The Distinguished Guest (25 page)

“I went to see Alan today,” Linnett said after a long silence. “At his office.”

Lily didn’t respond.

“He showed me a project he was working on. I liked it. Just as I like this house. Don’t you, Lily? Like this house?”

Slowly and with effort, Lily raised her shoulders. Indifference.

Linnett’s lips tightened. She was remembering abruptly Lily’s remark to Alan Friday night, her own forced complicity in it. She said, “Course we talked some about
his
memories. About how his memoir would go of that same period you wrote about. It was interesting.”

Lily’s looked at her sharply, and Linnett went on. “To him it was not as clear-cut as it was to you.” She could hear a car coming down the driveway. Looking out, she saw
Noreen’s crumpled station wagon swing up into the parking area. “Not as simply a matter of who was right and who was wrong. Which is how you seem to have seen things, Lily. Isn’t
it?”

Linnett waited. Noreen moved around in the dappled sunlight under the tree, slamming various of the car doors.

She thought she saw Lily shake her head, just slightly, and her mouth opened.

Then Noreen was bumbling up the stairs, rushing with too many bags, making a great deal of noise. She kicked at the door and it opened. The wind ruffled Lily’s hair, but her face was made
of stone.

Noreen’s voice was loud and energetic: news of the world out there. “It was ten degrees warmer in town than it is here,” she yelled. She hurried across the room to set the bags
down on the island. “I thought I’d die!”

“Well,” Linnett said. “We’ve been sitting here in the cool sipping this excellent wine. We’ve been
comfy
, haven’t we Lily?”

Lily slowly turned her head. This word was like a blow to her, for reasons she couldn’t have explained. (That comfort was what Alan had chosen for his life over what she might have wished
for him? That it was her failure not to have been able to offer it—comfort—to any of the people she loved?)

At any rate, she spoke now.

“Comfy!” she said, with all the energy she could muster, and in it Linnett heard anger, and judgment, and something else a little like despair.

At dinner that night, Lily could hardly eat anything, but her thoughts seemed to have completely cleared. She felt as though a generous hand had brushed her brow as she napped in her room after
Linnett left, and settled all the chaos within. Looking at Alan across the table, she remembered, oddly, a game he and his friends had played when they were small. But not too small. Perhaps nine
or ten. And what was strangest, she thought, was that she’d never heard the girls play anything like it. “How would you rather die?” one of the little boys would ask. “Would
you rather be burned to death, or shot? Would you rather be put in the electric chair, or hung?” The choices were always violent. “Would you rather have your head chopped off, or drown
in boiling water?” They would actually discuss the ramifications of these deaths in terms of how much pain you’d have to endure, at what point you’d “pass out,” and
the like.

She told Paul about this, and they’d laughed together about the high drama implicit in all the choices, laughed that the more likely forms of death, and the less thrilling, were never
considered—cancer, heart failure, despair. Being old. Being tired, done in.

They had laughed, Lily remembered. She had stood in the doorway to his study, where she’d come to offer her report of the boys’ game. The light from the window behind Paul’s
desk whited his hair around his face, and he’d leaned his head back to laugh with her. And with their laughter, weren’t they too, as surely as the little boys were, pushing away the
very possibility they thought they were recognizing?
Denial
, as Linnett would call it.

How beautiful he had been then, Paul! his head thrown back, laughing with her at death.

From across the table, Alan watched the faint play of his mother’s smile. “What are you thinking of, Lily?” he asked.

For several seconds, her mouth worked. “I am thinking of your father,” she said at last. “Of his laugh.”

Twice before Linnett had sat by while Lily entertained visitors. Sat by, sat in—whatever. Once it had been another divorced minister’s wife. She’d begun a
memoir too, and, it turned out, wanted to read some of it aloud to Lily, wanted to “pick her brains” about how to get a book contract. Lily’s disease had suddenly become much
worse, she’d actually managed to seem a bit non compos mentis before the afternoon was over, and the woman left, clearly disappointed, but full of a satisfying pity she signaled to Linnett
with long, pointed glances when Lily began to circumnavigate a subject peculiarly.

The other had been a pair of feminist scholars working on a book they were going to title
Redefining Heroism: The Female Mode
. With them, Lily was prickly, a bit Red Queenish. Which
Linnett had pointed out to her afterward. Lily had laughed.

This was different. It was different because Linnett felt differently about Lily at this point. Certainly not so allied with her. Much more critical. She’d decided to delay her own arrival
to avoid the prolonged settling in, with Noreen offering things per Lily’s instructions and Lily playing hostess, pouring things interminably, unsteadily passing the agitated plate of cheese
and crackers, or cookies, with what seemed a deliberated mischief. (Linnett was reminded of a friend she’d had with a wandering eye. He’d toy with people sometimes, trying to confuse
them as to which eye they should be trying to meet.)

She called Noreen to let her know she’d be late, and then fixed herself a tuna sandwich for lunch. She carried it and a bottle of beer to the metal table on her small, square deck and
settled herself down in the matching chair. Both were enameled a sharp citrusy green, gone to rust at the bolts that held them together. The chair rested on a single bent tube of metal that
traveled under the seat and across its back, and Linnett bounced lightly in it as she ate and drank, looking out unseeingly over the Thayers’ garden.

She’d been working all morning outlining the piece on Lily, filling in a paragraph here or there. She thought she might finally have the distance, the correct distance, to do the work.
She’d gone through what she recognized now as familiar stages with her—enchantment, then disenchantment or antipathy, and finally, magically—it usually happened this way—a
bit of elevation, as she thought of it, that let her see all of these emotions and where they applied, that let her see her subject whole.

She would use the illness, she’d decided. Or it had been decided for her, as she saw it, by Lily herself, by what she’d said to Alan last Friday. She’d write too of
Lily’s apparent bravery in facing the illness and what it had done to her. Linnett had convinced herself this was the right way, the fairest way, to use what she knew.

She’d begun:

She didn’t know quite where she’d go from there, but this was the start, the hook she’d been waiting for, she was certain of that.

The sun heated Linnett’s skin. A wasp settled on her sandwich, but was amenable to hovering when Linnett had her turn, so she didn’t even try to shoo it away. She closed her eyes and
slowly bobbed the chair. She could hear the buzz of a distant mower, the sound, faintly, of cars rushing by on the road. She dozed.

The shift in the air woke her. A thin veil of cloud had drawn itself across the sky, and there was a steady breeze. Linnett rolled her head from side to side, horizon to horizon. Dark clouds
were moving in slowly from the south. Goose bumps had formed on her bare arms and legs. She picked up her beer and sipped it. Tepid.

She went inside. It was three-thirty. Good. The visitor was to have arrived at three. They would be, as Lily put it, in medias res, and Linnett could come in and be an observer, rather than a
co-hostess, as she felt she’d been perceived before. She changed to a skirt, brushed out her wild hair. At the last minute, she grabbed a sweater—it was really getting chilly—and
kathunked slowly out to Frank’s car.

Lily’s visitor today was the Ph.D. from Brown, with the thesis on early integration movements. As she’d explained in her letter, someone had recommended Lily’s book to her, and
she thought she might be able to use the women’s group. Her approach, she’d said, was to try to talk to everyone she could find who’d participated at the time in a particular
effort at integration, and to get their collective memory of the nature of the experience and the quality, retrospectively, of the interactions between black and whites. Lily had been very tired
the day Linnett had read the letter aloud to her and she dictated her answer. They hadn’t talked about the student, but Linnett had assumed she was black.

She was. She stood to be introduced to Linnett and held her hand out, waiting patiently for Linnett to lodge her crutches in her armpits so she could extend her hand back. She was tall, quite a
bit taller than Linnett, which meant almost six feet, and she had mahogany skin. Her hair, like Lily’s, was smoothed back into a bun. Her gaze was sober, measuring, and Linnett found herself
wondering what she’d been making of Lily, how the exchange had been going.

Lily was sipping tea, Linnett noted, and her visitor—Mar
ce
a it was pronounced (had it been spelled Marcia? Linnett couldn’t remember) McKendrick—also had a cup of tea by
her place. There was an opened bottle of wine set out too, with three empty glasses by it, and an extra empty cup by the teapot, presumably for Linnett if that’s what she chose. Lily, via
Noreen.

“We’ve been discussing Blackstone Church,” Lily announced, as Linnett began to unload her backpack.

“Well, go right on. I’m just a fly on the wall,” she offered to Marcea. “I’m here to eavesdrop. I’m—did Lily already tell you this?—I’m
doing an article on her. For
The New Yorker
. So ignore me if you can.”

“
The New Yorker
magazine?”

“Is there a something-else
New Yorker
?” She was holding the little tape recorder in her hand. She grinned at Marcea.

“I guess not.” Marcea’s gaze was level and unamused.

Uh-oh, Linnett thought. But she said, “Do you mind if I record?” She sat down. “It’s just to get Lily, really. Really Lily.”

“No, it’s fine,” Marcea said.

“And of course, I love it,” Lily said. “More
me
for posterity.”

She was in high spirits today, Linnett thought. “Oh, come on Lily,” she said. “You’re hardly ready to accede to posterity.”

“One never knows,” Lily said.

Linnett clicked the box on and set it down.

“Lily’s been telling me about the church,” Marcea explained to Linnett. “The women’s group.”

Lily’s hand went trembling up and they both turned to her. “Bible group,” she said. “It was a Bible group. Not . . . not, not a women’s group as we understand that
now. A reading group, for discussing the Bible. The other part of it . . . well, as I was telling you, it evolved.”

“But it
was
consciously integrated. A consciously integrated group.” Marcea was asking, but it was a statement.

Lily frowned slightly. “Not as such. I mean, it was the church that was consciously integrated. It
had
been white, and then, as the neighborhood changed, the pastor that preceded
Paul, and then Paul—Paul and I, in my role as helpmeet—felt our mission was to prevent, in this one community anyway, the sin of prejudice, of white flight. To make everyone think about
what it meant to
be
a Christian church in such a neighborhood. About what being a ‘neighbor’ meant, as Christ used the word. The group became an expression of that, necessarily.
And that was certainly one of the things we talked about.”

“So, at any rate, you were conscious of
being
integrated,” Marcea asked.

Lily smiled the frigid Parkinson’s grimace. “Yes. That.”

Suddenly rain lightly tapped the window. Lily seemed oblivious to it, but Linnett and Marcea turned and watched it for a moment. The trees rocked in the wind.

“I heard on the radio that there’s some big storm passing out to sea tonight,” Linnett said. “This must be the beginning of the rump end of it.”

Lily barked—a laugh, a startling noise—and Marcea’s head jerked toward her. Then, to recover herself, she looked down again at her notes. Linnett could see a list of questions
in a girl’s handwriting, the letters rounded and prettified. The kind of handwriting in which you’d find a happy face in the dots of the
i
’s, or heart shapes.

Marcea lifted her head, asked away, and Lily was set in motion again. How many times had she told this story? Linnett wondered. She’d heard a couple of taped interviews with
Lily—NPR, and a talk before an arts council in Chicago—and she must have read at least a dozen, anyway, in various newspapers and magazines. Lily had the patter down. She repeated some
phrases verbatim. Linnett found herself barely listening to the history of the church, a history she knew by heart anyway. She reached over and poured herself a glass of wine.

As Lily talked and Marcea kept her going, the rain slowly intensified, the sky grew darker. At some point, Noreen came out from somewhere in the back of the house, and, seeing them sitting in
the dim light, crossed the room and turned the lamp on. Linnett lifted her hand to signal a greeting, and Noreen raised her eyebrows back.