Everything is lovely and peaceful here. Towhees whistle in the azaleas. Golfers hum up and down the fairways in their quaint surrey-like carts. Householders mow their lawns, bestriding tiny burro-size tractors. Why am I so jumpy?
On the other hand, the vines are encroaching. Mother’s yard is noticeably smaller.
My chair is placed so that I am facing Tara next door, Dusty Rhoades’s plantation house, which he purchased from Vince Marsaglia, a gangster from New Orleans who runs Louisiana.
Mother, I see, has all sorts of schemes afoot for me. She is saying:
“I can just see you and Lola walking up and down by moonlight while from the inside come the strains of lovely old-world music.”
“Lola Rhoades?”
“Ho ho, you can’t fool your mother! I know what’s going on between you two.”
“You do? What is going on?”
“I couldn’t be more pleased. She’s wild about you, Tom! What a wonderful girl!”
I am scratching my head: this is odd. Until now Mother hasn’t had much use for Lola, considering her Texas-raw and Texas-horsy. Lola’s cello-straddling always struck Mother as somehow unladylike. She’s been talking to Dusty, I reckon.
“You’re a Cancer and she’s a Taurus. It couldn’t be better!”
“That may be, Mother, but the fact is I don’t really—”
“Beware of Aries and Libra.”
“O.K., Mother, but—”
“Isn’t that little nurse of yours an Aries?”
“Who? Ellen? Good Lord, I have no idea, Mother. In any case, Ellen and I have no—”
“And isn’t that little Left snippet of yours a Libra?”
“Who? Moira? My Lord, Mother, how in the world do you know? And in any case why do you say ‘of mine’?”
“She’s not for you, son.”
“Are you speaking of marriage? Moira has no intention of marrying me.”
“Then all the more reason for breaking it off. But I’m not really worried about that. Here’s what’s been on my mind.”
“Yes?”
“Being a Cancer means that you are deeply sensitive and that family strife tends to cause you much suffering. God knows this is true in your case.”
“That it is.”
“Ginger Rogers and Red Skelton were Cancers.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“You are also under Moon rule, which means that you are emotionally unstable and tend to form will-o’-the-wisp relationships with more than one sweetheart.”
“That’s true.”
“What I wanted to tell you is that in this, the first week of July, I believe that certain things are going to become clear to you and that you will make some important decisions, but—”
“I believe that too.”
“But—! Do not make any real estate transfers until later in the month. I’ve told Dusty and Lola the same thing.”
“Real estate transfers,” I say, scratching my head.
“I’ve told Dusty and Lola and I’m telling you: whatever plans you all might have, don’t sell anything now or buy anything now.” She nods meaningfully at Tara.
“Sell anything? Mother, Lola and I have no plans. What did Dusty tell you?”
“Ho ho ho. I know a thing or two. And I know that Lola is a wonderful girl.”
It is true. Lola, a big beautiful cellist, is a wonderful girl. Last Christmas Eve we lay in one another’s arms in the grassy bunker of number 18 and watched the summer constellations wheel in their courses — I, smashed out of my mind with love, with scientific triumph, and brain hives, she full of love and music, hissing cello tunes in my ear. A brave girl, she saved my life at the expense of her reputation, went to fetch her father as I lay dying of love and hives in the bunker.
What Mother doesn’t understand is that we loved each other for one night and that was the end of it. One night I sang between her knees like an antique cello while she watched the wheeling constellations. A perfect encounter, but it is not to be thought that we could repeat it.
And yet — here’s the wonder of love — even as I bend shivering over the glittering mound of grits, love revives! Love is always possible, even here in the ashes of my forty-five-year-old life. Something stirs, a phoenix. Bad as things are, perhaps just because they are so bad, why not go to the fish fry this afternoon, see Lola again, drink a gin fizz or two?
“Doris was not for you, Tom,” Mother is saying. “God knows she was a wonderful person, but she was never for you. A Capricorn, your exact opposite. I told you!”
No, she didn’t. The truth is she was all for Doris at the beginning, embracing her as a Virginia aristocrat, which she was not, being no more than a good-looking Shenandoah Valley girl.
“Doris was not for you, Tom!” says Mother, swishing her leg angrily.
“Evidently she wasn’t.”
Look at Mother! Look at the difference between us! I, a shaky decrepit forty-five, she in her sixties as pert as a sparrow and on good terms with the world. She sits bolt upright handsome legs crossed, nylon swishing against nylon, one hand pressed deep into her waist to emphasize her good figure. This morning she’s been up for hours, rooting around in her garden, ordering the help around, calling prospects — she’s a “realtor,” makes forty thousand a year, is more successful now than my father in his prime.
She sparkles with good health and is at one with herself. I? I am six feet ahead of myself, ricocheting between terror and elation. My toes are rotating. The out-of-doors doesn’t suit me. I feel like Henry Miller, seedy and stove up, sitting in a park in Jacksonville, Florida. Her plate is clean. She eats like a longshoreman, yet is trim as can be, has a good skin and a clear eye. What a bowel she has! Unfortunately I have my father’s bowel, which is subject to conservative rages and liberal terror.
“Tom,” says Mother, lowering her voice and rolling her eyes. “I feel that something is about to happen. They are going to do something.”
“I have the same feeling,” I say, watching her curiously. “But what’s your reason for thinking so?” Whenever Mother lowers her voice and rolls her eyes, it means she’s going to talk about them, Negroes.
“I’ve seen them,” Mother whispers, “riding around, looking.”
“Who, the Bantus or the locals?”
“Both. But that’s not the main thing.”
“What’s the main thing?”
“Last Sunday I saw a black cloud with something coiling in it hovering over the Infant Jesus of Prague.”
“You took that to be a sign something is going to happen here soon?”
“Haven’t I always been proved right in the past?”
“What was the ‘something coiling’?”
“Entrails. Which is a sign of the Bantus. They divine and foretell by examining entrails. You think I’m ridiculous.”
“I think you’re right about something happening.”
Mother has a reputation hereabouts as a seer and prophetess. What she is is a Catholic gnostic. Though she believes in God, she also relies on her crystal ball — she actually has a crystal ball, which she looks into — and her gift for seeing signs and divining hidden meanings. But she is quite brisk about it, puts on no psychic airs, has no truck with séances and such. Her clairvoyant powers have rather to do with business and politics. She will not close a deal with a Leo in May. Most of her visions and dreams are about plots of the Lefts against the Knotheads. She predicted four out of the last five assassinations.