Chapter 14 #5
I would not be attending that nauseating celebration.
I slipped into the office and sort of crouched behind the filing cabinet, waiting for everybody to go into the lounge.
“Yonder she comes! Congratulations, Garnett!” I heard Pripp call.
Her ball peen voice could bang a hole in your head, especially after a bourbon supper.
There was applause from all the ladies. When I knew they were tucked away in there, I tried that filing cabinet one more time.
I was hoping Garnett’d unlocked it when she’d gotten back to town this morning.
No luck. Meg’s mother was supposed to be showing up at the house in a few days, not that I planned to just hand over Meg’s address to her if I got it.
She hadn’t gotten arrested and sent to an institution for nothing.
But I couldn’t forget how Charlie’d begged me to help her find her daughter.
That was Meg’s biggest regret, not hugging her mother goodbye, and I thought if I could just get Meg’s address, I could decide what was the right thing to do later on.
The ass-kissing contest had begun in the lounge, with Pripp winning and my sister a close second.
Pripp had joined Garnett down in Jackson.
“… and then he handed Garnett a check for two hundred dollars and this silver plate, and then a man took a flash photograph.” I heard my sister groan in ecstasy all the way down the hall.
I’d almost made it to the vestibule when I saw Mildred coming, carrying a stuffed flour sack with her pocketbook on her shoulder.
“Where you headed, Mildred?” I took the heavy sack from her, and she let me.
Her jaw was slack, her wrinkly eyes red and swollen. “Garnett let me go on account a so many girls got adopted at the view. She said she don’t need me no more—I live here, Birdie. I sleep with the toddlers in there.”
“Garnett fired you? But more girls’ll be showing up here—”
“Believe me, I know. I been here since it opened in ’27. This place’ll be full as a tick again soon.”
“Who’s supposed to stay with the girls at night?”
“She’s gone make a volunteer stay the night twice a month to cut costs.”
I set my hand on her damp, sloped shoulder. Mildred was what, sixty-five? Seventy? And this place could afford it. They didn’t have much, but Mildred only made a dollar forty a week.
“You know what I think it really was?” Mildred looked around the empty hall.
“I think it’s ’cause I stepped up for Meg and helped her get adopted.
Garnett tried to stop it, but that was Meg’s last chance.
Garnett don’t care about those big girls, she don’t have to see their faces the night of View Day after they been rejected. ”
What was there to say except “It’s truly a shame, Mildred. You stay here and I’ll run to the square and send you a taxi, alright?”
“Thank you, that’d be real nice. I’m just going to the depot. I got a daughter lives in Meridian. She don’t want me, but she’s what I got.” She looked up toward the vestibule, at the doorway to the lounge, and said lower, “You know what eats me up about all this, Birdie?”
I should’ve known what she was about to say.
“Why somebody who don’t even like children is running a orphanage.”
Sunday morning, Rory drove us all to church in the Studebaker. It was my first trip to church in Oxford.
Me and Frances rode in the back seat, while Mrs. Tartt sat beside Rory up front. I wouldn’t say Frances looked happy about the back seat, but she did look used to it.
Sitting next to Frances in her store-bought white dress with a black cartwheel hat tilted to the side, I probably looked like a poor country relation.
Which, in itself, ought to’ve embarrassed me, but what embarrassed me more was how much it embarrassed Frances.
She’d told Picador to iron my blue dress to such a crisp, it crinkled like I was wearing a copy of the Oxford Eagle newspaper.
“You’re gonna get Meemaw’s prod pole if you don’t quit looking at me like that,” I whispered in the back seat.
About half a mile down North Lamar, we passed the huge abandoned Percy mansion with overgrown grass and signs plastered on the pillars. Up front, Mrs. Tartt shook her head and said, “Henry always said the biggest fall the hardest.”
Just past it, Rory drove up behind a mule wagon, too close to be nice.
The family in the wagon wore clean overalls and long dresses and sun hats, ready for church.
Rory punched the pedal and sped around it, leaving them in a rude cloud of Lamar Boulevard.
It reminded me of the day soon after I’d arrived when a driver had passed that fruit truck beside me, after Rory’d told Frances he was too busy at work to have lunch with her.
I felt certain now that driver was Rory.
A little farther on, Mrs. Tartt said, “Alright, Birdie.” She drew in a breath, as if she was ready to tell me something important.
“Down that road there is Oxford Methodist Church and over yonder is Episcopal and up thataway is South Street Presbyterian and around the corner is First Presbyterian like you are, then outside town is College Hill Presbyterian, it’s awfully pretty out there, and that’s Oxford Baptist, though there’s also Primitive Baptist, too, and most the coloreds go to Burns in Freedmen Town, or Second Baptist where Picador goes, though she doesn’t always agree with Pastor Williams, God help him, and then the Catholics go down to Water Valley for their own service.
” She took a breath. “We, of course, belong to First Christ Methodist.”
There were a lotta churches in this town.
As we approached the square, long lines of black cars and buggies and mule wagons were turning or waiting to turn to drop folks off at church.
A good many were walking, wearing everything from overalls to seersucker suits, from slightly threadbare to shiny store-bought, but all had been ironed.
A hat topped every head over the age of thirteen.
“Do y’all ever try any of the other churches in town, Mrs. Tartt?” I asked.
“Heavens no,” Mrs. Tartt said. Frances elbowed me in the side. In Footely, we had the white Presbyterian and the colored Baptist, and I’d been to both.
Rory turned on a side street and stopped to let us out. Before he got out to open his mother’s door, he said, “Mother, are those shoes new?”
“Yes, I ordered these from Gimbels. Mr. Binny drove me to the PO to pick them up.”
“I told you don’t go buying new things right now, Mother. And I wish you’d stop wearing that terrible perfume.”
“Your father bought me this perfume in Paris. Shalimar was his favorite.”
“Well, he’s not here now, is he?” Rory said. Even Frances frowned and whispered “Rory” at the back of his hatted head, but Mrs. Tartt just looked out the side window and said nothing.
While Rory parked the car, we walked half a block.
First Christ Methodist might not have been the biggest church in town, but it did look like one of the oldest. Built of dark stone blocks, it had jewel-colored stained-glass windows on the sides—a Lazarus, a Moses, a baby in the manger.
The door was cut in a charming clover shape.
Standing around out front, the members looked better dressed than many we’d passed.
I saw zero overalls, though a few mended elbows, and plenty of white gloves, and nearly everyone wore that solemn pre-church look, out of either respect or dread of the famine-like hunger an hour of church seemed to bring on.
“Oh, there’s Mary Pepper,” Mrs. Tartt said and slipped off.
Frances started talking to Pripp, who was there with her husband, so naturally I eased back to take it in.
I liked church. The quiet, the simple reminder to be kind, don’t murder people.
But also because I took church at my own pace, usually going inside only two Sundays a month, which Mama called “peculiar.” Our pastor didn’t mind a bit if I weeded the flower beds or sat outside and listened through the window on the other two Sundays.
Meemaw called it efficient—two birds, one stone.
I spotted Garnett moving through the crowd of churchgoers.
“Morning, good morning, glory be to the Lord,” she said with a condescending smile.
My God, she looked constipated. People nodded back to her but they didn’t chat with her like they were chatting with one another.
Because how could you chat with a person.
Who stopped mid-sentence. So you’d think what she was saying.
Was important. I wondered if this was how she spoke to her husband when they were in the bedroom: Your assigned assignment.
Is to lie down. And put your … My sickest thoughts were always at church, don’t ask me why.
Church bells had started ringing all over town, and it was lovely, a little chaotic.
I noticed Garnett had arrived with a man, who was standing several feet away from her, talking to another couple.
He was a bit older than her, mid-forties, with wavy light brown hair.
I realized it must be her doctor husband, Welty Pittman.
From here, he looked handsome. Garnett smiled a real smile, an actual human being smile, and stood up a little taller when she thought he had finished his conversation and was turning toward her.
But it ended up he was turning to talk to someone else.
Garnett’s face flattened and she became Chairlady Garnett again.
Garnett Pittman, the coldest woman on earth, wishes her husband would notice her.
She must’ve been a different person when she met him. What in the world had happened to her?
Rory walked up, took Frances’s arm, and whispered something to her.
She nodded and touched his hand. It looked like an apology.
Which was good, I thought, since if she was going to ask him for the money this afternoon, it might help if he already felt guilty about something else.
I followed them inside, slowly, up the aisle, and we filed into the third row on the left.
I saw Rory whisper something to Mrs. Tartt too, and she nodded back.
I didn’t know the first hymn, but when we stood and sang “A Mighty Fortress,” it felt a little bit like home. The pastor gave a gentle sermon from Ephesians, asking folks to be considerate of one another. Even if I didn’t like every single person here, I had to admit, it was a nice church.
An hour later, we filed back down the aisle with the crowd.
Rory took a side door to go get the car, and Mrs. Tartt moved into the pews to chat.
Just as Frances and I stepped outside the front door on the stone landing, Frances turned around and positioned herself, solid as a tree, right in Garnett’s path, leaving people to navigate around us.
“Garnett, I just want to say again how happy I am you won that award.” Oh God, Frances—she’d said all this already—but on she went.
“You deserve it and you just do so much for those little children.” Garnett nodded, trying to step aside, but hungry Frances actually reached out and held her arm.
I glanced at Garnett’s husband, also trapped by my yapping sister.
I was surprised by how attractive he was up close, thick hair, sky-blue eyes, handsome in a rumpled sort of way.
We nodded hello, and he looked a little embarrassed that we were blocking the way, or maybe embarrassed was just his natural state.
He’s the one who found Meg, he saved her life, I thought.
Mildred had told me that. I said to him, “I knew Meg Lefleur, Dr. Pittman. She told me about you.” My point was to ask how he had found her, but his mouth dropped open and he looked so appalled it stopped me from getting the rest out.
Then his wife’s bony hand pulled him away, and the crowd moved down the steps, and I had not an inkling of what had just passed.