“I think my mother is home,” my hostess announces. She races into the living room as if we were adolescents who had been surprised necking when we were supposed to be doing our homework. I stand up. Since this conversation isn’t going anywhere, I might as well meet the family. As I follow Leigh into the living room, I hear a buzz of angry words. Apparently, her mother had agreed to be out of the house and has returned home sooner than expected.
As it develops, Mrs. Norman is a friendlier, more vulnerable version of her daughter. Granted, she could lose twenty pounds (I could stand to knock off about ten myself), but the beauty is still there thirty years later in her face even if concealed a bit by the beginnings of an extra chin.
“I’m Pearl Norman,” she gushes.
“So glad to meet you, Mr. Page. I hope you can help us.”
I take her moist hand, feeling there is something deeply familiar about this woman.
“I would very much like to,” I say, glancing at Leigh, whose expression seems to evidence a slight distaste for her mother’s effusiveness.
“This has been the most horrible six months in our lives!” Mrs. Norman wails.
“Why, Leigh’s never harmed a fly!”
“Mother,” Leigh mutters, loud enough to be heard, “how do you know?”
Mrs. Norman, whose bulk is well packaged (I imagine an oldfashioned girdle squeezing and firming her soft flesh), positively gasps at such impudence, as tears form in her heavily made-up eyes.
“You’re our daughter, that’s how!”
Embarrassed for her mother, Leigh laughs, but the sound coming from her mouth is sour and derisive, as if maybe her mother doesn’t know her very well. Though I haven’t yet met Shane Norman, I surmise that Leigh must be her father’s daughter in temperament. Pearl Norman reminds me of a woman of an increasingly by gone era the ineffectual, weak Southern belle who flutters her hands helplessly and expects a man to save the day. She is a bit of an actress but such a familiar one from my past that I feel right at home with her. She is also drunk, unless I am totally misreading the signs.
Like any small community, my hometown of Bear Creek had its share of alcoholics, male and female, who went through most days pleasantly (or not so pleasantly) sloshed. She is not offensive; in fact, she is much more pleasant than her daughter, who is plainly distressed at her mother’s condition.
Leigh forces a smile.
“I’ll call you later in the week, and we’ll set another time.”
I’m being needlessly run off. Pearl Norman would stuff a bale of cotton in her ears if I asked her to.
“When does your father get back in town?” I ask, standing at the door like a suitor who doesn’t want to leave. Maybe the old man can shed some light on his daughter. According to Bracken, I won’t understand Leigh until I talk to him, anyway.
Halfway across die room, where she is lurking as if she knows she will draw a reprimand if she comes too close, Mrs. Norman pipes up, “My husband gets in day after tomorrow.”
“Where is he?” I ask her, unwilling to trust her daughter even for a single fact.
“Peru,” Mrs. Norman calls, edging closer despite the dark looks coming from her daughter.
“He and about forty members of Christian Life have been there for a week assembling a prefabricated health clinic.”
At the mention of Latin America’s most troubled country, I feel a grudging respect for the first time for Shane Norman. With the Maoist Shining Path revolutionaries assassinating thousands of Peruvians, I think I’d send a CARE package instead. My own days in the Peace Corps in Colombia convinced me that politics in South America is truly a life-and-death matter.
“Would you ask him to call me?” I say to Mrs. Norman, who has begun to remind me of the actress who played Aunt Bee on the old Andy Griffith show. Her voice is all quivery and anxious but full of goodwill and probably gin. No mother and daughter could be less alike. What I had interpreted as resigned hopelessness seems almost like hostility in light of Leigh’s attitude around her mother.
“Certainly,” she says, gratefully coming to the door like a forlorn puppy being punished for shitting on the rug.
Leigh all but rolls her eyes back in her head.
“Daddy doesn’t know anything. Mother,” she says.
“Mr.
Bracken has talked to him half a dozen times already.
You know how busy he is right after he gets back from a mission.”
Now that she is standing next to me, mrs. Norman’s perfume, suggestive of lilacs, overpowers the molecules between us.
“This is your life at stake!” she says, her voice trembling at the indignity of her daughter’s apparent indifference.
“Of course he’ll call you. He’ll be back to preach this Sunday, and I’ll make sure he calls you Monday. I’d like to talk to you, too.”
Grateful for any cooperation in this case, I smile at mrs. Norman. Drunk or not, she is the kind of mother who would stick pins in a voodoo doll if she were asked. To her, Christianity, as it surely is to many of its adherents, may be like medicine. If it doesn’t cure, I doubt if she would be averse to trying another prescription, preferably one with a little alcohol in it. A practical people, most Americans demand results from their dogma. I drive back downtown, wishing I were defending the mother instead of the daughter.
4
“Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb I wait in front of the mirror in the living room. I am standing alongside Sarah, knotting my tie as she applies her lip stick.
“Don’t make fun,” she says crossly, her lips flat against her teeth.
“It’s probably a lot more interesting than Mass.”
Either my shirt is shrinking, or my neck is growing.
I tighten the noose around my neck, dismayed by the turkey wattle I have created above my collar. The worry lines in my forehead, I tell myself, are a sign of character; my neck, increasingly a road map of cross-stitches to nowhere, is devoid of such nobility. I need to break down and buy some new shirts before I strangle myself.
I probably deprive myself of ten I.Q. points every time I fasten the top button.
“I’m just reciting from “General William Booth Enters into Heaven.” I can’t shake the feeling we’re going to an oldfashioned revival meeting.”
Sarah frowns, uncertain whether I am serious. When I came home for the summer after my freshman year at Subiaco, a Catholic boarding school in northwestern Arkansas, my older sister, Marty, went around the house reciting Vachel Lindsay’s poetry untH I learned k my self. Sarah probably thinks Vachel Lindsay is a rock group. Odd bits of my memory surface from time to time like debris washed onto a largely barren reef.
Sarah pats her hair.
“Let’s go. I don’t want to be late.”
I goose-step out the door, leaving Woogie to wonder what is going on. I’m not supposed to be leaving the house on a Sunday morning unless it is with a tennis racket in my hand.
“With a cast in the thousands,” I say, gulping in the perfect spring day, “I doubt if they’ll stop the service and hoot at us.”
Heading for the driver’s side, Sarah explains, “I don’t want to have to sit in the front row.”
Inside the Blazer, I hand her the keys.
“Me neither.
They’ll probably be able to tell we’re Catholics and make us stand up and denounce the Pope.” Sarah must feel some guilt or maybe is nervous. Do they wave their arms and speak in tongues? Full immersion for baptisms? We have been remarkably sheltered from the peculiarities of other faiths. I feel a little nervous myself.
Rainey is not reassuring when we pick her up.
“Wait and see,” she says, grinning, when I ask her what to expect She looks great in a peach sweater over a blue skirt, pearls, and heels, dressed up in a way I don’t usually see.
“They have these giant spotlights in the ceiling that crisscross the congregation looking for people who’ve been identified as sinners. I’ve told ‘em your dad’s coming,” she tells Sarah.