Chapter 8 #4
“Of course, she may stay in my house as long as she likes,” Mrs. Tartt said, and I saw a little twitch in Frances’s jaw.
She was doing what I called her “scary smile,” a square thing she locked on when she had to be nice to somebody she didn’t particularly like.
I’d been treated to it myself several times.
“We’ll put her in the gold room, next to you and Rory, Frances. ”
As she spoke, I caught her giving my dress and deflated oxfords a good once-over.
The look was actually more curious than rude, and I wondered if the maids had warned her I wasn’t up to snuff.
To be fair, I was looking her over too. Her skin was surprisingly smooth, her hair a perfect golden arc around her face, nothing like the old witch Frances had prepared me for.
“Hard to believe it’s almost been a year since Frances and Rory got married and here I still haven’t met any of her people yet,” Mrs. Tartt said.
“I agree,” I said and smiled at Frances over the coffee table.
“Let’s see, now I know y’all live down in the Delta,” Mrs. Tartt said. “Tell me, did you get to the spring pilgrimage this year down in Natchez? I heard it was wonderful.”
Frances’s eyes drilled through me, so what I said was, “Unfortunately, I missed the pilgrimage this year.” That was a tour of grand old antebellum homes where ladies in hoop skirts and men in Confederate uniforms asked the Negroes to kindly pretend they were slaves again.
When The Delta Dispatch printed a two-page spread on it, I wrote to inform them, THAT IS NOT NEWS.
“I’d love to go see the tour sometime, ” Mrs. Tartt said. “And how are your cousins the Tates doing these days? I reckon I haven’t spoken to Emmogene Tate in, oh it’s probably been ten years.”
Cousins? I scary smiled back at Frances, wanting dearly to laugh, because how had I forgotten? Frances’s little problem with telling white lies. She was good at it, though they were never more than details, ornamental but deceptive like those innocent silky ribbons Mathilda Tate wore in her hair.
Slick as an eel, Frances said, “The Cousin Tates are traveling the European continent this summer, so we haven’t heard from them in a while.”
Behind Mrs. Tartt, the sun was setting, turning the room a softer, gauzy pink.
It really was a good room. The fireplace had a fiddlehead fern inside it, though whatever’d been hanging over the mantel was gone now, leaving a block of darker paint.
In the corner was a Victor Victrola with a big red horn sticking out, but I knew Frances wouldn’t want me to admit I’d never seen one other than in the catalogue.
But when I saw a photograph on the side table, next to an empty glass of something, I couldn’t help myself.
“Is that Theodore Roosevelt?” I picked up the frame from a cluster of others.
“Is it?” Frances asked. Even she looked surprised.
“Yes,” Mrs. Tartt said. “Did y’all know Teddy?”
Frances barely shook her head, as if not personally knowing a president of the United States might be some kind of a strike against her. I said, “I did not know President Roosevelt, no, ma’am.”
Mrs. Tartt leaned up and pointed over the pink sofa arm.
“Next to Teddy that’s Henry, my late husband.
” Beside the president was a huge, broad-chested man in a tuxedo holding a cigar.
“That photograph was taken right out there in the backyard.” Her voice turned soft and smoky.
“We used to have all sorts of balls and big occasions back there. Henry loved a party, any excuse would do.” Beyond the huge men, under a banner that read Happy New Year 1917, partygoers wore long gowns and suits, some posing with a foot out, tipping their top hats.
A dance floor was laid out right on the lawn, the grass trimmed and the bushes tidy, the crape myrtles a foot shorter.
I glanced at the backyard behind Mrs. Tartt’s head.
The photograph looked nothing like it did now.
“Course we don’t do those kinds of things nowadays,” Mrs. Tartt said. “Rory says it wouldn’t look right, with so many folks having a hard time. What about down in the Delta, y’all still throwing big parties and soirees?”
“No, ma’am,” I said.
Before setting the photograph back on the table, I spotted a younger, daintier Mrs. Tartt in a long gown, gloves up past her elbows.
She’d grown a few sizes wider in the hips these past sixteen years, but otherwise, she looked about the same.
There was something about this that made my heart hurt a little.
“How old are you, Mrs. Tartt? If you don’t mind my asking?”
“Birdie, don’t ask her that—” Frances said.
“It’s alright,” Mrs. Tartt said. “I’ll be sixty-two come December.”
I studied her face and Frances groaned. She was almost fifteen years older than our mother, and she didn’t even have bags under her eyes.
She had some crow’s-feet in the corners, strands of silver in her blond hair, but she just looked so unexhausted in a way Mama and Footely folks did not, and I wondered if this was how almost sixty-two was supposed to look if you hadn’t worried yourself sick over the price of canned peaches.
I didn’t dislike her for it, I just wondered.
“You look almost the same as you did in 1917,” I told her.
“Thank you, dear,” she said and touched the fat pearls at her collarbone. She said it so genuinely, I thought she’d been wishing somebody would say that to her for years.
“It’s getting late, don’t you think?” Frances asked.
“Heavens to Betsy, it is,” Mrs. Tartt said and tinkled a small silver bell on the picture table. It was sugary sounding. It made me hungry. Meemaw used to ring a cowbell and holler, “Git your rear ends in the house!”
Back in the grand hall and into the golden-lit dining room, we sat down to supper.
Frances and I sat across from Mrs. Tartt with an empty place at the head set for Rory.
Picador, the tiny older maid, stood waiting with a perspiring silver pitcher.
“Want you some ice, ma’am?” she asked after she poured water into my glass.
“Please,” I said, and with silver tongs, she clasped two cubes from a bowl on the table and dropped them in my water glass. Now that is luxury. Ice in your water that you didn’t have to stand over the sink and chop yourself.
Next, Picador set platters and bowls of food on the table: slices of a rare roast beef, white rice, brown peppery gravy in a silver boat, field peas with ham hocks, sliced tomatoes, and a bowl of mayonnaise with a spoon that looked like a seashell.
I was starving. Frances’s elbow informed me that I was putting too much food on my plate.
After a soft-spoken blessing from Mrs. Tartt, she said, “This looks just wonderful, Picador, thank you. And I’m sorry to keep you so late tonight.”
“Polly gone but I don’t mine, I wait fo Mr. Rory to get home.” Last, Picador set a glass of something milky in front of Mrs. Tartt. “I put you a little sugar in there.” She waited, watching Mrs. Tartt drink it down.
“I don’t like it,” Mrs. Tartt said and wiped the film off her lips with her napkin.
“Dr. Speed say you got to drink it, but it sho don’t look good.”
“Picador’s been with us going on twenty-six years now,” Mrs. Tartt said to me. “The year Rory was born. I don’t know what we’d do without her.”
“Skip your medicine’s what you’d do,” she said, and Mrs. Tartt chuckled.
As we ate, summer light slid down the wall and I saw Mrs. Tartt frown at the window behind me.
“I hope you’ll excuse the state of our yard, Birdie, but Rory let Mr. Jake, our yardman, go.
He says it’s only temporary. Rory pushed the mower himself out front but the back is still a mess.
” She did not sound happy about any of this.
“Rory told me he’d take care of the backyard this weekend,” Frances said and then, my way, “It looks bad to have too much help when so many can’t afford anything.”
Mystery solved, I guess, though I didn’t point out that this Mr. Jake probably couldn’t afford anything now either.
“Tell me about Rory,” I asked, cutting my rare roast beef. All I knew thus far was he didn’t like opinions.
Mrs. Tartt smiled. “He’s a wonderful son.”
“And husband,” Frances said, touching her napkin to the corner of her mouth. “And he works so hard. He’s been going down to Jackson a few times a week to meet with a new client.”
“No one’s prouder of him than his mother,” Mrs. Tartt said.
“Except for his wife,” Frances said, the scary smile already locking in on her lips.
“I know you’re proud of him, dear,” Mrs. Tartt said, “but it’s just different when it’s your child. Maybe you’ll know about that one day.”
That shut Frances up, but all this adoration told me nothing.
By coffee and caramel cake, I was so tired I could barely keep my eyes open, though the grandfather clock only chimed seven thirty. Mrs. Tartt covered a deep yawn. “I know I ought to go to bed.”
“Can I go too?” I asked Frances.
“Go,” Frances said to Mrs. Tartt. “Me and Birdie’ll wait up for Rory.”
“Well, I just drank all that coffee,” Mrs. Tartt said, “so I might as well wait on him too.”
Another half hour of small talk passed before the back door closed and the china rattled in the glass cases. “There he is. Rory, we’re in here,” Mrs. Tartt called.
“We’re at the table,” Frances said a hair louder, and in Rory came carrying a briefcase.
He was only a few inches taller than me.
I was five foot five. He wore a blue seersucker suit and a red tie tied tight around his neck.
His hair, dark blond, was oiled and combed back, and he was sweating a little.
His face was round like his mother’s and pleasant, boyish.
He wasn’t bad looking, there was just less of him than I’d expected, especially after seeing the photograph of his moose of a daddy.
“Hello, dear,” Mrs. Tartt said and turned her cheek up to him, but he went and pecked Frances’s.
“Darling, I’d like you to meet my sister, Birdie. She came as a surprise for my birthday coming up.”
I’d heard some pressure on that word birthday and maybe he did too because it took him a split second to smile.
My Lord, he had white teeth. “It’s very nice to meet you,” he said and came over to shake my hand.
His was soft. He had his mother’s dimples, and in fact, he’d be her spitting image if he went to the beauty parlor and put on a Flower Club, Sustainer pin.
Frances had gotten up and pulled his chair out at the head of the table and was forking roast beef onto a plate. I passed the peas, and Mrs. Tartt reached up and snuck a dab of mayonnaise on it with the shiny shell spoon.
Rory backed away from us all a few steps. “Thank you, but I’m really not hungry—”
“You’ve got to eat something, son, it’s not good for you not to eat,” Mrs. Tartt said and added a tomato to the plate.
“I had a late lunch. I just want to change out of this suit and then I need to work in my study. My client wants to see some numbers in the morning.”
“But you just got home.” Frances stood there holding the plate. “And I was hoping we could talk about my birthday next month.”
Still holding his briefcase in one hand, he frowned and eased back another step.
He looked trapped by three women all trying to feed him and get answers out of him.
I knew the feeling. Soon as I got home from the store, Mama always wanted to hear about every person who’d come in and what for, when all I wanted to do was sit down and have a nice quiet argument with The Delta Dispatch.
“I’m sorry,” he said, and he really sounded like he was. “But I have to get these numbers together, dear.”
“It’s alright,” Frances said and set the plate down. “I understand.” She went and kissed his cheek, and he said good night and left.