Bed & Breakfast Page 14

  They’d met on the first day of high school. The school had just been integrated and though everyone was exceedingly polite, the tension was palpable. A tall, scrawny kid with big ears, he’d been standing behind her in the line waiting for locker assignments. At first they’d only shared looks of impatience at the long wait, then he’d asked, “Your father in service?” When she’d said yes and how did he know, he’d pointed to the scars on her bare arm and said, “All your vaccinations. I’ve got ’em, too. I bet we’ve got shots for diseases most of these kids don’t know exist.” She’d said, with a world-weary shrug she’d been perfecting in her bathroom mirror, that they’d probably been to countries most of the locals didn’t know existed. As far as she could recall, they had never even eaten lunch together, but across Formica tables in a cafeteria that reeked of rendered lard, or at school assemblies, they’d cut their eyes to one another and share knowing looks when foolish things had been said.

  She gave him such a look now, across her sister’s candlelight buffet, and mouthed his name, “Hannibal.” He nodded and started around the table. She met him halfway, already saying, “The minute I saw you I knew that I knew you, but I just couldn’t place you. And when that woman called you H.A.... I just didn’t put it together.”

  “If your folks had christened you Hannibal Attucks,” he said softly, the sly smile cracking, “wouldn’t you be looking to change it to initials that made you sound like some guy on Dynasty?”

  “But you’ve changed so much.”

  “Am I supposed to say you haven’t?”

  “Hardly. But you were so skinny in high school.”

  “Yeah. I was a long drink of water back then.”

  It was hard to untangle what she’d actually thought of Hannibal at that age. She realized that it must have been some unrecognized taboo that had prevented her from realizing that even as a painfully thin, shy adolescent, he’d been potentially very handsome; but the notion of dating him had never even occurred to her.

  She hadn’t been brought up with redneck racial prejudice. Bear had always been a firm believer in meritocracy: a man was judged by his character and his performance on the job, not by the color of his skin, and Josie had shared his sentiments. Even Mawmaw, who, despite Cam’s arguments, had voted for George Wallace, had said she didn’t so much object to integration as she objected to “fools in Washington telling me what to do, when I never let my own flesh and blood dictate to me.” Cam no longer believed that this had been Mawmaw’s only objection. Mawmaw had wanted to perpetuate the Southern “way of life.” Hearing the word “nigger” hadn’t raised Mawmaw’s moral hackles, but she had given her children and grandchildren to understand that such terms were definitely declasse.

  “So, Hannibal . . . I mean, H.A.,” she teased. “Lord, this is like being in a time warp. I saw Bedford Bethune about fifteen minutes ago.”

  “Yeah. Bedford just said good-bye to me. I wouldn’t exactly say we’re buddies, but we’re on each other’s lists—you know, he calls me to sign a petition or make a charitable contribution, six months later I call him. Bedford’s still living in the seventies—but who can blame him?”

  “And you? Can you catch me up on the last thirty years in ten minutes?”

  “I’d sure like to try. But you go first. Don’t see a wedding ring. You divorced?”

  “Never been married.”

  He chuckled. “No surprise. I always thought, ‘Cam Tatternall—either she’ll have no husband or she’ll be tying Liz Taylor’s record.’ ”

  “I’m flattered that you thought about me at all.” She hadn’t thought about him in decades.

  “Oh, sure. I always wondered how you’d end up. It was a big deal when you went up to New York after graduation. You got out. You made something of yourself.” Cam grunted, stepping aside for a woman who was going for the pastries. “Well, you did,” H.A. persisted. “You’re a New York editor, right? It’s no small thing to be an editor.”

  “Smaller than you think—at least in terms of money—at least if you work for a nonprofit organization.”

  “Ah, money. That’s the thing that makes me feel old. Worrying about money all the time.”

  She arched an eyebrow. “You don’t look poverty-stricken.”

  “Like ol’ LBJ, I keep looking for the light at the end of the tunnel. My daughter’s only got another year to go in college and she’s a real hotshot. But my son—we’re talking about a black boy with SATs in the upper fifteenth percentile, could’ve chosen any college he wanted—and what does he do? He drops out and goes to Africa. Africa! The most pitiful damned continent on the globe. I went there in the Peace Corps ’bout twenty-five years ago, so I should know.”

  “And what are you doing now?”

  “Oh, I’m an administrator in highah education,” he said with an Amos ’n Andy drawl. “That be why I’m playin’ the political circuit at parties like this. You can’t imagine how prickly it is—Brer Rabbit in de briar patch.”

  “I’m feeling a little prickly myself. Want to go out on the patio?”

  “Actually, I was about to leave. Why don’t you walk me to my car?”

  “You’ve got a deal.” She looked around. “I already made more of an entrance than I wanted to. Maybe it’d be less obtrusive if we went out through the kitchen.”

  “I cain’t be leaving by the back door, missy. I’ll do my round of good-byes and meet you in front of the house.”

  She started toward the kitchen but saw her mother at the sink, hands plunged in suds, chatting to Cuba, who stood next to her, slowly wiping plates while servers who looked like they’d just climbed off surfboards sailed around them. She decided against leaving through the kitchen, turned and made her way through the crowd to the patio. Even the torches hadn’t succeeded in taking the evening chill from the air and it was virtually deserted. She looked around, saw a break in the hedges, and after a backward glance, slipped through and came out near a man-made stream with a small waterfall and, beyond it, what appeared to be a golf course. She stood for a moment, taking in deep breaths of the sweet-smelling night air and staring up at the stars. She didn’t see the stars all that often in Manhattan and looking at them now made her feel not so much insignificant as wondering about her place in the larger scheme of things, and wishing Sam was here with her, his arm around her.

  After her eyes had adjusted to the darkness, she figured out that she was next to a triple garage. She circled it, surprised to find her boots sinking in some muddy places, and came out on the side of the house, near a giant Christmas tree.

  H.A. stood, smoking a cigarette, farther down the drive near the street. “You made it,” he said, waved away the parking attendant who’d rushed up to aid them, and looped her arm through his. “It’s that old Honda just up the road under the big live oak.” They walked in silence. He opened the door on the passenger side, moved some books from the seat, helped her in, then walked to the other side, got in, closed the door, snuffed out his cigarette in the ashtray, and started to laugh. “Makes you feel like a kid again, sneaking out of someplace and getting away with it. Remember when you talked me into cutting class?”

  “I have no recollection of that. Where did we go?”

  “We didn’t go anywhere. I think you were going off with friends. It was a beautiful day and you said you didn’t want to waste it in class. I must’ve looked shocked because you dared me to do the same. I thought maybe I’d go fishing but I was so afraid the truant officer would catch me that I just sat in the woods for a while, then went and hid out in my room and when my mother came home from work I told her I had a stomachache. Not exactly Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. But you, hey, nothing stopped you. You were already taking off for another planet. You were a real inspiration. ‘Provincial’ you used to say when anything displeased you. ‘Provincial,’ in this sophisticated drawl.”

  “I spent a lot of time in front of the mirror working on it.”

  “You said it once when some guys had made some sm
art-ass racist remark and I was getting ready to bop them. Growing up on bases—well, you know what it was like—there was discrimination but it was more subtle. Everyone followed the same rules. Rank was more important than race. And when these guys at school called me jungle bunny’ or whatever it was, it really knocked me back. And you overheard them, and just as I was getting ready to jump on them, you said, ‘Oh, Hannibal, don’t pay any attention to those yahoos. They’re so provincial.’ ”

  “Not exactly Joan of Arc.”

  “Yeah, but it did the trick. That’s why I remember it.”

  “I always figured you’d go into the military.”

  “My dad wanted me to. He used to say, ‘your grandparents were shrimpers who lived in a two-room shack. The military’s the only institution that’s given us a fair shake. Why you want to turn your back on it?’ Even now he’ll say, ‘General Colin L. Powell is the only black man who could make a real run for the presidency’—as though I could’ve been Colin Powell if only I hadn’t wanted to spite him. Hell, he only made sergeant but he had it in his mind from the time I was a little kid that I’d be an officer. But I went to college and had my consciousness raised. I was reading Franz Fanon and wearing a Huey P. Newton T-shirt and letting my hair go natural. You ever had your consciousness raised, Camilla?” he asked with a grin.

  She smiled back. “Oh, sure. It was my principal occupation for about ten years.”

  “So,” he knocked another cigarette out of the pack and gestured to ask if it was all right to smoke. She nodded, he rolled down his window and continued, “So, there was no way I was goin’ in that man’s army.” He draped his arms over the steering wheel, shaking his head and looking straight ahead. “And I was so proud of Daddy when I was growing up, even though he used to whup me if I stepped an inch over the line. He always looked so neat. Creases in his trousers, pomade on his hair, shoes shined, tie straight. Spit and polish all the way. ‘Yes, ma’am. No, sir. If you make a mess, clean it up. If you borrow it, return it.’ ”

  “ ‘If you value it, take care of it. If it’s none of your business, don’t ask questions. If it will tarnish someone’s reputation, keep it to yourself ” Cam laughed. “There were about fifty of those rules, weren’t there? What’re your folks doing now?”

  “My mother died just as Daddy was getting ready to retire. It was hard for him at first—the retirement, even more than her death, I think. But I think he’s happy now, or would be if he could still order his kids around. He’s got himself a little farm down near Waycross, where his sister lives. Raises his own chickens and hogs, plants vegetables, even puts up pickles and relish and gives ’em to people for Christmas.”

  “I don’t think my father would ever have been happy as a civilian. At least not the sort of domesticity my mother wanted. Since he’d been brought up in an orphanage, I guess the idea of home and family always appealed to him—but the reality?”

  “I remember your daddy,” he said. “He looked like he belonged on a recruiting poster. I always figured he’d come from a long line of distinguished warriors.”

  “If he did, he never knew them. Funny, but I never even thought it was strange that I only had one set of grandparents until one morning at breakfast there was a particularly bad argument . . .”

  “My parents always argued over breakfast too. I still can’t get more’n a cup of coffee down at breakfast.”

  “My mother called him a ‘bastard.’ I’d never heard her use that word before. I guess I was about ten. I knew what the word meant because I liked to read histories of royal families, but I’d never related it to anyone I knew. When she called him that I thought he was going to kill her—and that made me put it all together.” She stopped, thinking perhaps she’d revealed too much. “Nothing that is said in this house goes further than the door” had been the rule, and she still respected it, which is why she was so appalled at Evie’s conduct. But this was different.

  Perhaps it was sitting in the darkness of the parked car under the big live oak, the cool breeze coming in the window and moving the Spanish moss so that it made shadows on the windshield that made her want to talk. Or maybe it was because she and Hannibal sensed a mutual trust, and knew they were unlikely to see one another again.

  “Yeah, Daddy loved the idea of home and family,” she repeated, “but, oh, how he hated the reality! The military wasn’t just an adventure or an obligation to him, it wasn’t even a way of life—it was his natural element. He suffered when he was away from it the way a dolphin would suffer if you took it out of the ocean. When he’d first come home, he’d seem real happy to be there, but it never lasted for very long.”

  She could remember the excitement, the holiday feeling of his homecomings, how Josie would do everything to make the occasion special, but after a few days she’d start with little “please don’ts”—please don’t smoke cigars in the house ’cause they smell up the draperies, please don’t put your feet on the furniture, watch out you don’t get hair oil on the back of the couch. He’d go along at first, but pretty soon he’d be looking at doilies as though they were insects he wanted to slap away. And he’d sit there in that ratty leather recliner, staring at the TV without seeing it, trying to read and not being able to concentrate. And the level of the bourbon bottle kept going down, but no one talked about that. Sometimes he’d get so restless he’d start doing push-ups in the living room. Josie would want him to prune hedges or mow the lawn, but he’d just sort of pace in the yard, like it was a preserve in a zoo. Sometimes he’d say he was just going to the store and be gone for hours. Sometimes he drove to the beach or a movie and took Cam with him. And she was more than happy for the opportunity to be alone with him, to try to entertain him, to get out of the stifling atmosphere of the house.

  “I wasn’t much for the home fires either. I always wanted”—she said the words as though they were enclosed in quotes—“a ‘life of adventure.’ I asked him once why he’d gotten married and he said—I’ll never forget this—‘Oh, a man isn’t complete until he’s married; and then he’s finished.’ ”

  “Did you ever think of going in the service?”

  “Never. Not once. Guess my consciousness wasn’t raised that much.”

  “My younger sister went in as a nurse, but that didn’t quite make it for my daddy. She can bust her hump till the day she dies and it still won’t quite make it for him. But she still lines up with him against me every time. Go figure.”

  “Sometimes,” Cam went on, because there was no sense of his having interrupted her, it was more like they were singing a duet, “we’d go camping, and when they were really on the outs, he’d just pull a frying pan and a sleeping bag out of the cupboards and go camp out by himself, and that’d really hurt her feelings. At the time I never saw it from her point of view.” She sighed. “When he came home, it was a sort of invasion. There was that anxiety—wondering what he’d look like and how he’d be—and that bit of resentment, knowing I’d have to take orders from him too. But when he left again—oh, sometimes I’d cry for days. I’d be afraid he’d never come back.”

  “Yeah, that coming and going was some kind of rip and tear. Even now, I hate good-byes. I always have to cut ’em sharp and cold. Like a salute.”

  “I’m the same way.” She thought about that last meeting with Sam. “Mama always talked about how wonderful things would be once he retired, but I don’t think I ever bought that. ’Course I was long gone by that time. But I came back to visit just as he was getting out and she was pressuring him to buy the house on The Point. He really didn’t want it, and they really couldn’t afford it.”

  Strange, she thought, perhaps for the first time, that her parents should have been so strapped for money when Josie had always been so careful about not spending it. “That’s when she came up with the bed-and-breakfast idea. And that was the thing that broke him. That was what killed him. The notion of spending his last years as a goddamn innkeeper. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to forgive her, fo
rgive any of them, for that. ’Cause Lila was there with her ‘anything you say, Mama,’ and Evie was there with her golly-gee-I-can’t-figure-it-out. And when he had the stroke I just said, ‘Pull the plug,’ because I knew he’d be better off dead than living like that.”

  She wasn’t aware that her body had gone rigid and her hands had balled into fists until he put his arm around her. “I know what family quarrels are like,” he said in a low voice, drawing her to him. “Bitter. Oh, so bitter. Not so much a wound as a split in the skin that can’t heal. I didn’t talk to my daddy for eight, maybe ten years after we had the big blowup about my not going into service. And it was Constance, my wife, who finally bridged the gap. Started sending him pictures of our kids. Even he couldn’t hold out against grandchildren. Is there anyone in your life now? Any man, I mean?”

  “No. Yes.” She shook her head. “If I sound confused, it’s because I am. There’s my boyfriend, Sam.” She gave a little laugh. “Boyfriend! Now that sounds dumb at our age. On the other hand ‘friend’ doesn’t quite make it, ‘lover’ sounds like you’re crooning a torch song, and ‘significant other’ sounds like a joke.”

  “Are you in love?”

  “Sometimes I think I just miss him like a habit; other times I have this . . . now this sounds like a torch song, too, but this . . . yearning. So, I guess the answer is yes.”

  “I wish I felt that way about Constance.”

  “Well, after twenty-some years you can’t expect it to be heavy breathing and pounding hearts.”

  “It never really was with us. Constance was cute and smart and ambitious. Still is. We had the same goals, personally and socially, and figured it would be easier to attain them if we were together. But pounding hearts? No, it was never like that. If I had to pick a business partner I’d still pick her. Trouble is, the mortgage is almost paid off and I don’t care anymore—I don’t care about the house or the pool or the cars, and I’ve had it up to here with all the racial jockeying in highah education. Constance is still out there fighting the good fight. She’s so involved in this committee and that organization I don’t think she notices whether I’m home or not. But me ... It’s not like I’m interested in other women, but I sit in my office and have these bizarre fantasies—I’m a beachcomber or a bartender in a little place in Tierra del Fuego. Nobody knows me, I just pour rum and watch the surf roll in and the bougainvillea climb up the whitewashed wall.”