I broke in, “Now hold on, Eastman. It’s not any trouble. It would be a pleasure to have you. I’ll leave the key under the mat,” giving up, surrendering, rolling over. After all these generations of Taillefer-Taliaferro-Tolliver-Telfair without a harsh word between us (or any other kind) I couldn’t be the one to create this genealogical rift that could split us into fragments like a family time-bomb. “Under the mat at the front door,” practically begging.
He said, “Never mind, Robert, we’ll go to a hotel,” and hung up.
As soon as I could convince myself the responsibility for all this tangle was Eastman’s not mine, a matter of a few seconds, I called Doshia and brought her up to date. “He’s threatened ‘hotel,’ Doshia. That’s fine with me but it will create a lot of talk—”
“Calm yourself, Bob. I’ll phone him again and straighten it out, such a nice-sounding young man. Naturally he’s a little on edge, making all the ‘arrangements,’ and this and that. I called Mr. Grimes and he is phoning his contact in Chicago; he will let me know as soon as he finds out anything, we are old friends, Mr. Sam and I, most kind and helpful to me in my own trials, his wife Mamie and I went to the old Houghton School together that burned down later in the Great Fire, such a pity. Teachers? They don’t make teachers like that any more—”
I said, “Excuse me, Doshia, I see Mr. Porlock at the door,” which allowed me to get round to proofreading the manuscript for twenty or thirty minutes.
I was correcting my own typo from “coat” to “coast” (pleased at the wad I was saving myself in Author’s Corrections) when the phone rang again: “You’ve hurt his feelings, Bob. He’s not coming at all.” I said, “God’s taking care of us, Doshia!” She asked what I had said and I said, “My God, I didn’t mean to hurt his feelings, I only meant—”
“He said he may have the body cremated, you know the way they do up there, so many people, running out of ground. I said, ‘Oh Eastman, you can’t do that to your poor old dad, Papa Charles has left all of us the Telfair Plot for just this sort of emergency.’ He said he was thinking of it. ‘Looking into it, looking into it,’ really quite distant, Bob. ‘I’ll take care of everything,’ he said, ‘Don’t bother.’ I said, ‘But it’s no bother, Eastman.’”
“Of course not, Doshia.”
“I couldn’t quite say it would be a pleasure to bury his dad. He practically hung up on me, Bob. ‘Must go now, very busy,’ or something. Quite upsetting. Then I thought of Ocilla.”
“Who?”
“Robert, don’t act like you don’t know your own people! She’s calling Eastman now. Inviting him to stay with them, just her and Edward in the house nowadays. He could stay with them and the girls could stay with me. I’ll let you know as soon as she tells me what he says. The Rector couldn’t have been nicer. In the chapel or the church or at the graveside, as we decided.” She said, Of course I had talked to Uncle Brownell? (faint Southern question mark at the end, knowing I hadn’t and meaning Get the hell on with it), and when I said I had been so overrun with getting out our Fall List at the Press—one title—I hadn’t had time to go to the bathroom she ignored the poor scatological fun and said to please call him right away. “There was something in the paper about Bivins and a car accident.”
I said I hoped it was nothing trivial, but she said she hadn’t seen the paper, Ocilla was telling her.
I said, “Why stir up Uncle Brownell, Doshia, you’ve got everything taken care of. The Girls with you if they should come, Eastman with Ocilla if he—”
She cut me off to say patiently that Uncle Brownell kept the key.
“Key, Doshia?”
The cemetery key, Bob. The key to the Telfair Plot. We’ll have to have that.”
I told her the gate was never locked that I knew of, and she said, “The walk-in gate stays open, Robert, but he keeps the drive-in gate locked, has to—children driving in to park and all that snurly business, even throwing those rubber things out on the gravestones.” I was going crazy, with all these interpolations messing up my day like penciled inserts on a well-typed manuscript, too crazy to say, Why the hell do you need a drive-in gate when all you’ll have are Eastman’s ashes, Dad’s ashes, if you even have those? I said, “All right, I’ll call him and borrow the key,” tacking on that I would leave it with Mr. Grimes, that I might be a little delayed in getting back for the service (might be!)—none of which I think she bothered to hear, her mind absorbed in the details for staging what might have been a Halloween party for young and old and how to get them all attended to in the time we had left.
Well, as anybody can tell you, it never rains but it pours. To give you the idea of the “pour” I’ll have to go back for a minute to Bivins Brogdon.
Not exactly Papa Charles’s bastard though that was the way we tended to think of him. His mother Charlotte-Virginia was the bastard (bastardess?—we don’t seem quite prepared for lady bastards), the daughter of Papa Charles and a Mrs. Virginia Fenwick, widow, of Mobile, Alabama—the “Charlotte-Virginia” striking a nice commemorative note for both of them. The family had never met Mrs. Fenwick, never heard of her until the will was read, never seen her until they tried to contest the provision naming her as the largest beneficiary of all the heirs, lost the case and watched her walk out of the courtroom with $80,000 (in cash, as she demanded), dropping a few pearly tears for Papa Charles among the long, green, beautiful, gold-standard, pre-inflation bills in her right hand and a few among the silken curls of little blue-eyed Charlotte-Virginia whom she led out gummily in her left, (all this according to Judge Fluther—“Nunkie,” behind his back, as Uncle Brownell was “Bubberdarlin” behind his). Charlotte-Virginia married Mr. Brogdon somewhere out there, which made Bivins himself legitimate enough, a bastard once removed you might say. But you would never guess from his company he was once removed; as real and fully equipped a bastard as you could hope to see, hope not to. He enjoyed being a bastard, took a pride in it.
He had become a tenant at the overpopulated Homestead on what amounted to a temporary visa, appearing out of the gloom one rainy night like a political refugee and persuading Uncle Brownell to let him spend the night in the old boiler room—Rufus Reel’s room, the yardman, but Rufus had gone to his sister’s with the flu—and then refusing to move out on the grounds of being the most direct descendant of Papa Charles of anybody in the house (which was the case, as old Judge Fluther, in the front room next to Uncle Brownell, regretfully pointed out); the whole thing as tangled up as Shakespeare’s Wars of the Roses, Bivins in the part of Richard III, if that was the Richard with the bad back, I haven’t read the plays lately. When his Unemployment Insurance expired and the Welfare people kept dragging their feet he took a job as salesman in a used-car lot on Macartan Street:
WE BUY, WE SELL, WE TRADE
Home of Nothing Down
—pennants fluttering on strung wires, light-bulbs twinkling, little whirligigs softly chirping.
Which was where he had lighted his third morning Tamparino from the half-inch ember of his second and propped himself against the twinkling phony shine of a green Chevy’s front fender when he spied a possible customer wandering among the face-lifted wrecks as if he had never seen so many sparkling jewels in all his life—a coal-black man in a khaki jacket over a white undershirt—British, somehow, “Outpost of Empire”—a gay tropical straw hat with a multicolored ribbon square on his head. It developed as they talked (Bivins not one to snatch up his hook at the first bobble of the cork) that his name was Leon Tolliver.
“Ash Island, BWI. And may I present Mrs. Tolliver.”
“‘BWI’?” says Bivins, ignoring well-fed Mrs. Tolliver, BWI not among Bivins’s acronyms, which tended to stop with FBI and IRS.
“British West Indies,” Mr. Tolliver explained, going on to confide in a friendly way that Ash Island was the modern name of the old French Isle del Vaches as adapted by Her Gracious Majesty’s Parliament which had no intention of taking on something with a low-grade name like Cows Island, “the French having frugally ducked out with most of the animals anyway.” Mr. Tolliver and his wife were on their way home but had stopped off to spend a few weeks at the Hotel Fair on Bay Street, which according to accounts of it in books by a Miss Lucinda Fannin and in a Broadway hit they had seen by the same writer provided generous accommodations—completely free for nothing, in fact—to members of the Tolliver family.
“Not ‘Tolliver,’ Tolliver. ‘Telfair,’” from Bivins in a not-to-interrupt-you tone.
Mr. Tolliver said, “Telfair, Tolliver, Taliaferro, Taillefer, what’s the dif?” bringing on several quick puffs from Bivins’s Tamparino.
It appeared that Mr. and Mrs. Tolliver had just called at Bay Street and Mr. Tolliver had said to an old white-haired man at the top of the first-floor stairs, “Pardon, sir, but I can’t seem to locate the desk clerk.”
“Desk clerk?” says the old man.
“Or am I having the pleasure of addressing the manager?” says Mr. Tolliver, setting down his rattan suitcase on our black-and-white hexagonal tiles.
“Manager!”
“My name is Tolliver, sir, and I am interested in accommodations for myself and Mrs. Tolliver for a few weeks—”
“Accommodations!” cries the old man, grabbing the banister rail to save himself from falling over, and Tolliver said, “This is the Hotel Fair, is it not?” (basing it all on his reading of Lucinda, who—while turning our foibles into gold—likes to play with words, as writing people do, and had contrived “Hotel Fair” from our original American name).
Uncle Brownell accumulated enough breath to say it was not a “hotel” of any sort, it was a private residence and there hadn’t been an empty room in it since the First World War, and Mr. Tolliver digressed for a moment to say with an ingratiating smile, “Excuse me, sir, but aren’t I speaking to Bubberdarlin?” breaking into Uncle Brownell’s “Now just a minute, if you please!” to say he was getting a crick in his neck from the stairwell and would Bubberdarlin come down or should he come up? All of it ending with some advisory whispering by Mrs. Tolliver, who seemed more sensitive than Mister at picking up the early-warning signals of trouble coming in from above, Tolliver accepting the turn in their affairs and asking Uncle Brownell for directions to the Social Security office, Uncle Brownell pleased at being able to end the visit with, He had never heard of such a place.
But everybody else knows where the SS office is and when he shouted the question at Bivins, who had revved up the Chevy and was giving the engine a series of seductive roars, Bivins shouted back that it wasn’t far, “just beyond the Beneficial Mortgage & Firearms Company” (as if that would place it for the usual transient), adding on second thought that he would drop them off there if that was where they wanted to go, quieting the motor to give center-stage to flashing the headlights and several authoritative squawks of the horn, Tolliver explaining that he was running low on cash, that the New York “restaurant and theater prices make your hair stand on end” (a manner of speaking, with his Caribbean cut) and he needed to be on Welfare for a while.
Bivins’s answer was an accommodating “Hop in,” and he drove them round town pointing out our monuments and old pre-mobile-homes homes and ten-floor skyscrapers and what not, not to get them hooked on the town so much as hooked on the Chevy, how it braked and scratched off with a burnt-rubber smell, mentioning that the SS red tape sometimes took a little time to unravel and they might find it handy to have a car at their disposal while they waited. In the end the Tollivers drove off in the green Chevy, leaving Bivins with a lien of some sort against the first three or four Welfare checks, and a lien of course against the Chevy; even so, a highly speculative position, except for the car’s being insured, might be “repossessed” (again), and the probability that Tolliver still had a little cash left from New York—which Bivins no doubt got some or most of there under the blinking letters of Home of Nothing Down.
It was not much later that frantic morning when a gray car with “Sheriff’s Dept.” on the sides and trunk went screaming past the lot followed by three wreckers jockeying for first place as if on the homestretch at Indianapolis, all headed west in the general direction of I-20, where “Mr. and Mrs. Leon S. Tolliver of Ash Island BWI” (the afternoon paper speaking) had been rolling along at a good clip down the left lane—the proper BWI lane—when a Transcon 18-wheeler “driven by ‘Dan the Fast Freight Man’” appeared in their windshield as if wrapped in the whistle of a diesel locomotive. The paper said Mr. Tolliver, “according to a hospital spokesperson,” had suffered “minor contusions and abrasions but was reported in stable condition;” Mrs. Tolliver’s condition however was, sadly enough, even more stable. She was, “according to the same source, pronounced dead on arrival at the hospital.”
All of this happening (though I wasn’t aware of it) at just about the time of my rash of phone calls and bringing on, with Bivins’s inspired help, the entanglements I have mentioned. For though we have integrated everything they told us to, schools, movies, hotels, restaurants, offices, drinking fountains, buses, rest rooms, we—and the Feds too—have somehow overlooked the most important rest room of all (quite possibly the excuse would be the staggering complications involved if the courts ruled the law to be retroactive, as they well might, given half a chance), I mean the cemeteries.
