Charleston Rowena Mudd

I think Murmur married Erik Nathanson because she went temporarily insane. It happens. Perfectly rational children become teenagers, and suddenly their genitals take over. And also, Murmur’s parents—while nice enough—never seemed to want her. Really. Once her stint as a child saint ended, life was back to Murmur and me, with her parents providing food and shelter and a minimum of interference. Maybe that’s what Erik provided: the interference she always craved. All I know for sure is that my sassy friend, who could spit in a snake’s eye and live to tell about it, folded like a Chinese fan every time he walked into a room.

Erik was a golfer who dabbled in law. His trust fund financed his undisciplined life in the courtroom, on the greens, and especially at the clubhouse. I was never a member of the country club, but word gets around: Erik dipped his stick all over town. His minor success as a lawyer was the fortunate result of his daddy being the past mayor and Erik being a charmer. Men liked him as much as women. They admired—no, coveted—his looks: the square jaw, the diamond face, the bright eyes, which never gave away what he was thinking (yes, people constantly gave him the benefit of the doubt, blithely assuming he had a clue). Mostly, they wanted his hair. It was Breck hair: longish—about chin level—blond, and full of body, actually silky, the kind of hair women dream of having. In my seasoned opinion, at his best Erik was a dumb blond, but because he had testicles, his idiocy went unnoticed, or was excused, at least.

Some people interpreted his mental dwarfism as southern-boy gall. Stories—appalling in my view but offered as praise—swept through town like an outbreak of pinkeye. Take this little jewel, for example: Erik had been practicing for only eight months when he stood before Judge Cooksey and informed him that he wanted a three-day postponement because the weather was a perfect seventy-four degrees, with not much humidity, and he didn’t want to waste his time in the courtroom when he could be out on the links. The judge granted the postponement. Erik’s client, a kid charged with his first count of shoplifting, looked at the judge, then at his lawyer, then over his shoulder at his mother, and burst into tears.

Erik was older than Murmur by five years. They married the summer of our high school graduation. They lived in St. Augustine Beach, right on the water, and stayed there until the fall, when the house became a weekend getaway and they headed to Gainesville and the University of Florida, where Erik would—by the grace of that fine hair and good straight teeth—squeak up a law degree. (I’m harsh on Erik, I admit. But believe me, this isn’t an apology, nor even a sugar-coated diatribe. It’s the Yankee truth.)

Consider this:

They had been married three weeks. Erik clerked in his dad’s law office weekdays and golfed on weekends. Murmur didn’t have much to do that summer other than keep house and please her groom. I was biding my time until mid-August, when I would head to Tallahassee and FSU and enroll in something—what, I didn’t know. Psychology. Sociology. Business. Political Science. Philosophy. God, there were so many choices. The only thing clear to me was that I was going to go to college and that while there a miracle would occur and my future would become self-evident. So Murmur and I decided that until the reality of fall descended and we were plunged into adulthood and college, we would work on our tans, drink beer, join Amnesty International, cut our hair really short, read Proust, avoid anyone who strolled around in public in warm-up suits, write letters to the editor, in which we would point out the ludicrous editorial policies of the St. Augustine Record, and avoid Bobby Meyerbach because he stank.

I arrived at their house one morning in June at around 10:30. Erik’s Porsche was parked out front. I didn’t know what he was doing home, but I figured it wouldn’t stall our plans, or Murmur would have phoned. I made my way through a winding path lined with potted herbs, the Crayola faces of zinnias, an immutable sundial, and a rusting fish basket filled with seashells. Since Erik was home, I decided to behave like company. I knocked on the front door, which Murmur had painted Chinese red shortly after moving in, because she said red doors welcomed in good spirits and scared away evil ones. No answer. Brushing aside the nagging thought that Murmur had ruined everything by getting married, I rang the doorbell. Still no answer. I walked around the side of the house to the kitchen door. She’d painted it blue. I didn’t know why. It was open, and I said to hell with Erik, and I walked on in. I started to call Murmur’s name but stopped short. The kitchen opened into a dining room. Behind the old pine dinner table hung a large mottled mirror. Murmur and Erik were reflected in its beveled light. He was dressed in a Brooks Brothers suit, she in denim shorts and a paisley halter top, which he gripped by one hand and yanked.

“Don’t! Erik, we’re just going to lie on the beach. We want to get some sun. That’s all.”

“You will not go out there looking like a tramp. You’re my wife now. Murmur the tramp is dead. Remember that, you little bitch. The tramp is dead.”

“Erik, I am not a tramp. Baby, I love you.” She reminded me of a little girl seeking an angry father’s love and forgiveness. I didn’t want to bear witness to this, but I couldn’t move.

Erik grabbed her by her hair. He wound it around his fist and pulled it taut. “You were a tramp when I married you. Now you’re not. I’m the reason, the only reason, you’re not still a beach whore.” He let go of her hair and jabbed his finger in her chest over and over, forcing her to back up, moving her out of the mirror’s reflection. “You will do as I say. You will not defy me. You are mine now. Do you understand?”

Unwilling to hear Murmur’s answer or witness her humiliation, I decided I had only one choice, and that was to make myself known. “Murmur!” I called, trying to keep the frantic warble in check. “I’m here! You ready?”

She did not respond. But Erik did. “Charlee!”

He strode into the kitchen, all smiles. “Hey, how you doing?” He leaned in and kissed my cheek. “I was just on my way out. Murmur is in the back, doing something. I don’t know what. Give her five minutes or so.” He plucked an apple out of the fruit basket on the kitchen counter and rubbed it against his starched white shirt.

“Okay.” I scratched an imaginary itch on my arm. “I’ll just wait here.”

“Good.” He scanned the kitchen. “Where’s my briefcase. Ah.” He grabbed it off the kitchen stool. He patted the backrest. “Have a seat.”

I did as I was told. I took some solace in the fact that he didn’t seem to have a clue that I’d seen the little spat. He fiddled with the lock combination on the briefcase and said, “Oh, by the way, you and Murmur aren’t going to the beach today. Just stay up near the house.”

“Sure.”

He shot me a big grin, a pretty-boy movie-star grin, and his eyes betrayed nothing. “See ya.”

“Yeah.”

Just before he stepped out the blue door, which, I decided, needed to be red—evil spirits and all—he checked out his hair in a small mirror that hung precariously from the doorjamb by a blue silk ribbon, and then he was gone.

I stayed seated on the stool, scared to move.

“Charlee?” Murmur yelled.

“Yeah?”

“Let’s do something besides the beach today. I’m not in the mood.” She sounded, I thought, falsely chipper.

“Okay. Fine by me.” I don’t know why I decided to play along. I guess I felt guilty for having spied on her—even though it wasn’t intentional—and, in all honesty, I was chickenshit. I mean, we all do it: wait for the person in crisis to fess up before we say anything.

“How about some tunes?” she yelled, and before I could respond, Marvin Gaye’s silk rope of a voice filled the house: “. . . That this ain’t the way love’s supposed to be.”

I slipped off the stool and wandered through the dining area and into the living room. Murmur stood at the French doors, gazing at the Atlantic, her bluebird eyes framed in fresh mascara.

“Marvin Gaye is dead,” I said as I walked over to her and put my arm around her tiny shoulders.

“I know.” She kissed my cheek. “By the hand of his own daddy. How awful is that?”

We stood there watching the waves rumble and recede, listening to Marvin sing about sex and love and all its possibilities, and for the next eight years, we pretended she was married to a good man.

         

This is what I remember about Murmur’s daughter.

Blossom Cordelia Charleston Nathanson was seven years old when she was diagnosed with leukemia.

She had her mother’s bluebird eyes, her father’s outstanding hair, and was clearly her mother’s daughter in terms of goodness and smarts.

She could count to a hundred when she was three and a half.

By age four, she was protecting lizards and beached sea life from the hunter-destroyer ways of little boys.

She loved to dance. She would bounce on chubby toddler legs whenever her mother cranked the stereo. With her face jam-smeared and her tiny hand clutching something—she was always grabbing—she’d squeal and grin and bounce almost in rhythm to the tunes. And later, about the time she hit five, the child could twist and shout better than her mother.

I had big plans for Blossom. She was, after all, my goddaughter. And the way my life was going—since I had become more interested in racking up academic degrees than finding a husband—she might also have served as my surrogate daughter, one I could heap praise upon, offering the sort of insider advice that mothers sometimes can’t because they have no objectivity, and experiencing the wholly unreasonable pride that springs from watching a beloved child come into her own.

         

This is what I remember about Blossom’s mother.

Her love was not stagnant. It was active, purple, fierce. Illness didn’t change that. In fact, as Blossom grew sicker, Murmur’s mother love boiled with a rage that transcended what most people would call good sense. She became mythic, an earth mother who refused to back down from her insistence that the universe straighten up and heal her daughter.

For six months, she did not sleep. With grace and power and haunted eyes, she demanded answers from doctors who were crazy enough to not return her phone calls when it looked like their tools weren’t capable of stopping the onslaught of Blossom’s disease. Murmur screamed at the moon, cursed the sky, begged the wind, wept bitter tears, which fell into the sand and oblivion, and then she cleaned herself up and was at Blossom’s bedside with teas and lotions and toys before the child had any notion of waking.

I was in the hospital room and witnessed this:

Blossom—bald and skeletal and surrounded by flowers and stuffed animals and finger paintings her classmates had drawn for her—reached for her mother’s face and asked like a straight shooter who knows no pity, “Mommy, am I going to die?”

Murmur’s face softened into that transcendent place, the one where the ego isn’t allowed, where our own sadness and fear have been sacrificed to serve the higher need of someone in trouble. “No, baby, you’re not going to die. You’re going to live forever in so many ways. We have a lot to do, you and I.”

And then the two of them broke into spontaneous laughter. The dying child and the shattered warrior-goddess mother, laughing in anticipation of a future they would never have.

Yes, that’s what Murmur gave her daughter in the final days of her life: faith that there would be a future. All dying children should leave this earth believing, as Blossom did, that tomorrow is going to happen.

I don’t know, maybe Murmur was a saint after all. Her granite-hard belief in nature’s capacity—but more importantly, willingness—to heal experienced stress fractures but never cracked. She got mad, desperate even, but her faith remained solid; she never stopped believing that the universe would not forsake her. Right up to the end, there in the house on St. Augustine Beach, while Blossom slipped into a coma she would never wake from, Murmur was offering prayers to whatever god might listen. She was frantic. She was broken. But she kept believing. Yes, she was a saint.

This is the awful truth: No matter the prayer or mode of delivery, no one was listening. Or if they were, they didn’t care. Evidence? The child died. Nothing Murmur or the doctors did worked. Not the lotions Murmur concocted from herbs sown by her own hand. Not the scraps of raw silk she dyed in soft tones from wildflowers sown by her own hand and then placed in Blossom’s palms, on her eyelids, in the painful crooks and crevices of her body. Not the soups brewed so lovingly and made with ingredients sown by her own hand. Not the prayers she made up, nor the old ones, the Catholic ones that she’d long ago abandoned. The universe would not listen to her on the subject of Blossom. Like one of those little hunter-destroyer boys who squash frogs, rip the tails off lizards, and stomp ghost crabs under a milky white moon, it was as if the universe saw Blossom’s beauty and potential and couldn’t bear it. So it snuffed her out. No amount of chemo or tinctures of organically grown herbs were going to change the jealous mind of the universal soul.

But Murmur, Murmur, my dear friend Murmur, simply looked out at all creation and tried to will a miracle.

         

This is what I remember about Blossom’s father.

Erik Nathanson left the house two days after his daughter was diagnosed with leukemia. Openly, unapologetically, he shacked up with his girlfriend of three months. He never visited Blossom in the hospital. He never visited her at home. He didn’t phone her. He did not attend her memorial service. He did not hold Murmur’s hand and take on even one ounce of her grief, nor did he share his. He simply went away.

Six months after Blossom’s death, he filed for divorce, citing abandonment. Erik Nathanson might never have read a book in his life, he probably didn’t know how to pronounce faux pas or understand the true meaning of son of a bitch when it was uttered by a woman, but he did know how the good ol’ boy legal system in St. John’s County operated. He was one of theirs. He drank and dined and played golf with them. He shared whores and stock tips with them. He watched their backs and they watched his. He could keep Murmur in court until the St. John’s River finally flowed the right way. He got the house, the cars, the silver, the furniture, the monogrammed towels, the china and rugs and wastebaskets and lamps and brooms and cleaning rags. And, as if this could get any worse, he walked away—in the eyes of the court and good Judge Cooksey—not owing his wife one dime of support.

Murmur died believing in ghosts and hauntings. I hope she was right. I hope that she’ll rise from whatever netherworld she’s at and exact her pound of flesh from Erik Nathanson. She surely never got it in life. For God’s sake, if the universe cares one iota about balance and harmony, she’ll be given a chance to haunt the holy everlasting life out of him.

And don’t you know that Murmur could whip his ass with some medieval hauntings. She could make his pecker shrivel up into a droopy little thing that would resemble a rotten baby tomato. Or she might throw down on him—all over him—the worst case of herpes the world has ever seen. Or she might—and this would be best of all—cast a spell that would force him out of his self-absorption and into an eternal wrestling match with the moral ghosts of his past.