Bliss, Remembered: A Novel Page 2

  There was an old house on the property where the tenants had lived. You wouldn’t have known it was there, that old tenant house, tucked away behind where the river bends. After Daddy sold the farmland, we just stored stuff in there, but when the hard times came, the Depression in ’29, there was an old colored man—excuse me, we called the black people colored then, and it just slipped into my conversation, remembering . . .

  “I understand, Mom. I won’t stamp you as a racist.”

  Well, Teddy, isn’t that white of you . . .

  We both laughed, and she went on:

  There was an old black man . . . an African American. Well, he seemed old to me. Probably wasn’t over sixty. Certainly nowhere near as old as I am now, that’s for sure. And maybe not even as old as you. His name was Gentry. That was his first name, Gentry. Gentry Trappe. There was the town of Trappe, Maryland, farther down the Shore in Talbot County, and I suppose Gentry Trappe’s family had been slaves way back and just took that name, or there were people named Trappe they named the town after who owned his ancestors when they were slaves. Anyway, Gentry Trappe was a wonderful old fellow, quite distinguished in his way. I always called him “Mr. Trappe.” Poor man—his wife had died in the flu epidemic of 1918. You familiar with that?

  “Oh yeah, sure.”

  Terrible thing. It was right about the time I was born. Well, Gentry Trappe never remarried and his children grew up, and then he lost his job in the Depression. Daddy had known him forever, and so he said, “Gentry, why don’t you come and live in the old tenant’s house on my place?”

  And he said, “Oh, Mr. Robert, I couldn’t afford anything like that.”

  But my father explained that he thought it’d be a good idea to have someone in the house, just to be on the property, to look after the two of his ladies—that’s my mother and me—when he was away on business. Your grandfather was the sweetest man, Teddy. There was no justice in such a model of goodness being killed. We always think of the mother’s milk of kindness, but I believe, if there’s any kindness in me, it came more from my daddy than Mom.

  Daddy knew Mr. Trappe would want to plant a little garden, and all he asked in the way of rent was that when the sweet corn crop came in, he’d give us a dozen ears or so, and some peaches and maybe a dozen of those good Eastern Shore tomatoes. One thing I remember about my father. He’d dig into a tomato like it was an apple. Just take a big bite. All that juice and those little orange seeds running down his chin. I can see that now. I was never that partial myself to tomatoes. I like tomato soup and tomato sauce and tomato ketchup more than plain tomatoes themselves. Must have somethin’ to do with rememberin’ the juice runnin’ down Daddy’s chin.

  Anyway, that was the deal Daddy struck with Gentry Trappe. A little produce would be rent enough if he’d keep an eye on the two gals. So he lived there on the property during all this time I’m tellin’ you about.

  Sorry, Teddy, I’m getting off the track. It’s your job to keep me on the straight and narrow here.

  “I’ll do my best, Mom.”

  Thank you. Daddy’s family did have a little money. My grandfather had started a nice little insurance office in Chestertown, servicing most of Kent County and some of Queen Anne’s, too, right across the river. It was thriving—you know, for that neck of the woods. And Daddy followed in his father’s footsteps. Stringfellow and Son Insurance, it became. Right there on Cross Street, the main drag in Chestertown. And the main drag was about the only drag then.

  Now, Mother, her family didn’t have a pot to piss in. They were farmers. Corn. The Eastern Shore corn is a sweet white corn, and it’s the best there is, but the DeHavenons didn’t have that much land, and I suppose it wasn’t the best, either. All during the Depression, Mother had to help her folks out. But Daddy understood. We were veryfortunate—relatively. I think everybody was more understanding, more generous, during the Depression. And the good thing about insurance then was that it was the one thing—well, after their mortgages—that people would try their damndest to keep up. Your insurance. If nothing else, if you had a life policy, it would pay for your funeral. You’d be surprised how that mattered to a lot of folks.

  “How did Grandmother meet Grandfather?”

  She sipped her ice tea, then shook her head at me.

  Here, I ask you to keep me on point. That’s what they say now in business, don’t they—“on point”?

  “I believe they do, yes.”

  Well, I urged you to stop my digressions, and promptly, Teddy, promptly you encourage them.

  “Okay, never mind about Grandmother and Grandfather.”

  No, even a blind pig finds an acorn now and then, and come to think of it, that was a pretty good question. It was apropos.

  “I’m glad to be on point, Mom.”

  Well, Mother was a couple years behind Dad at Chestertown High, and I’ll bet he had his eye on her even then. Mother was what we call “upwardly mobile” now. She didn’t want to marry some damn corn farmer like her mother. And she was smart as a whip, Mom was, and she learned how to type, and Daddy hired her as the receptionist and what-have-you for the office. Otherwise, I think she would’ve taken off for Wilmington or Baltimore, for the city. My mother was not going to be some farmer’s wife. But once Daddy got her in that office, she snared him pretty quickly. Or, I’m sure, he let her snare him. And it was a good marriage, Teddy. It was full of love, just like my own. As far as I could tell, Mom even liked it when he played that damn accordian of his.

  “You didn’t care for that?”

  No comment, buddy-boy.

  I think the only sadness in their marriage was that after me, Mom couldn’t have any more children. I never understood exactly why. She couldn’t. And, of course, Daddy had wanted a son. So I became more than just Daddy’s little girl. I did more things with him. He’d take me out in the boat, fishing, throw a baseball around with me, go swimming with me, take me dove-hunting.

  “You shot little birds?”

  Oh, don’t be such a nancy boy, Teddy. We all did. Why, Mr. Andrews, the next farm over, he’d grow a whole field of sunflowers just because doves like sunflower seeds So Daddy and me would go over there and fire away when the doves would pop down for a meal. Then come the fall, he’d take me duck-hunting, when the mallards flew down south over the Bay.

  “Blew those poor devils to kingdom come, too?”

  Listen, Teddy, you’re not going to get up before dawn and sit out there in that blind, freezing your heinie off, and not shoot. That was the whole point: to shoot. Daddy and the other men would bring a little rye to fortify them, so at least they had something to pass the time with, waiting for those damn ducks. So you bet I shot ’em when the chance presented itself.

  “Ever hit any?”

  Did I? You think a girl can’t shoot? Teddy, I was a regular Annie Oakley.

  She brought out an imaginary pair of six-shooters, pretended to fire them off and then blew cool over the top of one make-believe barrel.

  “Hey, no offense, Mom. It’s just that I never ever saw you have anything to do with guns.”

  She paused for a moment.

  Let’s simply say that I decided to lay down my firearms when we left the Shore. But I always had a wonderful time, just being with my father, whatever we did. He called me Trixie.

  “Trixie! Oh yeah. Now why was that?”

  It started off because he said I was so full of tricks, and then it stuck. All the way through school I was Trixie Stringfellow. I rather liked it, to tell you the truth. I was one of a kind, among so many names that were dime a dozen—and the fact that Trixie was my father’s name for me made it seem even more special. He was just a honey of a guy.

  Mom stopped then, sighed, and took a swallow of the iced tea. When she looked away then, I was fairly sure what was coming next. She swallowed and said:

  And then Daddy was killed.

  “Yeah.”

  He was going over to Sudlersville, over near the Delaware line, to handle
some sort of a policy, and coming back that night there was a truck that wandered over the line, and it hit Daddy almost square on, and you know what cars were like then. They weren’t much more than old tomato cans with wheels. It was June, Teddy, June 26, 1934. I still remember. And I’ll tell you something, if it hadn’t been June, been summer, my whole life would’ve been different, because I was so upset, and what did I start to do? I started swimming a lot. I’d go out in that river and swim my heart out. It got me through things. Mom had the agency. It wasn’t Stringfellow and Son anymore. It had become The Robert Stringfellow Insurance Agency. And she threw herself into the work. I remember. But me, I just swam all that summer. I don’t know why, but the Chester River always seemed warmer, and it seems like I could stay in it forever.

  I can see Gentry Trappe now coming by and watching me out there in the river, and he’d say, “Miss Trixie, you swim better than any fish I ever did see.” I just swam. All the time.

  Mom had already become like the office manager under Daddy, and after he died she’d hire young men to be agents. Remember now, this is ’34, the depths of the Depression. There were good men dying for work, anything at all, so she had her pick, and they’d work all on commission. She’d service Daddy’s old accounts herself. She kept that agency going just fine. My mother was not going back to farm work.

  And I swam. Out there off the dock in the Chester River. That’s why I liked the backstroke so much. I could swim and look up at the sky, and think some—well, when I wasn’t trying to swim lickety-split. You can’t think, Teddy, when your head’s down in the water and all you’re doing is comin’ up for air. The Chester River was a little brackish, too, so the salt taste could burn your lips after a while.

  Nobody had any pools then, private pools, you know, but some of the bigger towns on the Shore had community pools. Easton had one. It was the swankiest town around.

  “How far away?”

  Oh, I don’t know. Thirty, thirty-five, maybe forty miles. But of course the roads were all terrible, so it was a haul. It was a haul to go anywhere then. That made the Eastern Shore even more like a little kingdom unto itself. Across the Chesapeake Bay, over to Baltimore and Washington, that was another world. That was Oz. I guess the other side of the Bay was the western shore. After all, it was the western side, and it was a shore. But nobody called it that. Only our side was identified that way: The Eastern Shore. We were one. Everybody knew everybody. You take the people where we lived, in Maryland, we felt a lot more in common with the people from Delaware and that skinny tit of Virginia that stuck down on the other side of the Bay than we did with the rest of Maryland. In fact, they called us Delmarva, like we were a real state. I guess they still do. It’s been so long since I was back there. So long.

  You know what Delmarva was really like?

  I shook my head. I didn’t know where Mom was going, and I liked hearing her reminisce.

  We were like those countries in Africa that the great powers split up along political lines without taking the tribes into account. We were one big tribe, Delmarva, and they didn’t have any business divvying us up, willy-nilly, between Maryland and Delaware and Virginia. Yeah, we were tribal—very independent people. Very insular. Very suspicious—especially if you came from across the Bay.

  I remember Mom telling me there was this one big account that was in arrears. I mean, the grace period was about up. This was after Daddy died, so she had to go out there herself. It wasn’t like these folks were poor, either, but she said they behaved like it was an imposition that she was expecting them to pay the bill on time so they could keep their insurance up. The man said: “I don’t think you understand, Mrs. Stringfellow. You are new to doin’ bidness, but everyone on the Shore knows that we Carneys never pay our bills on time.” It was that sort of place, the Shore.

  “What happened?”

  What happened what?

  “To the Carneys, to the people who wouldn’t pay their bill?”

  Oh, I believe Mom just told them that she was sorry, but the Aetnas didn’t live on the Shore, they lived up in Hartford, Connecticut, and the way it worked in Hartford was, you had to pay, at least by the time the grace period was up. Mom left with the check.

  So anyway, Easton. They had a community pool, and somehow I heard that on Labor Day they had this swimming tournament, and I decided I was gonna go. Even though it was a haul, all the way down in Talbot County. It was all so strange, Teddy. I mean, I’d never been in any sort of real race. Nobody had any swimming teams. Well, for that matter, there weren’t any girls’ teams in anything. But I told Mother about the meet in Easton, and she said she’d drive me down.

  “Even though you said it was a veritable haul?”

  Yes, and don’t be a wisenheimer. I think she was just so glad to see me excited about something—anything—she’d’ve taken me anywhere. I was still so depressed about losing Daddy.

  And so we drove down. We had a new Ford, because us being in insurance, we had insurance on the car my poor father had been killed in. It was totaled. So we had a new Ford. We drove down to Easton, and right away I could see it was a bigger deal than I’d ever imagined because, as I told you, Easton was a swanky place (well, by Shore standards), and they had a country club, and all the kids from the club had come over, expecting to win all the ribbons. They’d been practicing all summer, racing against themselves at their pool. They even had a coach, and all of them had the same trunks on. I’ll tell you, one look, and it was very . . . imposing.

  Mother stopped suddenly and smiled her great big gigantic moon of a smile again. “What’s so funny?” I asked.

  Without losing that grin, she gestured toward the tape recorder.

  Turn that off a second, Teddy.

  I obliged. Mom leaned back in her chair and crossed her arms.

  Well, pardon my French, but I whipped all their asses.

  The phone rang. It was my sister, Helen, calling from outside of San Diego, where she and her husband lived. She’s my kid sister, but we’re placed in completely different birth categories. I’m a war baby, but she’s a boomer, born just after the war, when we were settled in Montana. Helen was coming to see Mother in a couple weeks. It made more sense for us to take turns being with her than for the two of us to come together.

  “What’re you and Mom up to?” Helen began, naturally enough.

  “Well,” I said, “we’re sitting here having an iced tea, and she’s telling me a story.” But when I said that, Mom had a conniption fit, mouthing “no” and running her hand back and forth across her neck to cut it out. So when Helen asked, “What story?” I mumbled something innocuous about stories in general, and how we were getting ready to watch the swimming that evening. Finally, with great relief, I passed the phone to Mom.

  When she hung up, I said, “Why don’t you want Helen to know this?”

  “It’s more important for you to know, Teddy. That’s why.”

  “Can I tell her?”

  “I told you: after I’m dead, sure.”

  “I wish you’d stop saying that, Mom.”

  “Teddy, I’m eighty-six years old, I have terminal cancer, and I’m done with the chemo, so I’m gonna die in the not too distant future. Now, let’s not be ridiculous.”

  “Well, I just wish you wouldn’t bring it up. You’re too direct.”

  “That’s my Delmarva upbringing, I suppose. We are not creatures of subtlety.”

  “But then I can tell Helen?”

  “Teddy, for all I give a hoot, you can sell it to television as one of those god-awful reality shows. It’s damn fine reality. It’s a good story, and there’s a love interest. Everybody likes a love interest.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” I said.

  “I wish you wouldn’t call me ‘ma’am.’ How old are you?”

  “I’m sixty-one.”

  “Well, it’s ridiculous to have a sixty-one-year-old man calling anybody ‘ma’am.’”

  “Come on, Mother, I can’t help it. I’ve ca
lled you ma’am all my life. Daddy told me to call grown-up men ‘sir’ and grown-up women ‘ma’am.’”

  “Well, your father was very old-school, very, uh, continental, and I’m glad the apple didn’t fall far from the tree, but if you would drop the ma’am now, and just call me Mother or Mom, I would definitely appreciate it.”

  “Could I call you Trixie?”

  “No, that’s out.”

  “Why?”

  “I’ll tell you later. I’m gonna take a nap now, because I want to be fresh for the swimming tonight. Natalie Coughlin’s in one of the heats of the one-hundred-back.”

  Pointedly, she picked up the violet acetate package and took it with her. She stumbled just a little bit as she got to her feet, and I instinctively began to rise up, but Mom caught herself immediately and didn’t look back. She knew I was watching her, so she made sure to walk especially carefully the rest of the way to the door as if nothing could possibly be wrong with her.

  There was an odd dichotomy to her. On the one hand, she spoke so blithely of her impending death, but on the other, she was determined not to let me notice any of her distress—although it was obvious that she was occasionally in discomfort, even some pain.

  How well, though, did I know that type of behavior. I think I always admired my mother as much as I loved her. She had never been a whiner, and now, if she understood so well that death approached, she was not going to bide her time in the waiting room. She was going to enjoy her last days, enjoy my company, and she appreciated that I couldn’t reciprocate if I was worrying about her. So she pretended that she was much better than she was, and I pretended that I didn’t know she was pretending.

  But she knew what she was doing; we had much more fun this way.

  That evening, Natalie Coughlin did win her heat, which absolutely invigorated Mother; she so wanted an American to take the gold in her old event. “Actually,” she explained, “I think the two-hundred was my better distance, but they didn’t have that in the Olympics then.”