The Undertaker's Daughter (24 page)

For whatever reason, perhaps after endless private attempts to address them, Evelyn was allowed her mood swings. They were like the wakes behind the speedboats on the lake; it was necessary to cross carefully to get to the other side.

Floating in the water, I gathered my strength for one more ride. I flew across the lake until my stamina was zapped and an unbelievable tiredness set in. My arms and legs ached until they trembled and it was time to stop. I gave my father the thumbs-down and he pulled back on the speed. When the rope could no longer hold me up, I let go and slowly sank into the water. In those
few minutes that I waited for the boat, I remembered the snakes. Lake Herndon was home to water moccasins; we often saw them slithering, their heads stretching up from their underwater home. My eyes followed the boat while I waited for safety and tried not to think about the snakes, or the emptiness in the pit of my stomach that came from being alone in what could easily become unfriendly territory. That’s what it was like to live with Evelyn.

I didn’t know what, if anything, was wrong with her. Though my parents may have thought nothing in Evelyn’s behavior was pernicious, that it was just a case of kids will be kids, it was bewitching to think that deep down they knew that, of course, something was wrong, something that would not be discovered for decades.

No one in Jubilee was mentally ill. The words were foreign to us. There were
retarded people
, the unfortunate label used at the time, and people who weren’t
right in the head
, who were ostracized and suffered ridicule. A psychiatrist was defined as a quack who experimented on the insane who roamed the halls of Gothic mental hospitals. We knew the term
manic depression
only vaguely in the form of domestic-suspense novels, soap operas, and B movies. But those had nothing to do with
our
lives. Certainly this condition called depression did not include children, and even if it did, no one would ever admit it. If Evelyn’s behavior had an underlying diagnosis, it remained buried in an area as dark and murky as the waters of Lake Herndon.

J
emma and I never realized what a buffer Thomas’s presence had served us against Evelyn’s wild world and we missed him terribly. She chose her battles more carefully when he was around, except
on the occasions when one of her stormy moods came upon her. One weekend when Thomas came home from college, he and a friend sat around the kitchen table talking, a rare sort of thing. It dawned on me that Thomas hardly ever had friends over. Now I knew why. Evelyn walked in and, as if possessed, began babbling on and on, interrupting them and laughing at them. It began as annoying banter, then escalated. When Thomas asked her to leave, she became more hateful and vulgar. Embarrassed and too polite to wring her neck, he waited until his friend left and then scolded her with the sharpest tongue anyone had ever dared. Evelyn ran to our mother and made up some blatant lie about how Thomas had attacked her. This, I was to learn, would be her lifelong tactic to preempt anyone’s effort to bring her to task. When my mother defended Evelyn and grew red-faced and angry at Thomas, he had clearly had enough. He set the record straight. My mother backed down, but it did nothing to change the pattern that had been set for years.

On the few occasions when it seemed that Evelyn had turned a new leaf and decided to be nicer to me, it always turned out badly. I didn’t realize that I was being used as a ploy to hurt Jemma’s feelings. One day Evelyn allowed one of her friends to show me a few cheerleading moves, but when Jemma came to the door to watch, Evelyn shut her out. I didn’t come to Jemma’s rescue and it left me feeling wretched.

When she wasn’t taunting Jemma, Evelyn ignored her entirely. The ten years between them left a gap with no common ground. In one blindingly clear moment, my mother once said, “For the longest time Evelyn was the only girl in our family, including our extended family. When you and Jemma came along, it was hard on her.”

Hard on
her
? Not half as hard as it would prove to be on Jemma and me.

My younger sister and I were thrown together in our family’s hierarchy and it was a good fit. We shared a kindred fascination for Jubilee in mourning. Risking a smack from our mother, she often joined me on the steps to spy on the people in the funeral home. From our elevated position, time was lost to the soft chatter of the visitors. We poked each other and pointed when a person attracted our interest. Our curious streaks mingled as we scooted our nightgown-clad bottoms to a better view. When something odd happened, such as the time a whole row of men fell asleep at the same time, we clasped our hands over our mouths to keep from laughing out loud. Tears in our eyes and bent over one another trembling with silent laughter, we bonded over Jubilee’s dead.

I figured it took an independent spirit and taste for oddities to come up with some of the things that pleased Jemma and amused me. At the tender age of nine, she decided she absolutely must have a wig. Our mother preferred our hair short, but Jemma despised wearing hers that way. She roved the floors of department stores in other towns on the hunt for her dream wig. She tried on a thick, black headband to which a long wad of dark hair was attached. The hair curled into a flip at the end. The ladies in the wig department called it a fall, not quite a full wig, and Jemma talked my mother into buying it for her. It was supposed to be a dressing-up toy, but once she owned it, she wore it everywhere. It was a lot of hair for a short, skinny little girl to pull off, but she wore it with audacious confidence.

After school, I usually found her sitting on the floor in front of the TV if we didn’t have a funeral going. She looked like a dark-haired Barbie doll that had rumbled with the Salvation Army’s shoe department. Her favorite pair of Buster Browns looked like bricks at the end of her thin, bare legs.

She camped out on the floor in her wig and Buster Browns with a plate of her favorite foods in front of her. She adored peanut butter on soda crackers and was addicted to bean-with-bacon soup. The soup needed diluting and a minute or two on the stove, but if Belle was busy, Jemma ate it straight from the can with a huge spoon. I liked variety and thought it astonishing that the mainstay of her diet consisted of three foods.

A small, white plastic bottle sat next to her on the floor. She carried it around with her like a talisman, the contents of which relieved her itching skin. Wool carpets, grass, just about anything, gave Jemma a nasty red skin rash. She won an unlimited prescription from the doctor.

At times I made an effort to protect Jemma when Evelyn emerged, determined to ruin a perfectly pleasant day. Not until we were adults did I tell Jemma about the bitter day Evelyn chose to blurt out the story that laid waste to my perception of my father.

On an ungodly hot day I sat atop my bed with the air conditioner cranked up as high as it could go, wrapped up in my favorite blue-and-white quilt that Belle had washed so many times it was as soft as a baby blanket. Though I was deep into a Nancy Drew detective story, I sensed Evelyn standing in the doorway.

“Do you want a Popsicle?”

Something was up—Evelyn never asked if I wanted anything. “No.” I turned back to my book.

“You wanted one last night.”

“No, I didn’t.”

“You don’t remember because you were sleepwalking.”

“What? No, I wasn’t.”

“Yes, you were. You came into the kitchen last night after you’d been asleep and I asked you what you wanted, and you said
you wanted a Popsicle for breakfast. Then you turned around and went back to bed.”

I was alarmed. I’d heard about a woman who was often seen sleepwalking in her nightgown. One night she walked right out in front of a car and was killed. Was I a crazy sleepwalker? I couldn’t tell if Evelyn was lying or not.

“I’ll ask Daddy about it. He’ll know if I’m a sleepwalker.”

“Daddy doesn’t know everything.”

I’d learned to ignore Evelyn by burying my head in a book, but sometimes she just wouldn’t be ignored.

“Yeah, Daddy isn’t perfect, you know.” She waited for a response, and when there was none, her tone grew conspiring. “Do you know Viv Salloway?”

“No.”

“Sure you do. She used to work at the church. That skinny little thing.”

Evelyn described people in the way of a caricaturist. Now I would be subjected to an exaggeration of all of Viv’s shortcomings.

“She wore those ugly glasses and had that funny mouth. You know, her teeth stuck out.”

“I kind of remember her. What about her?”

“Don’t you know? There was a huge scandal. Daddy got caught with her.”

“What do you mean ‘got caught’?”

“He had an affair with her.” Her eyes, shiny with delight, grew in size. There! She had plopped it in my lap and shocked me just as she’d wanted.

“How do you know?” I managed.

“Everybody in Jubilee knew all about it. It happened years ago. You were real young. She must have been in her twenties. Daddy
was in his thirties, maybe even his forties. I don’t know. Oh, yeah, it was a big thing. He used to be a deacon at the church, but they kicked him out of the deacons after that. So, you see, he’s not perfect.” Evelyn turned around and left with a little laugh that unsettled me.

I didn’t know whether to believe Evelyn and there was not a soul I could ask. I pulled the quilt over my head and waited for the anger that I thought should be aimed at my father, but it wasn’t there. I was intrigued. Where did he find the time? I pictured him standing at the door to the funeral home shaking hands, offering an elderly lady his arm, leading family members to their last moments with their loved one. I had trouble reconciling the other image, the one in which I imagined him sneaking into a motel room and into the arms of any woman other than my mother.

Yet, I did not think of my mother. Evelyn had forced me to imagine my father as a sexual being, a point I had not yet reached when I thought of my parents; their intimacy was quiet and private. This was something entirely different. Something wild and clandestine had been painting the landscape of my father’s life. Something passionate, with which, in a strange way, I identified.

But why did he choose Viv? Evelyn was right about one thing: Viv wasn’t half as pretty as our mother. Nor, as my mother would one day tell me, was Viv half the fighter my mother was.

I later learned that it wasn’t the first time; my mother had fought for him before, in Lanesboro. She changed Evelyn’s diapers, saw young Thomas off to school, and courageously battled it out with Patsy, a preacher’s wife with whom Frank was having a passionate affair. Lily Tate went to great lengths to break it up by following him from rendezvous to rendezvous, even reaching out to Patsy’s husband for help, to no avail. It was, strictly speaking, a mess. When Frank and Patsy ran away together, Lily Tate finally
admitted defeat and hired a lawyer, who drew up a separation agreement. At the dawn of the 1950s she felt she was entering a strange and frightening world. They were swiftly on their way to a divorce when Frank grew tired of Patsy. He missed his two young children and his job in the Lanesboro funeral home, all of which he had abandoned. When she agreed to take him back, Lily Tate decided that never again would she let him go. “There will never be another Mrs. Frank Mayfield while I’m alive,” she told herself.

My mother couldn’t have guessed where that statement would lead or how solidly she would have to stand behind it. Relocated to Jubilee with her children, my mother didn’t have time to pick up the faint clues to her husband’s whereabouts. When she learned that he often wasn’t where he said he would be, her heart sank. For a while she sought rational explanations, to no avail, for he soon burst on the bad-boy scene with an unprecedented flourish. Nor could she guess that the seed of this fracas had been sown in, of all places, our church.

The First Baptist Church in Jubilee meant many things to many people. For some, it served as a place to realign their moral compass. For my father, the church offered an opportunity to return to his passion for adulterous romance.

The new magnet to his groin worked in one of the church’s offices. They became careless in their passion, and in the heat of a less than sacred moment, he was caught, some say literally, with his pants down, in the choir loft of the First Baptist Church. Viv was a slip of a woman, angular and sharp-featured, unlike my mother, who was soft and curved. Viv, birdlike in her movements, lacked the good looks most often associated with mistress material. But one never knows what kind of transformation occurs under the sheets, or indeed in the alcoves of a church.