Ford was still alive, I had no doubt. I had not heard his voice among the voices the Gulf waters brought me.
Nightmares wracked my sleep. They were not new ones, which made them all the scarier, for I knew where they were going and still could not escape. On waking in the morning, though, with the caw-caw of the old doorbell loud in my ears, the memory was clear in my mind of opening the door to the ghost who called herself Tallulah Jordan, who had worn the scarf that I had found in the attic.
Fifty-three
MERRY Verlow began to keep close track of the key to the attic. When I had something to take up or retrieve, she made sure to be there. She allowed me no loitering time there to find the framed poster again. There was always another and urgent chore to be done. Trying hard to get back into her good graces, I promised myself that I would find it later, and let later become a lot later.
The high school I attended was something of an odd place—newly built, for one, and so lacking both history and cohesion. At least half the students were service brats, which meant the student population was in constant flux. Of the locals, none of us were as well-heeled, as well-traveled or as well-spoken as the children of the military. Our focus was hardly ever really on school, but on our families, on jobs that we had in the mornings before our first classes or that we had to leave for, early in the afternoon.
My courses and classes were arranged so that I could leave each day at two. Grady left at two as well; he did a full day’s work plumbing before and after school.
Grady lived with his daddy, next door to his granddaddy and right behind his five uncles. His daddy and uncles shared a couple of chronically broken-down boats from which they derived occasional income. They each had their own chronically malfunctioning pickup trucks, out of which they would sell small quantities of fish or shellfish by the side of the road, to people who didn’t know them and wouldn’t be able to find them if the fish made them sick. They were all divorced, widowed or abandoned, or some combination thereof.
Having lived so long in a woman-run household, what little I knew about the way men thought, reacted and behaved, I had had to glean from our male guests. Grady and his family were another tribe altogether. They brought to mind my half-forgotten Uncles Dakin. I could not remember any of my uncles being divorced or widowed but they had all been known to drink, get into fights, get arrested, have car wrecks, go bankrupt, do the occasional weekend in the county lockup, and find Jesus during every tent revival that came their way. The power of their wives—short of teeth and hard-worn—had been just as real as Cleonie’s power over Nathan Huggins, or Perdita’s over her Joe Mooney.
One Saturday night in the summer between sophomore and junior year, Grady and I got high on a six pack of Straight Eight. The beach was the perfect place to hoot and holler and crow. Jokes and teasing and handholding turned to grab-ass and went on from there. Of course we were clumsy and ignorant and made a mess the first time but our randiness sufficed, as it commonly does, to overcome our embarrassment.
We were grateful to each other, oh yes—Grady because of his extreme shyness and me because I was too young to realize that being goofy-looking is no bar to sexual activity. Miz Verlow was right. Our friendship allowed us the candor to admit that truelove was not a factor. I wasn’t Grady’s girlfriend, I just had the basic girlfriend equipment, and he wasn’t my boyfriend, just had the basic, etc. We were horny and curious and that was good enough for both of us.
That first time—idiot kids that we were—we took our chances and consequentially did some educational suffering, and got clean away with it. After that, Grady pilfered condoms from his father and uncles, so we didn’t worry about that little awkwardness, except for the times when one broke and another one slipped off, and we went through the sweet-jesus-spare-us again, just like everyone who has ever depended upon what, back then, we called safes.
Mama and I were incapable of maintaining a truce for more than a few hours. The only reason we didn’t kill each other was because I avoided her as much as I could. At first she didn’t realize it and when she did, she got on her very highest horse. After that she tried playing martyr about it. None of it got her anywhere with me. By then, my heart was entombed in Alabama marble.
Mama’s pretense that I was not her child occurred more often after I began my periods and intensified when she had become interested in some man. After Gus O’Hare, I recall her dating a wildlife photographer, then a former Navy flyboy come back to revisit his glory days in Pensacola, and then a radio engineer, Ray Pinette. I learned something from each of them, especially Ray. I tried to find something in each of them to like. And I tried to stay out of her limelight.
Mama went to the dog-track, the pictures, out to dinner, off on long romantic rides in her boyfriends’ cars. She smoked all she wanted, and drank a lot of expensive booze. She was only unhappy when she wasn’t getting her way, and that was going to happen with or without boyfriends. Sooner or later, the real Roberta Ann Carroll Dakin showed up to slap any infatuation across the face, and sink a stiletto heel into its foot.
As I began my junior year of high school, she was making a serious run at a second husband: an officer stationed at Eglin, a colonel no less. Tom Beddoes was twice divorced, due to his efforts to live up to the flyboy standard of infidelity. He had learned his lesson, he told Mama, and wanted only to find a decent Christian woman with a forgiving heart to spend the rest of his life with. Mama took to wearing a gold cross on a chain around her neck.
But she dithered.
Colonel Beddoes’s pay grade was excellent, with loads of perks and opportunities for advancement, and even after early retirement, eye-widening opportunities in the military industrial complex. The word “colonel” was a double-dutch fudge sundae on her lips, as “captain” had been on her mama’s. But. The armed forces were integrated, none more so than the Air Force, and there were even colored officers. As the wife of an officer she would be compelled to socialize with them.
Integration had been creeping into Pensacola, on tiptoe and with its breath held, since Harry Truman desegregated the armed forces. Segregationists rushed to open all-white private schools, of course, most commonly under the aegis of a blue-eyed lily-white Jesus—and not just all over the South but in Northern cities too. Because the Pensacola area happened to be thick with active-duty military, however, the public schools could not resist the expectation of integrated schools by military personnel.
When Mama found out that Roger Huggins was transferring from his old all-black high school to mine, she was horrified. Almost as terrible as the thought of integration was the fact that her dependence on the services of Cleonie and Perdita forced her to mute her indignation.
She was speechless when Nathan Huggins drove up to Merrymeeting one evening in our old Edsel. Its fenders and hood had been replaced at some time, and were different colors—red and blue—from the original, but it was the very one that we had once owned all right. Mr. Huggins had found it being offered for sale at the side of some dirt road in Blackwater. Never having seen it before, he had no idea of its history until I cried out with delight at the sight of it. Mama insisted that we had never even owned an Edsel. Miz Verlow walked all around it and shook her head in distasteful wonder and said nothing.