Daddy never offers a large opinion, or makes a large decision, unless he feels it’s absolutely necessary, that things just aren’t going to work out right unless he intercedes. Which is why I am inclined to abide by the wishes of a slightly senile eighty-two-year-old man in overalls who is giving away most of what some would falsely call my inheritance.
Seeing him now, with his short-term memory going along with his eyes and his heart, fills me with such shame for all the days we could have had together out here on the porch while the sun slipped across one more white-hot summer sky. Even now, though, I can’t make myself move back, give up all hope of being a Famous Writer, or even a Famous Scholar, in order to make my own father a little happier for a while.
It was in a little town on the southern shore of Lac Leman that things finally turned to crap for Mark and me.
We had planned our great European tour for months, and Mark had some definite ideas about what we ought to do. He’s a newspaper editor, and they can get so neurotic that they make English professors seem like Rotarians. All those deadlines, probably. Mark would try to dole out days in preordained parcels. Get up. Have breakfast (fifteen minutes). See British Museum (three hours). Have lunch (forty-five minutes). Take tube to Hampstead Heath and back (three hours). Stop in pub (thirty minutes). The way I’d always done European vacations, Stop in Pub was pretty much open-ended. I’ll give Jeff that; he didn’t mind changing schedules if the mood struck him. As it turned out, unfortunately, he didn’t mind doing anything if the mood struck him.
We did it Mark’s way all through Ireland and Great Britain, from Shannon Airport to the hovercraft at Dover, twelve days of it. I didn’t mind terribly much, because I’d already seen most of the British Isles at one time or another, and was getting pretty damn tired of them, to tell you the truth.
Mark would rave on about the English hospitality and sense of order, and those were the things I once admired in the British. But just as good friends come and go but a worthwhile enemy is forever, so it is that the negative things are what stick in my mind: the cabbies calling black people who don’t move out of their way quickly enough “Sambo”; the smugness; the black pudding. Anyhow, I like England but do not love her, so there was nothing much that Mark could drag me away from with an anxious look at his watch that I really minded being dragged away from, other than a couple of pubs that needed a pint or two more scrutiny.
But then we were in France, which is what I go to Europe for. We had a small argument before we left about how many days we’d spend there. Mark doesn’t like the “Froggies,” although he’d been there exactly once, for three days, as part of a seven-cities-in-eleven-days tour. All three days were spent in Paris, and he never got over the fact that the Parisians didn’t roll out the red carpet, were actually rude to him. Hell, I told him, the Parisians are rude to each other. Why should they make an exception for Americans?
We agreed, finally, to spend ten days in France, but only if we extended our time in Germany to ten days as well. Mark loves Germany. All that efficiency and cleanliness. The Germans give me the shakes. I can’t help but think that the same old guy who’s playing in the oompah band was once a young SS officer herding Jews into ovens. But to Mark, the French are more reprehensible for letting the Germans invade their country than the Germans are for invading. The French might be a bit snooty, but they’re spontaneous. They will surprise you.
I persuaded Mark to count the day in Zurich as part of Germany, since it’s practically the same thing, I argued, and I would count our day in Geneva as part of France. Montreux and Zermatt we would take from Italy.
So we rented a car and knocked around Normandy for two days, drinking Calvados and eating our first good breakfasts in quite some time. Then we drove to Paris, turned in the car at Charles de Gaulle and took a taxi to our small hotel between the Opéra and Place Vendôme, within walking distance of the Louvre and the Left Bank, to say nothing of several of my favorite restaurants.
Mark doesn’t speak French. I speak enough to get by in restaurants and shops and to ask directions on the street—and sometimes understand the answer. The French appreciate it if you try, though. A strange thing: Even though Mark is a demon for punctuality and formality, he never understood about the French and reservations. We would wake up to the breakfast in bed the cheery little maid brought in every morning, we’d eat our croissants and drink our tea, then Mark would leap out of bed and say, “Time’s a-wasting,” and reel off the nineteen things we were supposed to do before dinner. But what about dinner? I’d ask. We need to make reservations. But he’d hustle me out of our little hotel before we decided where we wanted to go, and then, when we’d stop for a minute to rest our feet on the Champs-Elysees or at the Luxembourg Gardens, he’d be too busy mapping out the next stop to talk about dinner. The English eat to live, he’d say smugly, and the French live to eat. If you cooked like the English, I’d reply, you’d only eat to live, too.
So, we’d wind up about eight o’clock, dog-tired because we hadn’t had the afternoon nap any fool knows you need to make the most of a day in Paris, and we’d have to go to a restaurant without reservations. In Paris, you might as well go without shoes. The maître d’ of some half-empty eighth arrondissement place would look way down that long Gallic nose at us and either tell us there was no room or make us wait, or put us at the table by the kitchen door. The French are not committed to being churlish. It’s just that, given the opportunity and the justification, they’re so damn good at it.
It took me until the third day to convince Mark that reservations equated to good manners in Paris, but he sulked the rest of our time there, and I knew he’d spend the next year ripping the French waiters, and the French train stations, and even the fact that they took away the pissoirs, which he’d have bitched about if they hadn’t gotten rid of them.
The other bone of contention in Paris was cafés. I was only slightly bothered when we didn’t have time to sit and ponder life and darts in British pubs, but cafés are different. I’ve never understood it, but the waiters in Parisian cafés, especially the outdoor places along those beautiful, tree-lined avenues full of the most interesting people in the world, cannot be persuaded to rush. If you were of a mind to get drunk at the Café de la Paix, you would have to order wine by the bottle. You can sit at the center of the civilized universe for forty-five minutes nursing one Kronenbourg beer and enjoying Paris’s best attraction—the people—without anybody asking you if you’d like anything else—like the check—even once. And on the Left Bank, it’s even better. They throw in fire swallowers and magicians and the odd street person who’ll stop long enough to drink half your beer if you’re not watchful. It’s slightly more charming than New York, where the chief attractions are muggings and watching someone go to the bathroom on the sidewalk.
The only time I was able to persuade Mark to stop was at a quiet place near the Boulevard St.-Germain. We’d been there about five minutes when this little gnome who must have been sixty-five at least started talking to us from the next table. He was about five two, very weathered and brown, and he somehow reminded me of Uncle Lex, only much shorter. We could converse well enough for him to find out that we were from Virginia and for us to find out he fought in World War II. Mark didn’t know much of what we were saying, only what I had time to translate.
Then the little old man asked if we would take his picture. So I did. Then he wanted to have his picture taken with me; so, with much sign language and flashing eyes, Mark took a picture of me with Henri, which was his name. Then he wanted one of himself and Mark. I had the pictures developed before I came down to the farm, and in that one, Mark looks as if he doesn’t want his clothes to touch Henri’s.
Finally, he wanted to take a picture of Mark and me, which I thought was sweet. I showed Henri how to focus and where the button was, and he took the camera. He took a step back, then another, on the sidewalk. In the picture he took, Mark seems to have Bell’s palsy, because he’s in the middle of saying, “The goddamn Frog is going to steal our camera.” Henri shyly handed the Nikon back to us. I don’t think he heard what Mark said.
We took the bullet train to Geneva for our eighth French day. The last two would be spent on the Riviera, with a friend who has a villa near Vence, in transit from Italy to Spain. Geneva might as well be in France, geographically, but it really has no nationality or night life.
The big thing we had planned in Geneva was a boat trip on Lac Leman, to Yvoire. It takes about three hours to get from the harbor to Yvoire, and there’s another boat to take you back every hour or so. I prefer lakes to oceans, and I’ve always loved the mountains, or at least ever since Daddy first took us the long way back from Atlanta. So, Lac Leman, with these neurotically perfect Swiss towns along the coast and the Alps in the background, met my specifications for perfection. It had been about five years since I’d been near the Alps, and I’d never taken the boat from Geneva.
We sat at a table inside and looked out through the glass at the water and the mountains. Mark had worn only a flannel shirt, no sweater, so that when I wanted to go up on deck, I went alone. We drank Cardinal beer and watched the passengers, mostly Swiss, mostly using the boat as a bus, come and go at Nyon. I wanted to take pictures of some of the children, maybe because they reminded me of Justin, not as he is now, but as he was at five and eight and twelve.
As we got nearer to Yvoire, where we planned to get off and catch the next boat back, it looked as if we were entering the Middle Ages. Everything seemed to have been not built out of stone but chiseled from a solid stone foundation, so that everything—the streets, the dock, the walls and roofs—was seamless. It is one of dozens of such towns I’ve seen across Europe, planned communities of the Dark Ages, built for common defense and accidentally beautiful, all the more striking because they never meant to be. And Yvoire may be the best of the lot. There were winding streets barely wide enough for one car; and everywhere there were flowers—planters in every conceivable spot bursting with a red that was perfect counterpoint to the austere stone. The town center’s fountain was inundated with them.
“No fair,” said Mark, nudging me as we got off the boat. “We’re back in France.” He pointed to the DOUANE sign and perfunctory customs office, and I realized that we were indeed in that tip of France below Lac Leman. Mark seemed to be only partly kidding. He was really getting an attitude—an “attytude” as his mother always said it—about the place.
We walked by a terrace loaded with tables shaded by those ubiquitous umbrellas that seem to be the premier product of Europe. I looked at the handwritten menu and suggested that we take a later boat back and have lunch in Yvoire, with the lake and the mountains in front of us, the towers and spires of this perfect combination of French grace and Swiss efficiency behind us. Mark said we didn’t have time. It was approximately the fiftieth time we hadn’t had time since we left Dulles International. It wasn’t noon yet, and we already had a place reserved in Montreux for the evening. I pointed out that we could probably drive from Geneva to Montreux in an hour and a half when we got back. I pointed out that we were almost to summer solstice, that it wouldn’t get dark until after nine.
Mark said we’d get a sandwich on the boat that was picking us up in thirty minutes. He didn’t say we could get a sandwich; he said we would get a sandwich. Amazing how one little word, one little letter, really, can ruin a relationship.
I basically just cleared out a spot there, right on the terrace of this hotel, and threw a shit-fit. I told him I had passed up about fifty hours of much-needed pub time, that I had lost a good two days of people-watching in Paris, all because of his neo-Nazi infatuation with making sure the train ran on time. I told him that the train had derailed and it was time to seek alternative means of transportation. It is not pleasant to have a roaring argument in front of foreigners in a strange land. On the plus side, they aren’t likely to tell everyone you know about it, but on the minus side, there is this feeling, especially in a tucked-away town such as Yvoire, that you are the sole representative of the United States of America, and that you are making a Bad Impression.
Mark tried to reason with me, but I am not reasoned with easily. Finally, he smiled a little smile and said he was going to wait by the dock, that he had seen enough of France for one trip. I don’t know if he thought I would follow him, but when I took his umbrella, which he always insisted on having in case of rain—he wouldn’t go to the Mojave Desert without it—and which I always seemed to wind up carrying, and pitched it like a javelin into the little harbor at Yvoire, he might have gotten the message.
I turned to face a waiter with an only slightly arched eyebrow.
“Does madame wish a table?” he asked.
“Mais, certainement,” I said with all the aplomb I had left.
I stayed in Yvoire that night, in a little hotel by the water, after spending the afternoon wandering through shops full of lavender and smiles. I had no clothes other than what I was wearing, but somehow I knew that Mark the fastidious would arrange things. So I spent another day in Yvoire, just sitting on the terrace by the lake drinking Kronenbourgs, because it’s the only beer the French can make, frankly, and it was beer-drinking weather. I took a nap/passed out in my room in the middle of the afternoon, to wake in the early evening to the smell and feel of a lake in the mountains at the peak of the summer. I felt like Daisy Buchanan.
The third day, I went back to Geneva, all gray, with mist off the Jet d’Eau chilling those of us on deck. I checked at the hotel where we’d stayed and, sure enough, they were holding my luggage. Mark had stuck a letter to the largest piece. It told me where he was going to be, in case I wanted to join him.
I am not made of money; few English professors are. For that, you have to do something really important, such as sell real estate. But I do carry plastic. I rented the smallest car they had for one week, and spent the next seven days wandering through towns between Geneva and the Côte d’Azur. I had dinner in a restaurant outside Grenoble that displayed Alps out every window and had no other Americans inside it. They put a U.S. flag and a French tricolor in a little vase and brought it to my table. I met a Frenchman from Annecy who took me to dinner by the lake there, and I met a wonderful couple at a farmhouse outside Digne when the VW Polo had a flat. By the time I got to Suzanne’s, three days before I was expected, I could barely remember Mark’s last name.
I never left the boundaries of France for the rest of the trip, until I took the train to Barcelona and realized that Mark and I had assigned seating, right beside each other, for the flight home. We didn’t speak all the way back until we were circling Dulles. He asked me if I needed a ride to Montclair, which started me laughing at the vision of myself standing at the airport exit, luggage in hand, realizing I had no way to get home. I graciously accepted. On the way back, we talked, and we agreed to disagree about the way we live our lives. We’ll see each other, spend the night together when the miseries get to either of us too much, but we won’t be taking any vows, or long trips, together, and that should make Justin happy.
All the trouble my son has gotten into caught up with me several days into the trip, when I called the Carlsons from London. My first feeling was irritation and a belief that he was doing this to make me feel guilty, even ruin my trip. He was so angry about my leaving, and maybe it was selfish, but this was the first time I’d had by myself, away from that town and all our old friends, since Jeff and I broke up.
Then I worried. I wrote cards to him and Daddy every other day, not mentioning the breakdown of relations with Mark, and talked with Justin over the phone. I’m surprised that he ran away, because he’s always been pretty close to the vest, maybe too much so, and I’m surprised that he went south, to East Geddie. He and Daddy never seemed to have a lot to talk about, and he was downright rude to Daddy over Christmas.
This probably won’t be my turn to be nominated for Mother of the Year, but things have been good between Justin and me since I got to the farm. He’s relieved that I don’t plan to send him to Fork Union; I’m glad that he took care of his own problem with the English situation. And it seems as if Daddy is a little less disoriented having someone else around to talk to. It appears that they’ve been looking after each other. Justin can cook a little more than he could when he left Montclair, and Daddy has someone to watch baseball games with on TV.
It wasn’t until yesterday that Daddy told me about the will. He said that I should tell Justin about it myself when we get back, that that was my place. Daddy has always been so careful about not trying to tell us how to raise Justin, always spoiling him rotten when he’s down here, but always telling him to “mind his parents,” even after his parents lived in different houses and started acting like kids themselves.
Daddy didn’t tell me about the wreck until I got down here. Said he was afraid I’d panic and do something crazy. They’ve set Justin’s nose and taken the stitches out, and most of the swelling has gone down. It could have been a lot worse; about the only thing he’ll have permanently is a little crease over his right eyebrow that shows when he furrows his brow. A friend of mine in Montclair says that any boy worth keeping will have a minimum of one car wreck before he’s twenty-one. I told my friend that that was a sexist statement, that I’d had two wrecks before I was old enough to drink, but now there’s a certain feeling of relief that maybe Justin’s used up his quota. Daddy said the other boys were both hurt worse than Justin was, and I told him I hoped the driver was, at least. He just gave me a funny look.
Justin went over to Old Geddie late yesterday afternoon, I think to visit with the other two kids who were in the wreck. He walked, and I told him to be sure to walk back, too. Daddy and I ate about 5:30, which is when everybody down here eats. It always takes two or three days for my stomach to get adjusted to East Geddie Time. About 6:15, he asked me if I’d like to go for a ride. I told him fine, but didn’t Jenny say that the cops didn’t allow him to drive any farther than the Bi-Rite? I told him that that didn’t sound like a very exciting ride to me.
“We’re going the other way,” Daddy said, and after we finally found the truck keys, off we went, by Rennie’s old house and the thicket beyond and into the swamp.
I hadn’t paid much attention to the Rock of Ages in some time, although the cemetery is right next to it. We used to play down there when I was a kid, although Mom didn’t want us to, because she thought it was disrespectful to play that close to a graveyard.
My main memory of the rock, though, is Warren Eccles. He was a senior at Carolina when I was a junior at UNC—G, and I guess he was crazy about me. He came to see me the summer before his senior year, and we put him up in the extra bedroom. It was a horrible summer, with Uncle Lex fading fast, and Aunt Connie dying right after he did. I worked as an intern at the Port Campbell Post, and sometimes I’d make up assignments to avoid having to spend part of the night at the hospital with Uncle Lex, or just to get away from all the sorrow. My family is funny about hospitals. If somebody’s in one, they feel a moral obligation to have a family member in the room every single minute. When Uncle Lex died, Daddy was right there, at seven in the morning, holding his hand.
Warren Eccles was a brief respite from all that. The only problem was, there was nowhere that we could be alone. He was a handsome boy, about six two, dark, straight hair that he would start growing long by the next fall, although it always looked better short on him; very self-assured, very bright. I wasn’t a virgin, and it suited me very well to make love to Warren, but where? Finally, on Saturday night before he was to fly back home, we went for a ride, up to East Geddie, then right on the Ammon Road, past the strawberry patches, and then right again on the old rut road that backs into our land. I had him turn right one last time at Lock’s Branch, with the lights off by now, because Rennie was still living then. We made love in moonlight so bright that the Rock of Ages shaded us from it as we looked across the branch at the distant, faint glow of the Blue Sandhills.
Warren and I broke up before Christmas, and he went to Vietnam after he graduated, was wounded and faded from my life. I haven’t spoken to him in eighteen years, but he made the Rock of Ages special.
Daddy stopped the truck between the cemetery and the rock. We walked over and looked at Mom’s grave, a place I never go unless he wants me to. It’s in my will that I am to be cremated and will haunt anyone who goes against my wishes. All this buying flowers to put on an expensive monument to the dead is very offensive to me and serves no one except smarmy undertakers and florists. They are to scatter my ashes off Afton Mountain.
Then we walked over to the rock. Daddy looked out to where the berry fields are, and out across the sandhills, and he reminded me a little of the pictures in my child’s Bible of Moses viewing the Promised Land.
“I’ve made a few changes in my will, Georgia,” he said, leaning against the rock for balance. “I hope they won’t offend you, and I want your promise, on your momma’s grave, that you won’t fight it.”
And then he spelled out the changes, and told me all, or most, of the reasons for making them.
Justin and I are to get the house and a rectangle of land going north and west from it, about thirty acres altogether, plus money that Daddy has in CDs and IRAs, a surprising amount, really, enough to have qualified him as rich around here, if anybody had known about it. But denying that you have any money is as important around here as having it. I told him that I hoped he spent every last cent of it, because Justin and I are fine, and he probably won’t get to take it with him. I only hope it’s enough to handle whatever might happen from here on. He forgot to turn off one of the burners on the stove again today.
The land south of the rut road, plus a strip running east from the house to Lock’s Branch, goes to John Kennedy Locklear, who Daddy had to explain was the Lumbee who is using a little plot of land back of the garage for a garden. I met him last week, without knowing that he was going to be inheriting about 160 acres of McCain land—and without knowing that he’s probably my—what?—stepnephew? half nephew? Anyway, Daddy told me about Rose. He said he wanted someone to know about her before he died. I thought it was a very romantic story, after I recovered from the shock. There always seems to be more to Daddy than meets the eye.
He said he figured Kenny should have the land around the old Lockamy place, since his family did most of the work around here, and that he wanted him to be able to be a real farmer instead of just a practice one. He said that Kenny reminded him of a carpenter without any tools.
The other part is the hardest to understand. Why is Daddy giving the rest of the land—ISO-some acres, including most of the swamp and the near fields, and the berry patches, which make more money than the rest put together—to a Mrs. Annabelle Geddie, to be turned over to her son, Blue, on his twenty-first birthday? All he’ll tell me is where they live and that these are people that we—not he, we—owe a great deal to. From where they live, I deduce that they’re black. Is Daddy making reparations? I saw a guy on Donahue recently, a really angry middle-aged black man, who demanded, the way that only those who have spent half their lives asking and being turned down can demand, that white people give the descendants of black slaves some unfathomable amount of money to pay for our past sins. It reminded me of when we were kids and we’d try to make up the biggest number in the world, something like ninety-hundred forty-leven triptrillion. Has Daddy decided to try and make his peace with everybody that’s been wronged with one symbolic gesture, and are Annabelle Geddie and her son the Chosen People for once in their lives? Or is there something deeper, something personal here? I can remember lots of black Geddies, descendants of slaves owned by my great-grandfather and sharecroppers who worked for my grandfather after the Civil War, but Annabelle and Blue—is that his real name?—are strangers to me. Why did Daddy say “we”?
I have been selfish and self-destructive in my life, sometimes managing the amazing feat of achieving both at the same time, which is somewhat similar to whistling and humming simultaneously. It would be quite impossible, though, for me to do anything else right now other than promise my father that I will not contest his last will and testament. More than anyone else I know, he has earned what is his, and anyone who helped him earn it enough to merit a part of it is dead and gone, as they say around here. The part he’s giving Justin and me is a gift, nothing more.
Besides, I sense that he is completely right about this, even if I don’t know all the details. He can’t remember where he puts the truck keys half the time, and he’s called Justin “Lafe” ten times since I’ve been here, and Jenny pulled me aside before church Sunday to tell me about an incident at the grocery store that is more disturbing than anything I’ve seen myself. In some deeper sense, though, he seems to be completely in control.
It’s funny, considering his lack of education and his generally passive nature—he always let Mom make the day-to-day decisions—but I’ve never been led wrong by Daddy. Oh, there have been times when I haven’t followed his advice, such as when he told me that Jeff Bowman might still have some growing up to do, after we told him we were getting married. He told me I might have some to do, too. Right on both counts, but it took me five years to forgive him and eighteen years to concede that he was right.
The sun is below the horizon, the sky a reflected blue, by the time we finish talking. I help him to the truck. His leg is stiff now, and he asks me to drive back. It is the time of day that sums up all my best memories of East Geddie and the farm, a time when you can drive along with the windows down, your left arm hanging out, and feel a cool relief that seems to spring from the crops and pines and dark, narrow streams. It is a sweetness of high school dates, of hope and promise.