Despite the portholes under the eaves that were meant to relieve the accumulated heat, the attic was stifling in all seasons. As we paused there at the top of the stairs, I heard the coo of pigeons, the ruffling of feathers, a skitter of tiny claws. Crowded as the attic was with inanimate objects, the place was alive with critters: moths, spiders, flies, beetles, wasps, bugs, bats, birds and mice.
We shoved the footlocker into the nearest available space and paused again to look around. Roger and I exchanged a rueful glance; much as we would have liked to explore, we dared not dawdle. Miz Verlow awaited our services.
We would have other opportunities to visit the attic, and eventually, as we grew older, free access to the key that Miz Verlow kept in a certain drawer in her office desk. The attic never got less crowded. We were always finding things in it that we didn’t remember having seen previously. Guests not only left pieces of luggage in storage during their visits but for temporary storage while they traveled elsewhere. The temporary storage sometimes became permanent, for reasons beyond our ken. A guest perhaps never returned, or forgot the left luggage, or deliberately abandoned it. The attic housed more than luggage, of course. It held everything that an attic should and then some.
Some of Miz Verlow’s guests came and went, and never came back; some visited irregularly, and others were very regular indeed. Some stayed a week while others dallied a month or six weeks. Mrs. Mank proved entirely unpredictable. Her longest absence was five months; the shortest, a weekend. We saw her at least three times a year. Miz Verlow always knew well ahead that Mrs. Mank was coming but she never told me until it was time to arrange Mrs. Mank’s suite.
I expected that we would one day see Fennie Verlow. Miz Verlow telephoned Fennie every few days and letters and small packages arrived for Merry Verlow, addressed in Fennie’s hand. Mention was made of visiting, but Miz Verlow never did go visit her sister, Fennie. I cannot recall that Miz Verlow ever went so far afield that she could not return to sleep at Merrymeeting.
Miz Verlow never disputed or challenged Mama in her playacting as lady of the manse in front of the guests. In time, even perennial guests who knew otherwise came to behave as if it had always been so. Mama directed the conversation at every meal, permitting no discussion of religion, politics, money or sex. Her rules naturally made for some stultifying conversations—the usual clichés about the weather, and Mama’s reminiscences of her days as a Southern belle, just after the war, when sometimes it seemed as if she were talking about the War Between the States instead of World War II—but on many occasions, the guests were more or less compelled to talk about themselves.
Miz Verlow’s guests tended to be reasonably well educated—sometimes very well educated—and were nearly always well spoken. Artists and photographers, both amateur and professional, often sat at her table, along with divines, academics, schoolteachers, musicians and many other professionals. A substantial proportion of Merry Verlow’s guests were also birders, a group with whom I had an immediate affinity. As the names in the guestbook changed, new subjects were introduced, and old ones continued. While Mama suffered through talk of birds and art and music and many other things irrelevant to the wants and the needs of Roberta Ann Carroll Dakin, I sponged it all up. The result for me was a level of stimulation that I would never have received in my own home, had not Daddy been murdered and Mama and I cast out.
Forty-one
CAME the first day of school, I walked to the road and climbed up onto the bus, which, except for the driver, proved to be empty. I would be first on and last off, for I lived at the greatest distance from the elementary school.
As soon as I was out of sight of Merrymeeting, I removed my homemade hat. It was one of the few things that I could do to avoid becoming a goat. I could do nothing about my looks, let alone the inevitability that it was known that my father had been murdered and dismembered. The younger they are, the fewer social inhibitions children have. I was immediately asked directly if it was true that my daddy had been suffocated to death and cut to pieces. My first instinct was to act as if I did not understand the question.
A furrowed brow, “Huh?” and the witless announcement that I had seen a mouse on the beach, convinced my questioners that I was twice as stupid as a doorstop. My schoolmates did not persist, thankfully, as the commencement of the school term provided many more excitements than the frisson supplied by gore associated with a newcomer. When I was a little bit older, I realized my instinct had been correct: If ever I had started describing Daddy’s murder, I would never have been shut of it.
The learning part was largely effortless and enjoyable; the social part of school, like constant sunburn to me. Science and languages came easily to me, so much so that by the time I was ten, I was being bussed to junior high school classes in those subjects. Social ineptness was expected of those who turned out to be “whizzes” at some subject or other. My schoolmates were in any case as put off by evidence of intellect as they were by overly large ears—waggable ears, after all, constituted true talent, along with being able to touch one’s nose with the tip of the tongue, or make armpit farts. My teachers, most of them, were my schoolmates grown up; they suspected any child who gave evidence of being smarter than they were, and nonconformist behavior was swatted as quick as a housefly. Naturally, there were others like me in some way: their physical defects all too evident, or they were intellectually too slow or fast, relative to the norm. Every social group has its castes; I accepted mine with something like relief, as it excused me from the anxiety of being someone and something that I was not. My ability to overhear my class-mates whispering and the confidences of the teachers to each other also gave me a useful edge in self-defense.
My formal schooling on the island settled into a dreamy, remorseless repetition of morning and early afternoon hours, five days a week, thirty-eight weeks a year. I rarely thought about it except when I was actually there.
My best school was Santa Rosa Island. Older and younger than its human residents, it was constantly remaking itself over time infinitesimal and infinite, immeasurable by my limited human senses. The great storms that I experienced on that exposed coast—Irene, in October of 1959; in 1964, Hilda, the first real hurricane of my life; the nameless tropical storm that came in June of 1965; and Hurricane Betsy, in the fall of that same year; in June of 1966, Alma would frighten, humble and exhilarate me all at the same time. But no less than the sight of a heron standing in the swash of the storm-wracked shore, one foot on a downed sand pine bole. No less than the peeps playing footsie with the quieted wavelets, the ghost crab peeking out of its tunnel, the hermit crab from a conch shell, the narcissus-pale trumpet of the railroad vine, or the houndstooth pattern of bird’s feet on the sand.
How could any ordinary school compare?
For Mama, playacting at Merrymeeting was hardly enough. She discovered that first fall a little theatre troupe in Pensacola and cast herself instantly as a star. The discovery that the troupe had put on Teahouse of the August Moon the previous season devastated her. Only the conviction that the show must go on enabled Mama to fight off a massive migraine. She comforted herself with the anticipation of trying out for the new production the troupe was planning: Anastasia. For hours, she fussed with her hair, and put on her most regal diamond earrings. Her accent developed a tinge of the foreign, though just what foreign it was impossible to say. Constipated British English was the only element that I could name; the rest had likely never been heard on any known continent or planet.