drew closer and began to sing along.

Pan was playing the harmonica furiously and stomping his right foot on the ground, the way he always did. When he looked up and saw me, his eyes lit up and a big grin crept around the edge of his “harp.” He nodded then threw his head back in a gesture of welcome, and my own heart soared with the music. Others greeted me as well. “Hey, little Liza, little Liza Jane,” we sang. I sat down on the grass. From this perspective, I could see the girl guitar player’s face, and then it came to me. She was Flossie, Ella Jean’s sister who had gone off to Knoxville in the car with that horrible man, the one who had tried to kiss me in the dark woods. Flossie! She looked almost exactly like her mother now, though she was paler and even more beautiful.

When they were done with “Liza Jane,” they did not stop but picked up the pace as they moved into “Orange Blossom Special,” leaning in toward each other until their heads touched, his shaggy dark hair and her wild light curls that caught all the sunshine, as they played faster and faster, playing up a storm. For a moment on that bright sunny day everyone else fell absolutely silent; we knew we were hearing something rare, something wonderful. It was a moment caught in time and space that would not come again. Oddly it reminded me of my own senior recital accompanying Lillian Field at Peabody, years before. Then Pan went into a big long train whistle, going away, going down the track, around a curve and then another curve, and she kept up with him, all the way down the mountain. “Oh Lord!” Flossie hollered as she hit the last lick. “Woo woo!” Pan yelled as he jumped to his feet, harmonica still in one outstretched hand.

It was over. They were dispersing, headed back to work, when Mrs. Morris called from the edge of the group: “Pan, I hate to break this up, honey, but Cal needs you to go down to the station with him right now to pick up a shipment.”

Pan touched my shoulder—just once, lightly, as he took off down the hill.

I got up and went to sit on his empty chair next to Flossie. She had appeared possessed, playing, but now she looked drained, slumped back in her chair as if exhausted, every bit of color bleached out of her by the bright winter sun. For a minute I wondered if she might be albino, or part albino, if such a thing were possible; yet I remembered how fair her beautiful mother was. Flossie sat gazing out at nothing, with no expression at all on her perfect paper-white face.

“You are Flossie Bascomb, aren’t you?” I said. “I’m Evalina Toussaint, and I was a friend of your sister Ella Jean, a long time ago. She brought me up to your house one time to spend the night, and I met you then, and your family, and your granny, too. We sat out on the porch and sang the moon up.” I smiled, for this was one of my favorite memories, and in all that had happened to me since, I had never lost it.

Her pale, glittery gaze moved back toward me very slowly, as if across the years. But I could tell that she remembered me.

“Where is Ella Jean now?” I asked. ”And the rest of them? Do they still live up on that beautiful mountain?”

She stared at me. “Don’t you know?”

I shook my head no. “I have lived away from here for a long time,” I said.

“Shit.” The word seemed doubly obscene, coming from such a pretty mouth. “Ella Jean’s gone and got famous. I thought everbody knowed it. Famous and rich and mean! Won that National Banjo championship and got on Jimmy Dean’s show and done made three records already. They call her the Cherokee Sweetheart these days. She was up in Cincinnati on a radio barn dance, the last I heard. She’s done got too good for the likes of us’uns.”

“Oh I’m sure that’s not so,” I said almost automatically, though what I said was true. For I remembered Ella Jean as forthright, honest as the day is long, and totally dedicated to her inexplicable family.

“And you—” I inquired more delicately. “You were on your way to Knoxville . . .”

“Well I got there,” she said, “But it didn’t work out. Ain’t nothing ever worked out since, neither. That’s the God’s truth. You think I want to be over here working in this here kitchen? You think I don’t want to be riding around in a custom-built silver tour bus with all the boyfriends and hundred-dollar bills I can handle? She wasn’t the one—I was the one. She didn’t have no talent to speak of. I had the talent. And the looks. I was the one! I was the talent! And now look at me, here I am, slopping up soup for crazy people, just like Mama.”

“How is your mother?”

“Dead.” She turned to look straight at me, squinting her eyes to silver slits in the sunshine. “Mama’s dead, and Mamaw’s dead, and Wilmer’s in Broughton, and Daddy’s gone, along with the rest of ’em, and the house gone, too. Burnt,” she said in answer to my look. “Burnt to the ground, all gone, but let me tell you, honey, I am still here! Why, you just ask any of them, they know me. They know me around here. And I’ve got me a boyfriend, too. Yes ma’am. You might not think it to look at me, but I’m telling you, Miss Whatever-Your-Name-Is, I’m doing all right. I’m doing just fine.” Her speech became more rapid, more incoherent and hostile, as she spoke. I found myself drawing back, as if for safety. Inadvertently I rubbed my palm, which had begun to itch, for no reason I could think of. I remembered how Flossie’s granny had held this hand so long ago, and the strangest feeling came over me. I shook my head to clear it, very relieved when Flossie suddenly jumped up, putting an end to our conversation.

“I’m glad to meet up with you again, Flossie,” I said carefully. “And I really enjoyed the music.”

“I’m the talent,” she said, absently scratching her thigh as she stared off vacantly into the distance beyond me. I was chilled to the bone as I watched her turn and go back into the kitchen, shutting the door behind her. It struck me that Flossie might well be crazier than many of these hospitalized here at Highland, and I wondered what she meant when she said that she had a “boyfriend.” Surely she didn’t mean Pan.

I
WAS VERY
e
xcited when told I could move into Graystone, the new women’s halfway house. I would be a sort of hybrid, part patient, part staff. Though officially hired to help Phoebe Dean with music classes and all musical events, even teaching piano, I would still be required to continue my personal counseling with Dr. Schwartz and my group therapy sessions with the new young Dr. Sledge.

“For how long?” I asked Dr. Schwartz.

“For as long as it takes,” she answered, smiling.

Graystone was an appropriately entitled old bungalow on a tiny side street off Montford Avenue, almost but not actually on the hospital grounds. This made an enormous psychological difference. Graystone was an experiment—a residence intended for people in the final stages of “transitioning” into regular life outside the institution. A similar “halfway house” for men had already been operating for about six months, several blocks away on the other side of Highland’s extensive grounds—too far away for socializing with us, or so it was hoped. A big, cheery social worker named Suzy Caldwell was present every morning to make coffee and get us going for the day. Suzy referred to herself as a “troubleshooter.” She’d check our plans, reminding us of hospital events and appointments, sometimes giving us rides into town for errands, though we were encouraged to use the city buses whenever possible. They stopped right at the end of our street.

Everybody’s schedule was different at Graystone, some combination of “day hospital” and work. I probably spent more time at the hospital than anybody else, since my job took place there, too. Well do I remember hiking up and down the icy hill in that winter’s freezing rain or falling snow. Sometimes they took pity upon us and gave us a ride to and fro. Whenever we were all expected to attend the same program or event, the big green van arrived, always a welcome sight. Sometimes Suzy Caldwell came back again in the evening to check on us, often making popcorn or hot chocolate in the kitchen.

Left to Highland Hospital in an old lady’s will, Graystone was like a time warp, homey as could be, with its flowered carpets, puffy old sofas, and antiques galore. China figurines, old framed photographs, and lacy antimacassars covered every available surface. It was like living in your grandmother’s house—if you had had such a grandmother. I was willing to bet that most of the women and girls who would pass through these doors—such as myself—did not, so in a way, Graystone was like a kind of wish fulfillment, or fantasy, or stage set. Still, this was a play I was glad to have a part in, for once. I had lived beyond those hospital walls for years, and was more than ready to do so again.

I was issued a corner room upstairs, other bedrooms having been already taken by Myra, who was “learning to live without Mama,” and black-headed Ruth, now taking phenobarbitol, and so much calmer and friendlier that she really seemed like a different person. Myra had been placed in a volunteer job at the public library. But Ruth had landed an impressive part-time job on her own, working at an exclusive designer clothing shop downtown near the bookstore. Ruth dressed to the nines every day, then caught the bus. I remember a red bead necklace she often wore, and her big lustrous pearls. I could not imagine such a job as hers, dressing up like that or dealing with the public so directly, convincing rich women to buy dresses.

“But sweetie, I’ve always been in retail,” Ruth said when I expressed my admiration. “My parents were in retail, even my grandparents were in retail! They had a little shop on Seventh Avenue. Besides, what about you? You were playing the piano in front of about a hundred people at that program last night.”

“Oh, that’s different,” I tried to explain. “That was background music. I’m just an accompanist, that’s all.”

Ruth’s laughter floated out behind her as she clicked off down the hall in her high heels.

M
Y LAST PIANO
s
tudent of the day had failed to show up, so I was sitting in the alcove window seat reading, out of view, when the front door of Graystone burst open and a number of people came in with a rush of cold air, loud voices, and the general stamping of feet. Except for Dr. Bennett, I did not know the men’s voices, though I recognized Dr. Schwartz, of course, and Mrs. Morris’s calm tone. I was surprised that Mrs. Morris had left her accustomed realm of Brushwood and greenhouse and ventured all the way to Graystone. And why was Dr. Bennett here, anyway?

“Gentlemen,” Dr. Bennett said in his clipped, commanding style. “Mrs. Morris will escort our new patient upstairs and help her get settled into her room while we take this opportunity for a brief chat.”

“I’m staying right here.” Soft but steely, the girl’s flat Southern voice hung in the room.

I put my book facedown on the window seat.

“Now wait just a cotton-picking minute, young lady, who do you think you are, telling us what to do, when we’ve done brought you all the way over here?” a man’s deep voice exploded. “Hell fire, I’d just as soon take you straight back to jail. That’s where you belong anyhow, in my opinion. This here is a bunch of damn foolishness.”

“Now, now, Officer Gillette,” a more neutral male voice interposed. “We are here to do the court’s bidding, of course. And as a personal favor to Judge Ervin. Annie Jenkins Feeney,” the same man continued pointedly, louder. “You go on upstairs with the nice lady now. This is your big chance, as we discussed in the car. It may be your last chance.”

I perked up my ears, as you might well imagine, for I had once heard these words myself.

“I ain’t moving. I ain’t about to move. I want to hear what you’re going to say about me.” The girl’s flat little voice remained unperturbed. “Those papers are full of lies. I’m going to stay right here.”

“Miss Feeney.” Dr. Bennett adopted his most military manner. “The law requires us to conduct an intake interview with the referring authorities, under these circumstances.”

“I can talk for myself,” the girl said.

“That’s the goddamn truth!” the deep voice was raised. “And won’t shut up, neither!”

I decided he must be a policeman. Probably the other one was some kind of police social worker.

“Of course you can speak for yourself, Annie,” Dr. Schwartz said, “and you shall have every opportunity to do so. At Highland Hospital, we are here to listen and to help. We hope that we can help you. But before we can do that, we have to admit you, don’t you see?”

“Come along, dear. I think you’ll like your room.” Mrs. Morris’s reassuring voice was followed by her heavy tread on the stairs. The girl said nothing more, and soon I heard their steps and voices above me. I was dying to go up there, too, but at this point I could not show myself, of course, or all would be lost. I shrank back into the pillows to listen.