Liberating Paris Read online

  Clay protested, “Shut the hell up!”

  Mavis stuck her head out the van window and yelled back, “Thanks, but if I was in the market for something like that, I sure wouldn’t go looking for your little overblown clitoris!”

  Smith and Clay looked stricken. They rolled up the windows and the car screeched off.

  Brundidge was now mortified. “What in the hell are you doing? This is supposed to be a damn funeral procession. You can’t be yellin’ stuff like that out my van!”

  Now Mavis was fuming. She could not imagine how her personal medical information had become public. “Screw you. I happen to be very upset right now.”

  Brundidge said, “Hey, don’t get mad at me. Who went all the way to Honduras with you, huh? Just so you could apply for a damn baby! And you still haven’t even bothered to thank me.”

  That was the final straw. Mavis turned to Brundidge and said, clipping each word in a way that let him know she didn’t mean it, “Thank you.” Then she grabbed her enormous purse, stuffing it with the corn nuts. “You know, it’s such a beautiful day. I think I’ll just walk.”

  She opened the door, climbed out, and began keeping pace with the slow-moving van.

  Brundidge craned his neck in disbelief. “What the hell is she doing?”

  Jeter watched her for a moment. “I believe she’s walking.”

  Brundidge began yelling at Mavis, “You’re crazy! You know that? All right, that’s it! I’m not ever going anywhere with you again!” Now he was yelling out the window. “Get in the damn car!”

  Mavis increased her speed, never looking back.

  A few minutes later, everyone was standing still with their heads bowed in the middle of Whispering Pines Memorial Cemetery. The sun lingered on the horizon, as Wood stood next to his father’s casket. There was a long, wide American flag laying over it. The minister had hold of Slim’s arm, even though she remained without tears and stood straight as a pin. Mavis, who had hitched a ride with the Lanier brothers, was discreetly inching away from them, while Brundidge narrowed his eyes, still chastising her. When a strong wind came up, Milan reached down and pulled Jeter’s scarf, the one her mother had knitted for him, more tightly around his neck. Then, with eyes set deep in his Humpty-Dumpty head, Jeter willed Wood the reassurance he needed to begin. “Only yesterday, he was putting me on his shoulders and swimming the Champanelle River…what he liked best was being a doctor, the kind who would, you know,” he cleared his throat and mumbled, “come to your house.” Wood looked down, putting his hands in his pockets. “At any given football game, he might look down the bench and suddenly realize that he had delivered everybody on it.” There was some laughter, which made him think he could finish. “Some say he delivered over three thousand babies in this town. He also held the hands of just as many…people leaving…. But you already know that. I guess there’s nothing more to say, except…” Wood turned in the direction of his father. His voice was strong now. “I’ll remember your decency. I’ll remember your strength, both physical and moral. I’ll remember your love for my mother…. Most of all, I’ll remember how proud I was to be your son.”

  CHAPTER 5

  Here’s what Slim McIlmore knows about gardens. You can’t get everything good going at the same time. You can get the foxgloves blooming with the roses, but by the time the hydrangeas are up and running, the foxgloves will be gone. Of course, you could plant only things that bloom simultaneously. But then your garden wouldn’t have all your favorite flowers in it. Because all your favorite flowers would not just happen to bloom all together. That would be against nature. It’s like that song by the Rolling Stones, “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” (and you certainly can’t get it all at once). Slim knew something about the Rolling Stones because they had been arrested by an auxiliary deputy of the Paris County Sheriff’s Department for throwing a Coke can out the window of their limo. Apparently, they were on their way to a concert in Little Rock and had spoken rudely to the officer. After that, they were the talk of the town—even the old people, who had never heard of them, bought their record. The general consensus was, yes sir, the Rolling Stones understood firsthand that you can’t always get what you want. And if they had only sung it for show before—well, now they knew it for real, after spending a night behind bars.

  Slim’s garden, like the Paris County jail, was full of hard lessons. And tending it over the years had taught her patience and gratitude. But today she wasn’t feeling any of it. Today, it was a widow’s garden and everything in it looked dead. Now she would really let it go, let nature run its course. Let’s just see next spring who’s strong enough to come back on their own. As though she didn’t already know the answer. But that was a secret, and right now she wasn’t letting any secrets out—not giving in to any emotion. Because if she were to show her true feelings, the ones that were commensurate with her loss, then they could just go ahead and bury her beneath her flowers.

  But Slim was not a woman given to histrionics. Right now, her husband was gone and her house was full of the people they had collected over a lifetime. And in a few moments she would leave this favored spot by the fireplace in his den and go out and graciously greet each and every one of them—shake their hands, hug them, “My, how your little one has grown,” “Yes, I know you know how it feels,” thank them for their covered dishes and good hearts and for all these years of caring about the McIlmore family—and finally, agree that yes, indeed, he was a wonderful man and this is going to take some time.

  Slim would do these things because she had what people who don’t have it call class. For her, it involved writing thank-you notes for things that didn’t cost money and knowing who was worth being with and what was worth owning or wearing and making the people who didn’t know any of it comfortable. Slim seemed to have been born knowing such things.

  She had not come from wealth. Her people were merchants from the Alsace-Lorraine region of France. Her father, Charles Pinchot Longchamps, had crossed in steerage to New York, then set out for Dallas to open a dry goods business. Perhaps it was because of the name, but he stopped in Paris for a root beer and he fell almost immediately in love with Miss Emily Arnold, an auburn-haired beauty with bee-stung lips, the only daughter of an Episcopal minister. While not particularly spiritual himself, he wrote his intended long letters from Dallas, citing her religious upbringing as a reason she might not want to dance with any other beaus in Paris. He proclaimed that while he wasn’t sure there was any real harm in dancing, he knew for certain there was no harm in not dancing. Emily, a strong-willed girl, wrote him back that she was an Episcopalian, not a Baptist, and that Episcopalians like to dance their heads off. The next day Charles went to a Dallas tearoom and plunked down a dollar twenty-five for his first lesson. It turned out to be a very good investment—waltzing, rumba, cha-cha, the Charleston—the Longchamps were good at all of it until the day Emily killed herself.

  A few years later, Charles started a second dry goods store, making enough money to steep their three girls in good educations at boarding schools and annual trips home to Europe. Their youngest daughter, Slim, who later sat on the board of the Arkansas Ballet Company, would instill in her son her love of dance, as well as her husband’s ardor for good books.

  Charles Longchamps’s best friend was Woodrow Phineas McIlmore the First. Wood and Belle McIlmore were rich—from each of their families they had inherited thousands of acres of black bottomland near the Champanelle River that flowed on the outskirts of Paris. Wood was a red-faced, barrel-chested son of a Welsh farmer and a beloved physician to people all over Paris County. A man of impressive vitality and intellect, he farmed most of his land out to tenants with whom he generously shared the revenues of each year’s cotton harvest. Belle, a graduate of Sophie Newcomb College, was a teacher, as well as a grand matron of the Arkansas Order of the Eastern Star and president of the Coalition of Garden Clubs of the Southern States.

  The two couples got along famously, but it was the
men who held the deeper friendship, and it was Woodrow who sustained Charles after Emily was gone. They were well-read men, ahead of their time, who liked to share good bourbon and argue about religion, politics, and music as well as how their little Paris should continue to prosper and unfold. And they were devoted to their wives, in spite of or because of their fascination with women in general. Each possessed a delicious sense of humor and a keen empathy for the underdog. Wood was self-effacing, Charles a practical joker. Older Parisians still tell the story of how Charles was once almost defeated in his bid to be mayor, until he hired some lowlifes to paint “Mrs. Charles Longchamps is a whore” on sidewalks all over town. He then attributed the dirty deed to his opponent and won in a landslide sympathy vote, with Emily never the wiser.

  After Charles’s daughter Slim married Wood’s son, Woodrow Phineas McIlmore Jr., the bond between the two fathers became even stronger. And when Slim gave birth to the only son of this prodigious union, all hell broke loose over which grandfather the baby would be named after. The parents finally decided that because there had been a succession of Woodrow Phineas McIlmores but only one Charles Pinchot Longchamps, the Woodrows would prevail. When that didn’t sit well with Charles, a card game ensued in which Wood whipped him in two out of three hands of poker. Legend has it that Charles, always an emotional man, then bolted from the room, ran to the barn, and grabbed a can of kerosene, threatening to burn himself up. After Wood offered him a match, there followed a terrible row in which the two men, in spite of Belle McIlmore’s protests, beat the holy hell out of each other. Everyone thought the friendship ruined until the twosome showed up on a midnight drunk, arm in arm outside Slim’s hospital window, singing “If I Didn’t Care.” The friendship endured, but Charles Longchamps, until the day he died, referred to his grandson not by his birth name, but rather by the French word for three, “Trois.”

  Suddenly there was a knock at the door, forcing Slim’s reverie back in the trunk. Eleanor Cahill, a well-turned-out woman, came in. She was wearing high heels and walked with a cane.

  “Slim, are you all right?”

  Slim looked at her for a long time. “No, Eleanor, I am not all right. And nothing will ever be all right again. You know, I’m very good at accessing these things and there is not even a shred of evidence that I’m going to be able to endure this.”

  “You are the strongest woman I know.”

  “Please don’t insult us both. You’re my best friend and I’m too old for pep talks.” There was a pause as Slim absorbed the other woman’s look of concern. “Oh, don’t worry, I’m going to go through the motions. But I just need another living soul to know that I do not want to talk to people, get up tomorrow, or do good works.” Then Slim turned her back on Eleanor, facing the window. “And most of all, I am so deeply ashamed that after fifty years of the gift of this man…I am unable to feel even a thimble of gratitude because…” She was whispering now. “I wanted more.”

  For a while, neither woman spoke. Eleanor finally crossed, put down her cane, and rested her cheek on Slim’s back, holding her. They remained there for a long time, two old friends folded into one statue.

  A few rooms away, as Chopin played in the background, scores of mourners were helping themselves to the generous funereal buffet. Mavis, who had earlier delivered her professionally turned out cakes and pies, was relighting the little candle under her potato timbale with horseradish cream. She was still mad that for this most auspicious funeral, she had been unable to provide her traditional mail-order Virginia ham. Mavis always kept one in the freezer in case someone died. She and her Cuban baker’s assistant, Rudy, had taken to calling it the Death Ham. Incredibly, the night before Dr. Mac died, Rudy had taken the Death Ham home and eaten it. And all because of some spat with one of the town’s gay florists. Now here he was, unashamedly filling his plate right in front of her.

  “Hello, boss.”

  “Don’t ‘hello boss’ me. You know what you did.” Then, brusquely pushing past him, “Ham pig.”

  The Lanier brothers had already stuffed their pockets with little sandwiches, muffins, and cookies and were now in the process of ladling Mrs. Grace Hartwell’s Festive Cranberry Punch into a six-quart thermos. Mavis folded her arms, giving them an ominous look. The two brothers crossed to the back door and left, their squirrelly laughter trailing behind them.

  The open kitchen and den area of the house where Wood had grown up was a perfect representation of who his parents were, from the eighteenth-century American antiques that people somehow knew were there to be used, to the family photographs—an adequate amount, but not so many that one felt one was being lobbied.

  Milan, who had already fed Jeter and filled the plastic container attached to his wheelchair with Dr Pepper, was now supervising in the kitchen. She watched as her husband graciously accepted another condolence. Right now, the McIlmores’ middle-aged, ruddy-faced yardman, June, wearing his best cheap suit, was shaking Wood’s hand. “I want you to know, Mr. Wood, just like I kept the yard all these years, I’ll go every week and pull the weeds off his marker.”

  Wood used his other hand to squeeze June’s shoulder. “Thank you, June. You’re a good man.”

  A sixtyish gentleman with two ladies in tow was next. “Wood, we’ll just get through this together. That’s all. Because there’s no other alternative.”

  “Thank you, Dr. May.”

  One of the ladies leaned toward Wood. “You know where we are.”

  “I do. I do.”

  The other lady spoke up. “I’m worried about your mother. She hasn’t cried at all.”

  “I know. I’m keeping an eye on her.”

  Milan was interrupted by an ancient, bent-over woman who handed her a covered casserole dish and spoke loudly, “Milan, this dish needs to cook at 375 degrees for fifteen more minutes. Will you remember that?”

  “I will, Miss Purtle. And you were just so sweet to bring it.”

  Mavis crossed to Milan and leaned into her face.

  “Seriously, the twenty-six green bean casseroles—is it like a state law or something that those canned onion rings have to be on top?”

  Milan admonished her, “Don’t start.”

  Mavis fingered the lapel of Milan’s black silk suit. “Very Grace Kelly.”

  “Neiman Marcus, fall catalogue.” Now Milan had her compact and was powdering Mavis’s face. “Your nose is shiny.”

  “Is that bad?”

  Milan sighed and then added some blush, her eyes drifting toward Wood again, who seemed to be avoiding her gaze. “Sometimes I just wish I knew what that man was thinking.”

  Mavis looked at Wood, too. She remembered the look on his face when he and Milan had first fallen in love. She could still picture them—Milan twirling around in her majorette skirt with the soft bunny-fur trim. Wood leaning back in a cafeteria chair with his hands behind his head, feet propped on the table and this enormous grin on his face that said, “That’s my girl.” It was the most happy, filled-up look Mavis had ever seen, and she had made a mental note that just once in her life, she would like to have someone give her a look like that. But unfortunately, as the years went by, the look had disappeared. And Mavis’s job, as a good friend, had been not to notice.

  Elizabeth and Brundidge were browsing through a box of old vinyl records at Jeter’s feet. Wood had his arm around Charlie, who occasionally pretended to try and break free. Elizabeth held up an album. “Can you believe Grand-mère gave me all of Grandpa’s Edith Piaf albums? Did you see them, Daddy?”

  “Yeah. That’s great, honey.”

  Brundidge pulled out several other records, “Man, this is an awesome stash, Lillabet. Don’t forget your old Uncle Brundy at Christmas.” Elizabeth laughed. Brundidge continued, “You still majoring in all that parlez-vous Français stuff?”

  “Yes. Well, actually it’s French literature.”

  Brundidge shook his head, “I don’t know where you get it. That was your dad’s and my worse subject.”
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  Mavis overheard as she crossed to them. “Please. Don’t get me started. At the beginning of every class we all had to say our names in French. You know, like Je m’appelle Mavis Pinkerton. I swear every morning, he would say, Jim’s apple Earl Brundidge.”

  Everyone laughed. Elizabeth glanced at her watch and then impatiently tapped her fingers on one of the albums. Wood noticed, because he had seldom seen his daughter appear nervous. Elizabeth wondered whether to tell him her news now or wait. She decided to wait.

  Slim appeared carrying an armload. Wood jumped up. “Here, Mother, let me get that.” She waved toward some more of boxes. “No, you just make sure that you all take some of these tapes home. Your father loved his music, and I want everyone to have these to remember him by.” Then she knelt in front of Jeter and took out a weathered old cloth hat with fishing lures on it. “Mac would want you to have this, Carl—he said you were the only person who appreciated his hat.” She placed it on his head and then began removing some of the tapes and albums from the box. “There’s the two Louies, Prima and Armstrong, and some of that old blues stuff you two liked.” She dipped her head a little, meeting Jeter’s eyes. “You know, you were also a son.”

  He had done so well all day, but now he was unable to speak. Dealing with funerals was nothing new to him. He lived in the company of old people. But somehow the sight of Dr. Mac’s hat, the one he’d worn so many afternoons when they’d gone fishing together, often with Wood, but sometimes just the two of them, well, it had caught him off guard. Dr. Mac had saved his life after the accident, riding in the ambulance all the way to Little Rock. Wood had slept by his bed every night while the older McIlmore researched and called all over the world to inquire about the latest cutting-edge technology and information on paralysis. And it had been Dr. Mac who, not all at once, but over a period of months, gently laid in the rest of the bad news. Like the first time, after his injury, when they had gotten the McIlmores’ old boat and gone fishing together. That was when Wood’s dad, in the middle of stringing several good-sized perch, told him something he already figured. That he would no longer be able to have erections. But he also said that fact would not diminish Jeter’s desire to be with girls. Dr. Mac had convinced him that feeling such things would be better than not feeling them and that without this small blessing, maybe he couldn’t even really become a writer.