Too Jewish (27 page)

"Okay, listen," she said. "Do you love your grandparents?"

"No, I pretty much hate my grandparents."

She grinned, and her eyes got a little teary. "Okay," she said, "I think we're okay."

Catherine and I hadn't talked about the accident since it happened. She'd spent the night, and we'd gone straight to school the next morning, and we'd gone back to being thirteen, when old people's crimes weren't part of our day. But Catherine's parents were in town, and when they were in town, they were a serious real family. They ate around the dinner table, and they talked for as long as they felt like it. The housekeeper lived there, but she could go to her little apartment, and they could leave their dishes. What counted was that Catherine knew she was understood. She told her parents about what she called the murder. "My parents are East Coast liberals," Catherine had told me more than once. "I don't know why we live here. Something about oil, which they hate, but they can't help it."

Catherine's parents had called the Mississippi authorities. And the Mississippi authorities had no choice. They were looking into my grandfather's accident. I told Catherine I loved her parents.

* * *

I didn't tell my mother. Catherine told me her parents didn't believe in justice, and probably nothing was going to happen, so I saw no reason to start trouble. I could just imagine my mother holding Catherine up as some great example of how well I was doing in the world because Catherine's parents had such good values, knowing of course that it was a way of telling Grammy she had lousy values. My mother was on this very quiet campaign to prove herself right and my grandparents wrong. But Grammy always figured out a way to punish my mother. She'd probably threaten to take away something unless my mother sacrificed me and Catherine. "All right, I promise I won't let her see that child if it makes you feel better. I'm sure the accident was all her fault."

I didn't need to tell her: my mother stepped right into it. Her way of dealing with the accident was to ignore it and take the offensive, so she called and pretended like nothing had happened and said she'd like to drop by after school on Friday with me if that was all right. It would be lovely, Grammy said, or so my mother told me. No one asked me if I had any plans after school. I actually didn't, since Catherine was going up to Virginia with her mother for two days to see her grandmother.

No sooner had we all three walked into the solarium than Grammy said, "Darby, go into the kitchen and see Louise." She sounded dead serious, and I knew something bad was going to happen as soon as I was out of the room. But there was only a wood swinging door between the solarium and the hallway to the kitchen, so as soon as I got into the kitchen I said to Louise, "Something big is going to happen. Want to listen?" Louise nodded. She knew we weren't going to be making a sound for the next little while. We both slipped off our shoes and tiptoed down the hallway, and we could hear my mother and grandmother as well as if we'd been in the room with them.

"This is the final straw with your husband," Grammy said.

Louise looked at me with her eyes wide open and a big, closed-mouth grin on her face.

Grammy kept on talking. "The Mississippi authorities are investigating your father. Someone called them."

"What?" My mother was genuinely surprised, as well she should have been.

"Swear to me you know nothing of this," Grammy said.

Louise and I looked at each other. We were enjoying this like crazy.

"Of course not," my mother said.

"Well, in a funny way, that makes it all the worse," Grammy said. "The only person who could have made a stink is Bernie. I think that is just unconscionable."

I mouthed to Louise, "Catherine's parents did it. What should I do?"

Louise beckoned me back into the kitchen. She still whispered. "Baby, I don't know. Sometime you can't win for losing. You can tell your grandma, but that woman not gonna believe you for nothing."

* * *

I told my mother in the car going home, and she started to get mad about everything, that I'd eavesdropped, then that I hadn't burst in and told the truth, then that it was the Martins. But before she got home she was practically shaking all over like she was about to win something because Grammy was wrong about Daddy, and Mama couldn't wait to tell her. She ran into the house, and I followed her to the phone, but I really could only hear her side of the conversation.

"Bernie didn't do it. The Martins did. You do, too, know the Martins. Their child was with you. You thoroughly traumatized her."

I could hear Donald Ducky sounds coming from Grammy through the receiver. She was really angry. I was waving at my mother. Catherine wasn't "traumatized." That wasn't the point. This was about killing a man. Which upset Catherine all right, but that wasn't the point. I shook my head, no, really vigorously. My mother turned her back toward me, waved her hand at me to go away.

"You are not going to blame my husband for something he didn't do," Mama said. She thought for a second. "Though I wish he had."

Now Grammy was really rapid-firing at her.

"It doesn't matter," Mama said. "In Mississippi they're going to dismiss charges against even a Jewish person when the victim's a Negro. So don't speak to him anymore. It's probably better for both of you."

* * *

Catherine was my family hero, and then she practically broke my heart. At least it took two years before she did it. And she didn't want to. First I had six months to get used to the idea, then the whole summer, then a few weeks, then just days, and now she was coming over to say goodbye. Catherine was going to boarding school. It was outside Washington, and her grandmother could pick her up at the airport and take her there because she had a horse farm near the school. That was why her parents had chosen it. Her grandmother took the world as it came. The name of the school was Madeira. "
Muh
dare
uh
," Catherine said, trying to sound as snobbish as possible. If she thought about being there, she got teary-eyed. But if she thought about staying in Newman one more year, she begged me to go with her.

I'd been telling her forever that her mother had it all wrong. Her mother had been warning her since kindergarten that this thing was going to happen, that Catherine was going to be jerked out of Newman when she hit high school because all the Jewish girls were going to get into cliques, and Catherine wouldn't have any friends. "But that happened in about first grade," I always said.

We were having the conversation at my house that last day.

"Well, it matters in high school," Catherine was saying. "At least to my mother. Of course, in boarding school, it's not like anybody will be going out on dates. Or having parties. Except the day girls. And that's a clique right there. At least I'll be ready."

"I am so doomed," I said. It just slipped out.

"So go to public school."

There were two choices of public school. There was Fortier, where all the public school kids went. I know that's a strange thing to say, but "public school kid" was a real kind of person in my world. No one knew any personally, but the story was that they were yats and frats, yats being the low-class kids who were pure New Orleans, the mythical beings who went around saying, "Where y'at, ya mama," and the frats who wore madras and went home every afternoon and watched
American Bandstand
. New Orleans had real white America uptown, and I could have been part of it if I'd gone to public school, but I was part of private school Olympus, and I wasn't supposed to accept that other world as being good enough. It sounded comfortable to me.

The second choice of public school was Benjamin Franklin, which just had opened. It was for geniuses. I was a hard worker, but genius wasn't perspiration like Edison said. I didn't wear thick glasses. I was afraid of those people. I was afraid to take a test and find out I wasn't a genius. My father had been tested with an IQ of 160 at Fort Benning when he spoke no English. If I couldn't get an IQ of 120, my father would be crushed. But my parents always joked about something my mother had studied in college called regression toward the mean. They figured I had to have an IQ of at least 130 if you just took the average between my father's and a hundred.

What counted though was that Grammy saw no alternative to Newman. She had my mother in a tangle.

I told Catherine I wanted to go to public school. "But my mother's playing some kind of strange game with my grandmother," I said.

"I know you've only got that one grandmother," Catherine said. She sounded disgusted.

I nodded. "It's like she dares her to pull me out of Newman," I said. "Like it would prove my parents aren't getting by without her."

"Hey!" Catherine said, all excited. "If you get a scholarship to a really snotty boarding school, it would shut your grandmother up forever."

"You mean tomorrow?" I said. I was feeling pretty desperate. But also kind of instantly relieved that I knew I couldn't possibly leave home right away.

"Of course not," Catherine said. "But you could stand anything at Newman for a year if you knew it was going to be over with."

I couldn't imagine being the new girl at boarding school for two years, but I wouldn't tell her that. Instead I pointed out that a school like Madeira would hardly give a scholarship to a Jewish girl. I knew Catherine was too sweet to point out that my name was Cooper, and I had light hair and blue eyes. She understood that was for me to say, and I wasn't saying it.

"I guess getting even with my grandmother is going to have to be my reason for going to Newman every day," I said.

"You know, I don't think I've seen your grandmother since, well, that time."

"You and my father both. She'll go to her grave thinking he's the one who called the authorities in Mississippi."

"How come you never told me that?"

I had to think back. Nothing really had happened. I hadn't had any news to tell her. "I guess because nothing happened, and thinking about Grammy is too sickening."

Catherine asked me if my mother hated Grammy, too. She could tell that I hated her.

I'd never figured that out. "I used to think my mother went to see her so she wouldn't get cut out of her will," I said. "But now I think she's got some kind of thing she needs. Like if she's good enough, her mother will love her or something. But Grammy's idea of good is different from Mama's, so I don't think it's going to work out, you know? If I were my mother, I'd hate her just for that."

"Yeah, your grandmother's pretty disgusting," Catherine said. "Your grandfather, too."

"Nobody else would have the right to say that," I said, "but you sure do."

Catherine's ghost lingered in the classrooms for the first few weeks of tenth grade. I looked for her diagonally from me, and she wasn't there. She and I were saved by getting honors English every year, and that was one class where I needed someone to look at. With no Catherine, I thought I would have to rely on my own judgment, and I was a little lonely. But yesterday, as we were starting
Tess of the d'Urbervilles,
Becca looked at me because Mrs. Fox said, "The lower classes pronounced her last name
Darbyfield
." Maybe other people were looking at me, too, but Becca was in my line of smart vision, my beacon that searched for someone who caught the sharp literary allusions the way Catherine did, and Becca was the class Tess, if ever anyone was one. Catherine and I had studied Becca hard when we were fascinated by divorce, and we'd learned a lot about self-confidence when we watched her back in middle school. I didn't think Becca needed girls, but I might find out. Or I might be like Becca, not needing people.

Strangely, only one person so far had made fun of me for walking alone, and it wasn't a student. "Where's your Siamese twin?" Mr. Kenyon said. He taught us English last year, and in some ways he had a right to identify me with Catherine. He didn't have a right to be loud about it, though. We were in the second-floor corridor, and a lot of kids heard him. They laughed, but I could tell they had no idea what he meant. They didn't know me. "Surgery," I said to Mr. Kenyon. I said it loud and clear. At Newman, teachers could be bullies, too. The only difference was that they couldn't go home and tell their friends.

We didn't have honors math class in tenth grade. The math classes were mixed in ability. It didn't take long to figure out why. Mrs. Walter was not just about geometry, she was about growing up. As she was the first to tell us. There was no standardized test that was going to divide us up into which people were going to survive her class in one piece. At least according to her. I didn't know how a person that small could scare people so much. She was probably old enough to retire, even though she dyed her hair reddish. I swear she wasn't even four feet ten inches tall, and I would think you'd have to be a hundred years old to have shrunk that much unless you started out as a shrimp, so I didn't know where she got so much nerve to begin with. But she was ferocious. She called us baby names. She talked baby talk to us. She told us we were stupid. And she thrilled me every day I was in her class. Because she was so right. I wasn't being snobbish. I was feeling like Mrs. Walter was on my side. The reason was that all the other girls rolled their eyes about understanding math. The boys mostly looked sleepy.

She stretched and drew a triangle on the blackboard. Pretty simple, and I knew she was going to take no prisoners with that triangle.

"All right," she said. "We all know the angles in this triangle add up to 180 degrees." I thought,
Yeah, all three of us who did our homework last night or remember it from sixth grade.
"But how do you prove it?" she said.

Nobody said anything.

I waited. Mrs. Walter labeled the inside angles of the triangle,
a, b,
and
c.
Still the room was so quiet we could hear voices down the hallway. I raised my hand. The motion alone got everyone's attention. It wasn't good attention. Mrs. Walter pointed at me. "Can I draw another line on it?" I said. As soon as the words were out of my mouth, I was worried. "I mean, may I draw another line on it?"