“Mama, would you like me to rub your feet?”
She chortled incredulously. “Yes, I would, Calley. Yes, I would.”
Mama yanked up her skirt and unhooked her garters. I pulled up a hassock and sat on it to roll down her silk stockings and rub her feet.
“The only useful thing that silly old man had to tell me was that your late beloved daddy owned a plot in some backside-of-the-moon boneyard. Isn’t that just the cherry on the whipped cream!”
I guessed that boneyard meant cemetery but the significance of owning a plot, a single plot, in one, escaped me. All I knew was that Mama did not like it.
All the good of the foot rubbing I did went to waste, like the meal that Tansy had prepared for us. An hour later, two hours later, Mr. Weems had not answered Mama’s summons to Ramparts, nor was anyone answering her phone calls to the Weems house. The Edsel was still on its way back from New Orleans, by arrangement with Uncle Billy Cane Dakin, and Mamadee wouldn’t let Mama have the keys to the Cadillac. Mama threatened to walk to Mr. Weems’s house. Tallassee was and is a very small town, so that no place, not even Ramparts, was very far from anywhere else. Mamadee’s response was to lock Mama in the salon. While Mama was hurling ashtrays and candlesticks, breaking lamps and punching out windows with a chair, Mamadee called Dr. Evarts.
Thirteen
DR. Evarts had been born and raised in Chicago, gone to college in New York City and studied medicine in Boston. He had settled in Tallassee, Alabama, for the simple reason that there he would have no competition at all. Before he came, the nearest doctor was in Notasulga, twenty-two miles distant. With a near-monopoly in Tallassee, Dr. Evarts made upwards of fifty thousand dollars a year in 1958 dollars. The town provided an office for him. He secured the staffing of his office by marrying a competent, efficient and reasonably attractive registered nurse. It was a sensible, practical marriage—even a love match, if love of money on his part and of social status on hers was love enough. He also owned the small hospital where a few of the old and terribly sick hung on past the time that their nearest and dearest could care for them and where a few of the babies having trouble getting born either made it or didn’t. Dr. Evarts got kickbacks from drugstores and the drug salesmen and the morticians and from the bigger hospitals in Montgomery when he sent patients to them, usually for complicated operations. He was received in the finest homes as a near equal. No more than a near equal; after all, no one was ever going to confuse him with a Southerner.
Except for his twice-annual vacations, he was on call twenty-four hours a day every day of the year. He paid a retired doctor from Montgomery to come out and tend his practice during his vacations, not because he cared that much about his patients but he did not want to encourage any poaching of his practice by hungrier physicians in reach of Tallassee.
Of course, he had to deal with Mamadee and the other grandees—grandees was one of Daddy’s words for them, confusing me (when I was just a knee-baby) into a belief that all the superior folk of Tallassee were somehow related to me through Mamadee. Daddy also called them pooh-bahs. The grandees and pooh-bahs expected immediate attention, immediate relief, and then argued about the bill.
Dr. Evarts also treated the multitudinous diseases of the abjectly poor whites of the Alabama countryside when they could find a dollar or two. Pale and malformed and destitute, these unfortunates led lives hidden to all but the social worker, the sheriff, and the physician. They were deviled with diseases that Dr. Evarts’s professors had declared eradicated. The dollar that he demanded from them for an office visit barely covered his costs, and for that reason alone, he slept the sleep of the just and righteous. His conscience was not so advanced for Dr. Evarts to treat coloreds. The nearest medical care for them was in Tuskegee, and how they got there or found the money to pay for their care, was of no interest to him. I learned later that when a colored male made the mistake of entering his office, Mrs. Evarts would determine if the man’s complaint was likely to be syphilis, and if so, Dr. Evarts would direct the man to Tuskegee, to participate in the eventually notorious study in which syphilis was not treated. He was not the first or the only white physician to follow this practice; all the white physicians in the county had agreed to do it, as part of the study. I have read that colored physicians did also.
He was a good-looking man with a fine head of silvering hair—all the ladies said so. He must have been in his mid-forties at the time I knew him. Before his marriage, he had admired Mama, or so Mamadee claimed. Mama always smiled secretively when the subject came up. It strikes me as doubtful, given Mama would have been all of ten or eleven when Dr. Evarts arrived in Tallassee. Much of what I know about him, I learned as a child, overhearing Mama and Mamadee and their friends discussing him. The rest I discovered years later, in researching Daddy’s murder.
Mamadee had ordered Ford and me to our rooms. Ford lurked behind the balustrade of the grand staircase in Mamadee’s foyer, peeking and listening. I went out a side door and up the nearest live oak with a view into the salon—hand over hand and in my socks. I could see Mama clearly. She paused to light a cigarette. Then she went on breaking the remaining bits of glass out of their muntings in the French doors. With the cigarette between her lips, she wielded a silver candlestick. It broke the muntings with a sound like a wishbone snapping.
Krikkrik
Around the corner of the house, Dr. Evarts’s two-year-old black Lincoln rolled on the gravel of the drive. Mamadee personally opened the door to him before he could ring the bell.
Mamadee rattled the key in the lock and flung open the door.
Mama had already slipped the candlestick behind the nearest sofa cushion. She flicked her cigarette out into the debris beyond the threshold of the broken doors.
Mamadee stopped short in feigned shock at the destruction.
Setting down his bag by the sofa, Dr. Evarts spoke in a soothing voice, “Now, Roberta Ann.”
Disheveled, barefoot and bare-legged, she took a step toward Dr. Evarts and swooned into his arms.
“Oh, Lewis.” She sobbed. And then, raising her face to the ceiling, she went on, “Sweet Jesus, thank you, thank you, for sending a friend in my time of need!”
Mama knew, of course, that Dr. Evarts had been called. She went all limp and weak in his arms and he carried her to the sofa.
“Roberta Ann,” Dr. Evarts said gravely, “your mama is your best friend, you know. You have had a terrible time, haven’t you? Forgive me, my dear, I am remiss. Please accept my deepest condolences.”
Mamadee passed Mama her handkerchief and Mama wiped her eyes, allowing Dr. Evarts to slip a syringe from his bag.
“I’ll bet you haven’t slept since this horrible tragedy started, have you?” he said as he pumped the syringe, squirting a little fluid out the needle.
Seeing it now, Mama recoiled. “I do not need whatever that is, Lewis. I just need for that damned lawyer to answer my questions.”
With the syringe in one hand, Dr. Evarts swabbed at her near arm with a little pad. “This will get you to sleep, my dear.” He paused to look at her bare legs appreciatively.
She yanked her arm away. “Who the hell do you think you are, Lewis Evarts? Mama wants you to knock me out and haul me off to the mental hospital, doesn’t she? She wants everybody to think I am crazy. Well, I am not. I am as sane as you are, Lewis.”
Dr. Evarts sighed and put down the syringe. “Roberta Ann, nobody is going to put you in the mental hospital. Now, you let me help you get to sleep. You’ll feel a lot better in the morning.”