Mr. Huggins did not dispute Mama’s denial or Miz Verlow’s obvious disapproval. He picked up Cleonie and Perdita and took them home after work and began to ferry them back and forth. They ceased to live at Merrymeeting during the week anymore: more change.
Mama was pleased to learn that Roger was acutely unhappy at school. He missed his girlfriend, a sweet and very smart girl named Eleanor, who did not make the transfer with him. His old school was closer to home. I only had to look at Roger to know that he felt isolated and vulnerable in the face of the deliberate, stony indifference of the majority and the moronic persecution by a handful of bonehead resisters. Despite the specific warning of Miz Verlow that the best thing that I could do for Roger was to steer clear of him, I made an attempt at offering my support. Roger thanked me and told me that the best thing I could for him was leave him be, to try and settle in on his own.
After ten weeks, he transferred back. I knew that was the deal that he had made with his mama and his daddy. Rarely have I felt so helpless or so frustrated. I went so far as to accuse Grady, who was entirely innocent of any such thing, of failing to help Roger make a success of integration. After I apologized to him for my hissy at him, Grady sat quietly on the beach with me for a long while.
Then he said, “Roger shouldn’t have to be miserable for no cause. You’re makin’ him feel bad about it. You want to be miserable for a cause, you do it.”
I wanted to accuse Grady of being just like the boneheads, but I couldn’t.
He put one arm around me and ruffled my snarly hair affectionately.
“Preacher says there’s a time for ever purpose,” Grady said. “Things’ll come round or they won’t. One lil ol’ Calley caint do it all by her lonesome.”
Mama could hardly contain her triumph, though she had done nothing to affect the outcome one way or another.
For the first time in my life, I said, “Oh, shut up, Mama.”
That made her jaw drop.
I was too big to hit anymore. I might hit back.
Since the end of my high school education was on the horizon, and I was all too clearly more Dakin than Carroll, the urge to wash her hands of me was getting stronger in Mama.
Ford’s twenty-first birthday was only months away.
Mama was incapable of shutting her trap about the fortune coming in her son’s hands, so Tom Beddoes knew all about it. It didn’t make Mama any less attractive to him. He was interested enough to interrogate her very closely, and to nose about for legal advice that didn’t come from Adele Starret.
I didn’t care whether Mama stayed anymore, not for my own sake, but I had not forgotten the warning that if she left the island, she would be unprotected. Just because I was out of patience with the woman’s whine in my ears, the stink of her tobacco, and her pretentiousness, didn’t mean that I wanted her harmed. I heartily wished that she would marry again and go live in Eglin, which was not only on the island, but had armed guards at its gates.
For one, I was very likely to inherit her bedroom, which was much nicer than my hole-in-the-corner. I would paint it a light color and refurnish it with furniture that didn’t look like it came from Tara. These thoughts went through my head at the very same time that I knew that I planned to leave the island myself; I wanted to go to college, for one, and I wanted to see the world. Of course I intended to return; there was no thought that Merrymeeting and Santa Rosa Island would not always, ultimately be my home.
On a Saturday morning, I found Merry Verlow in her office, with the door open. I flung myself onto the sole other chair. She glanced up and then down again at her accounts.
“Something, Calley?” she asked abstractedly.
“Yes, ma’am. I want to go to college—”
She looked up and interrupted to me. “Of course you do. You’ll be doing your undergraduate work at Wellesley and then go on to Harvard for an MA. You’ll live in Mrs. Mank’s home in Brookline, which if you check a map of Massachusetts, is a suburb of Boston convenient to both those colleges. Mrs. Mank has a high opinion of your potential.”
Rarely had I much to do with Mrs. Mank, other than waiting on her, but occasionally she would announce that she wanted a walk on the beach, just before supper, or just after, and require my presence, so that she might teach me a little astronomy.
And that’s exactly what she did. Mrs. Mank would sit on the beach in a rusting old lawn chair, with me at her feet, and she would point out a star, a constellation, a planet, or observe the state of the moon. I learned to find Polaris by the pointers of the little dipper, and from there, Betelgeuse and Rigel, and how to locate Spica by following the Crow’s beak. I learned enough to be aware of the night sky, and often, of the day sky, where the cold moon hung pallid and emaciated in the blue sky or Venus burned on the edge of the world.
It took me a minute to catch my breath. Miz Verlow’s gaze had returned to her accounts.
“What about leaving the island?”
“What about it?” Her pen scratched some notation on one of her papers.
“Is it safe?”
She snorted. “Of course it’s safe. It’s all inside the borders of the United States, everybody speaks English or something like it, and you’ve had all your shots. Stay away from race riots and you’ll be fine.”
“What about Mama’s enemies?”
Miz Verlow’s pen described a curlicue in the air. “Oh, she’ll always be able to make new ones, wherever she is.”
I sat silent for a while, working up the courage to push on in the face of looking utterly foolish.
“My daddy was murdered,” I said in a low tone, and despite my best efforts to sound calm and grown-up, my mouth went squiggly on me.
Miz Verlow looked up again and put her pen down. Then she reached into her sweater pocket. Out came a clean handkerchief, which she offered to me silently.
I blew my nose.
“It’s a grief that will always be with you, Calley. All I can say is that the passage of time will dull it. Roberta Carroll Dakin’s fate is in own her hands, as indeed it always has been. If she is fool enough and he is too, she may marry Colonel Beddoes without objection from me. I would be happy to have the room back. Your brother might have something to say, though.”
My brother. I hadn’t spared him a thought in ages; he was Mama’s obsession.
“How do you know?” I blurted.
Miz Verlow didn’t answer the question. She settled her attention on her paperwork.
“Go along, Calley. You have work to do, and as you can see, so do I.”
“Why can’t you answer the question? There’s a lot more that I need to know,” I said.
“Too bad,” she said. “But it’ll give you something to look forward to.”
A few days later, coming home after classes, I ran upstairs to toss my books into my room and there was Mama, busy rummaging one of my dresser drawers.
“What the hell are you doing?”
The first shock of being surprised flashed into a posture of defiant innocence.
“I need a tampon,” she said, in an irritated voice. “I’ve run out unexpectedly.”
She was lying and she knew that I knew. It was a struggle not to throw her bodily out of my room.
“Why don’t you get off your backside and walk to the store and buy some?”
“I won’t dignify that with a response.”
She cringed past me.
“You won’t find any money, no matter how hard you look,” I said.
In the ceiling of the crookedy triangular closet in my room, a space that I could no longer stand in straight up, I had a hidey-hole. The light fixture in the closet was a bare bulb suspended from the ceiling. All I had to do was loosen the collar of the fixture at the ceiling, pull the light cord down a little, and clear grit and mouse scat around the hole in the closet ceiling. The space accommodated a tin box with my spare cash in it, just bills, acquired mostly as tip money from guests, and so not deposited in my Nickel Account. With the light cord tightened to raise the bulb again, the collar firmly in place, and the bulb kept dirty, the hidey-hole was successfully disguised. Mama would never touch the lightbulb nor would she mess about with a fixture, for fear of electrocuting herself. If Mama were ever faced with changing a lightbulb, she would choose to sit in the dark.