Her face is flushed, and I’m glad there isn’t an American flag in the room, or she would probably stand up and salute it. Though she has been on this kick for a couple of years now, it is hard to believe this is my old anti-establishment “give peace a chance” sister talking.
“Who are people like me?” I ask, my blood beginning to boil. This right-wing drivel makes me sick.
“Give it a rest, Gideon,” my sister says, her voice suddenly weary.
“You know you’re a lot like Mother. It’s been seven years now, but you never made yourself get over Rosa’s death. She was supposed to live forever or at least until you keeled over at the age of a hundred with her at your bedside drooling over you. Since she died, about half the time you’ve gone around acting like an arrogant shit because somebody cut off your lifetime happiness guarantee.”
I feel my scalp on fire. The truth of what she is saying radiates through my brain. Maybe this is why I have gotten things so wrong in Bear Creek.
Everything I thought I remembered has been filtered through my own self-pity. Poor me, poor Mother. Death busted both our bubbles. But I’ll be damned if I’ll give Marty the satisfaction of knowing she is right.
“Speaking of people like me,” I say, maliciously, “did you know Paul Taylor has been charged with capital felony murder in Bear Creek and goes on trial week after next?”
My sister’s eyes widen.
“Paul killed somebody?
Are you his lawyer?”
“Not in a million years.” I should have called Marty two months ago, but I see now I didn’t want to have this conversation. I wanted to believe we were victims. We may never talk about it, but Marty and I both know we could have looked after our mother better. Instead, we both got the hell out of Dodge. I realize now that guilt is one of the reasons I’ve worked so hard to scapegoat the Taylors. I demonized Paul because I didn’t want to have to deal with the fact that things were a mess at home, and I coped with them, as I always have, by leaving.
For the next twenty minutes I give Marty a sanitized version of my participation in the events in our old hometown for the last two months, omitting my own motives and Angela’s confessions and my involvement with her. Even without them, there is plenty of juice to the story, and, as I knew she would be, Marty is fascinated.
“Why didn’t you call me?” she demands when one of her clerks interrupts us to say it is time for her break.
“You’ve been too busy making money,” I say, getting in a final jab.
Despite my attitude, she wants me to come out for dinner so I can fill in the details, but I’m not ready for the third degree.
Marty can smell a rat as well as anybody, and I’m not ready to spill my guts to her.
“I’m too busy now. I’ll come out after the trial,” I say, standing up, “and tell you all about it.”
“You don’t think Paul did it, do you?” she asks, darkening the screen on her computer.
“I wouldn’t be too sure,” I say, still smarting from her speech.
Actually, right now I don’t, but I’m too irritated with this entire conversation to make her feel better.
“Paul isn’t exactly a knight in shining armor.”
“Neither are you,” my sister says dryly, “but I doubt if you’ve turned into a killer.”
Knowing I’m better off letting Marty have the last word, I leave. She would skewer me for my behavior in this case if she had the chance. If we talk more today, we will end up fighting.
At home all I can think about is how badly I’ve screwed up Doss’s defense. I have no idea what is going on in Bear Creek and haven’t since the moment I took the case. Sitting in the living room and staring out the window, I feel self-hatred begin to eat at me like an ulcer. Lawyers like me are a danger to the profession. This entire attempt to go home again has been a disaster, and I have only myself to blame. At least now I know why.
In desperation I dial Airs. Ting’s number to see if she will let me talk to her again. Surely, knowing Willie best, she knows more than she has told any of the investigators. My call, however, is answered by Connie, who is as cold as she was when I first went out there.
“Gideon, what is going on? Tommy says you haven’t found anything.
Are you going to argue that my mother murdered my father or not?”
Every couple of weeks I’ve called Tommy and reported to him. Each conversation is shorter than the last.
“I can’t imagine even suggesting it to a jury,” I say, not quite answering her.
“As frail as she is, it would be ludicrous.”
“Nobody cares about my mother or what this is doing to our family,” Connie says, angrily.
“That’s not true,” I say. But it is. The Tings have been forgotten.
“Bullshit! My mother spent her whole life watching my father walking a tightrope between whites and blacks and look what it got him! You must think we are idiots! I know my father wasn’t respected and neither was my mother.”
“I don’t agree, Connie,” I say, trying to mollify her.
“We all knew how hard your family worked.
People did respect y’all.”
Connie ignores me.
“They weren’t treated the same. And you know why! They weren’t white.
I don’t care how much Tommy pretends things were different. No matter how much we achieved, we were never really a part of Bear Creek. Nobody treated them or Tommy and me as social equals. I never had a date.
Neither did Tommy. Not that they would have let us go, but we weren’t asked either. My parents weren’t invited to any white person’s parties. To their credit, they wanted to be Chinese, while Tommy and I wanted to be white. It didn’t work for us, whatever Tommy says.”
This torrent of emotion is as unexpected as her coldness had been. I never saw her or Tommy angry. I ask, “Didn’t you marry a white guy?” “And it didn’t work,” Connie says.
“Once his family figured out what our status was in Bear Creek-they
were from Memphis-I was never accepted. I remember my future mother-in-law’s expression the first time she saw Ting’s Market.
She nearly fainted. In retrospect I’m amazed Alan had the nerve to go through with the wedding.
He never had any courage after that.”
I slump against the wall in the living room, wondering frantically how to salvage this conversation.
“Weren’t you a physicist by then?” I ask.
“I could have been the Empress of China at that point, and it wouldn’t have mattered,” she says sarcastically.
“His family had old Memphis money, and their son had scandalized them.
My parents weren’t happy with my choice either. I was expected to marry a nice Chinese boy from Mississippi.”
Connie and I were in the same boat.
“Rosa, my wife,” I say, “was about a quarter black. As soon as people figured that out, she didn’t have a chance.”
“I remember the gossip,” Connie says, her voice less heated.
“You were kind of a hero to me when you came back from the Peace Corps.”
I had no idea.
“You must have still been in college,” I say, trying to remember when the last time was I saw her.
“I had just graduated and was home for a couple of weeks,” she says.
“You were the talk of the town. Of course, she was described to me as being a lot darker than she was.”
Back then Connie must have viewed my marriage to Rosa as a hopeful sign that things were changing. And, in fact, they have, to a point.
“My sister told me later that one of the rumors going around was that I had married a pygmy from a Brazilian rain forest.”
Connie laughs for the first time.
“Bear Creek would have accepted a pygmy as long as she could pass for white.”
I look out my window into the park across the road. I’ve understood almost nothing until the last few days. I had an image of my family and I filtered out any memories of Bear Creek that didn’t agree with that image. Tommy has been wearing blinders, too.