Lachicotte introduced me and handed over the steak pie with the same warm-up directions he had given Aunt Charlotte and me.
“I’ll take it up and show her,” she said, “so she’ll know we’re gonna eat well tonight.”
“How was your all’s winter, Roberta?”
“Well, you know Mr. Billy passed away in January.”
“No! How come she didn’t tell me when I phoned yesterday?”
“It knocked the wind out of her. She says it’s not natural, the parents are supposed to go first. Mr. Billy was just turned sixty-five. He went to get his pacemaker batteries replaced and had a heart attack right there on the table.”
“And her not saying a thing!”
“She’s still taking it in. When they called her from Washington, she hung up on them. When it commenced to ring again, she told me, ‘Don’t you dare pick up that phone, Roberta. Some nasty person is trying to frighten me.’ ”
“But she sounded just like herself yesterday.”
“Oh, she’s herself all right. It’s made her mad, more than anything. Just go up and talk about it normally. She likes to talk about him. She knows he’s buried in the family plot in Columbia, but we’re almost back to the place where we’re expecting his annual visit. The mind is a wondrous thing, isn’t it, Mr. Hayes? It hasn’t got to stay in just one place at a time.”
“What is that imposing object you’re weaving?” Lachicotte asked.
“That’s my monster. My grandson calls it my Boogie Basket.” Laughing, she lifted it from the breezeway floor and set it on her stool, which it overlapped. “They wanted it this size, but the proportions are all wrong. The handles, if I get to them, are going to look like elephant ears. I’ve a mind to stop while I’m ahead and send word that I passed on.”
“A commission, is it?”
She nodded. “They saw it in the Smithsonian book and wanted one just like it, only triple the size. It’s one of Granny’s models. She’d turn over in her grave if she saw this. Mrs. Upchurch said if I decided not to send it, she’ll pay the commission price and we’ll use it as our laundry basket.”
This struck me as hilarious, because that’s exactly what it looked like. I got the giggles and then Lachicotte laughed, and Roberta joined in.
“My aunt just finished a huge painting of these rich people’s beach house,” I said. “It was forty-two by fifty-six and they wrote her a check too large for her to keep in the house overnight. She said the next thing she painted for herself was going to be six by ten, or maybe even four by six. Unfortunately, she broke her right wrist that same night and can’t paint anything for a while.”
“Now that’s a shame,” said Roberta. “I slammed some fingers in a car door once and couldn’t work with my hands for six weeks. I about went crazy.”
Roberta led us up a flight of outdoor stairs, next to which had been built a ramp for a wheelchair. Inside a screened-in porch a tiny lady sat in the wheelchair awaiting us. As we rose into her sightline, she was taking a last greedy puff of her cigarette before extinguishing it in an ashtray on the glass-topped table next to her.
“What were you all laughing at down there? I thought you were never coming up.”
“It was my monster basket. Look, Mr. Hayes has brought us a steak pie.”
“Bless you, Lachicotte. Roberta won’t have to drive to the store and interrupt her art. And this is Marcus. Welcome, Marcus. This pie smells heavenly, Lachicotte. Come kiss me and we’ll dispense with condolences over Billy. I’m still cross with him for breaking ahead of me in line like that. Marcus, why don’t you sit in that chair across from me?”
For the second time that day, I imagined how Mom would see a woman who’d had better breaks in life than she’d had. (“Now that simple summer outfit, Marcus, was really costly in its day. And look how well-preserved it is. It’s gone back and forth to a quality cleaner for the last forty years. And notice her pampered complexion and the teeth! She’s had them capped or veneered, otherwise they’d be yellow from age and smoking. And she’s still got all of them! This old girl is a prime example of high maintenance over the long term.”)
“I’ll leave you all to socialize,” said Roberta. “What do we want to have with Mr. Hayes’s steak pie?” she asked Mrs. Upchurch.
“Oh, ice cream will be fine,” replied the indulged little child-queen of ninety-five, ensconced on her wheelchair throne. Close by her on the glass table, besides the ashtray, were binoculars, a bird book, a carton of cigarettes with a silver lighter on top, a carafe of ice water covered by a drinking glass, and one of those pill containers with slots for a week’s supply of morning and evening doses. On our side of the table were two tall glasses, a pitcher of iced tea, two folded cloth napkins, and a plate of unusually flat cookies.
Coral Upchurch’s lively old eyes engaged with me. “So you are Charlotte Lee’s great-nephew.”
“Yes ma’am.”
“Oh, please call me Coral. I’m trying to strip down to essentials. If I live much longer, I’m hoping even the ‘Coral’ will become superfluous. When you reach my age, you want to perform archaeology on yourself, get beyond family names and given names and polite forms of address.” Her accent had a Lachicotte base with what sounded like overlays of voice training from somewhere in her past.
“What would be beyond Coral, archaeologically?” I asked.
“That’s what I’m trying to figure out! Maybe you’ll help me. What would ‘beyond Marcus’ be like?”
This was a really interesting question. I had to close my eyes in order to think harder. “Maybe not any given name,” I said. “I mean, for instance, say you had a turtle and you named him Luke. Before he was Luke he was just a turtle. Or, if you wanted to be specific, a loggerhead turtle. And before that—I’m going to have to think about this some more.”
“I wish you would. I’ve never known a Marcus. Plenty of Marks but no Marcuses. The only Marcus I can think of offhand is Marcus Aurelius.”
“That’s who my mom named me after! She loved his Meditations. She had two copies of it. One of them was in Greek on the left side of the page. He wrote it in Greek, you know.”
“Was your mother a scholar?”
“She loved studying and learning things. She was planning to go to college and become a teacher.” I was about to add how determined she was to make something of herself, then remembered I had been through this before with Lachicotte, who had generously suggested that she’d already made something of herself by bringing me up so well.
“Lachicotte told me what a great help you are to your aunt,” said Coral Upchurch, “but when you’re not being a great help, what do you do to amuse yourself? Have you made any friends?”
Well, I’ve been spending a lot of time with this boy. He’s a little older than me, fourteen, and he’s been dead for fifty years.