Liberating Paris Read online

  The voice on the other end was growing impatient. “Mr. Brundidge, we try to be politically sensitive in our portrayal of all groups of people, regardless of ethnicity, religion, geography—”

  “No, you don’t. I’ve called you a bunch of times. You’re sensitive to ever’body else, ’cause you know if you said this kinda shit about them, they’d be so far up your ass you could deduct ’em. But you’re not sensitive to hicks ’cause you figure we’re too dumb and disorganized to do anything about it. Now that’s just the truth of it, isn’t it?”

  Two little girls came in and began to set the table. Their daddy smiled at them as he unscrewed the jelly jar. The voice on the other end was done with him.

  “Well, sir, I don’t know what else to tell you. I’ll certainly make the network aware of your complaint.”

  Brundidge winked at his daughters and continued his conversation. “Right, you do that. I just have one more question.”

  He crossed to the refrigerator and removed a carton of juice.

  “Seriously, now, just between you and me. Do you ever feel silly lookin’ down on us when you live in a place where people say stuff like ‘Happy Wednesday’ and ‘Watch out for the rain’?”

  There was a long pause and then a beep. Brundidge said, “I’ve got another call. Gotta go.” He pressed a button while pouring the juice. “Hello?” There was a pause, then, “Oh, God. Oh, no. When?…All right. I’ll let everybody know. I’m on my way.”

  The man who was lying down with shards of colored sunlight dancing around him was by all accounts an excellent man. Babies loved him. Their mothers swore by him. Their daddies wanted to be his friend. And now that he was gone, there was so much crying in the air, one could scarcely hear the Blue Notes Jazz Ensemble, which had driven all the way from Memphis, Tennessee, just to play his favorite hymns.

  Somehow it had seemed unthinkable that Wood’s dad might fall victim to the same end as ordinary mortals. His heart was so good, no one imagined that it could go bad. But that’s exactly what had happened. And now his fine deeds would become the stuff of legend. It had already begun as each speaker, black and white, mounted the pulpit carrying a little piece of the picture that was Woodrow Phineas McIlmore Jr. No patient turned down ever for lack of payment. For him and his father before him, being a physician was not a profession. It was a ministry. He treated people, not just symptoms. He listened to their stories without arrogance, accepting whatever payment they could muster. He never allowed anyone to die alone, which often meant sitting up all night. And if a patient refused to give up, he could be just as gentle in allowing them their illusions as he was ferocious in protecting them from the harshness of standardized medicine. He would have been an important doctor anywhere. But he had chosen to be one here in Paris. He had put his arms around his little town and cared for just about everyone in it.

  And now, it would not be easy for them to put him in the ground on such a splendid fall day. A day that seemed cruel in its promise compared to the reality at hand, with velvet geese floating across the tops of red-copper trees, their serene formations rising in unison and disappearing into wavy black streamers on the horizon. People knew they would not see the likes of this man again. But that didn’t stop them, even today, from beginning to look toward the son.

  Wood tilted his head down with eyes cast upward, a habit he had inherited from his mother. He had planned not to cry, but when he entered the church doors and heard the jazzy exultations of “Just a Closer Walk with Thee”—a sophisticated, emotional rendering that would’ve brought his own father to his feet, it had knocked all the air out of him and sent him struggling toward his seat. Milan had tried to hold his hand but he had quietly taken it back. This was one day he was not willing to be a part of her show.

  He stared at her as she scanned the memorial service program, no doubt making sure that everything was unfolding according to her plan. Even though all the beauty of her youth was still on her, he marveled that her black Escada suit and perfectly arranged hair somehow diminished it. He knew it was an Escada because she had asked which black suit she should wear and he had chosen the wrong one—the one that wasn’t an Escada. There was no question that Milan was even more striking without her clothes on. When the sermon was bad, he had often spent time thinking about her underneath her suit. But this would be the first time he had done so while weeping.

  He had to stop thinking about the man in the coffin. The man who had delivered him from his own mother’s womb and taught him how to make fire; who could recite every word of Tennyson by heart and who would put his highball down just so he could applaud the sunset. He could not think about him right now. Instead, he would steel himself by concentrating on Milan’s body. It didn’t matter that his desire for her had diminished. He could still stand in awe and even clinical appreciation of her abundant gifts. Even though she, like him, had turned forty, her figure had acquired none of the encroaching thickness that often accompanies such a milestone. Milan was only five feet, four inches, but well proportioned. It was almost unfair that just below the perfect symmetry of her face, she should have been blessed with wonderfully fashioned, slightly swingy, teenage-boy-fantasy breasts—the kind that could command a man’s attention after years of professionally probing an endless parade of others.

  Milan reached out and put her hand again in Wood’s. This time, he let it stay, mostly as a thanks for the imaginary use of her breasts. In spite of how much she could deplete him, there was something reassuring about the sameness of her. She was the most continuously unchanged person he had ever known and today, the last day his father would spend above the ground, her sameness was something he needed.

  Another speaker was telling of Woodrow Phineas McIlmore Jr.’s heroism in World War II. How he was a medic who volunteered for a dangerous mission that apparently medics didn’t have to go on at all. How he was shot at Malmedy while defending his battalion and even dug a bullet out of his own leg. He did this without anesthetic, which he saved for men who were more severely injured. All this had been taken down by people who were there and sent to the War Department. (Later, when Dr. Mac and his wife, Slim, compared notes, they realized that at the exact moment he was shot, she had set bolt upright in her bed, already knowing what was in the telegram that came days later.) Afterward, he spent another year in the European theater, declining to be sent stateside for rehabilitation. This caused permanent injury to his leg and later some comments that he walked a lot like Chester on Gunsmoke.

  Wood was thinking how much Dr. Mac would hate all this—people making him sound like some kind of saint and surely better than he really was. Maybe he should stand up and remind everybody how mad they all got when his dad made speeches against the Vietnam War. How the local barbershop even refused to cut his hair. And maybe he should also remind them just how much his old man could drink. But truthfully, even that wasn’t much of a criticism. Mae Ethel said it only made him sweeter and not mean, the way it did some men. Once while waiting for Slim to get dressed and after several libations, Dr. Mac had put on a record and jitterbugged with Mae Ethel all over the house. Wood remembered how surprised he had been to see that she was so light on her feet. And how, in spite of Mae Ethel’s pretending to act embarrassed, she and Slim thought it was all pretty funny. He also remembered how his elementary school principal called Slim the next day to tell her that her son was saying Dr. Mac had been “waltzing around with the McIlmores’ colored maid.” And Slim had said, “Oh, that boy, he never gets anything right! They were not waltzing at all. They were doing the jitterbug. If you need to straighten anything else out, please don’t hesitate to call.” Click.

  The World War II speaker was finished. Wood could see, on the other side of his wife, that their fifteen-year-old son, Charlie, had slumped beneath the weight of the day’s testimonials. Charlie wept until his shoulders shook. Wood was filled near to bursting by the sight of his son grieving so unashamedly for his father. He reached across Milan’s back and squeezed
Charlie’s neck, offering a reassuring smile. Almost everything about his son made him smile—including the Indian name he had given him, Charlie-Sleeps-All-Day, a nickname derived from the son’s inability to arise in the morning. Charlie was a dream of a boy, so easygoing and affable. He was the physical image of his mother, quiet and shy in temperament, but he had Wood’s lowered eyelids and a half-baked smile that made teenage girls, as well as their mothers, fall in love with him. He had never given his parents one day of worry, nor had he excelled at any particular thing, either. He was just Charlie, the beautiful boy whose curly hair people wanted to tousle and whose cheeks they wanted to pinch, probably because they knew they could. Even though Charlie was a teenager, Wood sometimes still picked him up and swung him around and kissed him, without giving a damn what anybody thought. Charlie would scream and holler like he hated it, then afterward stalk off in protest, tucking his shirt in, trying unsuccessfully to repress his trademark loopy grin.

  Charlie’s sister, Elizabeth, sat next to him, mindlessly folding her program into an accordion. At twenty-two, she was sure of herself and fearless. Elizabeth could be loud and even a show-off, but these qualities came more from a boundless spirit than ego. In fact, her effortless ability to be happy was her most attractive and enduring trait. But today, no measure of joy, even the kind she had recently discovered and hadn’t yet told her family about, could diminish the sense that she had lost something of greater value than all the other things she would gather in her life. She was her grandfather’s first grandchild. The one he called a pistol. The one he gave his own canoe to when she was only nine years old, telling her that the Champanelle River was her river and that she could go anywhere on it. He had taught her how to paddle, too, as he had once taught his son, showing her things like how one never puts one’s oar in the water while in the middle of a glide. And when she got older, he insisted that she come by and dance with him before every prom, loudly warning her embarrassed escorts that he pitied the poor boy who would try and boss her. Elizabeth had poured her tears into the skirts of Sadie, a French rag doll her grandparents had brought her many years ago on a ship from Le Havre. Like her mother, she preferred not to cry in front of people. If anyone criticized her dry eyes, well, that was fine with her. Her grandpa knew that Sadie’s skirts were wet, and that was all that mattered.

  The minister was saying the closing prayer. Wood’s mother stirred next to him. Slim McIlmore, whose given name was Evangeline, was tall, sparingly proportioned, with sleek black hair and olive skin. But today she appeared much smaller than Wood remembered. The slender parchment hands wound tightly in her lap, had begun to tremble. Wood saw this and put his free arm around her, without his mother seeming to notice.

  Slim’s marriage had been the envy of everyone in Paris. Try as he might, her only son had been unable to assemble a comparable union with Milan, one in which each person allowed the other such exquisite consideration, where shared observations and jokes went back and forth like a new box of chocolates and even discussing the parameters of fidelity would have been an insult to their devotion. Perhaps after having the good fortune to be the product of such a union, it would have been too much for Wood to have also received the gift of duplicating it in his own life.

  Suddenly, there were feet shuffling all round and a symphony of cleared throats. The sun had now climbed the stained-glass window near the front of the church. The purple cast of an angel’s fallen robe lit up the entire McIlmore family as they rose to sing their patriarch’s final hymn. As Wood joined in, it seemed to him that people were singing louder than they had ever sung before. The wildly beautiful instrumentation was ricocheting off the rafters and out the open doors. The air had turned a golden yellow. Even the ink in the hymnals smelled musty and familiar and good. It was the sort of moment one wishes all the moments of life could be like—when the most profound sadness transforms inexplicably into joy—and ordinary happiness gives way to some new kind of glory.

  And then it was over. Everyone headed for their cars in order to form the long funereal snake that would wind its way through the heart of Paris. Or what was left of it. It was mostly abandoned now, a place where hardly anything happened anymore. It had been a long time since a procession this large had passed along the Main Street. Somehow, it seemed fitting to Wood that this one would be carrying the simple pine coffin of his father.

  CHAPTER 3

  Milan stretched her newly waxed, artificially tanned legs inside the solemn El Presidente limo, thankful that it was black. She had hated the cheap, white Continental pimpmobile that Victor Lee Sayres had rented for their senior prom—hated the mossy carpet and maroon velour seats that smelled like vanilla car-wash cologne on top of old sex and cigarettes. She didn’t care for Victor Lee much either, but what choice did she have since she and Wood were broken up at the time?

  Right now, she was looking at her husband for some sign of whatever he was feeling inside, knowing full well he was not about to surrender this kind of information to her, especially not today. Wood continued staring out the limousine window. That was all right. Milan had enough love and resourcefulness to keep this marriage running for both of them. She brushed the hair out of her son’s eyes and gave him a long, sweet pat. He continued weeping and Wood handed him his handkerchief.

  “Here you go, son.”

  Charlie accepted it. “Thanks.”

  So far, this was all that had been said on the ride from the church to the cemetery.

  Elizabeth rested her head on her grandmother’s shoulder, the older woman and the girl lost in their own thoughts. That was all right with Milan, too. She liked to get lost in thoughts herself. She had been doing it for as long as she could remember. And right now, in spite of the sadness of the occasion, she was thinking that she bet her family looked good riding in this car. And that no one today would be wondering, “What’s wrong with this picture?” The way people had once wondered about the little girl sitting in front of her parents’ cinder-block house, a stunning blonde child with impossibly chiseled cheekbones and eyes the color of swimming pools—a girl who looked completely out of place next to a wrung-out old gas-station dog, rusted refrigerators, and mountains of used-up tires.

  If it hadn’t been for Woodrow Phineas McIlmore III, she might still be there, living in Hayti (long i), on the outskirts of Paris. Milan had made it her life’s work to put the best face on everything and so far it had worked handsomely. Her siblings, Rachel, Roma, Tom Jr., Frank, and Delilah, had all managed to move no farther than two blocks from their mother—Milan never said “Mama”—that was hick-Coal-Miner’s-Daughter talk—settling into various replications of their childhood environment, each moving his or her family into a discounted mobile home, all of which had become available after the killer tornado of ’89 wiped out everybody living at the Our Lady of Perpetual Grace Trailer Park.

  Wood and Milan had turned her mother’s house into a showplace, bricking the outside and filling it with antique lamps and overstuffed sofas that were so beautiful Mrs. Lanier wept and tried to cover them with plastic until Milan reminded her that’s the sort of thing hip Hollywood people make fun of on television. Milan’s mother’s house, with its elaborate eighteenth-century reproduction porch light, now glowed like an eternally burning candle on the altar of her daughter’s success. Othelia Lanier lived there, surrounded by five of her children in their satellite trailers, forming a sort of “Osmonds of the Ozarks” compound. The Laniers didn’t have money or fame, but they did have a shining star and that star was Milan, as exotic and different from them as the travel brochure that inspired her name.

  Unlike a lot of people who manage to rise above their raising, Milan often came home again, driving the sixteen miles to Hayti in her kid-glove-upholstered, cream-colored Mercedes roadster. And when she arrived with Faith Hill blaring on the stereo, her arms were always full. There were designer clothes, vitamins, exercise equipment. And it wasn’t just stuff she gave them either. She also tended to their psych
ological needs, selecting individual self-help books to fit any problem. After Rachel’s husband, Donny, called his wife a fat bitch at a family gathering, they received a copy of Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus. When Delilah decided to have a surrogate child for her boyfriend and his wife, she was FedExed the hardcover edition of Ten Stupid Things Women Do to Mess Up Their Lives. Each sibling also got copies of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, A Thousand and One Toasts for Special Occasions, and Emily Post: Etiquette Made Simple. Milan was undeterred when her brother Frank advertised his books as “Never Before Read” in the local Recycler—throwing in Chicken Soup for the Soul as a bonus. No problem, real or potential, was too small for her to turn the white-hot light of her can-do ingenuity on it. Even the bouquets she sent on family birthdays were accompanied by little bootleg packets of Viagra, which she had learned could make cut flowers stand up for at least a week longer than normal.

  Some, who were no doubt jealous, said Milan was just showing off or, even more darkly, making sure that her relatives were respectable enough to be related to her. But her family knew better. Yes, she cared about appearances, but that was only because Milan wanted the best for herself and everyone around her. She had always been like that, taking the old dresses she had sewn for school dances and reinventing them for her younger sisters, gluing sequins and pearls on a funky thrift-store cardigan or cutting the back out of her mother’s navy shirtwaist and transforming it into the daring cocktail dress Delilah had turned heads with at the Holiday Inn Tap Room.