Life Sentences (15 page)

DONNA HOWARD-BARR HAD THAT UNCANNY
knack for getting others to do her bidding, all the while making it seem that it was she who was bestowing the favor. Today, for example, she had summoned Tisha to her home near downtown Baltimore, indifferent to the havoc wreaked on Tisha's day or the way it would put her smack in the middle of rush hour when she headed home. The ostensible purpose was to lend Tisha the Howard silver for Easter. Never mind that Tisha hadn't expressed any interest in Donna's family silver or that she had agreed to have the dinner for the second year in a row when the tradition was to switch off. Again, Donna had made that seem like something she was doing for Tisha's sake. “You must be eager to entertain,” she had said, “given
how beautiful your dining room looks with the new wallpaper and dining room set.”

No, the offer to lend the silver was a summons. Donna needed to talk to her sister-in-law, but she could never say things
plain.
Tisha, who almost always spoke her mind, found this tendency baffling but also enviable, because it worked for Donna, produced the desired results. Donna's serene expectation that things would go her way was a self-fulfilling prophecy. Reg was a hardheaded bull of a man, quick to argue with anyone about anything, but he was the first to cave in to Donna, and not because her father had been his boss for so many years. Not that Tisha, now cruising the streets of Bolton Hill for a parking spot, could criticize her brother when she was almost as spineless around Donna.

Grant Donna this: She had a way of making an occasion of the most basic encounter. Out in Columbia, if Tisha had gone to a friend's house to pick up something, she would have been sure to find the place in cheerful chaos. A kid's project on the dining room table, washing machine chugging away, shoes piled by the door, Mom in sweats or yoga pants, a cell phone interrupting every few minutes as they tried to catch up with one another. Donna's home was hushed and perfect, not unlike the lady of the house. The only visible signs of a child's presence were Aubrey's perfect little pink rain hat, hanging on the massive hall tree, and matching rubber boots, placed neatly on the rush mat beside it.

The dining room table had been set for late-afternoon tea. If it had been anyone else, Tisha would have snorted at the affectation. But Donna—makeup perfect, hair perfect, dressed in smart slacks and a blouse for what appeared to be a fairly ordinary day at home—had always been able to carry this kind of show. For all her quiet modesty, she had an unwavering belief in herself. She was a Howard, the last of the Howards, given that her uncle Julius had never had children. Tisha, who had taken her husband's name, had been a little miffed at Donna's adamancy about being known as Howard-Barr, how quickly she corrected anyone who tried to shorten Aubrey's name to her father's alone.
But if Tisha had been the last of the Barrs, she might have felt the same way.

“How many for Easter dinner this year?” Donna asked, pouring tea, passing a plate of homemade cookies. Well, she had time to bake. Even now that Aubrey was in second grade—at a private school, a luxury denied Donna because of her uncle's political ambitions—Donna still employed a full-time babysitter who took the girl to school and fetched her at day's end. A full-time babysitter who did housework during those school hours. With that setup, Tisha would bake cookies, too, maybe find a cure for cancer.

“The four of us, the three of you. Your parents, Reg's, and mine. Do your uncle Julius and aunt Gladys have a place to go?”

“I'll check with him.”

Uncle Julius was always the wild card, falling in and out of favor with his brother with a regularity that baffled Tisha. Julius Howard had always been dogged by vague rumors of bad behavior, especially back in the early eighties, when he withdrew abruptly from the election for city council president that had appeared to be his to win. But the Howards, whatever intrafamily quarrels they might have, always presented a united front to the world, whether it was Julius Howard's derailment on his way to being Maryland's first black U.S. senator or Donna's first marriage.

“Do you have your menu planned?”

Tisha laughed. “Donna, it's five days away.”

“Yes, only five days away.” But Donna laughed, too. She had a sense of humor about herself, to an extent, which is the most anyone ever has. She could mock her own ruthless sense of organization, her need for just-so perfection. If Donna were having the dinner this year, the menu would be planned, and she would have multiple lists on her so-called smart phone. Tisha, chained to her cell because of the kids, had resisted the new gadgets, declaiming, “Smart phones lead to stupid people.” Personally, she didn't see that one could really improve on a list made on
paper, items crossed off one by one. The very making of the list helped to cement it in one's mind.

“I suppose you'll serve your ham again,” Donna said.

“I think I would have an insurrection on my hands if I didn't.” Tisha did a ham braised in Coca-Cola, a recipe that had come down through her father's family, originally from Georgia.

“Oh, I know. Everyone loves it. But since you're doing the dinner two years in a row”—again, no acknowledgment that this was being done at Donna's behest—“I thought you might want to experiment. I found the most intriguing recipe for a tangerine-glazed ham—”

“Uh-huh, I'll stick with the basics. Coca-Cola ham, mashed potatoes. You want to try your hand at something new, feel free. But, you know, if the Easter ham ain't broken, don't glaze it with tangerines.”

Donna let it go, let her win. Which meant she had larger fish to fry than the menu.

“Reg tells me that you had lunch with Cassandra Fallows, our former classmate.”

So that was it. Donna hated to ask for gossip out-and-out, but she loved dishing it.

“Against my better instincts. I couldn't help thinking she might really want to catch up, but it was all research for another book. Bad enough to show up in the first two unawares. I'm not going to
volunteer
for that treatment.”

“She wasn't unkind to you,” Donna said. “Or me. If anything, she was almost too laudatory.”

“But that was what bothered me. She built us up—not so she could tear us down, but to heighten everything. That girl, she could make a five-act tragedy out of spilling chocolate ice cream on a new dress and never even stop to think that there's this thing called detergent. You know me, I can't stand made-up drama. The world provides enough.”

“I was thinking of calling her, asking her over.”

“Donna.”

“You know the old saying. Keep your friends close, keep your enemies closer.”

That caught Tisha short. As exasperated as she was with Cassandra Fallows, she didn't think of her as an enemy. And Donna had always made it a point of pride not to engage with the portrait of her presented in Cassandra's books.

“I grant you, she's a fool, and her books are maddening, but still—”

“What she's writing now—it can't help reflecting on Reg. And the firm of Howard and Howard.”

Howard, Howard and Barr,
Tisha amended in her head.

“After all, she's not going to get Calliope to talk, even if she could find her, and from what I hear, no one knows where she is, not even Reg. So how's she going to fill in all that space? What if she attacks the legal strategy, suggests that the defense was all about showcasing the firm's innovation but not done with Calliope's best interests in mind?”

“Would she? Did she say something to Reg—?”

“No, but she's been trying to get to Gloria Bustamante, the first lawyer. What if Gloria sees a chance to burnish her image at Reg's expense? You know what a publicity whore she is.”

Actually, Tisha didn't. Donna often forgot that she moved in a world that, while all of fifteen miles away, was quite different from Tisha's. People in Donna and Reg's circles might gossip about Baltimore's lawyers—who did what, who said what. Where Tisha lived, the hot topics were high school redistricting and the bad-tempered basketball coach.

“And,” Donna said, “she cornered Fatima at her church just two days ago. At her
church,
out of the blue.”

“Fatima called you?” Tisha felt wistful. People grew apart all the time. She and Donna might have drifted away from each other if not for the familial connection. Besides, the Fatima she missed didn't exist anymore; she had been subsumed by the new holier-than-thou version
who didn't want any reminders of the girl she had once been. Still, Tisha would have been thrilled to hear her voice on the phone, for any reason.

“Fatima called Reg, asked what was up.”

“Reg? Why would she call Reg?”

Donna shrugged. “The home number is unlisted. He's easy to find. Cassandra did the same thing, after a fashion. Found Reg, then found you.”

Tisha looked at the place setting in front of her. The Howard china, like the Howard silver, was only three generations old, not quite the grand heirlooms that Donna made them out to be. Her mother, Irene Thomas Howard, had come from a well-to-do family, and these had been her mother's. They had been passed down to Donna upon her first marriage, and they weren't to Tisha's taste. The plates had a cluster of peonies in the center with a thick red-and-gold rim; the silver was similarly ornate. She had a hunch that Donna didn't really care for them, either, which was why she was so generous about lending the pieces out.

“What do you think it would accomplish, Donna, talking to Cassandra?”

“Whether she realizes it or not, I think Cassandra is acting out of spite. The reason I never minded the first book as much as you did is that the story was at least balanced. She failed us and we failed her. I don't care if the latter never happened—at least she placed it in a framework where we were reasonable, acting on our own wounded feelings. But writing about Callie's defense could have real repercussions, not just hurt feelings.”

“So if you befriend her, she won't write that book?”

“It's one option. Not the only one. But the easiest one, for all of us.”

“And if it doesn't work?”

The front door opened, Aubrey arriving home with her babysitter. The well-trained little girl hung up her coat before entering the dining
room, hugged her mother and her aunt, then waited to be invited to share the cookies with them, taking the three that her mother prescribed. She clearly wouldn't dream of wheedling for more, nor did she try to invade the adult conversation, not until Tisha asked her about her day. She spoke of school, Grace and St. Peter, with great enthusiasm. Funny, neither Donna nor Reg had been an outstanding student. Was it vanity on Tisha's part to see something of herself in her niece's hungry mind, her interest in art
and
science? It wouldn't be long before people would be telling the girl to choose, that one of these interests had to dominate and crowd out the other. Tisha, who had bought the propaganda and chosen art over science, had been delighted when her book club had introduced her to the work of Andrea Barrett, with her stories of biologists and history. Now that was
real
writing. Why couldn't Cassandra, who clearly had talent, direct her mind toward similarly ambitious work, instead of mining these wispy little childhood slights?

She helped Donna clear the table and wash the dishes by hand, Donna protesting all the while that Tisha should get on the road. Sure enough, she hit the tangle of rush hour on I-95 and cursed her own good manners. It was only then, stalled on the highway, whirling the radio dial in search of a traffic update, that she remembered how hard Donna's face looked when asked what she would do if Cassandra didn't prove malleable. Tisha almost felt sorry for their onetime friend. She herself would never want to inspire that look of stony composure. Donna, like most people used to getting their way, was formidable when denied.

“I HEAR YOU'RE HAVING DINNER
with your father again,” Lennie said.

Cassandra, who had been folding laundry as she spoke to her mother, almost dropped the portable phone cradled between neck and shoulder. Her parents had not, to her knowledge, initiated contact with each other for years. On those occasions where they had been forced to share the same space—usually events centering on Cassandra—they managed to be polite, nothing more. Things between them had been more strained since Annie's death, as if all that frosty goodwill had been for Annie's benefit.

“Y-y-y-yes,” Cassandra said, starting to lose her grip on the phone, then dropping the T-shirt in her hands in order to grab the receiver be
fore it fell to the floor. She wanted to point out to her mother that she really did need to discuss the format of her father's interview at the Gordon School. Besides, her mother was free to call
her,
to ask and even issue invitations. But Cassandra didn't raise either point because she knew how Lennie would reply. Reminded about the Gordon School event, she would say something self-deprecating, self-pitying. (“Funny, I was the one who taught there all those years, yet it's your father onstage…. I can't imagine spending fifty dollars to watch that…. Oh, no, I wouldn't dream of you buying a ticket for me. I do know the story, after all.”) As for the idea that she could ask for anything, from anyone, even her daughter—Lennie refused to believe that. Cassandra had dated a man once who had a dog so well trained that he could leave him in the room with a steak on the table, and the dog would only stare at it sorrowfully. That was Lennie all over, but she had taught herself this trick.

“He called me to get your local phone number,” Lennie said. “He wrote it down on a piece of paper and lost it.”

“I'd love to have lunch or dinner with you. If you're free.”

“Thursday lunch?” her mother offered.

Cassandra understood why her mother had picked that particular time slot. She was having dinner with her father Wednesday night; Lennie wanted the advantage of going second, the opportunity to criticize her ex-husband slyly, much as she had every other Sunday night when Cassandra returned from another weekend in his care. Those weekends had, in fact, been rather dreary, but Cassandra had refused to betray her father's inadequacies, such as the meals at Pappy's Pizza. (A novelty at first, but not when one went every other weekend.) Or the endless hours of television they watched together, to the accompaniment of her father's muttering. Like every child who had yearned for unfettered access to something and then gotten it, Cassandra had quickly learned how tedious a glut was. When her father took her to see
A Clockwork Orange
—she was all of thirteen—she had understood instantly how
Alex's treatment worked, having been through the same thing. Oh, technically, she could have walked away from the television at any time, picked up a book. Eventually, she did, but she had wandered through her own teenage wasteland first.

“I have plans Thursday,” she said apologetically. “Donna Howard and I are having lunch.”
Howard-Barr,
she reminded herself.
Married to Reg Barr, who is much too attractive for his own good. For my own good. And, incidentally, Donna Howard-Barr is the only person who seems to want to talk to you, who actually called you, so don't fuck it up.

“She was always my favorite,” her mother said. “Such beautiful manners.”

Not to mention rich and well connected,
Cassandra thought. But she felt she shouldn't be too critical of her mother on this score. She, too, had an awed regard for Donna, who moved with balletic grace, careful to avoid colliding with anyone or anything. Cassandra, a great bumper into things, forever bruising her hips and elbows on tables and countertops, wished she had that kind of delicate control, but it would have meant slowing down. Funny, of all the old classmates, she would have put Donna as the least likely to help her. She had been reserved and reticent as a girl, not inclined to confide in anyone. Then again, given her family, Donna was sophisticated, a little more worldly. She understood that Cassandra was going to write something; Donna might as well participate, get her side in.

“What about lunch on Wednesday?” Cassandra offered.

“Two meals out in one day?” Her mother found this scandalous. “No, no, you couldn't possibly.”

You
couldn't possibly, I do it all the time.

“You come here. I'll make shrimp salad. I'll get those cookies you like, from Bauhof's, which is called Louise's now, but I think they use the same recipes.”

Cassandra's sweet tooth had abated in recent years, and it was now salt that she craved. She could sit inside a bakery and not be tempted
beyond a nibble, while a bag of tortilla chips undid her. Yet even as she resented her mother's belief that she was still a little girl who liked pink-and-white refrigerator cookies, she was touched by it, too, and happy to sustain the illusion. She would go to Dickeyville, eat her mother's gloppy shrimp salad, scarf up whatever cookies were served, and if this undercut her appetite later that evening, when her father was taking her to one of Baltimore's best restaurants—ah well, that was probably the point.

 

“THIS CHEF HAS A FRENCH PLACE, TOO,”
her father said, inspecting the dining room at Charleston, “and I prefer that, in some ways. But the acoustics are hell. Shall we split a bottle of wine?”

Cassandra eyed her father's martini glass, with only a swallow left. He had been in the bar, waiting for her, when she arrived five minutes ahead of their reservation. Was he on his first drink or his second?

“Do you really think—”

“Cassandra, I know my capacity, my limits.”

She let this pass. But Cedric Fallows's life had been shaped by his ignorance of his capacity, his limits, as they were about to discuss. And although it wasn't suitable for the audience at the Gordon School, Cassandra had a question she had never dared to ask her father before, and she hoped to slip it in tonight, amid these rich courses and sips of whatever wine he wanted. Her apartment was two blocks away. He could sleep on the pullout sofa if it came to that.

“Red or white?”

“White wine,” her father said, “is insipid.”

His old prejudice seemed a shame, given the rich variety of Low Country seafood on the menu, but Cassandra recalibrated her taste buds, began checking out the plates listed under
VIANDES
. There was foie gras in the appetizer course, but she preferred that accompanied by sauterne, although she wouldn't dream of mentioning this to her father.
Wine—all alcohol, in fact—was supposed to be his bailiwick. Some fathers remained forever in charge of the yard or the cars. Her father ruled the liquor cabinet.

Cassandra had been interviewed far more than she had served as an interrogator, but she was developing her own elliptical style these days, inspired in part by Joan Didion's comment about how she let shyness work for her, so that subjects rushed to fill her awkward silences. Cassandra could never fake shyness, especially with her father. But she could lead him, as if down a series of switchbacks, to the topic she really wanted to discuss. They began easily enough, over light green salads, talking about the problems posed by her father's story. He was a white man who had collided with a seminal event that affected African-Americans far more profoundly in the end. Was his story meaningful in any larger way, or was it just a heightened love story?

“You mean, is it
War and Peace
or
Anna Karenina
?” her father said. “A little bit of both. In the end, I simply was in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

“The fact that you were white—isn't that part of the reason you were beaten so badly? Sort of like what's-his-name, in the L.A. riots all those years later, the man who was pulled from his truck.”

“I suppose,” her father said. “But Annie was attacked first. Don't ever lose that part of the thread. Other people were attacked, even killed. And they tended to be black.”

She tried to get him to sketch the scene, but her father had always been stubborn about the facts surrounding the beating itself, insisting he didn't remember anything after the first blow. He could describe Annie, how he had watched in horror as she got knocked down, then rose up again, as crowds began running down the street toward a drugstore that was being looted. The contemporaneous accounts of looting were, as Cassandra knew from researching her first book, borderline racist, portraying all the rioters as craven opportunists, intent on stealing, burning buildings to destroy the credit records that recounted who
owed what. But her stepmother had introduced Cassandra to women who could explain what it was like, that confused afternoon, how they believed they were on the verge of an apocalypse. What began as a desperate quest for food and medicine and baby formula spiraled out of control. It was Judgment Day. “It didn't,” Annie said dryly, “bring out the best in anyone.”

At the same time, Annie had always insisted she had no plan, that she was coming home from work when the riot erupted around her and she was knocked down, men tearing at her clothes, prompting Cedric Fallows's ill-considered bit of gallantry. Would he have gotten out of his car if the woman he had seen had been less beautiful? Probably not, Cassandra knew, although she could never quite bear to put those words on paper. She granted her father his love-at-first-sight version, but she was not required to point out that this love was sparked by Annie's gorgeous shape, her beguiling face whose only flaw was the gap between her front teeth. Her father adored that gap.

“Cassandra, I'm not sure you realize how badly injured I was,” her father said now. “I didn't suffer actual brain damage—thank God, I cannot imagine what my life would have been like if my mind had been impaired—but it was
healthier
for me to forget, and my brain complied.”

“Wouldn't it have been healthier still if there had been more talk of post-traumatic stress disorder then? It's my observation that your conscious mind may have granted you a respite, but your subconscious is a land mine. You jump at small noises, for example, like a door opening unexpectedly.”

“I jumped at small noises back when I could hear them,” her father said. “Now, I think, a gun could go off and I wouldn't flinch.”

She backed away then, not wanting to push him too hard. And, to be truthful, not wanting to delve into her father's decline, because it also implied her own. Instead, they discussed her father's view of the riots, which was admirably benign, all things considered. But then, he had
absorbed Annie's version of things. Her world had rejected him almost as thoroughly as his had rejected her, isolating the couple. It was a good thing that their love had held up, Cassandra often thought, because they really didn't have anyone else. Her father's colleagues, polite liberals, did not judge him, but they did not invite his new wife to their homes, and they could be thoughtlessly condescending when he brought her to events at the university. Annie wasn't a stupid woman, just not a bookish one. With her husband's encouragement, she had earned a nursing degree. But that mattered little to his friends.

As for Annie's family—when she married Cedric Fallows, she was dead to them.

And so the meal went, Cassandra pressing, then retreating, circling around and around, getting ready for the right moment to hit her target. She found it over the cheese course, her father mellow with port.

“I still miss cigarettes,” he said.

Cassandra was amazed. “You quit almost forty years ago.”

“Yes, I did, and I've never strayed, not once. But after a meal like this—I would love a cigarette.”

Strayed
was all she needed.

“Daddy—when you met Annie, you were an experienced, well, adulterer. You had several lovers before her.”

“Affairs, not lovers. I never loved them.”

“Okay, several
affairs.
” There had always been moments when this semantic distinction rankled, and this was one of them. “I guess what I'm trying to say is that you were experienced at cheating. But when you began the affair with Annie, after you got out of the hospital, you didn't try to hide it. You flaunted it, made mother acknowledge it, all but forced her to kick you out. Why did you do that?”

“Cassandra, I think you know.”

“No, I don't. That's why I'm asking.”

“Then what do you think? You know something of adultery—much as that pains me to say. I would never tell you what to write, and
your second book is quite well done, but I won't pretend that I wouldn't be happier if that document never existed.”

“Are we having a teaching moment? Are you using the Socratic method to get me to explain your life to you?”

“I think you have a theory, and you want to know if it's right. So go ahead, tell me, Cassandra. Why, after a history of furtive behavior, did I enter so flagrantly into the affair with Annie, refusing to conceal what I was doing?”

“I think it's because you had always lied—to mother, to those other women. To be an adulterer is to be a liar. The only way you could make Annie special was to never tell a single lie to her—or even about her.”

He sipped his port.

“This is not,” her father said, “going to be part of our onstage discussion?” He did her the courtesy of pretending it was a question.

“No, but—”

“Then let's leave it here, with a meaningful silence, where I neither affirm nor contradict your sense of me.”

She let him drive home, then instantly regretted it, thinking of those dark final miles to Broadmeade. She left a message on his machine, demanding that he check in, pacing well into the night when he didn't.