Leila’s mother.
To explain Leila, just to talk about her at all, means going back beyond my own knowledge, even beyond that mother, for Leila had a past, as Southerners can and Westerners cannot. But Leila, even more than most of us.
Leila Dolores Beaumont Thurston Stark. Born of her mother’s line to a repeatedly vanquished heritage, Leila’s family was the paradigm (to my firsthand knowledge) of Gothic ancestry. For I knew, in synoptic telling form, the sequential defeats of her perishable forebears; nor ever thought to question them, though outlanders (I realized) suspected the stories were only anecdotes told to comply with their preconceptions about crazy Southerners.
These were Slufords.
Arvid Andrew Sluford. Her great-great-grandfather. The first, to our factual certainty, of her traceable ancestors. Mistakenly shot for a Union scout while, without prior announcement or permission, borrowing C.S.A. rations from a neighbor’s tent outside Manassas.
His son Buford (Buford Sluford, out of his father’s rhythmic instinct). Who drowned in the big pond in which he was convinced (by his careful reading of the one letter his father, Private A.A. Sluford, sent home—in which he emphasized wishing he could see the old pond again) that, before his departure for the War of the Confederacy, his father had sunk his mother’s silver candlesticks and some ready cash in gold.
Buford had been right, not about the whereabouts of the cache, but about the impulse to conceal treasure. For they found, while digging his (the son’s) grave—having, the next morning, fished him out of the pond where he had drowned while seeking the gold—a buried burlap sack, repository of more valuables than even Buford had predicted.
Enough to enable his sole son and recipient of his posthumous, or rather humus, estate, Kurbee Sluford, to implement a vision. Which he did, following it out of the scrub mountains to a small rural village in the south piedmont of North Carolina.
Kurbee Sluford. Whose dream was one of environmental pragmatism, whereby the two Carolinian contributions to the world market, the produce of alternating growth in the hard red soil, fused their separateness in an epiphanic vision granted to Kurbee. He began to manufacture cigarettes of 40 percent tobacco and 60 percent cotton. His brand, King Cobacco, was undestined, however, to rival Bull Durham. Unfortunately, no matter whether the leaves and bulbs were joined in the making or were grafted upon each other growing, people simply failed to take to the taste.
In his disappointment, he married the heiress to twelve acres of mixed vegetables, Leila Rickey.
Leila Rickey Sluford. Our Leila’s grandmother and namegiver. Herself, like her husband Kurbee, a visionary, but her epiphanies increasingly sky rather than earthbound. She cared as little for the grafting of King Cobacco as the lilies reportedly care about their raiments.
The first Leila had not always been so celestial. But she had always believed in Truth, and had an awesome faith in the hierophantic powers of language to articulate that truth, even in fact to call it into being. When she was a child, this faith rested, without sophistication, in her persistent literalization of other people’s metaphoric communications. So profound was her belief in the word, indeed, that when her mother found their dog gobbling up an unguarded side of bacon in the kitchen and said he ought to be hanged for all the mischief he’d caused, Leila knew as absolutely as St. Joan what she must do, and that afternoon her mother found the dog hanging by its leash from a barn rafter. Six months later, the family cat was drowned in a washtub out of the same conviction.
Ultimately, the Rickeys developed an almost Jesuitical care with the spoken word, watchfully avoiding hyperbolic throwaways like, “If we don’t get some rain soon, I swear I’d just as soon be dead.” But after an evangelist-inspired religious conversion at fifteen, words to Leila Rickey became The Word and Otherworldly, and the Rickeys sighed in relief for the continuation of their livestock as just that.
Once married to Kurbee, Leila now Sluford bore witness at each revival camp meeting and tent show that was reachable first by mule team, then by a Ford purchased from the canning of her inherited vegetables solely to serve as her chariot to the house of the Lord. Returning home at night in the fervor still fevering her from the laying on of sanctified hands, she conceived seven children, bore them, and left them to Christ’s protection. Despite which, the three middle ones did not endure; dying respectively at five, three, and one. For some reason, the four others (two from each end of the sequence) insisted on surviving.
These were her firstborn son, Genesis, called Gene. Her firstborn daughter, Nadine. And her twins, Esther and Amanda (who was our Leila’s mother).
Nadine Sluford. Embittered from infancy, begrudging and begrudged. Who concluded in the crib that life did not intend to treat her well (which it didn’t) and who disliked it accordingly.
Amanda Sluford. Who was not so much angry as prudent, for she knew herself to be sane, and therefore an anomaly in her family. Whose sense, she was well aware, was simply a lucky fluke, whereby the few sane genes bequeathed her (perhaps by her paternal grandfather, Buford Sluford, who had at least realized the fact of the buried treasure, if not the site) had happened to come together in a rare stable combination. Prudent because she thought herself continually vulnerable to hereditary contagion and lived in a daily plan of quarantining her mind and body from the others until she could escape the farm and acquire the immunity of a college education.
Esther Sluford. Amanda’s ripened twin. Whose acknowledged good looks our own Leila had inherited, and whom Leila compared, after I had given her the book, to Faulkner’s Eula Varner, who was uneducable by lack of need and unambulatory by choice.
In all possible ways, Esther differed from her embryonic sibling. Amanda was for doing. Esther was, one supposed, for being. Not that she couldn’t, or refused to do. If they yelled into her dream and instructed her, pushed her in the direction of a chore, she would carry it out. But then she would sit back down in her rocking chair on the front porch, in which she swayed contentedly, stared at by passers-by, the subject of gaped double-takes from whichever male walked past the house for the first time. And thus the object of Nadine’s bitter chagrin, Amanda’s social indignation.
Nadine believed Esther would disgrace the family sooner or later simply by the fact of her physical attributes, and that belief, like most of Nadine’s other dour predictions, brought her, by its imminent fulfillment, Cassandra’s sullen comfort—the right to remark in the midst of catastrophe, “I told you so.”
It could be claimed, however, that Nadine’s phrasing of her prophecy was misleading in the sense that Esther (or more simply, Esther’s looks) proved to be only the inactive recipient of the disgracing action. Genesis, his mother’s first creation and her chosen favorite, was the causal agent. Or, rather, the predetermined proximity in time and space of how Esther looked and how Genesis responded.
Genesis Sluford. Shared with his mother that indomitable fevered thirst for ecstasy that comprised and defined Mrs. Sluford’s integrity. It was sublunary in him, however, and honed toward earthly milk and honey, of which Genesis realized (in his congenitally granted epiphanic moment) that his then fifteen-year-old sister, Esther, was the true incarnation.
He made no plans; he just believed that he knew where the incarnate godhead lay. This certainty grew upon him for the full fasting year of his novitiate, through which his mother coddled with sugared treats, this chosen of her brood; and during which Esther (allowing fried pork rinds to dissolve in her mouth) ripened further on the front porch, swaying in her chair.
Then the moment that came to Saul on the road to Damascus came to Genesis. One July evening, sent on a chore to the barn, he found Esther there lying drowsed on a hay rick, three apple cores beside her, for she had been directed some hours previously to bring back a basket of apples to the kitchen. Esther was not sullen or uncooperative; she would go if asked and do if watched. Otherwise she simply came to a stop, being unable to retain instructions in any mechanism of memory, and waited with a somnolent patience until retrieved by a member of the family.
When he saw her there, Genesis knew himself ready for union with the host, and rushing to the fragrant golden altar with as much certainty as his mother had swooned to the platform of a revival tent, he reached for the wafers of that spirit-containing flesh, grabbed the chalice, and gulped it down. His capacity to find the actualized objective correlative (Esther) to fit the symbol (the host of the Lord) was yet another of the mother’s gifts to her son. This particular act, however, was a pure apostasy, for Mrs. Sluford had given Genesis a strictly Protestant upbringing, and it had been over this very issue of transubstantiation that his ancestors had broken with the Pope centuries ago.
Esther, the manna in question, had not been made wise by the apples in her womb, but somehow this assault had at least brought her to the realization that she had a self to be assaulted. And she spoke out of that knowledge. And she began to scream, “SSSS-STAUUPPIT, GENE, STAUPPPP!” And she kept on.
Their mother, tired of holding supper for them, and coming out to select the apples herself, was given to witness this communion ritual at the instant of consummatio, whereupon without thought, she reached for the long-deceased Arvid Sluford’s rabbit gun hanging in the tack room and shot the communicant. With which salvo, she fired Genesis out of temporal bliss and into eternal, so that he died unabused of joyful belief.
Later opinions differed as to Mrs. Sluford’s motivations. Most people believed that she had failed to recognize her son and had maternally shot a presumed intruder. A few (Nadine) thought, quite in opposition, that Mrs. Sluford had not failed to recognize her son and had jealously shot a betrayer. Those who had known her as a child (the few surviving Rickeys) wondered whether there had been time or opportunity for anyone in the vicinity to have said to her, “The simple truth is any boy who would defile his own sister like that ought to be shot!”
Unfortunately, Mrs. Sluford’s own comments were not available accessories to clarification, for while she spoke a lot afterward, she spoke in tongues unintelligible to the secular from whom thereafter she wholly distinguished herself. As a matter of fact, from the instant of that shot (unpremeditated, but reverberate with the doomed mischance of all the Slufords), she never said another word in Southern Americanese or in any other branch of the IndoEuropean root.
Instead she rose from the dead (after pulling up his overalls, which she neatly buttoned) and ascended into garble.
Genesis was buried in the family plot without further unearthing of treasure deposits. A deputy sheriff accompanied the small funeral cortege led by the father, Kurbee Sluford (more bewildered now than by the failure of King Cobacco to become a household word), followed by the deflowered victim of outrage, Esther (possessed of a self but bereft of a brother), and by her two sisters, Nadine and Amanda—neither of whom expected to be able to hold up their heads anywhere in the county again. This expectation decisively grew in them when their mother rose to her feet midway through the Baptist minister’s eulogy (commending Genesis for his regular attendance at Sunday school), and insisted on delivering the funeral oration herself, perhaps (though no one present could translate it) taking as her text, “The mother gaveth, and the mother tooketh away.”
That in any case is what the deputy sheriff did with Mrs. Sluford. And after a long and presumably unsatisfying interrogation, she was charged by the state to be taken on the thirtieth day of July to the place of institution and there to be deranged in the head until she was dead. And they did, and she was.
Nadine, the following year, met and married, largely to punish him for being innately good-natured, a mild salesman of pharmaceutical supplies. They moved to Earlsford, North Carolina, where over the years, his disposition not so much darkened as contracted to two solaces, both of which he kept in the basement: a collection of pet rabbits and a collection of rye whiskey—the latter of which diminished as the former increased.
Esther, burdened with an identity now, relieved herself of its weight by bestowing it with developing frequency on the town’s yeomen, knights, and landed gentry. But her democratic nonchalance in this matter so appalled Amanda that she (Amanda) felt only relief when Esther ran off with a man who said he owned a nightclub in Baltimore and who promised to star Esther in his floor shows; relief even though she (Amanda) felt quite certain that the man’s terminology in regard to clubs and shows was highly euphemistic.
Amanda, valedictorian of fourteen graduating seniors, was awarded an Elks’ scholarship entitling her to study home economics at the state agricultural college, accepted it, took the family’s sole remaining suitcase (her mother, Nadine, and most recently Esther had made use of the other three), and telling her father to use his head for a change, left home.
She studied with diligence and prospered in knowledge, worked as a waitress, made her own clothes, kept herself aloof from the frivolities of her peers, and in her second year received a cable from her mother’s sister:
COME HOME. YOUR PAPA’S TROUBLES ARE OVER. CAUGHT IN TOBACCO MACHINE. HOPE AND PRAY HE DIDN’T SUFFER LONG. GONE TO HIS MAKER. ALL SYMPATHY IN HOUR OF LOSS. YOUR AUNT, LUCEEN.
But now, just when one would think she had escaped infection (by the death, incarceration, or departure of all her blood except Nadine—least likely to mortify her), Amanda herself came down with the Rickey-Sluford fever for ecstasy which she had so assiduously avoided for nineteen prudent years. She fell in love.
Brian Beaumont was a senior and now at his sixth college in seven years. He might actually have graduated this time had events gone otherwise, for he was inherently a bright young man, and now he had Amanda to settle him, encourage him to attend a few of the more important classes, write for him on time the papers he undoubtedly would have eventually gotten around to himself. More than quick, Brian was handsome. Blond, but unlike all the Slufords except Esther, not the bleached eyes and skin of the paradigmatic southern towhead; no, Brian sparkled with bright northwestern blondness. Someone had told him once that he resembled F. Scott Fitzgerald, and from then on, he modeled his appearance, as well as his drinking problem, on the analogy. However, unlike the writer, Brian never suffered a moment’s remorse—not that anyone ever heard of or saw, at least. He was always joking, laughing, talking in a patter of bright, quick sparkle.
Amanda had erected protective walls so far outside herself that, never expecting anyone to smile his way inside her defenses (nor anticipating her own vulnerabilities), she had planned no tactics for battle within the fortress. Outmaneuvered by Brian’s surprise assault on her heart, or whatever muscles, nerves, chemistry she preferred to think it, she managed only to insist on a ceremony with a South Carolina justice of the peace the afternoon prior to her final capitulation. That in itself was no slight achievement for one of her youth and inexperience.
But it ultimately proved a Pyrrhic victory, this through no fault of Amanda’s tactics, but as the result of a technicality: a prior, uncanceled marriage of Brian’s at an earlier university insisted on by an earlier young woman strategist. This very important information Amanda did not even receive until she might have predicted it anyhow, being an authority by then on the subject of Brian Beaumont’s perfidies. Which misdeeds included impregnating Amanda and leaving seven months later unencumbered by either diploma or his heavily laden illegal bride.
Amanda, despite having suffered these assaults upon her dignity, reasoned that Brian’s misconduct resulted purely from insanity (a disease she knew to be prevalent) and that steps had to be taken by someone responsible, i.e., herself. Not steps to recover Brian (whom she dismissed as one would a lapsed illness), but steps to insure her own diploma, that certificate of immunization she had stupidly almost forfeited.
Learning Brian’s father’s address from an unopened letter in his dresser, she wrote to the elder Mr. Beaumont, who immediately took a train from St. Paul, Minnesota, all the way to her side, full of indignation at his son (whom they later learned had traveled overseas courtesy of the Canadian Air Force) and full of warm support for his new daughter-in-law. Mr. Beaumont was a widower, lonely and alone, except for his housekeeper. Amanda would come and live with him. So two months later, our Leila was born, not in the South at all, but among the alien corn and wheat of her alien father’s fatherland.
Six months after Leila’s birth, Mrs. Amanda Beaumont (as she preferred to call herself) informed her husband’s (as she preferred to call him) father that she was returning to school and that, in all justice, he should meet the costs, since had he not been initially and directly responsible for the mendacious Brian’s existence, she never would have lost her Elks’ scholarship in the first place.
He agreed. And, having loved Leila before she was born and knowing himself enthralled once he held her in the expansive crook of his arm, he also agreed—more than willingly—to keep the child. For it was clear that Amanda would not be able to manage a bachelor of arts hood and motherhood simultaneously.
In fact, in his efforts to make things right, Mr. Beaumont went so far as to marry his housekeeper, and Leila lived for six years in St. Paul, Minnesota, believing this quickly assembled and adoring elderly couple to be her mother and father.
Meanwhile Amanda graduated, received a small sum from her mother’s death, bought a car, and drove it to Norfolk, Virginia, where she took a position as the purchasing agent for a V.A. hospital. There the fatal genes of Gene and the other, as she called them, fools of her bloodline caught up with her again. She met a man.
Jerry Thurston, an outpatient at the hospital, was suffering from periodic arthritis. The result, he told her, of seventy-four hours in the North Sea, where he had been shot out of his carrier. This ordeal had been followed by two years in a damp P.O.W. camp.
Thurston was dark, quiet, and without sparkle. Amanda at least knew enough not to repeat an identical mistake. He was an older man, thirty-eight. He told her he was on the verge of several million-dollar real estate deals in Daytona, Florida. How could she know otherwise, having only her agricultural college knowledge, which had little to say about the economics of speculative magnates? She had only been out of her native state twice in her life prior to coming to Norfolk: once, to the superfluous justice of the peace in South Carolina, and once, pregnant to St. Paul. How could she judge such possibilities? She had only her rural world’s myth that Florida was a magically rich place. So she believed him. So she married him.
Mr. Thurston’s enterprises remained on the verge as long as Amanda knew him. And she (who believed so firmly that education was the key to safety) was the victim again of lack of knowledge. Imagine, then, her deepened sense of injustice when she subsequently discovered that Jerry Thurston, like the distant Brian before him, was already married. To a Florida live bait stand owner. It really was enough to give Amanda Nadine’s gloomy attitude toward life to learn that she, so humble a supplicant to respectability, should find always a bigamist, never a groom. Her single consolation was that no one need ever know of her unsanctified status, not even Nadine: in fact, especially not Nadine. The world, Amanda discovered, asked for certificates less often than she had anticipated, though—just in case—she still kept her high school and college diplomas and both her marriage certificates (which appeared as substantial and proper as anyone could ever ask of pieces of paper) in her top dresser drawer, along with her savings account book.
Then Mrs. Amanda Thurston (as she preferred to call herself now) journeyed to St. Paul, and to the bewilderment of the happy family there, claimed her six-year-old child. She would soon have a home for Leila, she announced, a home with a daddy in Daytona Beach, Florida. Leila belonged to her, she told the elderly Beaumont couple, she had never signed any documents, as they well knew, renouncing her legal rights. And they would have to accept that, because should they try to prove otherwise, she would be forced to go to court, which would of course be a traumatic experience for the child. Whom, she added, Mr. Beaumont had meanwhile spoiled rotten and allowed to practically ruin her teeth by a poorly balanced diet.
Mr. Beaumont was too old, too mild to fight. He acquiesced in relinquishment, yielded to what he was told were the natural rights of the natural mother. He did not want Leila hurt by a battle. He let her go, settled his estate on her, and went back to being lonely and alone, except for his housekeeper. He died three years later.
In the few photographs of Leila taken after she left St. Paul, the surprised look of the unexpectedly betrayed (first seen by her grandfather when he told her that Mrs. Thurston was taking her to Norfolk, and later saddening my mother when Leila brought her the pictures to look at as they talked) never quite left her eyes. How, she wondered the rest of her childhood, did I fail him that he should let me go? In what way was I inadequate? What is the matter with me?
She watched Mrs. Thurston with a shy wariness through their first year together. And she tried, she told me, to construct hypotheses to explain these confusing adult relationships that apparently were always so abruptly to change her own life. Had Mrs. Thurston been married to her daddy (but no, he was her grandfather) and left him because she liked Mr. Thurston better? Mrs. Thurston was her mother, but Mr. Thurston told her distinctly he was not her father and never would be. She spent a great deal of her time with him, watching him, for while his deals were still on the verge, he stayed at home, dealing out poker hands, and Mrs. Thurston kept her job at the V.A. hospital. Leila knew that Mr. Thurston disliked her, although she did not know why he felt the way he did. Nor why he took such pleasure in inflicting pain on her by surreptitious pinches and slaps and jerks on her hair or arms when no one else was around. Or why he did things that he then told Mrs. Thurston Leila had done—things like scrawling on the walls with crayons or pulling the plants out of the window boxes. Leila was punished by her mother for these transgressions, and since she was punished further for saying that her stepfather was the real culprit, she stopped saying it, and accepted the unreason of life as it continued to be presented to her.
Finally, Mrs. Thurston discovered her husband’s sabotage for herself, once returning home early to find him wiping huge blobs of mud on her pink flowered rug. She sent him to a psychiatrist; by now she was a devout believer in the scientific efficacy of psychoanalysis practiced by diplomaed, and thus expensive, professionals. But Thurston having shown no diagnosable progress at the end of four years (the magnanimous time limit she had mentally set him), Amanda “divorced” him, which is to say evicted him, deprived him of room in which to play cards, and of board of far more snacks between meals than her salary could really afford. Snacks of kippered herring and sardines, whose cans he then used as ashtrays for his cigars and as repositories for the numerous orange peels he accumulated over a day of solitary seven-card stud.
Commanded to go, Thurston departed sorrowfully (after phoning in one last grocery order to tide him over on his long bus ride to Florida). His revealed destination, that magic land he was always to take her to, was by then a source of neither suspicion or regret to Amanda, for she had years ago developed so pervasive a cynical skepticism in regard to Florida land sites that she scarcely believed the state to exist physically at all, even as a swamp.
Thurston’s farewell speech to the ten-year-old Leila, plenished with tearful lamentations at their forced separation and with lofty advisory warnings concerning what her future would be like deprived of him, left Leila confused. He seemed so sorry to leave her that she wondered whether perhaps he had loved her all along and whether she had loved him too, and was sorry that he, like her grandfather, was to be removed from her life without satisfactory explanation. She missed him. She even wrote to him in Florida, wrote him for two years, though she never received a reply.
Mrs. Thurston (she kept his name and a framed photograph of her second “wedding” for future verification) then, in an economy measure, transported her goods, self, and Leila down to Earlsford, North Carolina, for there, Nadine and her husband, Ethan Clyde, the pharmaceutical supplies salesman, owned a small but respectable duplex. They lived in the larger half. Amanda would get a job and rent the other side. However, finding in Earlsford no immediate position commensurate with her qualifications (educational and experiential), she was forced to take a temporary post, which she held for the next twenty years, as assistant office manager of a dry cleaning plant, whereby, she reasoned, they would at least have freshly laundered clothes on their backs.
Leila loved her uncle Ethan. She spent her early evenings in the basement with him, where they fed lettuce to the rabbits, played checkers, and hid from the calls of Amanda and Nadine as long as they dared. There Leila attempted, though without much success, to substitute her affection for Ethan’s alcohol, for she knew that when he had drunk so many glasses of rye whiskey, which he kept in an old dismantled washing machine, the progressive results were fuzziness of speech, carelessness of movement, and the incurrence of his wife’s (her aunt’s) anger.
Leila loved but did not like her Aunt Nadine, whose housekeeping she was charged with doing as her contribution to the rent. Nadine, now quite plump, still begrudging, but unbegrudged (to her face at least) by Ethan, Amanda, and Leila, spent most of her day lying on her living room couch with her flowered heating pad, her boxes of dietetic candy, her collection of drugs for her nervous condition—supplied by her husband, the pharmaceutical supplies salesman—and her current copies of Redbook and Popular Medicine. When not reading, she watched the daytime television shows or listened to the radio serials, her favorites being those whose characters suffered year after year in a domino tumble of diseases. She would call to Leila to take time out from her dishwashing or dusting or vacuuming to come into the living room and change the stations for her.
Leila told the few of her school acquaintances with whom she forced herself to converse during recesses occasionally, (acquaintances, not friends, for she acknowledged none, nor was asked to do so), that her father had been lost in the war. Which was true in the most literal sense, since no one had ever heard of Brian Beaumont again. Then when her uncle Ethan from time to time began to stop by the school building to accompany Leila on the walk home to the duplex, she implied to these same few acquaintances that Mr. Ethan Clyde was the lost father previously referred to—now miraculously recovered and restored to the arms of his family. She told me she was unable to determine whether they received this new information with compliance, indifference, or skepticism. On the whole, she kept herself apart, in self-imposed isolation from the tribe, out of fear of hurt, out of self-deprecatory acceptance of her difference. The neat certitude with which her peers mentioned incontestable and confirmable fathers, mothers, grandparents, siblings, friends, possessions, skills, values, and preferences confused her and defined her only as alien.
So Leila’s childhood passed while she dreamed of an adolescence that must of necessity be an improvement. Her uncle Ethan died. She was not surprised. Since she had loved him, his departure was to her already an inevitability. Her Aunt Nadine sold the rabbits to a grocer, and in arbitrary memoriam, never again made use of the overhead lights. Instead she kept burning two electric lamps of pink flowered glass globes, which Leila was obliged to dust daily. The widow’s one other obsequy was biweekly attendance at the neighborhood Baptist church, which Amanda and Leila were therefore also pressed to frequent.
Then at fourteen, by the hormonal miracle of pubescence, Leila gained a sense of her, at least, external worth. She began in bodily form to resemble her personally unknown, but at home much discussed, Aunt Esther. At the same time, she began to command the attention not only of the male half of her peers, but of four-, five-, or even six-year male elders.
A motorcyclist (loosely associated with that awesome, distant structure, the senior high school) now substituted for her uncle Ethan and waited for her after the three o’clock bell. He was Link Richards, who, with one revolution of his Harley-Davidson, vanquished rivals before they even dared enter the ring, much less reach up to cuff his face with their gauntlets. Link was before his time in personal rebellion against the orthodoxy as to, for example, hair style, dress, and subservience to rules other than those that he himself formulated. He was the third person whom Leila had allowed herself to believe genuinely cared for her—the other two being her grandfather Beaumont and her uncle Ethan, both deceased. And so, in return for Link’s affection, she was more than willing to perform those at first inexplicable manual and oral rites that he asked of her, though she already knew instinctively not to mention them to the girls who were for the first time desirous of her company at lunch and on the playground, but who were (she also knew) banded in an unadmitted tribal hostility toward her, not selfhood perhaps, but body. Nor did she mention to them that Link came to perform the companionable rites on, for her, and that she came to enjoy, to desire them.
But eventually Link himself was routed from the victor’s circle by Leila’s need for acceptance inside the tribe’s citadel. He was, after all, an outlander, a barbarian. There were smoother, smaller gentlemen who sneered at his leather jacket and even at his most potent weapon, the chrome-gleaming motorcycle—which, after all, he couldn’t use to storm the bastions of clubs and cliques, nor to ride in triumph on around the gymnasium during the half-time of basketball games, nor during the intermission of proms.
And in the meanwhile, eleven years previously, my own life had come to Earlsford and adapted itself happily to furnishing its own niche as one of those same smoother gentlemen.
So on an October 7th, everything former and accumulative of Leila’s foundations (now fully hypothesized), beginning with her great-great-grandfather Arvid Andrew Sluford’s death by mistaken password, was ready to be joined to my foundations (ending with my mother’s return to Earlsford, her ancestors’ home, following a nine years’ Irish fling). Both our pasts had moved from their antipodes of origin and were now ready to be led inexorably by the chance impurposefulness of the gods to their inevitable conjunction.
On that day, I, hurrying from an eleventh-grade Latin class toward an American Literature class, saw Leila leaning over a water cooler in the high school corridor holding her blond hair back from the spigot with one hand, her notebook carved with innumerable initials in the other, wearing a red nylon sweater, a plaid skirt, and Dickey Brown’s, the fullback’s, going-steady ring fashionably beaten out of a new quarter.
And it took all that I have told (Buford’s drowning, the failure of King Cobacco, Esther’s burden of identity, the undisclosed marital status of Brian Beaumont and Jerry Thurston, the fall of Link Richards), and all that Leila told us of herself, and endlessly uncountable other decisions, coincidences, the probably infinite spinning tumbler of flukes, to bring Leila and myself to that water cooler at that moment.
And from there by more involutions and twined progressions out to a gray June morning in 1968 to find myself lying in a bed in Floren Park, Colorado, tapped on the shoulder by the four-year-old daughter of Leila Beaumont Thurston Stark (granddaughter of Boris Strovokov, great-great-great-granddaughter of Private A.A. Sluford, C.S.A.).
“Grandma’s upstairs,” Maisie said.
“Does she know I’m here?”
“She says you ought to get a job.”
The reason Mrs. Thurston had flown so unexpectedly to Colorado, when she did not trust the airlines and when, as she said, this trip had already cost her more than she could afford, was that she had some bad news to deliver and needed family to deliver it to. Her sister, Nadine, had departed this mortal life. And on her own prerogative, which was the worst part of the whole thing, as far as Amanda was concerned.
For Amanda was a Catholic now and knew, she informed us, that people had no right to fly in the face of the Higher Being by killing themselves because it was for Him to give and to take away, and not something for us to decide. According to her, the Sluford family had always displayed a careless disregard of the privileges of the One Above, as evidenced by their willful insistence on disposing of themselves and their kin whenever and however they pleased. The position of the Church regarding such behavior was quite explicit and not subject to interpretation.
Ironically, it was Nadine herself who had led Amanda down the road to Rome, making her the first Sluford to travel that way since the Reformation. For Amanda had intensely disliked being obliged to walk her sister up to attend the Baptist church twice a week, as Nadine felt compelled to do in the post–Ethan Clyde days. She, Amanda, found the parishioners there so déclassé that, as she said, she frankly would be surprised if the minister himself had a college degree, much less there being another in the whole congregation besides her own.
After a particularly benighted Sunday school class in which someone suggested that there was no such thing as mental illness, just devils, Amanda quit the flock. Such ignorance was intolerable to one who believed as strongly as she did in the reality of insanity.
After that, she began taking lessons from one of the priests at the single Catholic church in Earlsford—a handsome modern structure nearly half-filled when every Catholic in the county, plus several dozen curiosity seekers attended Mass together. So they were pleased to receive Mrs. Thurston into their fold. And she was pleased with them. They knew how to do things. Properly. They were gentlemen. Why, her instructor knew Latin and three other foreign languages. She could talk to him. It wasn’t like being with those Baptists who were downright illiterate, or might as well be, for all they ever got out of a book. Amanda, on the other hand, had last year read a library book every three weeks of her life, including the complete works of Mr. Thomas Costain.
So she often invited this priest to dinner and was, in general, so willing to bestow attention on him that, as Leila told me, the poor man would cut across the lawn to the rectory whenever he saw Amanda heading down the steps toward him after Mass. It was he who had recommended St. Lucy of the Pines for Leila’s education and salvation for me.
Thus, because of her new faith and theories, Amanda found Nadine’s suicide particularly upsetting. But by paying a late evening visit to the rectory after she found the body and by making six subsequent phone calls to the priest, she came to feel a little better. She told us why at breakfast the morning after her arrival in Floren Park.
The priest, a Father McGray, had given her the hope that her sister might have been insane. Amanda had interjected at once that such had been her suspicion for some time. Now, suicide, if deliberately chosen of one’s own free will, was a mortal sin. But insane people could not be held morally responsible for their actions since they lacked the free will to choose good or evil. This possible loophole provoked a mixed reaction in Amanda. On the one hand, it was comforting to think that as a result of their quite evident insanity, her mother, father, brother Genesis, sister Nadine, and brother-in-law Ethan were now in heaven, where they had been, or eventually would be, joined by her husbands Brian Beaumont and Jerry Thurston and by her sister Esther. On the other hand, she rather resented it that everything, even heaven, came so easily to lunatics when she had to bear all the heavy responsibilities that went along with being sane.
Sitting there, I felt certain that Mrs. Thurston liked me as little now as she had the day six years ago when she came across that sonnet sequence I had written fully describing Leila’s earthly delights. Sending Leila to a Catholic boarding school had cost her more than she could afford, and I could tell that when she looked at me she saw the sum total of those expenses branded on my forehead. However, now she pretended that bygones were bygones and even told me not to think she held the past against me because I was only a child then and didn’t know what I was doing, whereas she was an adult and the guardian of her daughter’s soul, and so she had had to do what she’d done in order to save that child from her own foolishness. But despite these disclaimers, I knew that she wasn’t overjoyed to see me there. My suspicions were confirmed by a suggestion she made to me as we sat together that first morning. Or as I sat, and Mrs. Thurston scrubbed the table. She was thin, pale, blonde, and very, very thin.
“Devin, honey,” she said, “a young man like you, with a college education behind you, why, you ought to be out there seeing the world, not sitting in a little dinky place like Floren Park painting on play-acting sets. You ought to be doing something exciting. Why, like teaching in a war zone! Someplace like Vietnam, where things are happening to change the very world we live in. You know, I read where the government has special jobs for young people like yourself who want to do something to help the less-privileged little ones and give them an opportunity to better themselves and seek an education.”
I thanked Mrs. Thurston for this advice and kicked Leila under the table to keep her from laughing.
Leila did not seem unbearably upset about her aunt Nadine’s death, although she said she was sorry that any human being should apparently have been that unhappy.
Her mother explained that Aunt Nadine had bequeathed Leila the two pink flowered glass globe lamps that she had for many years required her to dust daily. Mrs. Thurston had brought them out on the plane wrapped in newspapers in a big cardboard box. Laughing, Leila placed the lamps on the mantelpiece and said she would enjoy watching them getting filthy dirty. She gave me the newspapers, as I was eager to have some recent copies of the Earlsford Herald to read; I thought I might find a wedding picture of Jardin in one of them.
“Well, Leila darling,” Mrs. Thurston said as she shifted one of the vases on the shelf to make them perfectly equidistant, “it’s more than Nadine left to me, her only living blood relation.”
Leila stopped stirring the giant pot of leftover chili still simmering on the stove for our supper.
“What about Esther?” she asked her mother. For though she had never met her other aunt, Leila still felt a deep empathy with and a strong affection for her. From periodic Christmas cards, they knew that Esther had traveled from Baltimore and the “night club” to St. Louis to New Orleans to New York, where she was presumed to be living with a man in express violation of the Holy Scriptures as well as the city ordinances.
Nadine’s husband, Ethan, had in fact written to Esther once and told her that she had a niece. After that, she began sending Leila presents—a gaudy tea set, a stuffed bear, a fake ermine muff. And though Leila was fifteen when these gifts started arriving, so that the red kimono fit the bear instead of her, she treasured each present as a mystic bond between herself and the unmet aunt. She kept them all with her. The bear and tea set were now in Maisie’s room.
“No, darling,” Mrs. Thurston replied in her slow, precise, imperturbable southern accent. “We ass-ume your aunt Esther is still alive. If you can call the way she has chosen to con-duct herself leading a human life.”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake, Mother,” Leila said as she sat down, threw her feet up on the table, and lit a cigarette.
“Now, Leila Stark, I have asked you many times not to use that manner of language with your mother. And I think if you will analyze your subconscious motivations, you will have to admit that you only say such things just to shock people.”
Here she paused to smile at the rest of us and to direct a remark to Nathan Wolfstein. His attention at the time was more fully focused on efforts to move his cup of coffee and bourbon from its saucer to his mouth than on listening to Mrs. Thurston’s conversation, but she had isolated him as the only other adult available to her, and went right on.
“You know how it is,” she reminded him. “Young people have to de-fy the teachings of their elders so they can establish their own i-denti-ties. They have to think simply nothing at all of everything we ever said to them, in-cluding the importance of civilized manners!”
With that, she daintily shoved Leila’s feet off the table, and removing the cigarette from her daughter’s mouth, soaked it under the sink faucet and dropped it in the trash can.