No Dark Valley (13 page)

“Well, goodness, I haven't played in so long, I don't think I'd—”

“I didn't have any idea you played yourself,” Elizabeth said. “I was just asking if you knew anybody who did. We're getting desperate to find somebody.”

“Well, you'd have to be pretty desperate to want me,” Celia said, laughing, although she knew this wasn't really true. She had played the number two singles position at Blackrock College and had lost only four matches during her entire four years on the team, one loss per year. She didn't have either the power or the wingspan of the number one player, Elena, who was five-ten, and she wasn't nearly as aggressive as Elena at the net. She found, however, that her small size tended to make her opponents overconfident, and this worked to her advantage, as consistency was her strong point. Surprisingly, she had ended up with a better overall record than Elena by the time they graduated.

Elizabeth was shaking her head. “Oh no, no, I didn't mean it that way. You could probably run circles around the rest of us. I just meant the season is going to be starting soon and if we don't find another singles player, then our doubles players are going to have to take turns filling in, and they all hate to play singles, and . . .” Her words trailed off, and she shrugged again. “I sure didn't know you played. I was just . . .” Something came to her, and her face fell a little. “We're a 4.0 team, and you'd have to get verified.”

Celia sensed that Elizabeth was wishing now that she had never said anything. Though she wasn't letting on, she was probably starting to get worried that Celia wouldn't be good enough to get a 4.0 rating. She was probably thinking Celia had played a few intramural matches at some community college years ago.

There was a brief awkward moment before Celia made a quick decision. She had been thinking for some time that she needed to start doing something to keep in shape. She used to exercise to an aerobics tape, but more and more she was finding excuses not to. “You know, this interests me,” she said. “I just might like to do it.” She could hardly believe what she was saying. She rarely made up her mind so fast.

“They divide you into levels,” Elizabeth said hesitantly. It was clear that Celia's interest was making her nervous. “These people called verifiers watch you play, and then they give you a rating. Our team . . . well, most of us have been playing a pretty long time, but the team itself is fairly new. Several of our players used to be on 3.5 teams but got bumped up, and we have one girl who used to be a 4.5 but got bumped down, and then there's another one who switched to our team from another 4.0 team, so it's kind of a funny mixture.”

“But you're the only singles player?”

Elizabeth nodded. “We used to have two others, but one of them moved and the other one had foot surgery and is laying out. The competition's going to be really tough this season, but we think we have a pretty good chance of holding our own—if we find another singles player, that is.”

“When does this happen—this getting verified?” Celia asked. “Is there time to do it before the season starts?”

Elizabeth laughed. “My team won't believe this. We've been looking for a singles player for months, and then I breeze in here and ask you out of the blue if you know anybody, and . . . well, they're not going to believe it when I tell them.” She took another step closer. “And you really
are
interested in joining our team?” She laughed again. “You're not just teasing me, are you?”

Celia reached into the little tray on top of the desk and took a business card off the stack. “Here's my card. Let me know where to go and when. I'll get my racket out and dust it off.”

“You have to join USTA, too,” Elizabeth said.

“I can do that. I used to belong years ago.”

Elizabeth took the card. “I'll give it to our captain, and she'll be in touch. I think there's a verification next weekend.” She shook her head again. “I can't believe this.”

After Elizabeth left, Celia headed back to the workroom, wondering what had come over her that she would leap into something big like joining a tennis team when she had plenty to do as it was. She would be glad when the effect of her grandmother's funeral had worn off. It had been over two weeks now, and she was still as restless as the day she had come back, still doing the oddest things for no good reason.

Passing a black faux marble pedestal, she stopped as she often did to look at the white limestone sculpture of an angel displayed on it. Or, more accurately, the bottom part of an angel. It had been fashioned to resemble an ancient sculpture that had been broken in half, with only the part from the waist down to the feet surviving. The jagged break at the top looked quite authentic, like something that had been damaged in an earthquake or a war, then left to crumble over the ages. Celia wondered exactly how the artist had done it. Maybe he had made a whole angel, then intentionally broken it. Maybe the top part was displayed in another gallery somewhere.

Anyway, the bottom part was beautiful. The folds of the angel's robe were gracefully fanned out, showing a bend of knee beneath, and the bare feet were planted on a small slab of granite, one foot turned slightly outward and the other poised on tiptoe, as if the angel were ready to ascend into the heavens.

When she had first started working here at the Trio Gallery ten years ago, Celia would never have looked twice at this piece. It would have mystified her that anybody would intentionally
break
something and call it art. She certainly wouldn't have considered buying it. Today, however, she knew that if she could spare the nine hundred dollars that it cost, she would lay it down in a minute for this sculpture. She had even thought of the exact place to put it in her apartment—on the small black table beside the front door. She had already overextended her budget, though, with a large silkscreen of red zinnias she had bought a few months ago.

It came to Celia right now that the only imperfect part of the angel, which was the work of a sculptor who lived like a hermit near Walhalla and did only two or three pieces each year, was its title.
Angel Feet
was what the artist had named it.

Celia had looked at this sculpture a hundred times before, and never until now had she thought it was poorly named. If she hadn't been to her grandmother's funeral, she doubted that the thought would have occurred to her. Ever since returning from Dunmore, Georgia, however, she had been plagued by words from her grandmother's hymns. They invaded her mind at the strangest times, such as right now. This was another cause of her restlessness—all these unbidden and altogether unwanted hymns haunting her at all hours of the day and night.

Angel Feet
was a good enough start for a title, but it stopped short. The right title came to her now—
Where Bright Angel Feet Have Trod
. Probably no one else would recognize it as coming from “Shall We Gather at the River,” another of her grandmother's favorites in
Tabernacle Hymns
. Such a title would have a little more flair, and as a playfully obscure allusion that most people wouldn't catch, it would be a lot more fun.

Well, this wasn't productive thinking. There sure wasn't anything
fun
about her grandmother's hymns, and she wasn't about to start suggesting to artists what they should name their pieces. She shook her head and continued on her way to the back room, passing a painting of a nude woman bent over a basin pouring water over her hair.
Saturday
was its simple title. Celia remembered as a little girl washing her hair on Saturday nights, with her mother's assistance, in preparation for looking her best at church on Sunday. Of course, she was always fully clothed when she washed her hair, and they did it at the kitchen sink, not over a basin.

An amusing thought crossed her mind as she entered the workroom and set about packing up the last few prints. She tried to imagine all of Grandmother's sisters and her brother, Buford, showing up en masse here at the Trio Gallery, maybe attending the opening of a new show. She could see them all studying the works of art, clucking their tongues at the nude hair washer (“Wicked, sinful nakedness!”), staring in bewilderment at the broken angel (“Why, somebody's done broke that thing in two!”), gaping at Tara Larson's
Tumult
(“And what in the name of common sense is
that
thing supposed to be?”).

7

Some Melodious Sonnet

Within ten days two new things had happened in Celia's life. First, she had become an official member of the Holiday Winners tennis team, the same one Elizabeth Landis was on. The verification had been easy. She had requested a 4.0 rating, and after they watched her play, they gave it to her. The team captain, Bonnie Maggio, was at the courts that day. “Just stay loose and play in the middle of your game” was her advice beforehand. “If you impress them too much, they could deny you the 4.0 and give you a 4.5. You could still play on a team if that happened, but not ours.” She grinned as she patted Celia's shoulder. “And you definitely want to be on ours. We have the most fun.”

The second new thing happened on the same Monday she returned from her first practice with the Holiday Winners at the Holiday Inn courts in Greenville. One of the women on the team knew the manager of the motel and had talked him into letting them use their four courts as home base. Celia had met all the other team members that day, then had run home to shower and eat lunch before opening the art gallery at one.

The mail had just arrived as she was leaving her apartment, so she grabbed it out of the mailbox and tried to sort through it at stoplights on her way to work. Most of it was throwaway stuff, but one letter bore the name of a law firm in Dunmore, Georgia: Cassidy and Percy, Attorneys. Celia conjured up a picture at once of a shabby little room in an upstairs corner of a ramshackle building in downtown Dunmore with two aging lawyers, one of them blind and the other deaf, both of them wearing clacking dentures.

The letter took her completely by surprise. She was having such fun with the picture of two bumbling old hick lawyers, sporting suspenders and moth-eaten plaid vests and dozing off right in the middle of meetings with clients, that the first sentence didn't even sink in at first, and she had to reread it:
You are sole inheritor of the property at 604 Old Campground Road, Dunmore, Georgia
.

A car honked behind her, and she didn't have time to read further. Her mind was spinning, wondering what the rest of the letter said, but she had to wait nearly ten whole minutes to find out, until she pulled into the row of shops out on Highway 29, where the Trio was located. She had tried to sneak a few words at every stoplight, but wasn't that the way it went? Every time you wanted a light to turn red so you could take care of business—put on makeup or fill out a bank deposit slip or, in this case, read a letter—the green light shone cheerfully, interminably. But as soon as you were running the least bit late and were desperate for green lights, they were not to be had. Or else some moron at the head of the line would get distracted and sit through half the green light, or his car would die and he couldn't get it started again.

So finally, when Celia pulled around to the back of the Trio Gallery and parked in her usual spot, she read the rest of the letter. She had already recognized the address on Old Campground Road, of course, and could only figure out one way to interpret that first sentence, which indeed turned out to be the case. Her grandmother
had
made out a will before her death after all and, to Celia's dismay, had named her only granddaughter as the inheritor.

If this wasn't also par for the course, Celia thought. The things you wanted were so often out of reach, but then you'd turn around and get stuck with a piece of rundown no-account property to try to dispose of. The letter referred to “all edifices and equipage,” and this struck her as very funny.

Let's see, she thought, besides the house, that would include the outbuildings—what used to be the little neighborhood store, the small dilapidated barn her grandfather had used as both a workshop and a garage, the former outhouse that had never been torn down, and an old chicken coop—maybe a few tools and old pieces of rusted equipment, and then the vast wealth of treasures inside the house: the ancient appliances, the odds and ends of cheap furniture, the chipped dishes, thin towels, discolored linens. Oh, she was one lucky granddaughter, she was. It struck her as so funny that she laughed out loud in her car. She opened the door and carried the letter inside with her. She wanted to reread it throughout the afternoon and be amused all over again.

“Sole inheritor!” she said to herself as she made her way around the gallery, switching off the security alarm, adjusting the thermostat, unlocking the front door. “I'm sole inheritor of a little matchbox of a house next to a railroad track!” She flipped the sign on the front door to Open, then twirled around and headed to the front desk to put her purse away and turn on the computer. “Sole inheritor!” she said merrily. “Maybe I should keep the house and tell people I have a vacation cottage in Georgia.” A few minutes later when Ollie dropped by the gallery to take a look at some photos of a new artist's works they were considering for a show later in the year, Celia laughed and said, “I bet you didn't know you had a
sole inheritor
working for you, did you?”

“Yeah, no kidding?” Ollie said absently. He sat down in the chair in front of the desk, crossed his long legs, and picked up the photos. He looked hard at the one on top, a collection of overlapping iridescent ovals called
Under Glass
, then looked up at Celia as if something had finally registered. “Sole inheritor, huh?” he said. “Of what? Money? Stuff? Or both?” This was actually quite a speedy response for Ollie, who often answered questions minutes later or, even more often, not at all.