The Last Girls (6 page)

“Mama, I . . .” Harriet said. She was twelve years old and very, very shy. She had just gotten so that she could shake hands with Mr. Carr without blushing.

Mama touched Harriet's lips lightly with one finger. “Thanks,” she said.

It was even harder than Harriet thought it would be. Jeff Carr looked like Rock Hudson. And he was furious at his father for having a girlfriend, furious at being left with them for the afternoon, furious at his mother for being sick. He kicked rocks all the way to the park and didn't look at her. He wore a navy blue windbreaker with the collar turned up.

“Wanna smoke?” he asked when they got there. It was a cloudy, blowing spring day. He still didn't look at her.

“Sure,” Harriet heard herself say.

Jeff Carr produced two cigarettes from someplace inside the wind-breaker, put them both in his mouth at the same time to light them, then took a deep drag and handed one to Harriet. When she put the cigarette in her own mouth, the end of it was wet with Jeff Carr's spit. Suddenly he was grinning at her. “Take a drag,” he said. “Quick. Or it'll go out.”

“What?” Harriet felt like an ignoramus, one of Mama's favorite words.

“Like this.” Jeff demonstrated for her. He sucked the smoke deep into his lungs and blew it out in a cloud where the March wind blew it away.

“Oh, sure.” Harriet tried to sound blasé. She did it, then burst out coughing.

Jeff doubled over in laughter. “Oh, man,” he said. “Oh, wow. Far out. You're really a big smoker, huh?”

“Well,” Harriet said when she could speak. “Actually I've never smoked before.”

“No shit,” Jeff said.

“But I just
love
it!” Harriet added.

“
Sure.
” Like every boy his age, Jeff was a master of sarcasm.

“Can I have another one?” Harriet dropped her cigarette butt on the gravel walk and ground it out.

“Okay,” Jeff said. This time, she put it between her own lips and he lit it for her, which went surprisingly well. “Where do you go to school?” he asked.

“Why,
here,
” Harriet said. She didn't know there was any other choice, but Jeff said he was going to a boarding school in Massachusetts next year, that he was looking forward to it.

“You are?” Harriet could not imagine this. “Why?”

“Man, it's so depressing at home, you can't even imagine.” He described their big old historic house full of antiques, with a pool in back. He said it felt even bigger these days with his two older sisters grown and gone and his mother in the loony bin. Once she'd tried to drown herself in the pool, he said, but had been rescued by the gardener. He wasn't even sure she really meant to do it, since she was in the shallow end. Hard to tell. Anyway, she was drunk and she'd swallowed a lot of water and the rescue guys came.

“That's
awful,
” Harriet said sincerely. She was starting to feel lightheaded from so much smoke. Jeff shrugged. The wind came up and they stood shivering in the bowl of Gypsy Park, surrounded by the wooded hill on one side and the highway fence on the other. Nobody else was there. Suddenly Jeff leaned forward and slapped her hard on the shoulder, then hopped backward. “Can't catch me!” he called and then he was zigzagging through the play equipment and Harriet was after him, right on his tail. Though she'd never tried out for any teams and was judged to be “not athletic,” she could run like the wind. “Gotcha!” she cried finally, slapping him across the butt, and
then she took off with him chasing her in and out of trees on the hill until he cornered her between a pine and the fence, and they dashed back and forth around the tree until she slipped in the pine needles and fell and then he threw himself down flat beside her. Harriet was laughing so hard she couldn't breathe, and so was Jeff. “Hey!” he said in a minute, sitting up. “Hey, guess what she said yesterday?”

“Who?” Harriet could not quit laughing.

“Mama,” Jeff said.

“What?”

“When I went into the dayroom, she came over and grabbed me and took me up to everybody she knew and said, ‘I don't think you've met my son, Dwight Eisenhower.'”

“No shit.” It was the first time Harriet ever said that word.

“Yep,” Jeff said. “I swear to God. She's in la-la land.”

They walked down the hill and got on the kiddie play equipment for some reason. Harriet held on for dear life while Jeff pushed the little merry-go-round faster and faster and faster. Then they got on the swings and swung so high they went up even with the bars every time, up into the gray cloudy sky which was beginning to darken now. Every time she pumped, every time the swing rose forward on its perilous arc, Harriet's heart leapt into her throat and she thought, Now. Yes. Now, closing her eyes and leaning back and feeling her hair stream out behind her. She thought, Yes. I will die now, in a kind of rapture at the very top of the arc, but then she didn't, and finally when Jeff yelled, “I guess we'd better go,” she stopped pumping and started dragging her feet every time she came down. It was a long dark walk home.

Just as they turned the doorknob, Mama threw open the door and cried, “Why, wherever have you been? I was so worried!”

“Just over at Gypsy Park, like you said.” Harriet was indignant.

Mama leaned forward, peering at her. “Well, it must have been good for you,” she said. “Look at those roses in your cheeks.”

Harriet pulled back embarrassed.

“Come on,” Mama said. “Aren't you cold? I've got some hot chocolate for you.”

“Where's Dad?” Jeff asked.

“He'll be back in a little while,” Mama said. “He just called. He's still at the hospital board meeting which has lasted longer than he thought.” She ladled out two cups of hot chocolate from the little burner hot pot where she kept her ladies' coffee going all day long. “Here, honey,” she said, handing one to Jeff. “I guess your daddy's pretty much of a bigwig, isn't he?”

“Bigwig,” Harriet said.

“Bigwig,” Jeff repeated. He started laughing.

“Bigwig!” Harriet was laughing so hard that she couldn't hold her cup. She had to put it down and collapse on the love seat.

“Bigwig, bigwig,”
they chanted, rolling around on the love seat. Jill started laughing, too, while Mama stood there in her silly frilly blouse and watched them with a puzzled hopeful look on her face that could break your heart if you thought about it. “Bigwig! Bigwig!” they screamed.

This is how Harriet met Jefferson Carr who would fall hopelessly in love with Baby Ballou when she introduced them all those years later on the campus of Mary Scott College, an event that seems to Harriet in retrospect as inevitable as the passing of time itself, preordained from the very moment when Mr. Carr opened the door and came out of the rain and into the sewing shop.

Mile 736
Memphis, Tennessee
Friday 5/7/99
2210 hours

C
OURTNEY HAS INVITED
Harriet up to her room after dinner to look at her scrapbooks, the pride of her life, a work of art if she does say so herself. She has brought six of them, an overnight bag full of albums to show her friends on the
Belle of Natchez
. But wouldn't they all be amazed if they knew about the decision she faces as they steam down the river? Wouldn't they all be amazed if they knew that the most important person in her life is not even pictured in these albums? Her husband, Henry (“Hawk”) Ralston, has often teased her by telling everybody that he hasn't even unpacked from a trip before she's already had the photos developed and put them into the current album, with appropriate captions. But Courtney doesn't care if he makes fun of her for being so organized. So what?
Somebody
has got to be organized. Courtney's not going to get down on herself about it.

As a matter of fact, the original raft trip—the only “wild” thing Courtney ever did in her life, until recently—never would have happened without her. She and Suzanne St. John organized it all—got the information, kept the books, got everything lined up. At Mary
Scott, Courtney was on the Honor Court and yearbook staff. Now she is on the vestry of Saint Matthews Church right next door to Magnolia Court, Hawk's family home, circa 1840. “This home has
not
been restored,” Hawk's mother told her severely when she turned the keys over to Courtney. “It has been
maintained
.” Courtney knew she could handle it. She is good at maintaining. She is president of the Dogwood Historic Preservation Society and Friends of the Library.

See, here she is standing in the historic cemetery at Saint Matthews, next to the Berry monument. Here she is convening the Friends of the Library, with her gavel. And here she is with Charles Frazier, the author of
Cold Mountain,
whose appearance constituted their most successful event yet, bringing in scads of money. Courtney still means to finish his book. It's just that it was taking
so long,
all that walking across the whole state of North Carolina, it was pretty slow. Also, recently and for very good reason, Courtney hasn't been able to concentrate. Whenever she tries to read, all she can think about is Gene Minor; all she can see is his silly face.

But here's the house, as photographed for
Southern Living,
1984:
exterior,
looking up the long hill from Four Corners. It's a large stone manor house of a type uncommon in Raleigh, a house that would suit a moor except for those columns and the deep veranda which stretches across the front. This house is a testament to Hawk's Scots heritage, as he likes to say, and to his grandfather's monumental vanity. Eight huge old magnolias, four on either side of the long central driveway, have determined its name. The driveway runs all the way down the hill to Four Corners; here, the estate is shielded from the busy street by a high stone wall topped by wrought iron spikes. That wall means business. So does Hawk. And if you look closely at this photograph, you can see Hawk himself, in fact, standing by the massive front door, wearing slacks and a tie and a cardigan sweater, studiedly casual, sort of a corporate Mister Rogers. A handsome man, with that sharp nose and silver hair. A powerful man. A man to reckon with.

Interior
. Hawk and Courtney stand in the library before the big stone hearth made by Moravian masons on their way west to build the Biltmore Mansion outside Asheville. You can tell that Hawk belongs in this house by the way he smiles so confidently into the camera, chin up, one arm outstretched on the mantel which holds an antique clock flanked by silver candlesticks and a militant army of family photographs going back a hundred years. This is Hawk's greatgrandfather, Henry Giles Ralston, C.S.A.: this is Hawk's father in his naval uniform, World War II. The old sleigh bed in the master bedroom suite right upstairs is the bed where Hawk was born but scarcely ever sleeps in now. Courtney is used to it. She has been used to it for years, though at first her heart was broken again and again—right after the honeymoon, for instance, when he went to Charlotte on business and a girl's voice answered when she called the number he had left. Courtney had hung up without speaking. She cried all night long. The next day she'd attended her first Junior League meeting, at Buffy Sandover's house. In the afternoon, she took a tennis lesson. Two nights later, when he walked in the kitchen door, she turned from the sink and threw one of the new wineglasses at him. The wineglass hit the doorjamb just beside Hawk's head and shattered. He didn't even flinch. Just stood there looking at her, one dark eyebrow raised in a question.

“Who is she?” Courtney's voice was shaking.

“Where's Mama?” Hawk asked. “Where's Walter?”

“Your mother is out in her apartment. Why? Because you think I'm making a scene? Well, I
am
making a scene, by God. I don't care who hears me either. We just get back from Jamaica, and you're gone for two days. I asked you who she is!” Courtney threw another wineglass, not exactly at Hawk. It hit the edge of the sink, raining crystal down on the floor. Hawk shook his head, as if Courtney were an obstinate child. But at least he didn't lie.

“It doesn't matter,” he said. “She doesn't matter. Let's get that
straight right now, Courtney. You are my wife. This doesn't concern you at all.”

“It
does
concern me!” Courtney was crying almost too hard to stop.

“No. You are mistaken,” Hawk had said gently. He moved toward her across the kitchen floor, crunching glass. He caught her by the shoulders and spun her around.

“No—” Courtney twisted her head to the side. He took her chin in his hand and turned her face toward him and kissed her, slowly and gravely, for a long time. He was good at this. Then he took her out to dinner at the country club. By Christmas, she was pregnant.

She'd left him only once, when Scott was eighteen months old and Jeremy was a colicky newborn.

One April night, she'd been up with Jeremy for hours, her nerves on edge, when she heard a car coming slowly up the gravel driveway and looked out the window to note that its lights were off. It pulled right in front of the steps and stopped under the coach light. It was a red Cherokee which Courtney didn't recognize. Hawk got out, carrying his jacket over one shoulder and his bag in his other hand. He took a few steps toward the house and then turned and walked around the front of the car and leaned his head into the window on the driver's side for a long time, five or ten minutes, then turned and walked back around the car and stood to watch it pull away. He stood there until the car passed all the magnolias and reached the end of the driveway, red taillights winking away in the night. At the dark upstairs window, Courtney watched all this as if it were a movie. It was just starting to get light, pink sky above the horizon. Hawk reached out and broke a dogwood blossom off the tree by the steps and stood looking at it for a minute, then let it drop onto the grass. He turned and disappeared from view below and soon Courtney heard his step on the stairs, and then he opened the door.