Mr. Bones: Twenty Stories

Heartache

MOST OF THE still-intact small towns of the Deep South have a local diner, brimming with the tang of hot fat, where everyone is welcome. Good manners prevail, the mood is cheerful. Unless they’re saying grace, people look up from their food when someone enters. There might be a framed Bible verse on the wall or printed at the top of the sticky menu.

Louleen’s, in Peavy, Alabama, was one. I took the writer Kate Collier Delombre there for lunch two days in a row. Her lovely old house was outside the town. On the first day she said to me, “I have a heartache,” and on the second day, at my urging, she explained it, softly, with the fastidious pauses I’d found in her writing. She finished when we finished the meal. Perta Mae, her driver and housekeeper, listened with her head bowed over her plate.

“I wish I knew what to do.”

“Write it,” I said. “If you make it a story, you’ll ease your pain.”

“I’m too old for a long story.” She was a month shy of eighty-nine. She was fully alert, not sick but aged, small, fragile, easily wearied. Yet she was immortal-looking, with the mummified features you see in the very old, giving her the dusty glow of an idol, and still with an appetite for catfish.

“It’s been a furtive life,” she said, with the bird claw of her hand resting on her throat. Futtive and futtilize were words she made her own. “How did I manage all those years alone? People don’t ask. Twenty-eight stories published, and my memoir. So many stories started and put aside. The magic of getting it right — bliss for me, but who cares?”

“I do,” I said, and Perta Mae nodded, still chewing.

“Peavy people see an old white woman in a town of young blacks. I’m the minority now. They look at me with hatred. And why? In the secret history of the South we’re all related, by some ancient concubinage, persisting to the present. My work saved me. My work and Perta Mae. What makes me happy is my writing, like praying used to. I am speaking to readers as I speak to you. Readers listen, no one else does.”

Six weeks later I got a call from Perta Mae. “Miss Kitty,” and she swallowed, then a whisper, a sigh, “she pass.” I remembered how she’d lain her fingers on the back of Kate’s bird claw hand, black on white, to steady the menu. “Her heart give out.”

I asked Perta Mae whether Miss Kitty had done any writing in those weeks. She said no, just suffering. She invited me to visit. There was no story. The heartache was mine now, an obligation unfulfilled, mine to complete, or else to suffer.

Kate had adored her son, Jack, the more so because he was all she had; she’d been widowed when she was thirty and her son was five. He was Jack Delombre Junior, adopted in the second year of her marriage when her husband confessed (tears, his face in shadow) he could not father a child. He begged her to understand. His confiding this was a burden, but the appearance of Jack Junior crowded out the secret. Her husband was delighted when they saw this beautiful boy, who’d been put up for adoption by an unwed mother in the nearby town of Cow Creek.

Jack Senior was an attorney in Peavy. He was balding in his twenties, he looked old at thirty. He was a frail man, even sickly, ill with anemia, needing transfusions. Kate, sensitive to words, recalled “blood disease” and “his blood’s not strong,” and when he died, the doctor’s explanation: “a silent stroke.”

The child took his place as her companion until, at the age of twenty-six, he met and fell in love with Brenda Palmer, from Chattanooga. An intruder, so she seemed to Kate in the beginning, a stranger in a culture where an outsider with different ideas is taken to be an agitator.

In her solitude — Jack Junior soon married — Kate began to write stories. Writing gave her a purpose, made the day matter, and helped her to see. People from Peavy spoke through her stories, and local incidents were reshaped in them, the new tensions too, the way the balance of power had shifted from white to black, the whites feeling powerless and unappreciated, unremembered or wrongly remembered. In one story an old woman like Kate cannot understand directions, because the familiar streets have been renamed. She knew Dr. King, but who was Matthew Henson and who was Denmark Vesey?

Alabamans bring presents when they visit, a bottle of blueberry wine or homemade cookies or pound cake. On her few visits Brenda brought nothing, and Kate wanted to ask, “Is that usual in Chattanooga?” But Brenda glanced at her as though Kate had done something wrong, and Kate recognized an attitude toward blacks in the squint she gave Perta Mae.

The Brenda visits diminished, and then on the few that occurred she was late, which seemed more insulting than her not showing up at all. Was it resentment or disapproval? She never smiled. Nervy people have no sense of humor. She blinked a lot. At last Brenda stopped coming, and Jack Junior’s visits became less frequent.

Kate thought, To live with a humorless person is a martyrdom. But perhaps she didn’t know her.

Kate’s feeling of being snubbed, even shunned, gave purpose and vigor to her fictions. It was in this period of isolation that she sent stories to magazines, in the spirit of a loner posting a letter, yearning to be heard; and her first stories were published.

She wondered if anyone in her family, or in Peavy, would notice. No one did. Yet distant readers responded to her, and it seemed as though she was writing to them from a far-off land.

By now she had a granddaughter, Jackie. Kate had hoped to make her a friend, someone to whom she might leave her jewelry. But the girl was like her mother, sulky, disapproving, conveying a sense of blame in her squint. Kate was resigned to not seeing the girl and her mother; her sorrow was that she saw so little of her son.

Perhaps he was torn, but he sided with his wife, and when the child Jackie proved to be a problem at school, Kate said, Nothing to do with me. They’d detached themselves from her, and maybe the mother was the influence, but they were all complicit.

Kate had been shy at first in sending out her stories, but meeting with approval she was encouraged, and writing became a career and a consolation. She was a witness to an earlier time, a whispered insistent voice, who’d known white privilege and conflict in the small world of the country town, hardly altered in her house where Perta Mae cooked and cleaned, as her mother had done for Jack Senior when he was small. Perta Mae was more loyal to her than Jack Junior, and her warmth and willingness took the curse off the rift with Brenda, if you could call that silence a rift.

“You’re like family to me,” Kate said to Perta Mae. “Better than family, based on the families I know.”

Perta Mae lifted her head as if to speak, but smiled and said nothing.

One of the stories Kate wrote was about an old white woman and her black housekeeper — the housekeeper the daughter of the white woman’s childhood servant, as Perta Mae’s mother, known as Mammy, had been to Jack Senior, in the same house.

To wish for her son back was hopeless. She mildly scolded herself for not being content and was reminded that her unease, her seeking resolution and order, impelled her to write. And she who desired her son’s happiness could not object if he found it with his wife and not his mother. But if Brenda had some good qualities, they were indiscernible, and if that little family was tormented, Kate didn’t see it. They were absent, younger people she’d once known, that was the whole of it, and being absent they defied interpretation. That was a lesson. Her stories as a consequence were impartial, without explanation or blame. But she ached over the words “my son,” and she resisted thinking of his adoption.

Her readers visited her now and then. They marveled at the old remote farmhouse, full of books, at the edge of its empty fields. She gave these visitors lemonade on her porch. In the Southern way they brought her fruit or cookies. They asked serious questions and listened gratefully when she replied.

Sometimes she said, “I would trade everything I’ve written to have composed a ditty that people would go on humming,” and then stared and hummed a tune that strangely vibrated behind her face.

No one in her family had read a word she’d written. Reading was such a pleasant pastime that their refusal had to be deliberate, or hostile. They could so easily know me by reading me.

They don’t want to know me, she felt, and not reading her stories was their saying “See, we don’t care.” It wasn’t her son’s absence that pained her — it was his indifference. And what sharpened it was the attention of so many others, those strangers. She imagined herself an artist whose family refused to look at her paintings.

Returning home late one night, Kate stumbled on the front stairs and injured her lower back. “Trauma to your left kidney and some spinal bruising.” In the hospital she was reminded of Ivan Illych in the great story, how a fall had injured him, how he lay dying, the mention of his “floating kidney.”

Kate’s fall seemed like that, provoking a fatal illness; in her physical pain she felt immensely old and feeble. She lay in bed in her hospital room wondering whether her son and his family would walk through the door. How did they know she wasn’t dying?

On the second day — why the delay? — her son visited. “I just got the news” could not have been true. She stared, as you do at a lie. He held her hand and uttered the conventional formulas of concern. She wanted to tell him: I’ve written better commiserations than that.

“Not good,” she said, to test him when he asked how she felt.

The next day Brenda came. She took the bedside seat, stone-faced, empty-handed, as if commencing a deathwatch.

“I don’t know how much longer I have,” Kate said, “but I don’t want to die without saying this.”

She could hear Brenda’s breathing from the scrape of air in the hairs in her nostrils.

“I know you don’t like me much,” Kate said, without any bitterness, as though naming a color. “But I don’t know why. I just want to say that whatever the reason, if there was ever anything I said or did to hurt you,” and she paused, “I’m sorry.”

At first Brenda said nothing, and the only sound was the protest of the nose hairs. She swallowed a little, and the way she swallowed changed her expression and shaped her mouth to a rueful smile.

She faced Kate, unsmiling then. She had become a heavy plump-jowled woman.

“I accept your apology,” she said, barely opening her mouth, as if someone else inside her was speaking.

Kate Collier Delombre didn’t die. She lived for ten more years — ten years of solitude, not writing, looked after by Perta Mae, a respected figure in Peavy and elsewhere. Her fame grew and she won awards when she stopped writing, a paradox that amused her.

I met her in that period, and she told me how she had lost the affection of her son. Could it have been as simple as his adoption? Hated by her daughter-in-law, doubted by her granddaughter.

“My heartache.”

That was the lunch at Louleen’s when I urged her to fictionalize it, to ease her pain.

But she didn’t write it, she died of heartache, and I did not begin to write it myself until after I accepted Perta Mae’s invitation to visit the old house outside Peavy, set in the desolate fields her husband’s family had once farmed, the furrows grubbed and scabby in winter.

I took Perta Mae, who seemed much older, to Louleen’s, so as to be away from Kate’s aura in the house. But even so, her spirit lingered there in the diner. Why is it, on a return to such a homely place, you so often choose the same table? The familiar entrance, people looking up from their food, Perta Mae limping ahead of me.

Perta Mae ordered fried catfish and mentioned how Miss Kitty had liked it that way, with two sides, rice and gravy, coleslaw, and a biscuit, a sort of homage set out on a plastic tray.

“You were true to her,” I said. “The only one.”

“Had to be.”

“She was so grateful.”

“Never told her why.” Perta Mae worked her biscuit apart with her thumbs. “Old Mr. Jack and me was kinfolk.”

I thought, What? But I suppressed my shock. “Why didn’t you tell her?”

“Heh. Tell that woman anything and you see in her eye she fixin’ to make it a story.” She became serious and added, “Later on, I tell young Mr. Jack.”

“But he was adopted.”

“That’s why he need to know. For his wife sake too.” And she laughed and lifted half a buttered biscuit. “That’s why they gee and haw when they see me and Miss Kitty.”