Chapter 16 #3
“Oxford, Mississippi, is no place for a young man to act peculiar like that,” she said.
“Henry—he thought Rory was just shy around girls, so he took him to see a woman, someplace south of Memphis. He thought that’d do the trick.
But then Henry …” She flashed her eyes up to the ceiling.
“Caught Rory at it … again, and it was awful. I mean, just awful. Henry refused to let his son suffer from the disease another day. So he consulted a doctor, confidentially, and he learned there was a treatment that’d had some success at a hospital down in New Orleans.
Henry arranged for Rory to be admitted as soon as he graduated high school.
We told folks he’d gone to tour Europe. Thank heavens the draft was over, or he might’ve been found out.
” Mrs. Tartt uncorked the bourbon and took a long sip.
When she was finished, she frowned at the bottle for that tacky thing she’d just done.
“Rory was terrified. He was supposed to only be at the hospital for a month, Henry promised him that was all it would be, and Rory agreed to go, but after his first night, he wrote us begging to leave. And every day after that, he wrote to me pleading for me to change his father’s mind.
He told me about the … horrible things they were doing to him, but Henry wouldn’t hear of it.
” She took another long sip to blot out that awful memory, closing her eyes as she did it.
“Did he get better after the month?” I asked.
“No. He did not.” She took a handkerchief that had been tucked up her sleeve and dabbed her raw lips. “After a month, the doctor told us that Rory needed further treatment, so Henry told him to go ahead and administer as many treatments as it took.”
She saw my look—they’d lied to their son?
“I had to support Henry’s decision. He was my husband, for heaven’s sake.”
“How many months was Rory there?”
“Five,” she said. She sounded frustrated.
“When he finally got home, his clothes plumb hung off him. He had marks up his arms from all the injections.” She wrung her hands.
“He was so different. He didn’t smile or laugh anymore.
He drew back if I tried to touch him. When he left for Baylor, he wouldn’t look either one of us in the eye.
He’s never been able to forgive me for it. ”
She offered me the bottle, but I waved it away. I thought about how trapped Rory had looked, but maybe I’d seen shame too. Despite everything that’d happened, I thought, Poor Rory.
“Does Frances know any of this?” I asked.
“I don’t think so. I don’t know what she thought when Rory wanted to get married so quick.” She took in a harsh, guilty breath. “Henry changed our will so Rory wouldn’t get a dime if he didn’t get married before he was twenty-five. No property, no money. Nothing.”
Poor Frances.
Three walls away, the telephone rang at hardly six thirty in the morning.
I toed open the screen door, trying not to drop the eggs I’d basketed in my nightgown.
Picador and Polly hadn’t come in yet and if they didn’t show up in the next half hour, I decided I’d walk to Freedmen Town to see if they were all right.
Yesterday felt like a dream, a bad one, but I should’ve gone and checked on them anyway.
Feet drummed toward the hall, including mine. Frances scooped up the receiver first. “Tartt residence,” she said.
“Rory—is it Rory?” Mrs. Tartt asked, rushing down the stairs.
Frances handed her the receiver. “It’s the lawyer, calling long-distance from Jackson.”
Mrs. Tartt sat down at the little telephone table in her long nightgown. She cleared her throat. “This is Mrs. Henry Tartt.”
I sat on the bottom stair about ten feet away, the warm, heavy nest of eggs cradled in my skirt.
Frances, still in her wrinkled navy shopping dress, sank down beside me.
She’d slept on the library chaise last night.
As Mrs. Tartt listened, she stared at the wall where the family photograph used to hang.
Please say there’s something left, I prayed, for all our sakes.
I took Frances’s hand. I wasn’t sure if she really understood what was happening.
At the other end of the hall, the kitchen screen door popped and I heard Picador say, “Law, it’s hot this mawning.
” No one moved. After a few minutes, Mrs. Tartt hung up the receiver.
“He said … he doesn’t know of anything except the deed to this house,” Mrs. Tartt said from the telephone table.
“What does that mean?” Frances stood up.
“I don’t really know exactly, though I reckon,” Mrs. Tartt said, putting her hand to her neck, “we’ll have to do some cutting back.”
Frances wandered back to the library, not looking well, and I went to the kitchen to put the eggs away. Mrs. Tartt was talking to Picador. I’d forgotten this was Polly’s day off.
“What he did?” Picador set a hand on the edge of the counter. “He took all the—what?”
“What did Rory say yesterday, Picador? Did you see anything strange?”
Picador’s tiny forehead turned into a stack of wrinkles. “Little after ten yesterday mawning, he come back here from taking y’all shopping and he say for us to go on home, that he want the house quiet so he could do some work.”
“So the two of you left before … he did any of this?” Mrs. Tartt asked. I guess it was just too soon to admit out loud what her son had done.
“Yessum. You reckon he coming back? Where you think he gone to?”
“I don’t—we don’t know yet,” she said. “Picador.” Mrs. Tartt set a hand to her own cheek, maybe to comfort herself. “Until things get sorted out with the money, I don’t know what I can do …” Her voice grew higher, cracking a little. “I’m sorry but I can’t in good conscience keep you and Polly on.”
Picador’s mouth turned down so harshly it looked like a drawing of a face frowning.
Mrs. Tartt held a silver netted change purse out to Picador that I hadn’t realized she was holding.
“This is all I’ve got in the house, but you take it, and I promise you we’ll pay you what we owe you and Polly just as soon as we can.
” She urged it toward Picador again, and coins clinked inside.
Picador’s small shoulders drew back slightly; she had no intention of touching Mrs. Tartt’s change purse.
“Please, Pic, put it in your pocketbook.”
Picador reached up and took it between two fingers and set it on the counter near Mrs. Tartt. “When you take the medicine, you put you a little sugar in there. That’s what I do fo’ you.”
“It’s—it’s just for a little while until we sort this out, Picador.” Mrs. Tartt shook her head, her eyes full of tears.
“I come in if you need me, I don’t mind.” Picador looked over at the sink where she’d stood for twenty-six years. “Law, I done cleaned this kitchen more’n I cleaned my own. Give Mr. Rory his first bath right in this here sink.”
“You were here when they brought the pole out and we got electric lights in ’22.”
“And Mr. Henry tote in that big ole ugly stovepipe in ’24.”
“You didn’t like it, did you?”
“Still don’t,” Picador said, and Mrs. Tartt smiled.
Picador’s bottom lip trembled. “Yesterday, Mr. Rory give me a hug like he used to when he was a boy.”
They both shook their heads, remembering and mourning it all.
“There anything I can do for you, Franny?” I asked. She reached down from the library chaise and handed me the throw-up bowl. There’d been some activity, though thankfully not much.
She went upstairs. Except for the lovely blue grandfather clock ticking in the hall, the house was unnervingly silent for this time of day.
I braced myself and opened the door to Rory’s disgusting bedroom.
As I stacked dirty plates and ringed glasses, I wondered if Rory had some cash on him that maybe he’d been withdrawing and setting aside.
I assumed he planned to sell the valuables he’d taken but what in the world did he intend to do when he did?
Start a new life? Leave all these unopened bills and an unpaid mortgage for his mother and wife to deal with?
And here I’d thought I’d be getting on a train today.
That sure wouldn’t be happening—but it would need to soon.
Though all I’d be bringing home was the fact that more bad things had happened, and I’d be leaving behind two women who’d never even made their own dang breakfast before.
After carrying down an armload of crusty dishes and a stack of bills, I decided that in the least, I should take inventory of what they had left in the kitchen.
In the icebox were two cooked pork chops, half a chicken, leftover butter beans and okra from Monday lunch, plus a dozen jars of pickles and relishes and devilish toppings.
They stored some root vegetables in the cellar, flour and cornmeal in the pantry, plus there was the cow for cream and the chickens for eggs.
All those ingredients I knew like friends.
But Frances was an astonishingly terrible cook.
She let eggs boil for hours. Her white rice crunched between the teeth.
What in the world were these two supposed to eat?
As I sifted deeper in the shelves, I found stacks of mysterious little gold tins.
Imported Italian anchovies, cockles, squid in brine, mackerel, petite octopus, jars of German white asparagus, capers, olives of all sorts—kalamata, manzanilla, Castelvetrano, tiny pickles called cornichons.
There were some cans of regular old beans and some corn but also things labeled truffle shavings and foie gras, whatever that was?
They had the usual spices but also a red powder called paprika, smoked.
I sniffed it. It smelled meaty, zesty. Also four glass tubes of Moroccan saffron, which must’ve cost a fortune, the threads a delicate blazing orange.