The Distinguished Guest (9 page)
Read The Distinguished Guest Online
Authors: Sue Miller
“Ah, ever the journalist. Where’s your sympathy? That comes first.”
He smiled at her. “Where’s a beer for me? That comes first.”
“Inside. Refrigerator.” He started into the house. “Bring out the chips and stuff too,” she called to him. “I was trying to resist till you got here.”
After he’d settled next to her on the couch, beer in hand and the chips and salsa resting between them, he asked again, “How’d you do it?”
“I fell when I was jogging this morning.”
“What a cliché.”
“I know. I’m sorry. But at least it wasn’t a heart attack. That’s a really tired ploy.”
He was chewing loudly. “Does it hurt?”
“Yeah, but I got drugs.”
“Hey, whad’ja get?”
“You can’t have any.”
He elbowed her lightly. “Bitch,” he said companionably.
They sat in friendly silence for a moment, surveying the weedy scraggle that was Linnett’s yard. In the distance down the empty road, where there’d once been a cornfield, there was a
soldierly row of raw new houses, the beginnings of what would be a major development. He spoke again. “It’s gonna cramp your style a little.”
“Not much, but I do have a problem I want your help with.”
“Please, no.”
“You don’t know what it is yet.”
“Linnie, I mean it. My own life is all I can manage right now.” He was shaking his head. Jowly, she thought. He’s getting jowly.
“It’s no big deal,” she said.
He sighed. “What is it, then? What is it?”
“I want to trade cars. Yours is automatic.”
“It’s underinsured,” he said quickly.
“But I’m a better driver than you are anyway. And my
car’s
better than yours. This is a no-loser for you.”
“How long?”
“Month. Month and a half.”
“What’s in it for me?”
“I told you. A better car, a better driver for your car.”
“What else?”
She gestured at the bowls between them with her bottle. “All the beer and salsa your heart desires.”
“What about my other heart’s desires?” He did a Groucho Marx turn with his eyebrows.
“That’s not your
heart
, idiot.” He smiled. “You’re just horny, Franky boy.”
He nodded several times. “True. Very true.”
“Find someone. You don’t even try. You just ogle the undergraduates. Which is now, I hasten to point out,
against
the rules.”
“How would you know? That I ogle?”
“I know. I hear things.”
“Gossip is odious. You should be above it.”
“I also heard you went to a party at Eda and Earl’s where there were lots of available, grown-up women, and you sat in the kitchen playing Scrabble the whole time.”
He shrugged and ate another chip. When he’d swallowed it, he said, “Wanna play?”
“Scrabble?”
“
Bien sûr
.”
“What about the car?”
“Yeah, you can have the car. Let’s play Scrabble.”
Over the game, she told him about Lily, about the article she wanted to do. And then she was aware that she was offering this to him, as she had done so often in the past, as a kind of trophy:
“See how smart I am?”
And as he’d done so often in the past, he gave her advice instead of praising her. “She’s been done to death, Lin. I must’ve read half a dozen things about her over the
last four or five years. You’d better have a new angle. What’s your angle going to be?”
Now, driving his car into the little town of Bowman, she heard his voice again, she remembered how he’d looked, the irritation moving over his face at the news of her coup, the mean way
his mouth curved down before he spoke. He’d put a
Q
on a triple-letter square shortly after that, and she’d tipped the board up to end the game.
She drove slowly, cruising the streets. It was a Friday, and she wasn’t due to start with Lily until Monday. She’d given herself the weekend to figure things out, to get used to her
surroundings. There was an old town center—five or six buildings clustered around a green, including the requisite church, a clock in its tall bell tower. She’d noted a shopping mall a
mile or two back up the road, with a chain supermarket, but here everything was more tasteful. On the first floors of several of the grand old houses there were an ice cream parlor, a gourmet
store, an antique store, a bookshop. Linnett stopped in the real estate office just outside of town to get the key to her rental cottage, and directions.
The next day, Saturday, she set up her computer and laid out her books and notes. Then she got into Frank’s car and drove again. She found a liquor store and bought a bottle of gin and
some beer. She went to the supermarket and did a big shopping, hobbling slowly behind her cart. She sat on a bench on the porch in front of the ice cream parlor and ate a double-dip cone, pistachio
and chocolate, while she surveyed the weekend action on the streets in front of her.
It was the kind of town that drove her crazy—mostly retirees, it seemed, the men in green or madras slacks, the wiry, gray-haired women speed-walking in two and threes, wearing expensive
warm-up suits. She noticed that a parade of old pickups was steadily passing, some with what she recognized as lobster traps in the back, others with other equipment she took to be nautical. When
she’d finished her cone, she headed down the road they’d been driving back and forth on. Harbor Road. It ended at water, at a sheltered harbor, appropriately, with two or three docks
reaching into it and some of the trucks she’d seen, or ones like them, parked in a row again a cement half-wall. She sat in her car for a while, listening to a shouted conversation between
two men working in solid, beat-up boats pulled against the largest dock—the main one. It was what she thought of as guy talk, work talk: numbers mostly, in this case weights of a catch of
some sort, and then money—the price per pound at various places, the cost of fuel, the cost of repairs. The water in the harbor glinted in the sunlight. Bobbing at moorings farther out were
what looked like expensive pleasure boats, and on the ocean in the distance, Linnett could see at least a dozen sailboats gliding over the silver water.
That night she found a bar in an old hotel in the next town over that was lively enough—some fishermen here too, she discovered, eavesdropping. Shortly after eight, an entire softball team
arrived on a swell of loud voices. They all wore T-shirts that said
Cox Hardware
. Many jokes there, she speculated.
She spent the evening in the bar watching the Red Sox lose on a very large television set mounted in the corner, and the clientele slowly get drunker and louder. Late in the game, they all began
to put the moves on each other. Linnett got a little attention, but basically it was a crowd that knew each other, that liked the sense of the familiar. When she wasn’t as friendly as she
might have been, they left her alone. She went home at about eleven. Almost all the lights in the village were out.
The next day, Sunday, she drove to the supermarket in the mall and bought the
New York Times
. She sat outside on the little deck in front of her house, drinking coffee and making her way
through it. When she was done, she went inside and skimmed all the notes she’d made on Lily Maynard. She flipped through the short-story collection, looking at her underlinings and marginalia.
She went more slowly through the memoir.
What had drawn Linnett to Lily Maynard in the first place was the memoir. Not just for the reasons that feminists had embraced it, and only initially because she was intrigued by the publicity
angle: the old woman and the sensationally successful first book. No, it was as she began to read—even the first few paragraphs—that Linnett had thought she’d like to interview
Lily. The world she presented seemed like new territory to Linnett, and also there was something loopy and nearly careless, but compelling stylistically about the way Lily launched herself into the
memoir, about the way her prose moved. It began:
We met on Tuesday night for fourteen years. We met to read the Bible, and we did read the Bible, but we also made a world, and with my dying breath I will bear
witness, I will testify, that that world worked. We were all women, we were all colors, and when we gathered, all that mattered to us was the love that coursed among us.
“Wherefore seeing we also are compassed about with so great a cloud of witnesses, let us lay aside every weight, and the sin which doth so easily beset us, and let us run with
patience the race that is set before us . . . For whom the Lord loveth he chasteneth, and scourgeth every son whom he receiveth.” So we would read; and by the end of the evening we
were speaking of Mattie’s son, already a father at seventeen and lost to her, of Shirley’s husband, unfaithful again, of the death of my mother or the loss of a baby or the
falling away of hope and the belief in the possibility of human kindness. And in that world of middle-aged women gathered in our ordinary living rooms on the south side of Chicago, there
was solace, and comfort, and the lifting of even the heaviest of these burdens. And there was laughter and true fellowship.
I never even saw a black person—a
Negro
as we said then—until I was ten or thereabout. I was on a city trolley in St. Paul with my mother when the man got on. My
father did not like Negroes, he didn’t think they were clean or upstanding. But he held himself to be a Christian and he was an American, and therefore he also believed that if they
wanted to, Negroes could live as respectably as we did, that it was possible that they could be our equals. It was, then, a failure of their will and moral fiber that they were not. This
man was well-dressed, though his clothes were worn. He sat down on one of the long op en benches at one side of the front of the bus, and, unlike the other men riding among us, he took
his hat off and held it on his lap. To my astonishment, his hair was a reddish color. I noted too that the brown fingers circling the crown of his hat faded to a pale color on the inside,
almost as light as a white person’s. I was openly staring at him, something I knew to be rude, but when I glanced over at my mother to see if she’d noticed this, she was
staring too.
She felt compelled to comment after we’d gotten off the bus. There was a bit of hemming and hawing. Perhaps I’d noticed, she said, something different about the man
who’d gotten on. “Yes, Mother. He was a Negro.” Yes, and obviously a very nice man, she thought. She came back to it several times over our afternoon in town. Had I
noticed this about him, that? Had I noticed how politely he held his hat on his lap? I had. It just went to show you, she said. Yes. At last she said, “We won’t mention this
at home,” and instantly I understood, though there was no direct hint of this in what she’d just said, that the reason we wouldn’t mention it was that my father would
then insist we not ride the trolley anymore.
Linnett admired these four paragraphs for their honesty, their quick conveying of a whole way of life. She was intrigued by the way they commented on each other. She liked the sudden turn Lily
Maynard made to her father in the third paragraph. She wondered how conscious of her style Lily was, whether an editor might have suggested to her that her father get a paragraph of his own,
whether Lily might have resisted that.
The first chapter went on to talk about the church in Chicago that Paul and Lily had come to, about the attempts the preceding pastor and then Paul made to keep it integrated, even as the
neighborhood around it turned to ghetto. Lily wrote of her own unpreparedness for this struggle.
I came hearing my parents’ voices in my head saying the things they’d never said in so many words to me: that Negroes were different, inferior, and
somehow also threatening. That they were tolerable when they behaved with a kind of abject, eyes-averted respect, but not when they were “uppity.” But I also believed that all
men were equal in the eyes of the Lord. And I believed, with Paul, that to be a Christian meant truly loving our neighbors, no matter who they were. Hadn’t our Lord, after all,
aligned himself with those lowest in his world, with sinners and thieves, with lepers and Pharisees? Didn’t our religion teach that we were fallen too, sinners all, even a man like
my father no better than a thief?
Linnett had no experience of religion itself, though she’d attended church occasionally as a girl, mostly at Easter and Christmas with her mother. The idea of Lily’s religious
principles making demands of her, instructing her in how to conduct her daily life, was fascinating to Linnett. She read through the memoir excited and moved by the opposing forces of belief and
loss; interested in Lily’s writing; and intrigued by her sense of Lily’s character.
Now, in her cramped cottage, she was reading from a passage in the last third of the book, after Lily and her husband began to have difficulties over the direction in which he was leading the
church as Paul embraced the politicization of his ministry, as he began to be interested in the teachings of Saul Alinsky, the radical leader then working in the neighborhood to organize the
community, to encourage them to press for their rights, to push against the machine and the economics which had virtually imprisoned them. Paul began to feel his role was to encourage black
cohesion, black resistance.
One night, long after we’d gone to bed, the telephone rang. I was the lighter sleeper, so I was the one who got up and ran down to Paul’s study to answer
it, fearing for each of the children quickly and in turn as I went. I recognized the voice at the other end of the line as being that of Larry Sims, in charge of one of Paul’s new
outreach programs, but he didn’t identify himself to me. He just asked if Paul was there and said it was a church emergency.
I waked Paul and lay back down in bed feeling dismissed and shut out of his new world. When he came back to the bedroom and began to dress, I asked him what was wrong.
“Just something involving some of the kids at church.”
I couldn’t see his face—he was bent over, pulling on clothes by the light from the hall—but I could hear the vibrating excitement in his voice. When he left, he told
me he wasn’t sure when he’d be back, but that there was nothing to worry about.
He forgot to turn the hall light off, I remember, and I lay for a long time in that half-light, thinking over the course of events that had brought us here, to a point where Paul felt
more alive than he ever had, and I felt old and abandoned; and each of us was utterly certain he was in the right.
He didn’t return home until almost noon. By then I had regained my equanimity. I made him scrambled eggs and opened some soup. We ate together in the polite silence that marks an
experiential gap between people. He was happy, I could tell, and stirred up by whatever the illicit events of the night were—sometimes it was bailing someone out of jail, sometimes
it was paying people off so someone wouldn’t be thrown in. I was very angry at what I saw as his destructive, cheap pleasure in this new and tawdry world, and then angry at myself
too for being so full of judgment, so righteous. When I slid the dishes into the sink to wash them after he’d gone upstairs to take a nap, I did it so fiercely that I broke two of
them. It was all I could do not to hurl the shards to the floor. But I didn’t. I stepped on the pedal to the trash can and carefully laid the broken pieces in on top of the
morning’s garbage. Then I put a paper napkin over them so Paul wouldn’t see what I’d done. I was afraid he’d think I’d broken them on purpose. And perhaps,
in some unconscious way, I had.