The dot of seven, he had said. Valerie Whitmire looked at her watch. 7:09, it said, and no Norman Laney. But when she looked back up, it was to see his prodigious face plastered against the glass, peering in at her and grinning hugely. Valerie found herself grinning back and waving eagerly, her heart leaping strangely within her as if it were the love of her life planning to join her, rather than this freak of nature, this human leviathan lolloping toward her. But in fact he was a love of her life, and she felt lucky to be sitting at the table that was his destination for the evening.
It was taking him a while to reach it, however, because he seemed to know someone at every table, and with Norman, there was no such thing as a casual greeting. For one thing, his very size prevented it. He had no way of slipping past anyone with a brief nod. When he came by, chairs had to be shifted, men had to stand up, and tables edged slightly this way or that. Norman knew how to revel in the commotion he caused whenever he entered a room. His preposterous fat was as good as celebrity, and just as effective as beauty. All heads turned in his direction; there was no way not to notice him. Female voices shrieked in delight and called out his name. His smile had a mega-wattage as outsized as he was while he shook hands with the men and embraced the women he knew at every table. Everything about him was outsized: his appetites, his laughter, his enjoyment. Larger than life, he filled up the room, and not just with his bulk, but with his enormous good cheer. He was an instant party in and of himself.
On this Thursday night, the restaurant had been half-empty, quiet and subdued when Valerie first came in, but when Norman arrived, the restaurant was suddenly crowded and loud, the air was instantly electrified with the excitement of something rare and wonderful. In a split second, his tremendous presence transformed the hush of a weeknight in a provincial city into the feverish mirth of a festive, gala occasion in a glittering world capital. By the end of the evening, anyone in the restaurant who had never before heard of Norman Laney would now know who he was.
Even when Norman finally reached her table, Valerie was obliged to share him there as well. After all, Norman Laney was a kind of public property, especially for the ladies. No sooner had he ordered his whiskey than these ladies came over to tell him the latest, ask him one more question, inquire after his mother, issue an invitation, or beg for a time to get together. Norman was the benevolent and magnificent king on his throne, holding court for adoring subjects who couldn’t wait to pay him homage.
“Naw, darlin’,” he drawled to one in the exaggerated Pratt City accent he sometimes reverted to. “I’m too old and too fat to spend one more summer of my life in a hell-hole like Montgomery. Never again!”
“But you were wonderful! Absolutely wonderful!”
“They just wanted my body!” (He had to wait for the giggles to subside.) “Falstaff is a role I was born to play!” he boomed in a voice loud enough to be heard all over the restaurant. “I’m glad I did it. I was happy to donate my carcass for such a good cause. And it was a privilege to be on stage with those other actors. The Alabama Shakespeare Festival really is one of the best in the country, and I was honored to be asked.” He rapped his knuckles on the table for emphasis. “But never again! One summer in Montgomery is all I can do, even for art and culture! Somebody else will have to do Part Two. No, this summer, I’m off to Europe!”
“I’m seeing her tomorrow night as a matter of fact,” he said to another in much more confidential tones. “I’m taking her to the March of Dimes gala.”
“You are? She’s going? How is she?”
“Fine, fine. I think it’s going to be an amicable divorce—best for everyone involved.” (This is the tack he would force Fee to take if it killed her.)
Only when the waiter materialized to take their order did the stream of visitors subside. It was a waiter unfamiliar with Norman Laney, and he made the mistake of pointing out the restaurant’s signature starter: grilled shrimp on a bed of garlic infused grits.
“Don’t dare talk to me about grits or green tomatoes!” Norman blustered in mock outrage. “If I want grits, I can fix ’em myself! Give me somethin’ I cain’t fix at home!”
Rapidly he scanned the menu while the waiter hovered in trepidation, unsure whether this mammoth of a man was genuinely irate or only pretending to be angry. Throughout the restaurant, diners were chuckling among themselves: Norman Laney was a one-man show.
“Foie gras!” he announced, just as the pioneering chef/owner of Birmingham’s premier (and only) fine dining establishment arrived at the table. With a nod, the chef dispatched his hapless waiter, who promptly scampered to one of his colleagues and begged him to take over the table.
Meanwhile, the chef was offering Norman a dish not on the evening’s menu, a spécialité prepared just for him—veal scallopine with red-eye gravy on a bed of wild rice flecked with kale and collards. It was that perfect marriage of haute French cuisine and down-home Southern cooking that was Frank Stitt’s brainchild and would make him famous one day, Norman had no doubt. He responded by showering the chef with his most effusive compliments and begging him to hang on, to give Birmingham a chance to catch up, become civilized and stop being barbarians who ate nothing but barbecue. In a way, he and Frank Stitt were engaged in the same important enterprise. Stitt was doing with food what Norman Laney was trying to do with his school, and that was, make an entire city GROW UP.
“If it weren’t for you, dear boy, we’d all be sitting in the country club trying to cut into some tough old T-bone and wondering how long Lula Pet’s ash was going to grow before it fell on her steak!”
Laughter came from several tables, especially those whose occupants had been at the club the previous evening and would be there tomorrow night, watching as Lula Petsinger’s cigarette ash littered the plate containing her uneaten steak. Lula and her husband Big Pet ate out every night at the Mountain Brook Country Club, except for Mondays when it was closed, and Lula never ate a single bite of the steak she invariably ordered. She still adhered to the debutante code of decades ago, which stipulated that a girl should never let her escort observe her eating with any appetite, or eating at all if she could help it. Apparently, Lula was afraid to break this rule although her current escort had also been her husband for at least forty years.
“Now, darlin’,” said Norman, scraping his chair noisily across the floor so that he was facing Valerie exclusively with his back to the rest of the restaurant, signaling the official end of the open audience with the king. As much as he worshipped Highlands, he couldn’t bear to watch the spectacle at the bar any more than he could tear his eyes away from it if facing that direction. The restaurant had only been open a year, and while it was definitely gaining patrons, those who came to sit at the gorgeous marble slab of the bar were the marginalized members of Mountain Brook. The divorced, the disgraced, the over-dressed and overly made-up who were obviously and desperately grasping for some quick escape or even redemption from the current failure of their lives. This evening there was a woman sitting at the bar whose plastic surgeon must have trained under Michelangelo: her breasts were literal monuments to the art of sculpture. Since Norman was a huge fan of Michelangelo’s work, he couldn’t help but be fascinated by the statuary now affixed to this woman’s chest. Obviously, no flimsy fragment of lingerie could be expected to support such massive stone cuttings, and she was obliged to rest them on the lip of the bar top. The man lighting her cigarette appeared to be debating whether he could cushion the blows life had recently dealt him in this woman’s hard bosom later on in the evening.
Nothing less than an entire soap opera unfolded every night at Highlands’ bar. Since Norman was also a huge fan of soap opera, the only way he could keep from watching it was to make it physically impossible to do so. Tonight especially, he had to turn his back on it and focus on the young woman in front of him, because his own life was in danger of turning into just such a soap opera.
Shaking out his napkin, he said, “Tell me why you’re available to have dinner with a fat old man like me.”
Valerie laughed, but Norman’s pale blue eyes were looking at her with genuine concern. She was touched.
“You’re going to start sounding like my mother,” she said, chuckling.
“You’re right. I am,” he retorted with good humor. “I kept her quiet through Duke and medical school, but now I’m ready to share her point of view. It’s time for you to make love and make babies!”
“Can’t do it alone,” she said cheerfully.
His eyes narrowed. “You’re not seeing anyone?”
She shook her head and took a sip of her drink.
“Hard to believe,” he muttered, rattling the ice in his glass.
“I’m fine,” she protested. “I don’t have time to meet anyone, and the clinic is so busy I wouldn’t have time for anybody I did meet.”
His eyes narrowed further and he leaned across the table. “Are you trying to tell me you don’t have time for a sex life?”
She blushed.
“If there’s anybody who’s in a position to know all the good reasons for not having a sex life, it’s me,” he announced, in a voice a shade too loud for Valerie’s comfort. (He was rarely content with an audience of one.) “You can tell me you don’t like it, you don’t want it, you don’t need it, or you can’t get it, but you cannot tell me you don’t have time for it. How old are you?” he said abruptly, knowing very well exactly how old she was. “Twenty-eight?”
“Thirty,” she said, blushing more deeply.
“Get busy,” he said, leaning back in his chair. “Love and work. Love and work.” He rapped his knuckles on the table. “You’ve got one; now go get the other.”
Valerie leaned forward to take a silent sip of her drink.
“Whatever else you can say about the man, he had that one right. It all boils down to love and work. You’ve got to have both.”
“So how’s your love life?” said Valerie, an impish twinkle in her eye.
“Oh, darling,” he said. “I have a great love life, because I’m in love with thousands of people. And you’re one of them. But I don’t have to explain why I’ll never go so far as to ask anyone else to join their life with my body. There’s hardly enough room in my life—not to mention my small apartment—for my own impossible self. You, on the other hand, need to get with it.”
“You can’t just go out and get a husband like you can a medical degree,” she said, defensively.
“Used to be the other way around,” he mused reflectively.
“Thank God for progress.”
“If you’re sitting here with me in ten years, I don’t know if you’ll call it progress,” he said. She was silent.
“There’s a handsome young teacher in my school I’d like you to meet,” he said on sudden inspiration. “This is his second year with us. Might be a bit younger than you, but not much.”
“What does he teach?”
“English,” said Norman, losing restraint and seizing the bread. “Seventh and eighth grade English. He’s leading the Reading Seminar too this year. I’ll tell you what.” He chewed thoughtfully.
“What?” she said.
“When the movie premiere’s in Birmingham, I’ll bring him along. You can meet him then.”
She neither assented nor demurred, but took the opportunity to change the subject.
“So how was Hollywood?” she said.
“Oh,” he said, suddenly bored. “Grand, I suppose.” He really did not want to get into his trip this evening. Normally, he could have regaled her through dinner with his Hollywood experience, but tonight he was not in the mood to alchemize the dross of his trip into narrative gold. The weekend in Hollywood had mainly been a disappointing anticlimax, and not simply because the movie itself turned out to be so bad. As far as his own role went, he was pleased with his performance and the editing of the scenes in which he appeared as a disruptive night-club patron who goes berserk when the stripper refuses to give him a lap-dance. He’d had fun filming his scenes a year ago, and that was that. There was really nothing else to tell. As far as being “in” a movie with Arnold Schwarzenegger: he had filmed no scenes with the star and barely even met him before he was whisked away in a limousine from the party after the premiere in California. This party he had looked so forward to was more about cocaine than conversation, and he was extremely sorry to see that Valerie’s cousin and his former pupil James—on whose book the movie was based—was as heavily into the cocaine as everyone else. It was not Norman’s scene.
“Since I was neither thin nor snorting cocaine,” he said to Valerie, “I had nothing in common with anyone there. L.A. really is the capital of the barbarians.”
Surprisingly, he had told her not the story of his trip, but the absolute truth of it, and she was more interested and impressed by this, he saw, than if he’d tried to dress it up for her. She really was a special creature, he thought. Ellis might not be good enough for her. But then, nobody would be. And she must get married. He would insist on that. Smart and successful as she was, there was something sad and defeated about her too, he thought. Was it simply the sadness of the unfertilized female? That could be part of it, he admitted, although there was something else as well. All that intelligence, all that education, all the hope and promise of a bright young life, and it all ended up inside the four walls of the examination rooms where she spent her days. Even though the work she did was necessary and important, even though the world needed good doctors, and God knows, the poor people of Alabama needed good doctors, it still didn’t seem like enough. Something was being squandered; something was being lost. What it was he couldn’t quite say, other than to point to his long-held belief that those who lived for Art and Culture had the greatest chance of fulfilling the best part of themselves.
“I can’t wait to hear what it is you couldn’t talk to me about on the telephone,” she was saying.
But just then their first course arrived, and wait she must, Norman insisted. He did not want to get into “all that” while trying to pay his respects to the glorious food in front of him.
“All that” had occurred two years ago, when one of his seniors, Alexandra Sanders, had appeared unexpectedly at the door of his office one afternoon just after the final bell, asking if she could speak to him privately. No sooner had she sat down than she burst into tears. Eventually he gathered that she was pregnant. At first he was flabbergasted: he would never have picked her as someone likely to engage in the kind of activity that could get a young girl pregnant. She was a special kind of student, a gifted musician, something of a prodigy with the cello, and a frequent stand-in with the Birmingham Symphony Orchestra. She attended all the rehearsals, took lessons and made decent grades in all her subjects at school. She was hoping for a spot at Juilliard, and had won an audition scheduled to take place next month, when she would fly to New York. Normally students with her kind of artistic ability attended the Alabama School of Fine Arts, but her mother was a friend of Norman Laney’s and also wanted to make sure her daughter had a well-rounded education.
“What do you want to do?” Norman had asked.
Still sobbing, she had shaken her head helplessly.
Norman had to think for a minute and meanwhile, found her a clean handkerchief from the supply in his drawer. He got up to give it to her and began pacing back and forth across the room while he continued to think.
“Let me put this another way,” he said finally, stopping to look at her. “Do you still want to go to Juilliard next year?”
She nodded through her tears and dabbed at her eyes with his handkerchief.
“I take it you don’t want your mother to handle it, or you wouldn’t have come to me in the first place,” he stated flatly.
She nodded again.
“Okay,” he said, moving back to his desk and pulling out his chair. “Here’s what’s going to happen. In a few days’ time, you will get a phone call from an alumnus of this school. She’s young; she’s a doctor. Her name is Valerie Whitmire. She’ll make arrangements to meet with you, and she’ll take it from there.”
The word abortion had never been uttered in his office. When he had called Valerie from the security of his own home, he had also avoided any use of that word and even steered clear of the concept itself. “What exactly do you want me to do?” Valerie had asked him. “That’s between you and Alexandra,” he had said. His fingerprints could not be found anywhere on the scene of this crime. Nevertheless, the truth of the matter was, he had arranged for one of his students to get an abortion. The procedure had been performed, Alexandra had been accepted at Juilliard, and had been flourishing there for the past two years.
He had believed any danger was long past. And after all, he had made no appointments at any abortion clinic; he had paid no money for a student at his school to get an abortion. He had never even said the word to anyone involved. And he was a good Catholic who technically did not believe in abortion. He did not know or want to know who the guy was, though he assumed it was one of the older musicians in the Symphony.
But if Alexandra had ever told her mother or the father of the child, and word had gotten out … there was at least one powerful (meaning extremely wealthy) member of the Board who would see it as his Christian duty to expel Norman Laney from the Garden of Eden and place him on the road to perdition. Or what if it was Alexandra’s mother who was furious?
Valerie was adamant that she had never breathed a word. She had not seen anyone she knew at the clinic. Planned Parenthood did not ask for identification, and Valerie had paid in cash. Most important, she was absolutely certain that Alexandra understood the need to protect those who had come to her rescue.
“Why is it an issue all of a sudden after all this time?” she wanted to know.
Norman had not decided whether to tell her, although if he were to tell anyone, it would be her. After all, it was the Whitmire family he had to thank for getting him a job in Birmingham all those years ago, when he’d been a tour guide leading a group of old ladies from Mountain Brook through Europe one summer. What began as a nice way to earn extra money and see Europe on his schoolteacher’s summer vacation ended up changing his life when the old ladies, especially Bella Whitmire, had fallen for him as if they were a group of schoolgirls and he was the handsome captain of the football team. In a way, this is how they made each other feel about themselves.
He got along wonderfully well with what the world called old ladies, not just because he lived with his mother and had daily practice, but because he did not make the usual mistake of assuming that just because they were old, they had no life or desire for life. People made similar assumptions about him all the time because of his obesity. Being fat was just like being old—you got written off. People assumed you lived in abeyance, beyond the parameters of normal existence. But he actually preferred old ladies and often found them much more fascinating than younger women, who tended to be caught up in husbands, children, lovers, divorces or affairs. Older women were no longer in thrall to their sexuality, and could discuss a concert or a play or the glories of Europe with enthusiasm equal to his own.
At the end of that first trip to Europe, Bella Whitmire had deplored his return to Pratt City, and began plotting to get him out. Bella wanted him not only for next summer’s tour; she wanted him at her parties. And—with her immense fortune and the influence that went along with it—if there was something Bella Whitmire wanted, she was usually able to get it. Not for nothing was she the principal benefactress of the private boys’ school which her grandson James was attending at the time. This school was originally founded as a segregationist academy for white students who lived in the Birmingham city limits rather than Mountain Brook, where there were no black people. Over the years this segregationist academy had not evolved much from its origins, except that it now attracted plenty of students from Mountain Brook because of the discipline it administered to unruly rich boys whose parents were often in Europe. Still, it was far better than the public high school where Norman taught in Pratt City. He knew his main chance when he saw it, and the school was quite happy to offer it. If he could handle those rough Pratt City kids, he might be able to work wonders with the spoiled Mountain Brook boys. He had certainly worked a miracle in his own life and that of his mother, who was happy to leave Pratt City although her other son remained as the manager of a rental furniture store.
No one in Mountain Brook had ever seen anything quite like Norman Laney before, and there were whispers at first. But there were two things Norman Laney would never be accused of being: one was a lap dog, the other was a pet poodle. And it would never occur to anyone in Mountain Brook to consider Norman Laney “a little mule,” although historically, the men like Norman’s father, grandfather and great-grandfather were the “little mules” who supplied the labor for the “Big Mules” of Birmingham’s iron and steel industries. Despite his origins, Norman had his own kind of claim on being called a “Big Mule.” When you weigh as much as he did, you were quite capable of holding your own, as he was fond of saying. Bella Whitmire might have gotten him in, but he was more than prepared to take it from there on his own. Perhaps the best way in which his fat had worked for him was to make him one-of-a-kind; people were instinctively drawn to the power of the original. If he was anything, he was an original. And if he could make it as a fey fat boy in Pratt City, Alabama, he could make it anywhere.
In less than a dozen years, Bella Whitmire was gone, and so was the boys’ academy, which decided to merge with its all-girls counterpart and form the Brook-Haven School. No one could predict what would come of this venture, and everyone was nervous about a two ton force meeting an immovable rock, about Norman Laney’s oil to Elizabeth Elder’s vinegar. But the school had succeeded beyond anyone’s hopes, including those of Norman Laney and Elizabeth Elder. Not only had they transformed an institution designed to keep a hidebound city mired in its dubious past: they were now using it to help transform that city itself.
It was an irony too great to be believed that a casual outsider like Tom Turbyfill would usurp their creation and exploit it for his own personal benefit with utter disregard for its importance to an entire community. But he was not yet ready to tell anyone other than Elizabeth, until he had a better idea of what he was up against and how he wanted to handle it. What was he was up against? What was being turned against him? What had he done?
“Is something wrong, Norman?” Valerie looked at him quizzically.
“Someone is trying to get rid of me,” he said.