Anne Siddons - Fault Lines

Next, the note bade me give the two bird dogs who lived in the run down by the river their worm capsules, two each. Samson and Delilah were liver-spotted setters, rangy and lean and sleek, seeming always to vibrate with nerves and energy and readiness. Pom had grown up bird hunting with his father, the Judge, on a vast South Georgia timber plantation, and he thought to take the sport up again when we bought the house on the river five years before, so he kept a brace of hounds in the river run at all times. But he had yet to get back out into the autumn fields with them, even though he belonged to an exclusive hunting club over in South Carolina, on the Big Pee Dee River. He did not spend much time with the dogs, and did not want me to make pets of them. It spoiled them for hunting, he said, and it wasn’t as if they were neglected or abused. Their quarters were weatherproof and sumptuous, their runs enormous, and he ran them for a couple of hours on weekends, or had me do it, if he couldn’t. Besides, they were littermates, brother and sister, and they had each other for company. I will take them the pills in late afternoon when I decant the rats, I would think. Then I can spend some time with them and no one will be the wiser.

It had not yet struck me, at the beginning of that summer, how much of my time was spent doing things about which no one was the wiser.

Mommee restless: Nothing ambiguous about that. Glynnis Parsons Fowler spent her entire married life in her big house on the edge of the great plantation and ruled her husband, sons, and household help with an iron hand in the lace mitt of a perennial wiregrass debutante. As far as I know she was never called Glynnis in her life; her adoring Papa called her Punkin, her sons called her Mommee, and her husband Little Bit, but despite the cloying nicknames and her diminutive stature, she was a formidable presence always. Even now, ten years widowed and five years into Alzheimer’s, two of them spent under our roof, she ruled, only now with mania instead of will and wiles. A restless night meant muttering and shuffling around her room at all hours, which Pom, no matter how weary, never failed to hear and I, no matter how well rested, seldom did. The note meant that he had had to get up and calm her again, and I whose task this was, had not…again. I knew that Pom had no thought of shaming me about this. The shame I felt was born entirely within me. I should have heard her. I will spend the morning with her, I would think, and Ina can go for the groceries and dry cleaning.

Finally, the note told me that someone with the potential for major financial support for the clinic was in town, and Pom was wining and dining him, and might be taking him somewhere afterwards for a nightcap. Many of the clinic’s benefactors were from the smaller cities across the South, and liked to see what they thought of as the bright lights of the big city when they came to Atlanta. Not infrequently, that meant one of the glossier nude dancing clubs over on Cheshire Bridge Road. The first time Pom had come in very late from one of those evenings I whooped with helpless laughter.

“Oh, God, I can just see you with huge silicone boobs on each side of your face, hanging over your ears,” I choked. “Even better, I can see you with huge silicone boobs over your ears and half an inch of five o’clock shadow, glaring out from the front page of the Atlanta Constitution . ‘Prominent physician caught in raid on unlicensed nude dancing club.’ What would Amy say?”

Pom’s square face reddened, and his black hair flopped over his eyes as if he had spent the evening shimmying with a parade of danseuses , but he grinned, a reluctant white grin that split the aforementioned five o’clock shadow like a knife blade through dark plush. By the end of a long day Pom frequently looks like a pirate in a child’s book.

“She’d say it never hurt a real man to sow a few oats,” he said, leering showily at me and twirling an imaginary mustache. And I laughed again, because it was just what she would say, and because he looked, in the lamplight, so much like the much younger and far lighter-hearted man I had married eighteen years before. That man was intense and impulsive and endearingly clumsy, and somehow astonishingly innocent, though he was certainly no stranger to strip joints and bovine boobs. I had not seen that man in a long time. I held out my arms to him that night, and he came into them, and it was near dawn before we slept. That had not happened in a long time, either.

Pom has amazing eyes. They are so blue that you can see them from a distance; you notice them immediately in photographs, and the times I have seen him on television they dominate the screen as if they were fluorescent. It may be because they are fringed with dense, dark lashes and shadowed over by slashes of level black brows, and set into flesh that looks tenderly and perpetually bruised. His thick black hair is usually in his eyes. All of this darkness makes the whites extraordinarily white, and very often they seem so wide open that the white makes a slight ring around the irises. All that white should, I tell him, make him look demented, a mad Irish visionary, but it is the genesis of his apparent innocence, I think. Much of the time Pom seems wide-eyed with surprise at the world.

The rest of him is solid and muscular, and he moves lithely and fast on the balls of his feet, a tight package of coiled energy and strength. He has always reminded me, in his stature, of one of the great cinema dancers, Jimmy Cagney perhaps, or Gene Kelly. But Pom is an abysmal dancer. He is always in a hurry, and frequently stumbles and bumps into things. Oddly, he is an awesome tennis player, fast and savagely focused and powerful. He shows no mercy. I hate playing with him.

He is short, or at least not tall: five nine. My height almost exactly. He pads when he walks, like a tomcat or a street punk, and looks as disheveled as if he had been in a fist fight an hour after dressing, no matter how carefully his shirts are done by the specialty cleaners over in Vinings, or how perfectly Clifford at Ham Stockton’s fits his suits. The shirts and suits are my arsenal, my weapons against the sartorial entropy with which he flirts daily. Pom doesn’t care what he wears. He remembers the blue blazer because his father told him when he sent him off to Woodbury Forest that a man needed nothing else but a good dark suit and a tuxedo to dress like a gentleman. I think his heart leaped up when he discovered white medical coats. He would wear them everywhere if he could, not because he considers them becoming (they are), but because they are comfortable, correct, and there is a seemingly inexhaustible supply of them both at home and at the office. Amy sends them home to be washed twice a week, tenderly folded in tissue paper. She would wash and iron them herself if she could, I am sure. Pom said he saw her polishing his stethoscope once.

Mommee has always insisted that the Fowlers are of old Saxon stock, but both Pom and his brother, Clay, have Celt written all over them, as did his father before him, and his oldest son Chip is the same small, powerful dark creature of the Cornish caves or the wild cliffs of Connaught. Mommee herself is small and birdlike, with a thin, high-bridged nose, pale hazel eyes, and the jaw of a mastiff. A little Teuton in the Tudor gene pool there, no doubt about it. I think Jeff, the younger boy, looks like her, but since Pom’s first wife, Lilly, is short and giltblond too I can’t be sure of that. But in Lilly’s case the smallness is of the small-town high school cheerleader variety, not the Blanche du Bois sort, as Mommee’s is, and runs now to thumping curves that strain at her Chanels and Bill Blasses. And even I, with no eye at all for such things, can tell that the polished hair comes weekly from Carter Barnes. English or Irish, the Fowler provenance matters not at all to anyone but Mommee. Atlanta, and indeed most of Georgia except the old Creole coast, is far too raw and new and self-involved to make much of a distinction, requiring only strong Caucasian chromosomes and good teeth.