The Keepers of the House (31 page)

That one night and one day he was home, I brought him cups of hot broth and dishes of ice cream, and when we were alone, I asked him: “John, you don’t think that about Negroes, do you?”

His bright blue eyes were sharp. “So your cousins have put the snake into Eden?”

“ I want to know.”

“That smaller heads and pea brain stuff. … I was quoting what’s his name at the university. That lunatic biologist they bought themselves.”

“But what do you think?”

He was serious now, very serious. “I’m a practical man,” he said. “I’ve got to deal with things as they are. It’s hell for them, but my saying so won’t help them or me.” He took the cup of steaming broth out of my hand and put it down on the bedside table. It left a celery-flavored trail in the air. “You want me to be a knight on a white horse fighting injustice. … But if I did, I’d be nothing but a politician without a job and a lawyer without a practice.”

“But you don’t have to stay here.”

“I don’t have a chance anywhere else, honey, and you know that. The connections are here, the help is here, your family and mine.”

He was right. Of course he was right. Usually he teased me, but he was not teasing now. He had not shaved and his shadowed face looked gaunt and hollow.

“Why do you say things like that?”

“I say it because it’s part of the game.” He had rarely been this serious with me before. For a minute or two I saw the quiet rational calm man he was. “It’s the credo, and though I don’t like it, I don’t mind it. I’m no worse than anybody else, and I’m maybe even a bit better.”

He picked up the cup of broth and sipped at the scalding liquid. “That isn’t enough for you, is it? But, honey, you can only work with things you’re given.” The doctor bounded in then, bringing swirls of fresh air. He’d been amusing himself playing shuffleboard outside with the children. He checked John’s chest for the rattle of congestion, and gave him another capsule.

John said to me, over his shoulder: “That speech will win, honey. I said so little before—and not even recently—that they wanted to know where I stood. That one speech is going to get the primary for me.”

It did. He won by a very large margin. We forgot about the report the Atlanta paper had carried. We thought it had gone into the trash with the paper itself. There may have been just one clipping saved, but it was enough.

In our state the primary is the only real election. The one that is held in November against the Republican candidate is a gesture, and an empty one, toward the two-party system. The margin is usually something like thirty to one. John no longer worked so hard, nor traveled so much. It would be a matter of routine from here in.

I sat in the quiet familiarity of my house, the house where I had lived as a child, in a country I had known as a child, and I was happy and content. My children were healthy and my husband successful.

We didn’t know. We didn’t know.

That fall our daughters went back to school—Abigail to the seventh grade, Mary Lee to the sixth. Johnny began nursery school. Only the baby Marge and I were left. One day, abruptly, John phoned.

“Have you noticed anything amiss?”

“No. I don’t think so.”

“Any calls?”

“There are always lots of calls, John.”

“Anything you’d notice?”

“You mean crank calls, or threats?”

“No. Not like that. Not necessarily.”

“But what?”

“The line is tapped,” he said shortly.

“But they’d know anyway, wouldn’t they?” We always said they, and I was never sure who really listened to the taped transcriptions of our conversations.

“Well,” I said, “if you want to make sense to me, I guess I’ll have to come down to your office.”

“Come on,” he said.

He was standing impatiently waiting in the patch of sun on his front doorstep. “Why did you have to bring her?” He meant the baby.

“John, she likes to ride.”

“Leave her with Miss Lucy, then, and come inside.”

So Marge was left on Miss Lucy’s desk, shaking a box of paper clips. We went into John’s office, where that hideous roll-top oak desk stood. I sat in the big cool leather chair while John paced up and down.

“There’s something wrong,” he said. “You can feel it all around.”

“I don’t know.”

“My father called this morning.” He let the sentence hang unfinished.

“Did he know anything?”

“He’ll find out,” John said, “he’s always been able to do that.”

“Look,” I said, “be practical. What could it be?”

“Damned if I know.”

“Tax trouble?”

He looked at me scornfully and snorted, not even bothering to answer.

“A mistress?”

“Don’t be a silly jackass.”

“You haven’t killed anybody?”

“As a matter of fact,” he said levelly, “it’s got something to do with you.”

“Did Papa John tell you that?”

“He’s not the only one hearing,” John said, “that there’s something funny about Mrs. Tolliver.”

“Well,” I said, remembering Papa John and his close-set blue eyes and his leathery wrinkled face, “I don’t have a lover and the children have all been normal, and I don’t have any close family still alive.”

“I’ve been asked about it four or five times in the last few days. Nobody knows what, but they all know it’s something.”

“We’ll just have to wait and see what it is, if it’s anything,” I said. “Maybe you’ve got a bad case of nerves.”

John whistled quietly in and out of his front teeth. “It’s something,” he said, “and they’re leaking it out, while they check back to be sure they’ve got it right.”

“If they’re going to lie about you, why would they check?”

“It’s not going to be a lie this time,” John said grimly. “And I wish to God I knew what it was.”

The cigarette he had just tossed into the ash tray fell to the rug. I picked it up, ground it out. “It would have to be a lie.”

He stopped dead in his tracks, stopped stock still in his pacing. He looked at me as if he had never seen me before, as if I were something under a microscope. We had been married fifteen years and he simply stood there and stared at me, cold blue eyes and strain lines pulling around his mouth. “Are you so sure?” he said.

I didn’t believe it. I just sat staring at him, in a bit I opened my mouth and then closed it again. I couldn’t think of anything to say.

After a minute, he said: “Go on home, I’ve got work to do.”

Mechanically I got up. As I left, he asked quietly: “What have you done?”

The door was open, Miss Lucy heard. Behind their heavy glasses her eyes jumped toward me.

Why did he do that, I thought, why did he do that?

I only said: “Thank you for keeping the baby. I hope she didn’t interrupt your work too seriously.”

Her lips smiled and her eyes didn’t. She’s in love with John, I thought, but there must be a lot of women around the state who are.

“Will you be home for dinner?” I asked him.

“I told you,” he said, “I’m speaking in Longview.”

“So you did. … Wave bye to Daddy.” I pumped the fat arm up and down. At our car I looked back. John was standing in the open door watching us leave just as he had watched us come. And he wasn’t seeing his wife and his youngest child, he was seeing some dark nameless horror.

Marge settled in her seat beside me. I studied myself in the car mirror. I didn’t look different. I always looked this way. I had the sort of face nobody remembered an hour after seeing it. (They remembered John, of course: he was dark and thin and striking. He looks a good bit like a monk, one flower-hatted lady had told me not too long ago.) Though no one had ever bothered telling me, or probably even thought of it, I knew from my pictures that I had been a plain child. And I was still plain. No, I was pleasant-looking. Brown hair, neither light nor dark, just the color of a mouse’s coat. Blue eyes, no black-streaked depths (like John’s), no brilliant china flash (like my grandfather’s), just ordinary eyes, under straight brows. Nice teeth, fine skin tanned lightly by the sun. And my figure, well, breasts that were too small and hips that were too large—a matronly figure: I carried myself that way, and I knew it. And this was why I had got on so well with the women. I was motherly. … I knew what John meant: I was the perfect wife for a candidate. He had chosen and trained me well.

I wondered what the rumors were about. Nothing, I told myself furiously. I had done nothing. Nothing anyone could object to. I had chosen the wrong man, but nobody would know that but me. And I had just found out. …

I drove home, wondering how many hundreds of times I had gone that same highway. I hardly heard the baby drooling and jabbering beside me, I was busy with my own bitter thoughts.

They all ran more or less in this path. John had married a wife for his career. Had there been anybody else? Was it the girl he’d been dating when he first met me? The date he had broken to take me to dinner that first time. And did he remember her, the girl he had given up because I had been able to offer him more? … I had bid for him, all that openly. Those long spring evenings when we sat in my car. Never putting in words, but fighting my unknown competition silently, listing wordlessly the things I would give to him. …

I knew it then, of course I did. But I hadn’t minded. I really hadn’t. It just seemed the way of things. And now I wasn’t so sure. Thoughts will do that sometimes. Once they have gotten close to you, you can never push them off to the old comfortable distances again. It wasn’t new, but it hurt now. It hadn’t ever before.

Are you so sure? What did you do? … John would never have said that, had he not been upset and afraid. But they were said, and that was that. The old structure of innocence—childish, it was—disappeared. He was no longer the husband I loved, he was simply the man I had married. I think now that it was amazing that it had lasted those fifteen long years.

Like my mother, I thought, only hers didn’t last this long. Everything ends sometime, I told myself as I drove up to the house, and the hounds came running over to plant their muddy feet on the fenders.

There were two more days of waiting. The first day John called, as he always did. “Tell him I’m in the shower,” I said. He said he would call back later if he could. He didn’t.

On the morning of the second day, quite early, before the children had gone to school, I noticed a car come up the front drive and stop. The butler had not yet got to work, so I answered the door myself. It was a young man, and I had never seen him before. I didn’t even recognize the different family strains in his face as I can so often do. He was just a neat young man in a grey suit. The black Chevrolet behind him wasn’t familiar either.

“I was to deliver this,” he said, and handed me a plain brown envelope, unmarked and very clean.

The children were laughing over breakfast in the dining room. I closed the door on their voices, and stood and watched the black Chevrolet drive down the bill. I sat down in one of the rockers and studied the slopes tending off toward the river, the river the first William Howland had named for his mother. And finally, I looked in the envelope: two pieces of paper, clipped together. One was newsprint. I looked at it first. It was the front page of the capital’s evening paper, dated for the coming afternoon. There was a picture of a man getting off a plane, blurred as newspaper pictures always are. The headline was larger than usual:
Negro returns to visit his legal white family.
And then a subhead:
Past of prominent citizen comes to light. Gubernatorial candidate involved.

I didn’t read the fine print. Instead I looked at the second piece of paper. It was a photostat of a certificate of marriage. Between William Howland and Margaret Carmichael. The place was Cleveland. The date was April 1928, two months before Robert’s birth.

I sat on the bright sunny porch and heard John’s words over and over again: “Are you sure? What have you done?”

I phoned John’s office. Miss Lucy sounded like she had been crying. “Will you tell my husband that I have seen the papers.” Luckily I had no more to say, because she hung up on me.

I put the clipping and the photostat back in their crisp clean brown envelope and slipped them under the phone, thinking what I had always known: that my grandfather had been a good man. That he had found a woman to fill the last decades of his life and that he had married her. A good man. And when I thought of what would happen now, I felt sick.

I kept the children from school. I sent them down to the barns to amuse themselves with Oliver. I could see them riding their ponies in the near pasture lots, clumsy figures on fat clumsy ponies. The phone rang. “I’m not home,” I told the butler. “Unless it’s Mr. Tolliver.”

Not that I expected him to call. I wasn’t even sure that he’d come back. He might, when the hurt and shock had lessened. But not soon.

All around the house things went on as if it were just another day. The gardeners came and mowed the lawn and set out new daffodil bulbs in the azalea beds. They brought up two large drums of gasoline from the pump by the barns—they parked tractor and flat-bed trailer out of sight behind the bathhouse. Tomorrow they would use that gas for their equipment. They would mow the large front field, they would grade the road too. Bringing the gas drums to the work area had been John’s idea—save time and trouble, he said. He’d had a lot of good ideas. The greenhouse, for one, that he had built outside the library door. He grew lovely exotic plants, tending and propagating them himself whenever he was home. The glaziers were repairing some cracked panes there now—any cold leak would ruin the plants—their hammers were tapping gently. In the house itself there were the comfortable familiar sounds of vacuum cleaner and floor polisher, the smell of furniture polish and floor wax. I sat in a chair in the living room, the big one by the fireplace, not doing anything, not even thinking. Just waiting. I was cold. I went to the hall closet and took the first coat I saw. It was my fur, and I huddled inside it, one hand holding the mink tight at my throat. I sat quite alone in an empty room, wrapped in the skins of dead animals.

Oliver came up from the barns and peered in the living-room window, tapping the sill. “I reckon I would close the gate.”