Life Sentences (27 page)

NO ONE HAD EVER SEEN
a party like the “graduation” celebration that the Howards threw for our passage from elementary school to junior high. It was a melancholy night for me, filled with reminders that I would be going to a different school from the others. The color theme, for example, was maroon and gold, the colors for William Lemmel Junior High, and the elaborate cake held the legend
HERE WE COME, SCHOOL #79.
I didn't even know the colors for Rock Glen, although I had already attended an orientation where we were taught the school song, to the tune of “The Happy Wanderer.”

“Dag, Cassandra,” Fatima said when I sang it for her. “You sure do sing loud.”

I also had been given a copy of the school's dress code, a mysterious document that seemed more concerned with potential weapons than propriety. The banned items included clogs (then bulbous, wooden affairs from Sweden), picks with metal teeth, and belts worn unbuckled. The latter was presumably forbidden because an unbuckled belt could be whipped out and used to administer a beating. I wish I could say that the list was an alarmist, reactionary document, but it proved eminently sensible. Rock Glen was a tough school, although those of us in the “enriched” track usually moved in a rarefied bubble, at a safe remove from the rougher element. The year after I left, there was an actual riot. Lemmel was tougher still, yet this was not mentioned, not at the graduation party.

The Howards' house was a marvel, modern for the time, built in such a way that the front revealed little about its true scale and tasteful luxury. No, the Howards' material wealth was evident only from the back, where the house had been positioned to take full advantage of the lot, on a wooded hill high above the Gwynns Falls. The rear of the house was almost entirely glass, the better to take in that view. Earlier that year, a girl had run down that hill, building up so much momentum that she had plunged into the stream, swollen by recent rains, and ended up drowning. Donna said her family wasn't home at the time, or her father surely would have run down the hill and saved the girl. There was a pool with a flagstone terrace. There was a pool at my house, too, but we couldn't afford to fill it even before my father left, much less repair the cracks and return it to functionality. We danced around the Howards' pool, but no one went swimming, not that night.

The party was winding down when Tisha's little brother burst in, probably sent to summon Tisha for her ride home. Reginald Barr was known as Candy, the kind of nickname that Tisha never would have allowed anyone to bestow on
her. Another child, one with a lesser personality, might have been ruined by such a nickname, but Candy embraced it, developing a signature dance that he performed whenever possible, singing an Astors song by the same name. “Gee whiz,” he sang, spinning in circles as Tisha rolled her eyes, disturbed that her baby brother had crashed the party. But he was singing to Donna, our hostess. I don't remember the lyrics exactly; it was a typical love song, full of sweet lips and blue eyes. But when he got to the part where he declared that the girl would one day marry him, Candy Barr dropped to one knee on that flagstone terrace and held out his hands to Donna, who had covered her face to smother her laughter, soft as it was. Candy didn't mind that Donna was laughing at him, as long as she was laughing. Donna's laugh was a rare thing; we all competed for it.

 

“THE THING IS, HE WASN'T THERE,”
said Tisha, who had marked the spot with a Post-it in a copy of the hardcover edition of
My Father's Daughter,
now a collector's item twice over—a first edition of a bestseller that had been extensively revised. “Not at the graduation party. That happened at my birthday party, a month earlier.”

“Well, thanks for setting the record straight on that crucial matter,” Cassandra said. “Unfortunately, I've already sent in the new epilogue and the book is in copyediting.”

They were in the same suburban restaurant where they had lunched six months earlier, but it was Tisha who had suggested this meeting. She also had chosen a later time, happy hour—“But on the late side, after the teachers clear out”—and was indulging in a glass of wine. Still, Cassandra couldn't help being wary. Tisha was Reg's sister, Donna's oldest friend. She had to have an agenda.

“I'm not showing it to you to prove what you got wrong,” Tisha said. “It's about what you got
right.
Can't you see? Even then, Reg was crazy for Donna. He wasn't just fooling when he did that dance. He'd do anything for her.”

“I'm well aware of that.”

“He loves her, Cassandra. He loves her more than she'll ever love him, and that's tragic. You may not have understood what you saw, yet you captured the way he put her on a pedestal.”

“Hmmmm.” Tisha's overture, while well intentioned, was cold comfort. What was the point of glimpsing the little things in hindsight? It didn't change the fact that she had been wrong about so many big things.

The more disturbing development was how little anyone cared about setting the record straight. With her father's blessing—as Lenore predicted, he was relieved to let go of his secret—Cassandra had gone to her original editor, Belle, and explained that the heart of
My Father's Daughter
was essentially false. Cassandra had expected the existing copies to be recalled and pulped, but Belle had proposed a new edition with a lengthy epilogue, which would allow Cassandra to clarify the record but also reflect on how she had changed since the book was written.

“It's still a beautiful little book, and so heartfelt,” Belle had said. “I think it would be more valuable to let it stand on its own, then give readers the context to understand all this new information. After all, that's how you experienced the story, so it's not ersatz or false. This was true when you wrote it. Now it's a different kind of true.”

And as Cassandra worked—interviewing her mother and father, but also steeping herself in the historical record of the time in order to provide a more accurate overview of the riots—she realized that the bulk of her story was unchanged. What were those hurtful words that others had thrown at her?
Martin Luther King was assassinated and ruined my birthday party, boo-hoo-hoo.
Stripped of its fake portent, its never-was link to a seminal event,
My Father's Daughter
turned out to be a genuinely sad story, one about a girl who needed the mythology of a huge historic moment to rationalize a parent's pedestrian betrayal.

The epilogue did not reveal how she had learned the truth; she wrote only that someone had furnished her a copy of the police report. And while her old publicist—another happy reunion—had stoked the
media with a few tantalizing details, she had shrewdly kept back the biggest revelation. The orders for the new book promised to be robust and Belle had even floated the idea of an updated version of
The Eternal Wife.
Cassandra was far from the financial ruin she had envisioned when she sold her place in Brooklyn and used part of the equity to make a sizable donation to the Gordon School. She had thought her profits on New York real estate would mean she could buy a waterfront penthouse in Baltimore, especially in this soft market, but between the donation and her decision to return the advance on what was to have been the Callie book, she had just enough to buy a condominium with a view of another condominium.

But she hadn't moved back to Baltimore because it was cheaper. She wanted to be close to her parents, especially her mother, who would eventually have to give up the house on Hillhouse Road, probably sooner than she thought. A few weeks ago, Cassandra had stopped by unannounced and discovered her mother weeping in the middle of the afternoon. Lenore confessed that she had trouble mustering the necessary strength to open the elbow joint on her powder room sink. Cassandra had taken the wrench in hand and, with much coaching, done it for her.

“You like being back?” Tisha asked now.

“I miss New York. But the fact is, I live within walking distance of several good restaurants, a drugstore, a gym, and a Whole Foods, and that pretty much covers my needs. Plus, I can be at either parent's home within thirty minutes. How are your folks?”

“Still in the same house, still healthy enough to live on their own.” Tisha rapped the bar with her knuckles, although it wasn't actually wood. “We'll see how long that lasts. I'm grateful that Reg has the money to help them out, when that day comes. I'm not ashamed to say that. I've got two college tuitions.”

“You know, I thought about living in Bolton Hill. It reminded me of my neighborhood back in Brooklyn. But…”

“But you were worried about running into Reg and Donna.”

“Maybe. I don't know. It's strange, how little fallout there was. Don't you think?”

Tisha shrugged. “It was a long time ago, Cassandra. What did you expect to happen?”

“I don't know.
Something.
”

When it came to Callie Jenkins, it turned out that Donna was the one with the true gift of prophecy. Callie had—with Cassandra's advice and money—found a criminal attorney. The lawyer had set up an appointment with the state's attorney, where Callie recounted everything she had told Cassandra. The state's attorney thanked Callie for her “confession” and said it had been determined that it was counterproductive to prosecute her for her child's death. She had spent seven years in jail, after all. Sudden infant death syndrome was not implausible and with no body to autopsy, a jury would be put in the position of deciding how credible Callie was. City juries were notoriously lenient; it would take only one skeptical citizen to deadlock the process.

In short: The state's attorney didn't believe a word of it but didn't want to waste resources on a trial.

And what of Andre Howard, the money passed through his brother's campaign? That information would be forwarded to federal authorities, Cassandra was told, but Julius Howard would bear the brunt of the investigation. Cassandra had pointed out to Callie that she could go to the newspapers, which would be happy for the information about the Howards. Or Callie could write her own book. Cassandra offered to set her up with a literary agent, ghostwrite the book if need be, for no fee.

Callie wanted none of it. “I'm not much for telling,” she said. And that was that. Even with her income cut off, she didn't want to leverage her power over the Howards. Her only concern was for her mother, but Myra Tippet's nursing home accepted Medicaid, and given Myra's complete lack of assets, it was no problem to get her qualified. Once the issue of her mother's care was established, Callie was content. She would
find a job, she told Cassandra. She didn't need much. The house and car were paid for. The people at the school where she volunteered thought they could find her work.

“But if you sold a book,” Cassandra had said, “you might not have to worry about money at all. You could go to culinary school—tuitions there are as high as any private college—really do something with your baking. You could—”

Callie had cut her off. “I'm not much for telling,” she repeated. At the time, it had felt like a reproach. But Callie Jenkins, Cassandra had come to realize, would never prescribe how anyone should live.
You have your way, I have mine,
she was telling Cassandra. Neither way is right, neither way is wrong. There was mild consolation in the fact that the Howards had to live with the possibility that Callie might change her mind, but it was mild indeed. Besides, Andre Howard knew better than anyone how skilled Callie was at keeping quiet. Perhaps he had chosen her, all those years ago, for that quality. But perhaps he really had loved her. Both things could be true.

And now that
My Father's Daughter
was done, Cassandra wasn't sure if she had anything more to tell. Maybe she would try fiction again. Why not? She had been writing fiction all along.

“Are you working on anything?” Tisha asked. Could she follow Cassandra's thoughts? But she was probably just being polite.

“I'm going to take a year off, teach in the Hopkins writing sems, clear my head, make a community for myself. I don't really know anyone in Baltimore except my parents. It would be nice if we could see each other sometimes, keep in touch.”

“That would be…complicated,” Tisha said. “Donna wouldn't like it, and Reg doesn't like anything that Donna doesn't like.”

“Do they have to know?”

“They'd end up knowing. Baltimore is small that way.”

Cassandra smiled. “You make it sound almost as if it would be an affair. But I'm discreet. I have experience in those things.”

Tisha covered her ears. “I really don't want to think about that, okay?” But she was smiling, too.

Cassandra looked at her old book, the page marked by a magenta Post-it. Tisha had bought this new, many years ago. Tisha had remembered her, despite what she said. “I probably should have asked you about what I got wrong, from your perspective, in my memoir. And it's true, I've sent the revisions in and I can't make wholesale changes. But I will have opportunities to make small fixes. So if there's something that really bothers you—”

“I don't care about the party,” Tisha said. “It's not that important.”

“But what about the fight?”

“The fight?”

“That day in ninth grade, when that girl, Martha, attacked me on the softball field. You and Donna and Fatima just watched. I mean, you were standing off in the distance, but you didn't do…anything. I had the impression that anecdote bothered you most of all.”