I was the subject of the most vicious gossip. The story was that I lived alone with my Third World servant. In one version, I was a tyrant who satisfied my lusts on her. In another, she was a shrew who tormented me.
All talk. At this stage of my life I am keenly aware of the malicious innuendo and falsehoods spread about reclusive men my age. The things that people say! Just listen to the crap they talk about other people. Are they so much more scrupulous when they talk about you?
Instead of accepting that, I am writing this. I realize that what motivates most other writers in the world is the desire to have control over their obituary.
The other facts, then. We married off-island, in Las Vegas — her choice, and the day she came off the payroll, Nhu revealed a new side of herself, her love for gambling and her winner’s instinct for numbers. She won at blackjack, she knew when to double down or fold, she had a knack for remembering cards that had been played, she knew how to wait, when to collect her winnings, and when to quit. She claimed gambling was like fishing. I did not see that at all, which was probably why I was unlucky at both.
But I was lucky in having her.
She said, “I way you!”
“You might have had a long wait.”
She said that she had decided upon me early on, and that if I had not acted, she would simply have worked for me, whatever happened; no one else would do. All this was in her mind. The plan was fully formed as an intention, but she could not presume; it was for me to make the first move.
No long after that, I was diagnosed with all sorts of ailments — macular degeneration in one eye, cataract in the other, a bad knee — requiring surgery. Ringing in the ears. I was forgetful. Fishing for a box of cookies on a top shelf, I slipped off the chair and broke my collarbone. I was falling apart. Nhu was in great shape, still smoking, working every day to keep the house spotless, fishing now and then.
This is the life I dreamed of. I am ill, but bearably so. I am mild. She runs the house, she runs me. She is wiser, more experienced, shrewder. When we go fishing I steer the boat, she fishes and determines the route, the speed, the duration. I am her servant. It is what I want.
We seldom go out. We see no one. We phone for groceries now. We might take the boat for a run over to Edgartown on a calm day with a fair tide, or even to the Cape. But the rest of the time we live behind our hedge in the huge house I built for her on the Neck.
She will outlive me. She will continue in this house as the Junk Man’s widow. And I will rest easy knowing that long after I am gone, people just off the ferry will look east and, seeing our house, will make faces and say in shock, “What the hell’s that?” It is a symbol of our love.
Heartache
MOST OF THE still-intact small towns of the Deep South have a local diner, brimming with the tang of hot fat, where everyone is welcome. Good manners prevail, the mood is cheerful. Unless they’re saying grace, people look up from their food when someone enters. There might be a framed Bible verse on the wall or printed at the top of the sticky menu.
Louleen’s, in Peavy, Alabama, was one. I took the writer Kate Collier Delombre there for lunch two days in a row. Her lovely old house was outside the town. On the first day she said to me, “I have a heartache,” and on the second day, at my urging, she explained it, softly, with the fastidious pauses I’d found in her writing. She finished when we finished the meal. Perta Mae, her driver and housekeeper, listened with her head bowed over her plate.
“I wish I knew what to do.”
“Write it,” I said. “If you make it a story, you’ll ease your pain.”
“I’m too old for a long story.” She was a month shy of eighty-nine. She was fully alert, not sick but aged, small, fragile, easily wearied. Yet she was immortal-looking, with the mummified features you see in the very old, giving her the dusty glow of an idol, and still with an appetite for catfish.
“It’s been a furtive life,” she said, with the bird claw of her hand resting on her throat. Futtive and futtilize were words she made her own. “How did I manage all those years alone? People don’t ask. Twenty-eight stories published, and my memoir. So many stories started and put aside. The magic of getting it right — bliss for me, but who cares?”
“I do,” I said, and Perta Mae nodded, still chewing.
“Peavy people see an old white woman in a town of young blacks. I’m the minority now. They look at me with hatred. And why? In the secret history of the South we’re all related, by some ancient concubinage, persisting to the present. My work saved me. My work and Perta Mae. What makes me happy is my writing, like praying used to. I am speaking to readers as I speak to you. Readers listen, no one else does.”
Six weeks later I got a call from Perta Mae. “Miss Kitty,” and she swallowed, then a whisper, a sigh, “she pass.” I remembered how she’d lain her fingers on the back of Kate’s bird claw hand, black on white, to steady the menu. “Her heart give out.”
I asked Perta Mae whether Miss Kitty had done any writing in those weeks. She said no, just suffering. She invited me to visit. There was no story. The heartache was mine now, an obligation unfulfilled, mine to complete, or else to suffer.
Kate had adored her son, Jack, the more so because he was all she had; she’d been widowed when she was thirty and her son was five. He was Jack Delombre Junior, adopted in the second year of her marriage when her husband confessed (tears, his face in shadow) he could not father a child. He begged her to understand. His confiding this was a burden, but the appearance of Jack Junior crowded out the secret. Her husband was delighted when they saw this beautiful boy, who’d been put up for adoption by an unwed mother in the nearby town of Cow Creek.
Jack Senior was an attorney in Peavy. He was balding in his twenties, he looked old at thirty. He was a frail man, even sickly, ill with anemia, needing transfusions. Kate, sensitive to words, recalled “blood disease” and “his blood’s not strong,” and when he died, the doctor’s explanation: “a silent stroke.”
The child took his place as her companion until, at the age of twenty-six, he met and fell in love with Brenda Palmer, from Chattanooga. An intruder, so she seemed to Kate in the beginning, a stranger in a culture where an outsider with different ideas is taken to be an agitator.
In her solitude — Jack Junior soon married — Kate began to write stories. Writing gave her a purpose, made the day matter, and helped her to see. People from Peavy spoke through her stories, and local incidents were reshaped in them, the new tensions too, the way the balance of power had shifted from white to black, the whites feeling powerless and unappreciated, unremembered or wrongly remembered. In one story an old woman like Kate cannot understand directions, because the familiar streets have been renamed. She knew Dr. King, but who was Matthew Henson and who was Denmark Vesey?
Alabamans bring presents when they visit, a bottle of blueberry wine or homemade cookies or pound cake. On her few visits Brenda brought nothing, and Kate wanted to ask, “Is that usual in Chattanooga?” But Brenda glanced at her as though Kate had done something wrong, and Kate recognized an attitude toward blacks in the squint she gave Perta Mae.
The Brenda visits diminished, and then on the few that occurred she was late, which seemed more insulting than her not showing up at all. Was it resentment or disapproval? She never smiled. Nervy people have no sense of humor. She blinked a lot. At last Brenda stopped coming, and Jack Junior’s visits became less frequent.