Anne Siddons - Fault Lines

I simply stared at her. Her words were like mercury spilling out of a broken thermometer; there seemed no way of stopping them, of picking them up. Pommy? Mommee? I had never heard anyone call Pom’s mother that but Pom and then us, his family. This ridiculous woman seemed to know as much about my family, especially my husband, as I did. I smiled stiffly as the words tumbled and skittered on. Beside me I heard Jenny snicker softly.

“Well,” Sweetie went on, “I just wanted to tell you that all Pommy’s old friends were so happy for him when he found you, and proud, and all that. Taking those poor little boys to raise after that woman ran off, and giving up your own career, and your sister on your hands all your life and then her going off like that, and of course poor little Mommee, and then I understand your daughter hasn’t been at all well…”

She looked at me with eyes as avian and voracious as a starling’s. Her smile widened; the sharp little teeth gleamed.

“My daughter’s just fine,” I said, smiling back. My mouth felt stretched.

“I’m so glad! As I said, you are truly to be admired, you surely are. You all come see us real soon. I’m having a glorious time doing over that big old white elephant. Tell Pom I’ve put in an old-fashioned rock garden just like his grandmother Parsons used to have at Sea Island. He’s really just got to see it.”

“I’ll tell him,” I said.

She waggled her fingers at us and tottered off to join the circle of men on the veranda. I could see the peeling, brown, bald head of Leonard Cokesbury in the crowd. From behind she looked like a little black cube topped with cotton candy, but she had beautiful legs, tanned and shapely. Her skirt was very short.

We were silent for a moment and then tall, raw-boned Dot Crenshaw across the table said, “We’ll watch until she goes to the ladies’ room and then we’ll rush her. Jenny can tackle her, I’ll stick her head in the john, and you can flush it, Merritt. God, what an awful woman!”

“But rich,” Jenny and I and Pam Crocker next to Jenny said together, and we all laughed.

Later, after dinner, I went to the ladies’ room to see what I could do about my naked, sweating face. The heat on the terrace, where we had had coffee, was stifling, even at ten o’clock. I washed my face and was standing there dripping and blinded, groping for my towel, when the door whooshed open and I heard Sweetie Cokesbury’s piccolo voice again.

“Sweetie, hello,” she bubbled. “You have the right idea; it’s simply sweltering, isn’t it? Let me hand you that…”

She passed me the towel and I mopped my face and looked at her. She was gleaming and enameled; there was not a gilt hair out of place. I wondered what she had sprayed herself with to preserve her surface in the heat.

She dabbed at my skirt with a paper towel.

“Here, you’ve splattered,” she said. “Listen, I really meant what I said, you know. Not many women I know would have had the gumption to stick it out, to hold things together after everything else you’ve been through, when that silly business at the clinic came up. When was it? A long time. I remember Bush had just been elected…”

I looked at her in the mirror. She was smiling brilliantly at me.

“What business was that?” I said.

“Oh, that little nonsense about the Negro doctor. Or was she Indian? None of us were sure. And none of us believed it, of course. It was just that Pommy always did adore the Negroes—”

The door swished open again and Jenny came in.

“Pom’s looking for you,” she said, and stopped. I think now she must have seen something on my face, though at the time it felt perfectly still and blank.

“I have to run, too,” Sweetie said. “I just wanted you to know you have a real fan on Habersham Road.”

She bustled out, leaving a trail of Opium behind her.

“What was that all about?” Jenny said, looking after her.

“Did Pom ever have an affair with a black woman doctor?” I said.

“What? No! Of course not! Did that bitch tell you he did? She’s lying…”

Jenny’s voice rose in incredulity and anger. She caught herself and lowered it, and took my hands and looked into my face. Her hands felt scalding hot. Mine must be ice-cold, I thought stupidly.

“Do you know that he didn’t, Jenny?” I said.

“Of course I know it,” she said, almost hissing in her effort to keep her voice low. “Don’t you think Phil would know if he had? Even if nobody else on earth knew, Phil would, and he would tell me. He’s never said a word about any affair with any black doctor. God, I suppose she meant Bella Strong. She’s that Jamaican doctor they had on staff for a year or two, before she went to Africa, you remember. That’s just ludicrous. Bella had a fiancé on the faculty at Morehouse; she married him and they both went to Biafra or somewhere—”

“She didn’t mention a name,” I said. I felt as though I were speaking through a mouthful of Kleenex. My mouth was desperately dry.

“Somebody should throttle her,” Jenny spat. “She’s been after Pom for years, I thought you knew that. Phil said she used to follow him around like a puppy before he went off to prep school, and I think he did ask her to a dance or two up there, mainly because his mother made him. When he married what’s-her-name, in Baltimore, she practically went into mourning. To hear Phil tell it, the whole stupid little town did. When that broke up, her husband conveniently kicked off—I wouldn’t be surprised if she didn’t put rat poison in his juleps—and she high-tailed it up here to grab up ol’ Pom before somebody else did. But it was too late. He’d already met you. She hung around for several years trying to get into our crowd, but nobody invited her anywhere, and finally Lennie married her. Well, hell, Lennie’ll marry anybody. You can just imagine how much she thinks of you, can’t you? Of course she’s lying. Can’t you see what she’s trying to do to you? I’m going to tell Phil the minute we get in the car. I don’t care how much money Lennie Cokesbury has; the clinic ought not touch a penny of it. And they won’t, either, if Phil has anything to do with it. God, but Pom’s going to be furious—”

“Tell Phil not to mention it to Pom,” I said. I knew it would do no good to ask her not to tell Phil. “I mean that, Jen. It’s…I just can’t stand the thought of people talking about us that way. I’ve never once in twenty-six years thought of Pom and anybody else—”

“Well, that’s because there hasn’t been anybody else,” she said. “I’ll tell Phil not to tell Pom, but somebody ought to put the fear of God into that lying bitch. I’d love to do it myself.”

I turned to the mirror and began dabbing lipstick on my mouth. My hand was shaking so that the lipstick ran wildly up my cheek. I began to scrub at it with a tissue.

She reached over and put her hand on mine, and I stopped scrubbing and looked at her in the mirror, and let my hand drop. I felt hot and then cold, all gone inside; I ached all over as if I were getting the flu.

“You do believe me, don’t you?” Jenny said.

“Of course I do,” I croaked. I cleared my throat and said it again, more strongly: “Of course I do.”

“If you have any doubt at all, ask him. Ask him, Merritt. You know he won’t lie to you.”

“Maybe I will,” I said. She was right. Pom would not lie to me. He never had.

“Do it,” Jenny said.

But I did not think I would. Partly it was because I did not believe Sweetie Cokesbury’s words; Pom? An affair? Simply impossible. I would have known.

Partly it was because it did not matter. No matter what my mind believed, something deep inside me must forever look at Pom now as a man who had or had not had an extra-marital affair. There was an option, no matter how incredible, where none had existed. We were in new territory, a place with a different geography. It was as if I stood on a shore and saw, not the horizon that I had always seen, but a new shore-line, another country. I did not believe Sweetie, but still I could see that other shore. Possibility rejected still exists.