We turn into a room.
“That her?”
It is. Unmistakably; though depredations there have been. I cross to Theenie and deliberately do not acknowledge my escort. Theenie recognizes me instantly and tries to say, “Lord! Who is that? I raised you but I don’t know who you is! You ain’t been to see your Theenie in … a criminal time. Like you a secret. What is you, a military secret? Come on in. You want a Coke?” It does not come out that way. Her right arm, which resembles a deer’s leg drawn up by a slow fire, and the left side of her face, drawn down toward her shoulder by a permanent spasm of muscle, move rhythmically, and a sound comes out of her, but it is a sound I have heard only once before, from a dog hit by a car. Hurt badly but not killed, it sat on its useless hind legs and waved its head and moaned.
6
SHE’S TUCKED IN, IN a neat hospital bed, but a smell hits me and I detect damp edges of the sheets and have small outrage — what is wrong with catheters? I turn to the escort to make some demands and she is, of course, gone. This would be difficult enough, Theenie and I alone doing whatever we are to do, but there’s more: a woman I just now notice, sitting in the corner, stands up and approaches me very formally. She is well dressed and so self-possessed that it occurs to me she may be the mysterious administration herself. “I’m Athenia’s sister,” she says, and shakes my hand.
“I didn’t know she had a sister,” I say.
I glance at Athenia, who is more agitated now than when I walked in. Her eyes are reeling from side to side and she is trying to talk.
“May I see you outside?” the woman asks.
“Certainly.”
I give Theenie a gesture of conspiratorial assurance that I am just humoring this woman, anticipating correctly, somehow, that what she — Athenia — is trying to say is, the woman is not her sister.
Out in the hall, the woman makes a presentation that convinces me she is a sister. It goes something like this:
“I assume you are one of the families she has worked for. Am I right? Well. This is distressing—”
“I didn’t know Athenia had family.”
“That does not surprise me. She removed herself from us many years ago. She had everything. It has been a mystery and a painful thing for us. She threw away … she did not have to do with her life what she did. And now—”
“She did not have to work … as a maid?”
“No. My father had a lot of money, in—”
“But you’d think she’d have mentioned—”
“She is inscrutable. Here.”
She hands me a business card, her husband’s, a dentist in Florida. I look at the woman. The resemblance is there. I recall the one piece of family about Athenia there was: a portrait of her mother wearing a headdress of some kind that suggested very vaguely to me as a child, and I can be no more specific now, “the islands.”
I am back in the room, the woman having granted us a private session. Athenia cannot move her mouth or talk in any way, but she manages to say, with her eyes and some breath, clamping my hand with her good one, “Not my sister.”
“I know.”
She shakes her eyes back and forth — her No, I am learning.
I go into diagnostic check mode. Her Bible is by the bed.
“Can you read?” I ask.
Eyes say No.
“Even if it were held up for you?”
No.
“I take it you can understand everything said to you?”
Eyes don’t move: Yes.
“Well.”
Yes. Well. What now? I am a tit on a boar hog, is what now. Of what value am I? I, whose family employed this woman for twenty years, standing here like a mourner at a funeral, who has not to this point had the wit to see that the woman claiming to be a wealthy sister is the salvation if there is one … and the woman claiming to be the sister is gone. She has stepped out for a snack or she has stepped out for a plane to Florida, her mission, whatever it was, abrupted and altered by me. And not inappropriately, I think: white people have been in that woman’s way all her life, in a way directly opposite to the way her sister, Athenia, had them in her way. I am in the middle of a large political and racial family spat, with some bizarre contours to it, if Theenie has elected servitude as the woman suggests. If she has thrown things away: and that is a terrible thought, when the woman making the accusation has the demeanor of a bank president and the throwing-away accused had the demeanor of a bandannaed Jemima, before her veins blew out. I am made a little nervous by these speculations. Worrying about catheters and euthanasia was easy compared to this. I want to run, withal, before any more can happen, and basically, I do.
If you have emptied yourself of sympathy, you get blunt. I say to Theenie: “Athenia, this looks pretty bad.”
Eyes still.
“But you told me the solution years ago.”
Eyes still.
“You don’t have to do anything in life except die and live till you die.”
Eyes still, then back and forth.
I wonder if it is not, somehow, salubrious news. All she has to do is rot in sores and piss until she dies, and I have told her so.
On the curb, outside, I discover I am not empty of sympathy. It is that you must distrust sympathy, and cruelty is more suitable. Sympathy is the only emotion you have in a Turtle Creek, and it will overwhelm you if you let it, and you would be, though perhaps medically more fit, no more mentally adept at survival than the patients, among whose wheelchairs you would go down in a weeping heap. On the curb I look at the gutter which my feet hang over as if I am surfing. I could start crying if I allowed myself to, and not stop. If you were to start, you would not stop.
If you start things in life, the likelihood is you will not stop. That is the sum and the summit of what I know today, teetering before careerhood, having taken up hermiting in a beach house, erstwhile the house I grew up in. I certainly see nothing to obstruct this most agreeable hermitage. I can see from this salty vantage, lounging around on grit and noting repairs necessary to the house but not about to effect them, that you must be careful in life not to begin things you do not wish to do for a long time. The gravity of habit looks perdurable and instantaneous. I hesitate — for one low-minded and trivial example — to replace the hinge on the shutter by the sideboard. It is one of, looks to be, ninety-one more hinges, none in top condition.
Here’s another trivial example: With the purchase of one pair of Kelly-green poplin slacks and with one phone call to my father telling him I’d like to belong to Hilton Head Pines Country Club, he’d secure me membership, a bag of pro-grade clubs you’d need a caddie or a cart to carry for you, and I would golf at HHPCC and other clubs of similar status from here through Georgia and North Carolina for the rest of my life. Member-guest tournament would be a permanent, recurring phenomenon in my days on Earth.
7
MY MOTHER IS AT the house when I get back from my little lesson in first and last things at Turtle Creek. This is what she meant by “good,” when I told her I’d be holing up: she can, too. In the backseat of her car is a case of liquor and what looks like a Smithfield ham. She is a good one for provisions, laying them in and savoring the larder. She’d be good on a ship.
I take up a load — there are sacked groceries, too — and hear from the kitchen the shower going. My mother will emerge with a towel on her head, Nefertiti fashion, and a good terry-cloth robe, and make herself a tall gin-and-tonic and look like a movie star for an hour. Being around her is like being on safari; there is an elusive something we are after, in difficult conditions, and we will look good in the getting there. She can manage to snuggle into the world where ordinary people would languish. She will look like a lion hunter with a small glister of country-ham fat on her lip and the fine spray of fresh carbonated tonic dancing in the air before her bright eyes. And she will taste the salty meat and the tart tonic and gin and lime and settle into the crisp wicker with a contentment that is agreeably restless: What now? she says, smiling.