Chapter 23 #5
“When those men at Ellisville decided what was best for me,” she said and rolled her eyes up to the ceiling in supreme frustration, “they sat me down in their clean white coats and explained real slow …” She made a sickening smile.
“How the state had passed important legislation that allowed them to do what they were about to do. Course they still hadn’t told me what in the hell that was, talking to me like I was some idiot for sale, so I asked were they planning to cut my damn head off or what?
Oh, they got a laugh out of that. They said”—she squinted—“well, not exactly. What they would be doing was so that women like myself”—she clenched her jaw—“couldn’t give birth to more imbecile babies.
They claimed they were doing me a favor. ”
It sounded like a nightmare, those men in white coats leading her to the operating table.
“You do know, I would’ve spent, what, three, four days in jail at most if Garnett hadn’t gotten me committed.
You should’ve seen her smiling, calling the judge by his first name.
‘Don’t forget, Johnny Joe, we ladies have the vote now.
’” Charlie let the scissors clatter to the floor.
“So I was talking to a colored man closer than appropriate—maybe I am a little crazy, but do I seem feebleminded to you?”
“No. You do not.”
“Well, they said that’s what I am, and that’s all that matters.
Even if I was feebleminded how can they have the right to do that—and they claim it’s hereditary, this feebleminded bullshit.
So if I’ve got it, then Meg must have it too.
” She rubbed the scar that wrapped around her right wrist. Red and snaky, they circled both wrists, but the right one was thicker.
The more she worried, the more she rubbed them. So, often.
“The minute they talked to Meg, they’d see how smart she is,” I said.
“That doesn’t matter! Garnett will still concoct a reason to jerk Meg away from that family to ruin her life—”
“Shh, they’re right there,” I said, nodding to the open window. “Charlie, do you think you might be getting a little … carried away?”
Her face turned redder, jaw muscles pumping, she looked like she couldn’t believe I’d said that.
“I’m not saying Garnett’s not capable of taking Meg away from these people,” I said, “but Meg was legally adopted. Why would Garnett go and do something like that?”
Charlie ran her palms down and up her thighs, over the thin white fabric of her slip. She shook her head, clearly she didn’t want to say whatever this was.
“Because I—” She swallowed, grimaced. “I … slept with Garnett Pittman’s husband. Welty Pittman is Meg’s father.”
I stared at her. And I kept staring.
Charlie placed her hand around her neck, like she was trying to keep more from coming out.
“When did this …” But I knew when. Meg was eleven years old.
“When I was young. Very young.” She flinched, as if young was a crime. “And by that I mean I was not very smart. Welty was … older. And handsome. I was seventeen, but I looked like I was in my twenties, and make no mistake, it was me who seduced him.”
“Was Welty already married when y’all …?” I asked. Charlie nodded. Good God, this was probably Garnett’s worst nightmare. That the child her husband had from an affair not only existed but … “How did it happen?”
Charlie looked down at the floor. One of Frances’s Photoplays was laying there with Hedy Lamarr on the cover.
“Like I said, I was young. And stupid, and I thought—hoped—Welty would leave his wife to be with me when I got pregnant. I was alone, my mother had just died three months before, I didn’t have any family. ”
“How did you meet him?” I asked.
“I was working in one of those dime-a-dance clubs in Memphis, just trying to get by. Welty had to come up there now and then from Oxford, he was in the service. But he didn’t want to be at the club, another army officer had made him come along.
Anyway, we danced. And danced again, and …
” She shrugged. “I guess we were both lonely.” She folded her hands as primly as Frances did when we discussed sex.
“He said his wife wouldn’t sleep with him anymore after she’d lost the baby. He said it’d been years.”
“So you—was he happy about Meg?”
“I thought he might be, but when I told him …” She shook her head.
She looked so girlish sitting on the little stool, her hair tied back in the red kerchief.
“He gave me thirty dollars and the name of a doctor who’d take care of it.
And said we couldn’t see each other anymore.
” She bit her lip. “I thought he’d reconsider if I had the baby.
So I didn’t go through with it and didn’t tell him until after she was born.
” She looked up at me. “You have to understand, it wasn’t just some …
dalliance we had. When I was with Welty, it felt …
” She searched for the word. “It felt … abundant.”
“What happened? When he found out?”
“Nothing. I guess he didn’t want her.” She shrugged and her eyes watered.
Maybe not for herself but for her girl. “I never heard from him.” She took a deep breath in and let it out, recentering herself on the stool.
“I wrote him letters, but after a while they started coming back, returned to sender after they’d been opened.
Somebody’d read them. I don’t know if it was him or her, but sometimes I could feel it was her …
” She was twisting a lock of dark hair tight around her forefinger, releasing, twisting again.
When she talked about Welty, she looked angry and sad.
When she talked about Garnett, she looked angry and scared.
“Does Meg know he’s her father?” I asked.
She shook her head. “All she knows is that her father left. And I never told anybody else because I didn’t want Meg to be treated like a bastard child.
” She gazed off at some spot behind me. “But you know what I always imagined happened? I imagined Welty and Garnett sitting down together, maybe at breakfast over coffee or something, and making the decision together to pretend Meg and I didn’t exist.”
Pretend it’s not there, pretend you don’t see it. Just like the ladies at the Orphan.
“That’s what I imagined she told Welty to do, until she couldn’t pretend anymore.”
“So Welty never helped out or sent you money or anything?”
“No.” She sucked on her teeth. “And let me tell you, those were some lean times, but then I landed a job as a governess. That was pretty good.” She smiled, like she was living it again.
“When I answered the agency’s ad, I was dressed like that.
” She pointed to what was left of Mrs. Tartt’s white Victorian gown with the high lace neck.
“I looked like Florence Nightingale. All those manners and etiquette my mother’d taught me finally came in handy.
We were so happy living in that little cotton house.
” I could see Meg in her smile. “We bought this rattletrap car to take us to town. I had Meg’s portrait made and I sent it to him.
” She nodded. “I wanted him to see how beautiful Meg was.”
I groaned, thinking how Garnett probably tore that photograph to pieces.
“I bragged in the letter about my job working for the Cooper family and how we were doing just fine without him.” She smiled, but like she wanted to kill somebody.
“Two weeks later, somebody wrote Mrs. Cooper a letter saying I was a dance-hall whore with a bastard child and a moral threat to her two little girls.” Charlie laughed, low and dark.
“So there I was, 1931, out of work again. It was a lot different from 1926, I mean I looked everywhere for a job. We were so broke, I had to start selling taxi rides in my car.” She frowned and folded her legs to the other side of the stool.
“When did you get arrested?”
She licked her lips, negotiating her words.
“Two days before Christmas, I approached a colored businessman at the depot, well-dressed, handsome—just a man from Illinois trying to get to Alabama to see his family for the holidays, but he’d missed his connecting train.
Before I knew it, the stationmaster and the sheriff showed up and decided what it was.
They beat him with a billy club until he—” Her face crumpled. “He cried for his mother.”
She looked sickened by her life. I leaned back and the old bones of the chair creaked.
“They told a colored porter to tend to him. I don’t know what happened to that poor man.
” She shook her head, squinting at the memory, shuddering.
“I said some pretty crude things to that stationmaster about the size of his manhood, and they hauled me off to jail. They said I was a loose white woman soliciting a colored man—that’s what she used to get me declared feebleminded.
Before they transferred me to Ellisville, the stationmaster—he came to my cell with his billy club. ”
“He beat you?”
“No. But he used it.” There was something dead in her voice. It took me a moment to imagine what she meant. Sweet Jesus.
After that we both went quiet. I stared at the shiny silver scissors on the floor.
It was a lot to take in, everything that had brought Charlie to this raw, harrowing place in her life, and most of all who had made sure she’d gotten here.
It made me remember, cringing, Meg asking me once if I thought she was “dirty.” I didn’t understand why she’d ask that, but then I realized—Garnett must’ve called her that.
Of course you’re not dirty, I’d told her, you are clever and funny and perfect, Meg.
I’d hugged her—but what kind of person says that to a little girl, blames her for what the husband had done?
I hated to think what else Garnett had in store for Meg if she got her hands on her again. And I had no idea how to stop that.
“Charlie,” I said. “I think I might’ve underestimated Garnett Pittman.”
Charlie gave me the purest look of affirmation I’d seen on her, chin tipped up, eyebrows raised; you’d think she was about to laugh at something. Her look said it all: Now you understand what in the hell I’m up against here.