Silence.
I fished in my handbag and produced my business card, embossed with the university seal and indicating my status as a member of the faculty. I’d found that pulling rank as a professor could prove useful. Even in Washington, where the average government intern probably wields more actual power than I do, the title commands respect. It’s as if people hear professor and are transported back to their student days, a period in their lives when teachers represented ultimate authority.
Sure enough, the chain dropped and the door swung open.
Inside, the scrawny, nervous-looking woman introduced herself as Nan Dorminy. She loved the house, she told me. Great morning light. She’d bought it nine years ago, when her husband left her. He was a good man, she insisted, misinterpreting my startled look. I shouldn’t think otherwise. He just needed his space.
I nodded politely. Were Southerners always this forthcoming around strangers? “Men can be like that,” I offered, hoping this was an appropriate response.
Apparently it was, because Nan Dorminy clasped her hands together as though a point of disagreement had been settled. Now then, she asked, when exactly had I lived here, and what could she help me with?
“Thirty-four years ago,” I told her.
“Oh, I’ve no idea who was living here then.”
“My parents were the Smiths. Boone and Sadie Rawson Smith.” I watched for a sign that she recognized the name. Surely it would have been notorious for a while in this neighborhood.
But she shook her head.
I tried again. “They were—it’s a terrible story. But they died in this house, I think. They were killed. Back in the seventies.”
Her chin jerked up. “Oh. Oh, yes. Old Mrs. Carter told me something about that. Years ago, when I moved in. There was a whole nice family that died. A little girl, too. But the property’s changed hands several times since then.”
“No, that’s just it. The little girl was me. I was—I was injured, when they died. But I survived. I moved away.”
“Good heavens.” Her hand fluttered to her heart.
We stood without speaking for a moment.
Then I asked, “This Mrs. Carter you mentioned. Is she a neighbor? Did it sound like she knew my parents?”
“She might have. But I’m afraid she’s dead now, too. She passed away last summer. Or was it two summers ago? Her niece got the house.” Mrs. Dorminy frowned. “I can’t think of anyone on Eulalia who goes back that far. Thirty-four years. A long time.”
She agreed to show me around, in case anything jogged my memory. But she was right. Thirty-four years is a long time. The house had been renovated. She pointed proudly to where previous owners had blown out the back to build an eat-in kitchen, and how she herself had knocked two bedrooms together to make space for a master bath. The old pantry had been converted to a laundry room. None of the internal walls were where they used to be.
There was only one moment, when I asked what lay behind a door off the main hallway.
“Oh, that’s just the attic,” she sniffed. “Hot as Hades up there in the summertime.” She opened the door to reveal a dark staircase leading up. The steps were worn wood, stacked with paint cans piled three and four high. An assortment of dried-out paintbrushes and mixing pans clogged the remaining surfaces. She appeared to use the staircase as shelving, storage for tools for half-forgotten home-improvement projects. But something about the slant of the stairs, and the sharp smell of dust and unfinished wood, tugged at me. I closed my eyes and breathed in. Something flickered. It felt as if there should be a light switch, on the left, not a modern flip switch, but the old-fashioned kind, a metal chain you have to yank. When I peered into the dim opening, there it was.
But Mrs. Dorminy was already pulling me back. “It’s been cleared out up there, if that’s what you’re wondering,” she said, not unkindly. “It’s only my old clothes up there now. I’m not the kind of person who would move into a house filled with other people’s things.”
She shut the door and the moment passed.
Afterward I sat in the rental car, staring at the elm tree. It was still just a tree. Just bark and branches, no epiphanies hiding there. Faulkner’s famous line came to me: The past is never dead. It’s not even past. William Faulkner would know. Southern writers feel the weight of the past more heavily, capture it more precisely, than those from anywhere else. Not even Proust, not even Joyce, can touch them.
In this case, though, Faulkner had missed the mark.
The past was past. Whatever love or laughter or fear or sorrow I had known in that house remained lost to me. The girl who had once climbed those attic stairs was a ghost, nothing but a ghost.
Eleven
* * *
TUESDAY, OCTOBER 15, 2013
My appointment at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution was both productive and painful.
I had reasoned that the newspaper might be a source of names. The coverage back in 1979 must have quoted people who knew the Smiths, friends of the family and that type of thing. I had the vague sense that if I could find someone who had once looked my parents in the eyes, who could share a few old stories about them, it would provide me some sense of closure. If that failed, at least the archives might contain details that would help fill in my sketchy understanding of how—not to mention why—my birth parents had died.