The Keepers of the House (37 page)

Mrs. Locke, whose husband was a partner in the drugstore, clucked nervously. “White trash will be the death of the South. Dear, dear!”

“It wasn’t all trash,” I said. “Which of you had husbands home that night?”

A quick breathing silence, and Mrs. Holloway said: “Well, it was dreadful, but it’s over.”

As she turned back to her silver coffeepot, I interrupted. “It’s not over. It’s my turn.”

For a moment I caught sight of the granddaughter’s face. “I’m sorry, honey,” I said to her, “I’m ruining your party, but it really wasn’t given for you anyway.” Her mouth popped open, but nothing came out, no sound at all. I gave her a quick smile. “Your grandmother really should have explained to you. …” I took a deep breath. “You listen now, and you tell your husbands. You bring them a message from me. The Howlands were the first ones here, back when it was Indian country, and you set out your dogs at night, and you barred your doors against them, and went about daytimes with a rifle. It’s still Howland country. I’m taking it back.”

They clucked then, all of them, nervously, and the fruitcake smell of the house was overpowering.

“There’s precious little around here that didn’t belong to Will Howland, one way or the other. Only you forgot. But watch now, and you’ll be seeing it shrink together, you’ll be seeing Madison City go back to what it was thirty years ago. Maybe my son will build it back, I won’t.”

A nervous titter again. Did they understand what I was saying? Had it gotten through the warmth of sherry? Or would it take a while? Would they understand only after I was gone? I would make them. And now.

“I just closed the hotel,” I said. “That’s a start. Didn’t you hear the hammer sealing it up? Did you drive right by without noticing?

I caught sight of Jean Bannister’s face. It looked frozen and stiff. She understands, I thought; she is the brightest and so she understands and she is trying not to let herself believe. Because she has a new expensive coat and her husband’s trucking business has just begun to make money.

I watched her face, fascinated. The large wide-set grey eyes. The straight blond hair. She’s feeling her insides go cold, I thought, and she’s feeling the tips of her fingers start to shiver. She’s feeling just the way I did. …

“Barn’s gone, and the equipment. I won’t rebuild. I won’t even pay you to haul the ashes away. I’ve already sold all my stock, excepting the children’s ponies, but I expect you know that. Without them what’s going to happen to the slaughter yards and the packing plant? Nobody else around here can fill them. And there’s the ice-cream plant. … Whose milk was that?”

I went to a window and opened it, the room was stifling. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Louise Allen begin to chew her finger nervously. Her husband and his brother owned the slaughter yards.

And your quavering stomach, I thought, that will change to a permanent lump, a millstone to carry. …

There was a shuffle and a rustle behind me as Mrs. Holloway pushed her way through the crowd to stand next to me. She seemed to start to say something, but she didn’t and all I heard was the creak and stretch of the old-fashioned stays of her corset. I didn’t even look at her.

“The lumber business now, that’s the big one around here, and half of it is my land.” In the street outside a procession of three dogs went by, solemnly. I watched them out of sight. “That’s on contract, so I can’t do anything about it right now, but contracts run out. … Howlands have crazy blood, I used to hear. … It’ll cost me to do this, but I will. I figure to have enough money to live.” I was still holding the glass of sweet sherry that I had been drinking. I put it down carefully on the window sill. “You watch. This town’s going to shrivel and shrink back to its real size. … It wasn’t Will Howland you burned down, it was your own house.”

There wasn’t a sound as I walked out, not even the rustle of breathing, just my heels tapping across the floor boards. I found my coat among the ones piled on the hall chairs. The maid, a thin mosquito in black dress and frilly white apron, peeped at me through a crack in the kitchen door. I nodded to her and she jerked back out of sight. I could almost hear her buzzing. I left, slowly, majestically. I didn’t feel the concrete street under my steps. My feet touched air, I was floating. You bastards, I told them all, you bastards. …

And I said to my grandfather, who seemed to be walking right next to me, just a little behind where I couldn’t see: “I should think you’d be laughing.”

I’m not, he said.

“I can do it.”

I reckon I know that.

“I had to do something.”

I heard him sigh, just as plain as the little wind that rippled the dry leaves. It had to be done, he said.

“That was for you,” I said. “You won’t like what I’m going to do now, but this is for me.”

I know, he said, and the light winter breeze sighed for him again.

I went into the office that had been John’s. Two of the three secretaries’ desks were empty. Miss Lucy and Mrs. Carson were gone with John. There was only one typist now, a new one I’d hired—a slight mousy-colored girl with bad skin. Her mother was the town’s prostitute, she didn’t know her father. She was bitter and ugly and efficient. I trusted her because she had no one else to be loyal to. She did not like me, but since I was paying her, she disliked the others more.

I nodded to her. She bobbed her head slightly, not missing the rhythm of her furious typing. I went on into the inner office. Mr. Delatte was finishing his work; he smiled his neutral colorless smile.

“Will you do me a favor, please?” I asked him. “Will you call a Dr. Mallory in Oakland, California? I don’t know his first name, but he’s a radiologist, so you can find him without any trouble. And would you ask him for the address and phone number of his son-in-law?”

With a sudden sharp look in his mild rabbity eyes Mr. Delatte asked: “Who is his son-in-law?”

“Robert Howland.”

He hesitated, then picked up the phone. While he did that, I opened the back door, and I propped it wide. I turned back to the huge yellow oak desk; I emptied the drawers, all of them, carefully, tossing the papers and the rubber bands, and the clips and the envelopes, into empty chairs. Then I put my shoulder to the desk and began shoving it toward the door. Mr. Delatte looked up from the phone—he had at first tried to pretend not to notice what I was doing. “If you wait a minute, I’ll give you a hand.”

The desk was not on rollers but it moved easily enough because the polished rugless floor was quite slippery. “No, thank you,” I said. “I can manage.”

I pushed the desk toward the open door—its passage left long white scratches on the floor boards—until the slight rise of the sill blocked my progress. I checked quickly to be sure that the door was wide enough—it was. I reached as far under one end as I could, and lifted. It was very solid, my back began to ache—but the desk itself was top-heavy, and I managed to heave it high enough to have it topple of its own weight. Out the door, down the two steps, into the concrete yard. I left it there. It would block this door, but we could use the front. And anyway, I couldn’t move it again. I seemed to have strained my back. I put both hands to it and rocked gently while I looked at the gouges on each side of the painted door frame. “I seem to have done a bit of damage,” I said to Mr. Delatte. “But I’ve been meaning to do that for such a long time.”

The rubbing and the stretching seemed to do my back no good at all—I would just have to get used to the pain. I stopped and closed the door. Mr. Delatte was sitting by the telephone. He did not seem to notice anything strange. “I’ve got the number,” he said. “Would you like to make a private call?”

“No,” I told him, “don’t bother to leave.”

His face had the empty look of people in church as he handed me the slip of paper. There were two Seattle numbers.

Mr. Delatte said: “One is his office, the other’s his home.”

Saturday—he would be home. It was so simple. So very, very simple. He himself answered the phone, I recognized his voice. “I said I would find you, Robert,” I told him. “Do you remember me? Are you waiting for me?”

He didn’t say a single word. Just a quick rasp of breath as he hung up. “Oh, Robert,” I said to the empty line, “that won’t do any good. I’ll be calling again. Over and over and over again.” I sat back and laughed. Laughed until my insides hurt. Laughed until I put my head down on the smooth top of the telephone and cried. I was conscious that people came and bent over and looked at me, shook their heads and went away again. On tiptoe as a funeral. I no longer cared. I had my own sob-wracked echoing world, and I was locked into it.

Look at the colors, I thought, why are there so many colors? There never were before. Tears make prisms in the light.

I went on crying until I slipped off the chair. And cried on the floor, huddled fetus-like against the cold unyielding boards.

Shirley Ann Grau is a Pulitzer Prize–winning author whose novels are celebrated for their beautifully drawn portraits of the American South and its turbulent recent past.

Grau was born on July 8, 1929, in New Orleans. A few years later, her family moved to Montgomery, Alabama, where her father was stationed with the army. Grau returned to New Orleans for her senior year of high school, then attended nearby Tulane University, earning a BA in English in 1950. She initially planned to continue into graduate school, but soon found she was far more interested in writing than in scholarship.

Her first published story appeared in 1953, in the university quarterly
The New Mexico Review
. Soon another was printed in
The New Yorker
. Encouraged by these acceptances, Grau began a series of short stories set in her familiar world of the Deep South. That collection,
The Black Prince
, was published in 1955 and earned great critical attention.

That same year, Grau married James Fiebleman, a philosophy professor at Tulane. For many years, they split time between New Orleans in winter and Martha’s Vineyard in summer. While starting a family (Grau and Fiebleman had four children), the author completed her first novel,
The Hard Blue Sky
(1958), a story of feuding families on an island in the Gulf of Mexico.
The House on
Coliseum Street
(1961) followed, with an unflinching depiction of a young woman’s life in New Orleans. Her next novel,
Keepers of the House
(1964), directly confronted one of the most urgent social issues of the time. Considered Grau’s masterpiece, it chronicles a family of Alabama landowners over the course of more than a century. Its sophisticated, unsparing look at race relations in the Deep South garnered Grau a Pulitzer Prize.

Though she taught occasionally—including creative writing courses at the University of New Orleans—Grau focused on her writing career. Her novels and stories often track a rapidly changing South against the complex backdrop of regional history.
The Condor Passes
(1971) celebrates New Orleans even as it reveals some of the city’s worst sides, as experienced by one of its wealthiest families.
Roadwalkers
(1994), Grau’s last published novel, follows a group of orphaned African-American children as they scrape by during the Great Depression.

In addition to writing, Grau enthusiastically pursues her loves of travel, sailing, dogs, books, and music. She continues to split her time between New Orleans and Massachusetts, and maintains an active presence in the New Orleans literary community.