Upstairs, Mary Byrd didn’t call Ashleigh, who she knew was on her way; instead, she called Evagreen, wanting to be sure she was at home. Jeez—still busy. The children were watching TV in what had been their little playroom. Hearing her approach, the Quarter Pounder, who knew he was in violation of the house rule about dogs on furniture, tried to skitter back downstairs, passing her on the steps with guilt in his eyes. Puppy Sal was afraid to go upstairs at all in winter because the cats lurked there in the warmer air.
Eliza and William were stretched out and propped up on oversize pillows, side by side on an old comforter. Notebooks and textbooks were arranged around them to simulate working on science fair proposals, but neither one budged to assume a studying pose. Two spotless dinner plates and forks were pushed back into the corner, she knew, by the Pounder, who’d licked them clean. William, a mouth-breather, stared gape-jawed at the tube, absently stroking Irene, who was curled in a ball next to him.
“William,” Mary Byrd said, and he immediately snapped his mouth closed. Poor fella. “What are y’all watching?”
“Nothing,” they both said, which meant they were watching Real World, or E.R. reruns, neither of which they were supposed to watch.
“What’s wrong with the History Channel?” she asked them.
Eliza looked at her scornfully. “You mean the tank and aircraft channel?”
William looked up at her and said, with irritation, “That’s what I wanted to watch but Eliza wouldn’t let me.” Eliza cranked her forearm against his chest, rising to change the channel to Nick at Nite.
“Ow!” he yelled, making Irene startle and run off. “Look what you did to Irene!”
“Okay, quit,” said Mary Byrd. She wanted nothing more than to lie down and watch Real World with them even though she hated it and would die if her kids turned out like those people. She just wanted to crawl up with her babies in their little nest and breathe their not-very-fresh smells. Of course, she knew if she attempted to do so they would both be gone in seconds.
“Ashleigh will be over in a minute so get your showers and get ready for bed,” she said. “Soon.” She added, “And I will look at your science fair things when I get home, so leave them out, okay?”
No one responded and Mary Byrd said pointedly, “Okay, Mom.” She made the overhead light strobe to get their attention.
“Not Ash-hole again,” said William.
“William. I hope you don’t call her that.”
“He did once,” said Eliza. “She thought it was funny.”
“We’re going out to the Palace for dinner.”
“Where’s Daddy?” asked Eliza.
“He’s in Memphis with a gallery guy. He’s supposed to meet us.”
Eliza refocused on the TV. “Okay,” she said, “luvyabye.”
On her hands and knees, Mary Byrd kissed one, then the other. She picked up the plates, forks, and ubiquitous large bowl from which William topped off his pasta with his nightly fodder of Honey Nut Cheerios. You have to choose your battles, she thought. Today was not a day for carping at children, your dear, darling, alive children, about dogs on furniture and TV and homework. “I’ll check on you when we get home. Love you both.”
“Okay,” said William, transfixed by the tube.
“Luvyabye,” Eliza said again, dismissively.
She wondered about Evagreen. She could just leave her money in the mailbox, she supposed, if she wasn’t at home.
At the bottom of the stairs stood Mann, a bottle of wine tucked under his arm.
“Mann, what are you doing? Get back in there and keep an eye on him!”
“I’m starving. I want to eat and go home. This is promising to be a very long night.” Mann was so small, with the metabolism of a hummingbird, and he could get very surly if he did not eat every two hours. “Can you please get your act in gear and let’s go?”
From the kitchen, a girl’s voice called out, “Hey-ay!”
“Here’s Ashleigh,” Mary Byrd said, coming quickly down the steps.
The teenager came through the hall and started up the stairs. In an accusatory voice she said, “Who’s that guy in the kitchen? He’s like, way hammered.” She didn’t stop for an answer.
Wiggs was indeed hammered. He sat on a kitchen stool and was leaning back against the wall with his eyes closed and his arms folded over his chest.
Mary Byrd put a hand on his arm, saying, “Wiggs, let’s go! We’re starving. And Charles might already be waiting at the Palace by now.”
“Yes, darlin’,” Wiggs said, barely opening his eyes. “And we can all go back to my room later and see the casino prints. I have scotch and Stoli.” Wiggs, usually snobby about booze, preferred the medium-priced Stoli because, he said, it was “distilled with the passion of the Russian soul.”
“Great,” she said, hoping that would not happen. “We’re dying to see them. Charles is really excited. And he wants to talk to you about a new show.” Mary Byrd knew she wouldn’t be going anywhere later but the blanket show. Charles could go back to Wiggs’s room, or they could do their business in the morning. Some time had to be taken to think about going to Virginia, to make some arrangements, but she couldn’t do it now. I’ll think about that tomorrow, she loved to tell herself. She was amazed that her mother hadn’t called. Maybe she didn’t want to think about it any more than Mary Byrd did.
Finally in the car, headed down the old Fudgetown Road, they all felt a little better, out of the house and refreshed by the night air. The night was cold but clear. It was hard to believe that a winter storm was coming. An orange moon was rising but still hung up in the trees, not giving off much light. Mary Byrd had the urge to fuck with Wiggs and punched off the headlights. Even with the moon they could see the Milky Way, which was a luminous cloud in the deep country darkness. To her surprise, it was Mann who shouted, “M’Byrd! Stop! You’re scaring me!” He laughed, though. “Fool!”
From the backseat the reclining Wiggs, who actually seemed to have sobered up a bit, snorted, “My, but we’re easily frightened, aren’t we, petite monsieur Valentine?”
Mann ignored him. “Turn those lights on, you dumbass. We’ll get stopped or end up in the ditch.” She switched the headlights back on at the thought of being stopped and subjected to the most dreaded weapon in the county, the Breathalyzer. It wouldn’t matter that she wasn’t drunk, but if she registered at all she’d be dead meat. Charles would kill her.
“I’m sorry, y’all, but I’ve got to go by Evagreen’s and give her her money. It’s on the way and will just take a second.”
“Fine, but I hope we’re not eating at that charred-mystery-meat emporium in the odious shack that everyone thinks is so wonderful,” Wiggs said loudly. As if he were going to eat anything.
“Yep,” said Mary Byrd. “That’s exactly where we’re going. You’ll enjoy it, Ed. The steaks are really good.”
“Mis-steak, you must mean,” he said. “As long as we can bring the bottle.”
The Pink Palace was eight miles away and a place people liked to go for a change of pace. Or just a meat fix. The Palace was just a board-and-batten shack from the outside, but inside it was all painted raw-flesh pink, and the low ceiling was covered in white glitter. Dozens of bass trophies lined one wall. The place was known for its perfectly grilled steaks, the most popular cut being a twenty-ounce T-bone that was about the size of a flattened baby. The Pink Palace motto, beloved by frat boys who regularly stole the sign and put it in front of the Tri Delta sorority house, was the pink center you crave. The Tri Delts, pretty, cheerful girls (they answered their house phone with, “Delta, Delta, Delta, can I help ya, help ya, help ya?”) who were known for liking to do it (“If you’ve tried everything else, Tri Delta”), had had a surveillance camera installed, but all that ever came of it was footage of guys in various costumes—gorilla heads and E.T. and Darth Vader masks—planting the sign again and again. Occasionally the sign went to the Bowheads’ house, the Delta Gammas, who were prissy and wore giant ribbons stuck in their hair, but they were no fun and would call 9-1-1.
Mary Byrd went on. “It’s sparkly and colorful. You might want to shoot something. Or somebody.”
Wiggs sighed. “Maybe. If I were Diane Arbus or Shelby Adams.”
Mann said, “Well, I, for one, can use some red meat. I’ve been feeling puny. And I am sick unto death of chicken.”
“I imagine so. Bok bok bagok, here chickee, chickee,” said Wiggs. “I . . . had a fahmm . . . in Affreekahh . . .”
“Do you have to be such an asshole?” said Mann.
“Horrors. An attack. Let me get my cuirass on,” Wiggs said. “Oh, no, I’m sorry, that’s what you wear.”
“Oh, fuck yourself, Ed,” said Mann, almost amiably. To Mary Byrd, he said, “What’s a cuirass?”
“I have no idea.”
“If you and your little friends could buy them at Barneys, they’d be all the rage in New York,” Wiggs said.
“You sure seem to know a lot about me and my little friends, Ed.”
“One must know the enemy, don’t you know.”
“Oh, I know all right,” said Mann. “Don’t I know.”
Mary Byrd turned off onto the King Road, headed to the old Beat Five community called McCrady Hill. Many of the oldest black families had been living there since slaves were freed. There were Pegueses, Dixons, Carotherses, Isoms, and Barrs out there—black representatives (and in some cases, descendants) of all the first white settlers in the county.
McCrady Hill was a neat, close-knit neighborhood with its own church and playground. They had even had their road paved at their own expense because the ignorant county supervisors, all white, had found dozens of excuses not to do it. McCrady Hill children were bused into the city schools to comply with all the convoluted integration laws even though the county schools were much closer. The small, modest homes were mostly the same, although some urban renewal federal architect had attempted to make them distinctive by using different, and maybe less expensive, brick than those in white neighborhoods: some houses were yellow brick, some black and yellow, some red and black. Here and there some of the original shotgun houses remained, although they were altered and added onto and patched with siding or shingles or tar paper, and had newish tin roofs. All the houses had iron grillwork storm doors. West St. Peter Methodist Baptist church stood at the end of the dead-end road, a plain, white-frame building with a small steeple and a new brick fellowship hall tacked to one side.
To Mary Byrd, the few times she’d been to the church for funerals or weddings in Evagreen’s family, it had always seemed as close to the medieval idea of the cathedral as the center of life as any church could get. For so long, churches had been the only places black folks were allowed to gather, and even so, how many black churches had been bombed or burned? It always made her sad, going to West St. Peter M.B. and thinking of those four little girls in Birmingham.
She did love to come out here and enjoy the difference between the houses and yards in McCrady Hill and the houses closer in town. Wishing wells, windmills, an old black kettle or a tire planter, fancy brickwork around a flower bed; even the plants in the neighborhood were different. Showier, pass-along stuff: clumps of red president cannas up against porches, wine-colored barberry sculpted into tuffets, exploding fountains of pink pampas grass, elephant’s ear, tall stands of variegated cane. Scabiosa and dinner-plate hibiscus and creepy-looking but rich, velvety coxcomb. Abelias pruned into globes. Diamond-shaped beds of Day-Glo lime and cherry gladiolus. There weren’t any fences, and it wasn’t so different from the yards of white folks out in the county, but it was a refreshing change from the faddish wreaths, pineapple banners, and organized landscaping concepts in town.
Tonight every house on McCrady Hill seemed to have yellow porch bug lights on. Several houses still had strings of colored Christmas lights or the webbed, faux-icicle kind strung around, and two or three had translucent red Valentine hearts plastered randomly on the picture windows. The street had a warm, hearthlike glow.
Wiggs sat forward in the backseat, thrusting his head right up between Mary Byrd’s and Mann’s, scoping out the neighborhood. “This is too wonderful,” he said.
Mary Byrd pulled up to Evagreen’s neat little brick ranch house where several cars were already parked. The front door was open, and through the glass-and-grill storm door she could see people sitting around. She turned to Mann and said, “I’ll be right back.” To Wiggs, who was already climbing out of the car and fooling with his camera, she added, “Wiggs, please don’t wander off. This will just take a second.”
Mann, hungry and pissed, lowered his window and said to him, “Look, don’t embarrass us, Ed. We have to live here.”
“What are you two? The PC police? Nigras love to have pictures taken. But I am not the least bit interested in these people. Look at this light!” He snapped a few pictures of the Bons’ house and moved off down the street in a purposeful slink, suddenly sober and as intent as a sniper on a mission.
Mary Byrd tapped softly on the glass door with a corner of the envelope that held Evagreen’s pay. A short, round black man ejected himself from a recliner to open the storm door, which made a loud sucking sound. The man looked at Mary Byrd, almost, but not quite, in the eyes.
“Hey, L. Q.,” she said. “How are you?”
“All right, then,” he said, stepping back and holding the door open with one arm. “Come in, Miss M’Byrd.” This seemed a little odd. She’d never actually been in Evagreen’s house and normally she would have just handed over the envelope at the door. It was so strange that black people often saw white people as they really are, in their homes, sometimes in their most intimate state, but whites had so few clues about the private lives of black folks—their home life and families.
“Everything all right out here?” she asked, stepping into the hot, bright living room, immediately realizing it was not.
Evagreen sat on the sofa with two women Mary Byrd didn’t recognize. In the kitchen she could see a man talking on the phone. The furniture in the room looked clean and new and comfortable, every wall and horizontal surface displaying china knickknacks and framed photographs, things Mary Byrd knew Evagreen had received every birthday and Christmas or acquired by attending every yard sale in town every Saturday at dawn. Not unlike her own kitchen windowsill stuff. She thought she detected the very faintest note of lavender in the stifling room. There was silence. Mary Byrd could sense that no already-spoken words even hung in the air.
“Evagreen, is—are you all right? Is something wrong?” She studied Evagreen’s impassive face, from which she knew she’d learn little.
From a room in the hall emerged Evagreen’s son, Ken, a tall, handsome guy with a shaved head, half-dressed, or half-undressed, in wrinkled military clothes, a standard-issue pale green dress shirt and dark green pants. He looked tired. Joe Tex was faintly singing “Skinny Legs and All” somewhere down the hall.
“Hey, Ken,” said Mary Byrd. “I didn’t know you were home.”
“Hey, Miss M’Byrd,” the man said. “We’ve had some bad news. Mama?”
Evagreen’s hands lay in her lap, pale palms upturned. “Angie done kill Roderick,” she said flatly, as if she were saying, “Angie just ran out to the JFC.”
“Oh, my god, Evagreen, no!” Mary Byrd cried. “Evagreen! How could that have happened?”
She flushed and instantly felt beads of sweat on her scalp and face. How many fucked up things could happen in one day?
“She say he wouldn’t stay out the street. She was afraid he’d make her and the baby sick.” Evagreen opened her mouth to say more but nothing came out. Then, “He wouldn’t quit runnin’ in the street. Wouldn’t quit, wouldn’t quit, wouldn’t quit.” She looked directly at Mary Byrd and added, lower, “He beat her, too.”
L. Q. looked at the floor and shook his head. “There was a girl,” he said quietly, “an’ other things.”
“Oh, Evagreen, L. Q., I’m so sorry. What about Desia? Where is she?”
“She with Angie’s friend. Cookie gone up to Memphis to carry her back, but Rod’s people up there, too,” said L. Q. “Don’t know what’s gone happen.”
“There’s going to be a hell of a custody fight, among other things, that’s what’s going to happen,” Ken said quietly.
“Oh, god. Evagreen, Charles knows lots of people in Memphis. We’ll find Angie a really good lawyer. With a good lawyer maybe she won’t—Angie won’t—”
“Get the ’lectric chair?” Evagreen looked at her with something almost like amusement in her eyes. “Go to jail? She already there. Maybe she need to go.”
“Mama,” Ken said firmly.
One of the other ladies put her hand on Evagreen’s leg and patted.
“Lawyer ain’t gone bring Rod back to his mama,” L. Q. said.
The two families were neighbors and friends. Rod’s people, the Kimbros, lived close by the Bons on the King Road. She remembered Rod when he and Angie had dated in high school. He was a nice kid—a bastketball player? Maybe a little wild. What kid wasn’t. For a second she measured her own family’s tragedy against Evagreen’s. There was no doing it. Who could ever know or weigh another’s suffering? Her heart ached for the Bons and for the Kimbros; they all would now have this terrible gravity affixing them to this moment, this day, this turn of events, and to each other, forever.
“Evagreen, I wish you’d called me! Please let us help. Let us help you find a lawyer, okay?” Mary Byrd pleaded, instantly thinking of how proud Evagreen was, wishing she hadn’t said it. Oh, was it ever going to be okay between blacks and whites? Probably not; not any more than it would ever really be okay with Muslims and Jews, or Tutsis and Hutus.
Evagreen bent slightly toward the coffee table and picked up a big framed photograph of Angie on her high school graduation day and placed it in her lap. “Don’t need no help. Ken can take care a us.” She rubbed two fingers softly across Angie’s cheeks. One of the ladies rose and stepped out the front door.
Mary Byrd’s face burned with regret and the heat of the room. “I . . . I know that. Of course he can. I know he’s a great lawyer, but it might, you might—” Her voice trailed off. She could not say, You might need a white lawyer.
Ken stepped forward and took Mary Byrd’s hand in both his own. “Miss M’Byrd, we will figure this out and we won’t hesitate to call y’all if there’s anything you can do.” Mary Byrd remembered Ken when he was a kid, too—a serious but sweet boy with a quick smile full of teeth, and later, braces. Amazing how good-looking and poised he’d become. She remembered that Ken’s full name was Hamer Martin Kennedy Bon, named for Evagreen’s heroes: Fannie Lou Hamer, the mother, sharecropper, and civil rights leader from Sunflower County who famously said, “I’m sick and tired of being sick and tired”; and, of course, for MLK, and for JFK, who’d been assassinated the year Ken was born. Evagreen named all her babies for heroes. Why not. If she could have gotten away with it, Mary Byrd might have named hers Mick Jagger and Aretha Franklin. From Liddie she knew that while Ken was a newborn in the hospital, one of the nurses, seeing only “HMK Bon” on his birth papers, had labeled his little plastic nursery tub his majesty the king bon. And that’s what he was to Evagreen and L. Q. Evagreen had wanted his calling name to be Kennedy, but L. Q., who normally knew better than to cross Evagreen, had said, “You crazy? Might as well call the boy Khrushchev. Uh-uh. No way, Evvie.” So he was just Ken. Always a smart kid, he won the high school Latin prize, played second base, went to the university on a full ride and then joined the Air Force. The Air Force paid his way to Tulane for his law degree, and now he was a captain in the JAG Corps. Ken and his German wife, Irmgard, lived in Wiesbaden and he was often in Somalia or the Middle East, helping soldiers sort out their legal problems and make their wills before they were sent off to be killed or handicapped in some stupid war that no mother would ever have started. Charles had always thought that Ken was CIA, which made sense, he traveled constantly. There were two children Liddie had seen occasionally. They didn’t seem to visit often.
Mary Byrd felt her eyes welling up. “Okay, Ken,” she said. “But please keep us posted. We’ll be worrying like crazy.”
“I will. I’ll call you when I’ve gone up to Memphis and we know more.”
“And if you—if you need—” She held up Evagreen’s envelope. “Charles will insist.”
“Thanks, but don’t worry,” Ken said. “We’re okay for now.”
Mary Byrd hesitated for a second and then went over to Evagreen and hugged her. Evagreen didn’t resist, but she didn’t hug back either. Her lips moved a little, but she said nothing.
Mary Byrd retreated, laying the envelope on a small stand near the door. “Okay. We’ll be thinking of y’all. Night.” She gave Ken a rueful, tight-lipped smile, and left.
The lady outside was smoking and she exhaled a white cloud into the purple dark. “Shouldn’t be such a beautiful night, should it?”
“No, it really shouldn’t,” Mary Byrd said, and then, “Good night,” thinking, Bad night. Bad day. Horrible day.
Mary Byrd plopped herself into the driver’s seat as Mann said, “God, this pleasant evening is getting longer by the minute.”
She put her head down on the steering wheel and told Mann what had happened.
“Oh my god! That’s so awful,” he said. “Angie? How did she do it? Jeez. Where is that asshole?” He looked down the street where Wiggs had disappeared. “Here. Switch places. Let me drive.”
They swapped seats and Mann turned the car around. He pulled on the headlights, illuminating Wiggs coming up the street, walking stiffly.
“What’s he doing, a goose step?” asked Mann. “Fucking maniac.”
They heard a huge, angry voice shout, “Come ’round my family again, I’ll shove that camera right up your skinny white ass! You’ll be looking at a snapshot of the dark side of your tonsils, cracker!”
“Oh no,” said Mary Byrd. “That’s Roderick’s house. Shit.”
Wiggs threw himself into the car. “You wouldn’t have believed it. There’s a house down there—the one that’s all lit up like a juke joint, where all the cars are. There’s something awful going on—I don’t know what—a wake or some wretched thing. You can hear the wailing from the street. I went into the yard to get some shots and all of a sudden, this—this fucking animal was on me! He nearly killed me! He nearly broke my back! He thought I was a fucking newspaper reporter! He grabbed my Leica—I’m sure this lens is ruined.”
Wiggs blew his nose into a handkerchief and looked at it. “I wanted a picture of the window. Not those creatures. Wonderful. Now my nose is fucking bleeding.”
“Well,” Mann said, lighting a cigarette from the dashboard lighter, “There is a god. So much for your new coffee table book, ‘Nighttime in the Quarters.’”
Startled by this salvo, Mary Byrd said, “Mann! Don’t.”
“You’d feel a little differently if that baboon had given your candy ass a turkey stride,” Wiggs said through his hankie. “Give me a smoke.”
“I need one, too,” said Mary Byrd. “And another drink. Or three or four.”
Wiggs wanted to go straight back to the Holiday Inn to nurse his patrician nose and medicate himself with vodka. He wouldn’t eat anyway, but they stopped and got him a chicken-on-a-stick and tater logs at the Chevron. Mann cautiously negotiated the downtown traffic; students were beginning to come out and were careening around in their big, fat death chariots on their way to the first parties of the night.
When Mann and Mary Byrd returned to the house, the sitter had Emergency 911 on and didn’t want to stop watching long enough to be walked home. “Some guys were scuba diving and a pipe fell on one guy’s air hose. His girlfriend saved him. He has a cool Rolex,” she said.
“That’s why she wanted to save him,” said Mann. “Gold diggers, all of you.” The sitter eyed him suspiciously for a second and turned back to the TV.
“Let me cook something quick, M’Byrd. I’m vanquished,” Mann said.
Mary Byrd looked around the counter for the science unfair proposals that of course weren’t there. She called the Pink Palace looking for Charles but he hadn’t come in yet. She asked the Palace to give him the message that they couldn’t make it and were home, then she went upstairs to check on the children. Charles wasn’t going to be happy with her.
William was asleep in his bed, hair still damp from his shower. She sniffed it and didn’t smell shampoo, so he’d just faked a hair-washing. He’d better not get the damn cooties again.
Mouth slightly open, he lay on his back with a few of his favorite gadgets and models arranged by his head: pocket knife, binoculars, and a small model war plane still in his hand. Beside him, open, was Jane’s Guide to Fighting Aircraft. Mary Byrd knew he had conked out—no one conked out like little boys—midflight, on some dangerous, epic bombing mission to Nagasaki or Dresden or Pearl Harbor. He didn’t favor Japs or Germans, of course, but he loved their planes and tanks. His favorite, the one in his hand, was a little Russian Seagull, a plane so primitive that at Stalingrad it had flown so low and slow that Messerschmitts couldn’t hit them. Peeking from under his pillow were his tanks: a German Mark VI Tiger, and a Shturmovik that William could tell you had destroyed the Third, Ninth, and Seventeenth Panzer divisions at the Battle of Kursk. Where the hell was Kursk? William could go straight to the huge world map on his wall and show you.
For a minute Mary Byrd imagined William dead, and shuddered. She kissed him, and, knowing he would knock his stuff to the floor in the night, she moved it all to the bedside table, picking up some empty Skittles boxes and throwing them in his Ninja Turtles trash can.
Eliza was still awake reading a trashy teenage novel that no doubt involved dope in lockers, heinous, clueless parents, and lots of near-sex. Mary Byrd lay down beside her. Her bed was so comfortable and poofy. There were about six inches of down underneath the sheets and comforter, and two feet of down on top, and several big, squishy pillows piled at the head.
“Mom.” Eliza protested. “Why are you home?”
“Don’t read that junk, please,” said Mary Byrd. “Read something classic or uplifting.” She wound a piece of Eliza’s damp blonde hair around her finger.
Eliza jerked her head away. “Like what? The Weekly World News that you always look at at the JFC?”
“I have to keep up with what’s going on in the world, don’t I?”
“Yeah,” said Eliza, “Like what Bat Boy and Misbehavin and that guy Nostrildamus are up to?”
“Exactly. Let’s see your hands.” Mary Byrd put her daughter’s hand against her own, remembering Eliza as a new baby and her hands that had looked like tiny stars when she was full and happy, and when she was hungry—practically always—had been knotty little fists pressed up against her cheeks, those huge chipmunk pouches and that precious potato head, like Charles’s. She was surprised that Eliza had prettied up so much.
“My nails are clean,” Eliza protested.
Mary Byrd ignored her. “Wow. Your fingers are as long as mine already. That means you’re creative. You’ll be a pianist or a painter, I’ll bet.”
“A surgeon. Like Big William. Who cares about creative?” she sniffed. “Mom, get up.”
“I care. Dad cares,” said Mary Byrd. From downstairs came the smell of hot olive oil and garlic. “You go to sleep.”
“Why are you home? Where’s Dad?” Eliza asked.
“Ed had to take some pictures, and we decided not to eat out, so I guess Dad is on his way home.”
“Why do you and Daddy hang around with him anyway? He’s always drunk and creepy and says mean things to Mann.”
“Drunk and creepy? Ed? You can’t mean that.” They both laughed.
“No, for real,” said Eliza.
“You know why. He’s a really great photographer, one of the most famous in the world, and Dad sells a lot of his work.”
“Yeah, but what good is being famous if you don’t know how to act?” asked Eliza.
“That’s a good question. But when Ed’s not drunk and acting up, he is really, really smart and interesting and, I swear, charming.”
“Huh.”
“Maybe brilliant people should get cut a little slack, do you think?”
“Nope. Liddie wouldn’t have liked him.”
“Probably not. But Liddie would have tolerated him and been polite to him anyway, right?”
“Maybe. But she wouldn’t hang around with him. And she would have said something like, ‘He is such a bore. Have you evah?’” Eliza was great at imitating her grandmother. They laughed again.
“But I bet he would straighten up around someone like Liddie and be the perfect gentleman. She had that effect on people.”
“Why don’t you have that effect on people, Mom?”
“Not cut from the same cloth, I guess. Liddie’s silk, and I’m . . .”
“Polyester,” said Eliza.
“Thanks, pal. I was going to say denim, at least.”
“Whatever.”
Mary Byrd wondered if she should tell Eliza about Evagreen—she might hear about it at school in the morning—but decided against it. She reluctantly got off the bed and bent and kissed Eliza’s face seven times, all over. Eliza narrowed her eyes and scrutinized her mother.
“Madison said her mom saw you kissing someone.”
Mary Byrd stiffened a little. “Oh yeah? Who was that?”
“Some old man. One of those guys of Dad’s.”
“Pfft. I kiss those guys all the time. Is there a law against kissing? Is that the eleventh commandment or something? Thou shalt not kiss?”
“A gross kiss.”
“If it was one of Dad’s guys, I was probably giving him CPR. And besides, the Durthes are Church of God or Church of Christ or one of those religions that believe that dancing is a sin, for god’s sake.”
Eliza was silent.
Mary Byrd said, “Look, sometimes you just have to kiss people. Some people are needy.”
“On the lips?”
“Oh, jeez, Eliza. Yes, on the lips. Lots of people kiss on the lips. Liddie and Evelyn and Big William kissed on the lips. Europeans kiss on the lips. Big deal. Dad kisses people all the time.”
Eliza said, “Yeah, Dad kisses Mann.”
This gave Mary Byrd pause and she tried to read her daughter’s face. Kidding? Charles and Mann often joked that they were a couple, and that it took both of them to be a husband to Mary Byrd. Then she said lightly, “Exactly. Ha ha. Be sure to tell Madison that. Stop making things up to worry about.”
“Well, stop doing embarrassing things!” Eliza practically shouted. “Stop wearing that stupid FUPA skirt!””
“God, you’re insane!” She couldn’t help but laugh. “What’s wrong with this skirt? What’s FUPA mean?”
“That’s for me to know and you to find out,” Eliza said. “Why don’t you ask one of your supposedly cool friends?”
“Okay, I will. Now go to sleep before I call Whitfield to come get you.”
“Hmph. They need to come get you.”
“Fine. At least then I might find some people down there who’ll be nice to me for a change.”
“Yeah,” said Eliza viciously. “You might find some slobbery retards and head-banger psychos you can kiss all the time, too.”
“O-kay!” Mary Byrd turned to go, saying cheerfully, “Don’t say ‘retards.’ Night-night, Miss Mean. Seepy-seep!” She turned off the light and closed the door. “Love you!” she called.
Eliza yelled back, “Yeah, right!”
Mary Byrd understood that possibly her most important function as a mother was to be a punching bag. Fine. Who else would Eliza take her hormone-driven insecurities and rage out on? Well, William, of course. Poor little guy.
When Mary Byrd got to the stairs, Eliza jerked open her door and said, “I already know about Evagreen. Roderick’s sister works in Mr. Barksdales’s office and the twins told me.” Her lovely face looked vulnerable now.
“Okay,” Mary Byrd said tiredly, and sadly. “We’ll talk about it in the morning.”
Mary Byrd thought she knew about children, about taking care of them, anyway—the nuts and bolts. She’d taken care of her brothers since she was Eliza’s age. She’d certainly thought a lot about children all her life: about being one, about being a stepchild or a half-sibling, about having a child, and about losing it. But she did not know how to show her children how to be happy, or to give them happiness, which seemed to be the most important thing of all—certainly more important than piano lessons or Sunday School or SAT scores. Did any parents know? As Liddie used to say, “You’re only as happy as your unhappiest child.” Eliza and William were good kids—intelligent, warm-hearted, stable. Except for Eliza’s preteen surliness, she thought they were fine. Mary Byrd hoped deeply that they’d stay that way, and she believed that with a little luck, because luck seemed to have everything to do with it, they would.
She and Mann sat in her kitchen and ate the fried egg and sautéed pepper sandwiches on stale French bread that Mann had constructed, and drank red wine. Mary Byrd wasn’t very hungry. She lit a Camel Light.
“Pretty good, if I do say so myself,” said Mann. “But I was kind of craving the pink center. And I think Wiggs was craving yours.”
“Shut up. He is not the least bit interested in me.” She sipped some wine. “And things are too screwed up for one of those conversations,” she said. “Anyway, he doesn’t even seem sexual, somehow. Like a lot of people who are, you know, interested mostly in themselves and what they do.” She didn’t really want the smoke and stubbed it out.
“Yeah, I guess,” said Mann, sopping olive oil with a hunk of bread. “This Chianti isn’t bad,” he said. “Even if it doesn’t have the black cock on the label.” He examined the bottle. “Hey, did you notice he was wearing the bulge exaggerator again? Dressed on the left this time, which I think is a signal.”
“I thought you didn’t like him, butt head.” She ate a few bites of fried egg. They were delicious. What would the world do without eggs?
“Of course I don’t.” He started singing sillily, “What’s like got to do, got to do with it?” Then, “He’s just so incredibly good-looking, all I’m saying. And you know what we say out at the coops: cock’s cock, even on livestock.” He picked up a box of matches. “I’m like these. A strike-anywhere kind of guy.”
She couldn’t help but give a little laugh. “You are so not that. You are more afraid of cooties than I am,” she said. “Now I am wondering where Charles is. If one more fucked-up thing happens today, I’ll kill myself.”
“You didn’t even get those prints or anything, did you,” said Mann, stating a fact.
“No,” sighed Mary Byrd. “Charles will be pissed. But I have the excuse about the Bons. Maybe Charles can get with Wiggs in the morning.” She bit off more sandwich. “Is it my idea that almost everything revolves around or happens because of sex? Either too much of it or too little of it or the wrong kind of it? Or did I read that somewhere?” she said. “I mean, Angie killed Rod because he had a girlfriend. My stepbrother got—”
Mann cut her off, waving his little hands. “We are not going there now. You might have bad dreams.”
“I’ve been feeling all day like I’m in a bad dream!” Mary Byrd sighed loudly. “This stupid trip, and now what are we going to do about Angie?”
“What can you do?” Mann said. “You don’t even know what’s really happened.”
“I bet Teever will know something, if I can scare him up.” She wondered if he’d seen his message at the JFC yet.
“Yeah, but will it be true?”
“I don’t know—his information is surprisingly reliable.”
“Okay, so you know the details, then what?” Mann shrugged his shoulders.
“God. What a mess.” Mary Byrd said, absently scraggling up her hair with both hands. “And what good is it going to do for me to hear new crap about my stepbrother?” she asked.
“Because duh—didn’t we already do this? There will be one less bad guy in the world,” Mann said.
“How am I going to get up there? I can’t be ready to go ’til Saturday, and the airport might close.”
“Hmm,” said Mann. “We’ve got a truck going up north on Saturday. Maybe that could work?” He laughed. “I’d love to see it!”
“Very funny.”
He cocked his head and said seriously, “Actually, why not? Foote Slay—you know him—we took some papers to his house that time. He’s our best driver.”
“Uh-huh. And what do you think Charles will say?”
“I’ll take care of Charles. Let me look into it.”
“You’re nuts. I can’t think any more about it right now.” She was so tired. “I’m sorry to drag you into all this, Mann. Thanks for coming over. I don’t know why you hang around with me—I’m depressed and depressing.”
“I know,” he said. “I guess I just always want to see what’s going to happen next.”
Mann left, walking the sitter out with him. Mary Byrd picked up the Spode plates, oily from the drippy peppers, and ate the rest of her egg with her fingers before putting the dish in the dishwasher. In went the silverware; she shouldn’t have used the sterling because the eggs and the stainless stuff would tarnish it, but she liked to use her nice things for Mann.
Charles should be home any minute, she thought. Where was he? Maybe he was up to no good, but she let the thought go. She was too exhausted and distracted. Besides, Charles was almost exclusively up to good. She just wanted him to get home and help her deal with Evagreen’s mess, and talk about going to Richmond, and she wanted to admit to her failure to secure what was needed from Wiggs and take her licks for that.
She wondered what Ernest had called for. Drunk again, she supposed. There was nothing to say. Still, it would be nice to hear him say nothing right now. Crazy thing.
Mary Byrd didn’t bother with the greasy pan and began making her nightly rounds turning off lights, locking up, making sure Mann had turned the stove off, situating Puppy Sal and the Pounder and making sure Iggy and Irene were inside for the night. She left the driveway floodlight on for Charles even though he deserved to come home to the reprimand of a dark house and fumble his way around the bikes and dog bowls and possible eviscerated voles and garden tools on the porch.
Passing though the hall on her way upstairs again, she paused, as she often did, at the engraved portrait of Charles’s ancestor and her crush, William Byrd, and the framed manuscript page from his amazing diary. Of all the lovely, heirloomy things Charles had, this was far and away her favorite. Using a seventeenth-century shorthand textbook called La Plume Volante, Byrd had written his entries in a cryptic scrawl that hadn’t been transcribed and published until 1941. But long before that, some manuscript pages with horny entries had gone missing from the original text in the Virginia Historical Society. How Charles’s family had come by the manuscript page was sketchy. Charles suspected either his very prudish Victorian great aunt or her infamously lecherous husband—an uncle only by marriage—of having pilfered the pages, or at least this particular page. They really ought to give the page back to the VHS. But then, why? It belonged to the family, didn’t it? She would hate to give it up. The translation of the entry was penciled on the back—the children hadn’t discovered this, or didn’t give a rat’s ass. Mary Byrd knew it by heart, anyway.
[September 26, 1711] I rose about 6 o’clock and read a chapter in Hebrew and some Greek in Lucian. I said my prayers and ate milk and rhubarb for breakfast. I danced my dance. I settled several accounts and wrote some of my journal. It was fine warm weather but there was great want of rain for the grass. I ate roast pork for dinner. In the afternoon I rogered my wife on the billiard table. Captain H-n-t came and told me he had but 70 hogshead on board and the reason was because people gave notes for tobacco which was not ready. About 4 o’clock I took a walk with him to Mrs. Harrison’s to inquire when she would send her tobacco. She gave us apples and wine and told me that Colonel Harrison was very much indisposed and drooped without being sick and believed that he should never see Williamsburg again. In the evening we returned home where my family and people were well, thank God. At night I had several people whipped for being lazy in the morning. I said my prayers and had good health, good thoughts, and good humor, thank God Almighty.
In spite of his colonial cruelties, somehow Mary Byrd had long adored William Byrd—had known him longer than she’d known Charles, since her William and Mary days. In fact, she knew that some part of her initial attraction to Charles had to do with his being descended from Byrd, and that he and his ancestor, who had been born more than three hundred years earlier, seemed so much alike. Not the cruelty, but his stoic swashbucklingness, or something.
She knew Byrd intimately. At William and Mary she’d pored over Byrd’s insanely extensive and anal-retentive diaries—volumes and volumes he’d written detailing life on his James River plantation, participation in the House of Burgesses, laying out the cities of Richmond and Petersburg, acting as colonial agent and diplomat in London, commanding the militia for two counties, and surveying the boundary between Virginia and North Carolina. He wrote in it every fucking day about every fucking thing that was going on, from his bowels and his wife’s periods to the state of his tobacco crops. It was irresistible to Mary Byrd that she could get such an intimate glimpse into early eighteenth-century life; the diaries were practically a time machine and fed the voyeur in her. She’d read other early American diarists in American lit class, but the bloodless, spiritual ruminations of the chilly Yankee, Cotton Mather, couldn’t touch the earthy, sticky, and stinking humanity of Byrd’s diary.
In the day, they’d called him the Black Swan because of his dark and dashing good looks—his portrait, an etching after a Kneller painting, was framed side-by-side with the yellowed hieroglyphic page—and Byrd looked charmingly swarthy; a little like Stanley Tucci in a wig. Byrd himself had used the pen name Steddy in his prime. His family crest was crowned by a swallow, a bird that she discovered symbolized perpetual movement and safe return: he’d crossed the Atlantic a few times. Ten times! A trip that sometimes took more than two months! Mary Byrd loved him so much—she could remember when she was a little girl feeling the same way about Fess Parker as Davy Crockett, King of the Wild Frontier—that she’d chosen to write about Byrd for her senior thesis: “Ague, Flux, Blue Wing, and Sallet: Healing and Foodways on an Early Eighteenth Century Virginia Plantation.” If he wasn’t walking about Westover checking on his mill or his orchards or unloading hogsheads full of tobacco or bossing his people around, Byrd was worrying about bad New England rum, sloops and tides, making business deals, arguing politics, writing letters back to England, raising the militia for a smack-down on the Tuscaroras, or complaining about his wife, who was a poor household manager or just lazy, and was frequently “out of order.” Ha! They argued a lot: once, because he wouldn’t let her pluck her eyebrows. This didn’t stop him from rogering her vigorously or giving her a flourish, sometimes on the library sofa or wherever. Other times he committed uncleanness, or kissed or felt up someone else’s wife or a maid, and when he went up to sessions of the House of Burgesses in Williamsburg, he and the other burgesses were merry on canary, syllabub, mead, sack, or persico and played the fool or made good sport with girls, or just spoke lewdly. Talked trash! He was a control freak and super-industrious, like someone else she knew, and read the classics in five or six languages every day, but also found time for gambling at piquet, hazard, basset, cudgels, whisk, and horse races, seeming often to lose some shillings, but never more than fifty, which was his limit. He dealt with characters who had crazily Dickensian names, like Billy Brayne, his dumb nephew; his friend Dick Cocke; and a French pirate named Crapeau! Believing that one should only dine on one dish at a meal, he was always having milk (he said he ate it), caudle, sallet, chine, sheldrake, neat’s tongue, pease porridge, water gruel, and calf’s head. Everyone, black or white, rich or poor, was always indisposed with quartan fever, distemper, bloody fluxes, gripes, gout, dropsy, and impostumes, vapors, and worms, and they came to Byrd for purges of scurvy grass or laxative salts, tincture of snake root, jesuit’s bark, beaver mineral, spirits of juniper, red lead plasters, burnt hartshorn, Venice treacle, stupe, or laudanum. Often, he’d salivate them for rheumatism, or let blood—whole pints of it—for whatever, or have them take a physic or a glyster. He gave his slaves and servants no choice—Mengele had nothing on him—but his wife often sensibly resisted his quacky, experimental cures. For his own terrible piles, he had his wife anoint his fundament with tobacco or linseed oil and balsam or saltpeter. What a guy. No wonder he had ’rhoids: he was always doing stuff like slogging across the Great Dismal Swamp because he wanted to buy it and drain it and grow hemp!
Byrd was crazy busy managing his practically medieval, gigantic estate; he owned something like two hundred thousand acres. If he’d been born twenty-five or one hundred and twenty-five years later he would have been a revolutionary or a confederate. He didn’t like being fucked with and even in 1709 he was already pissed off at the governor and the king for all the cash they were squeezing out of Virginia. Nulla pallescere culpa, he had adopted as his motto. “Pale at no crime.” It was a good thing Byrd hadn’t been around to see his beloved Westover first ravaged by Benedict Arnold and Cornwallis, and then used as headquarters for Union troops in the War of Northern Aggression, as he surely would have called it.
Imagining herself as Lucy Parke, Byrd’s put-upon wife, she saw herself in her undress, meaning a sort of housedress; she’d rather have been in the fancy mantua that Byrd had brought to her from England, thickly embroidered and beautifully scroddled in swallows and flowers, with its lovely scroop, the train tucked up in back, but he wouldn’t have stood for all that froufrou on a workday. She did have on a lovely new lace cap.
“Could you please get off your ass and do something around here?” he’d say.
“And what is it that my lord and master would have me do?” Mary Byrd would reply, lounging on some fabulous piece of furniture, picking sadly at a sweetmeat.
“I’ll have you unloading some hogsheads, if you can’t find anything else to do. God in heaven, woman,” he’d say.
“I’m indisposed at the moment,” she’d say. “I’m overwhelmed and despondent, having just lost my only son.”
“Work is the best cure for that,” he’d say. They’d fight a little more. Then, he’d say, “I know what you need, my good wife,” and he’d yank her up, toss up her skirts, and bend her over the billiards table.
In William Byrd’s mind, she’d enjoy it, and he’d believe that they were reconciled, but Lucy Parke probably faked it. Mary Byrd would’ve straightened her cap and gown, smiled weakly, and gone upstairs to lament her lost baby, do up some laudanum, and nap.
“Fuck this guy,” she’d think, hoping he wouldn’t follow her and have her anoint his fundament.
Byrd was a hard-ass. He had to be! When their baby son had died he barely mentioned it in the diaries, which had led some famous, dumb-ass feminist historian to offer this as further proof of his misogyny, or some silly crap. Mary Byrd knew Byrd better than that: it didn’t mean that his heart wasn’t broken. A teeny coffin was made from one of his walnut trees, and his baby boy was buried in a hard summer rain. William Byrd couldn’t afford the twentieth century luxury of grieving. Hundreds of people depended on him. He just sucked up his gripey, colicky, hemorrhoidy guts, swallowed his tears, and attended to what needed attending to. Got back to work.
Mary Byrd’s very favorite thing about him was the daily notation: I danced my dance. He mentioned it nearly every single day. No matter what wildness was going on around him—Indian uprisings, incompetent overseers and public officials, unpaid bills, shipwrecks, crop-ruining or sloop-stalling weather, people sick and dying—he got up at the crack, read his books, ate some milk, and danced his dance. Of all the Merchant Ivory vignettes of Byrd she carried in her mind, it was this one that fascinated her most. She pictured him shedding a Chinese silk wrapper, and then his billowing white shift—rough flax to mortify himself—and in front of a blazing fire, he’d do a sort of combination minuet, tai chi, and yoga, his longish colonial balls and mauve, sheathed cock bobbling and slapping against his strong, capable, and no doubt hairy thighs. Maybe there was a merkin, too. She couldn’t remember if he ever mentioned lice. How did they stick merkins on, anyway? Call it exercise or exorcism, his dance got him prepared for, or through, his days and years. It seemed to give him what he needed to go on.
The truly bad things about him, though, Mary Byrd hated knowing. He not only had slaves but was part owner of a slave ship. He bought political favors. He lost his temper and sometimes resorted to yelling like a maniac or cruelly punishing people; Evagreen would not have fared well in Byrd’s household. He suffered remorse and guilt, though, about these things, and at the end of each day’s entry, he’d usually write, “I recommended myself to God.” But just as often, no doubt completely exhausted by his responsibilities and busting his ass all day, he’d regret that he’d “neglected to say his prayers.” Then, he’d always close with that same upbeat entreaty, “I had good health, good thoughts, and good humor, Thank God Almighty.” She loved Byrd anyway because he wasn’t exemplary but struggled to be, even knowing that perfection was never going to happen. Was he so much worse than Thomas Jefferson? Historians—about whom Mary Byrd often wondered, because, despite seeming to have boring little faculty lives, they made careers out of examining the lives of guys like Byrd who lived large—had kicked around the question of what would inspire a man to keep such an obsessive, personal diary every day of his life, but she totally got it. Duh. It was a way, like praying or keeping an expense account, to try to impose some order on a scary, random, calamitous universe where the overseer was a vengeful, Old Testament God. By keeping his diaries Byrd had used every way he could think of to make sense of things. Diaries were great until other people read them. She was certain that Byrd had never intended for other people to read his. Why else would he have written them in a secret language? Too bad she hadn’t done that back in 1966.
Giving the portrait the lightest kiss, just touching the glass with the tip of her tongue, Mary Byrd went upstairs to bed, hoping that wherever he was, the Black Swan wouldn’t hold it against her for peeping.