Forbidden Objects

For Howard Morhaim, who had faith, with my greatest gratitude.

... facilis descensus Averno; noctes atque dies patet atri ianua Ditis.

-Virgil

CHAPTER ONE

Secrets, my aunt says. Secrets, secrets. She pokes one finger absently into her blond hair, which has just been done at the beauty parlor, and her hand shakes. Her nails are covered with pink pearl nail polish. She is nearing sixty but is still very well turned out. You two are just the same as ever. When you were little, you used to sit under the back stairs whispering and carrying on. Really—thick as thieves.

This afternoon my aunt Arbella is jittery as a bird. She jumps one leg forward suddenly under the table to press the foot bell and screams for Henry Two. My cousin Julian looks at me over his soup and winks. Henry Two is supposed to answer the pantry bell and nearly always does. But since my uncle Stegman became a born-again Christian about a year ago, my aunt relies on nothing. She’s a nervous wreck.

We don’t have secrets, Mamma, my cousin Julian says.

I can’t lie like that. You have to admire it. Julian is wearing an emerald-green velveteen blazer, and his hair is frizzed up in a cloud like portraits of the poet Shelley, whom he is currently reading. His hair is the same pale color as his mother’s. They are both small. My aunt was known in her youth as the Pocket Venus and is still good-looking, whereas Julian is just small for a man and growing potbellied. Julian has three sisters, all from my aunt Arbella’s first marriage. Until he joined the Full Gospel Businessman’s Fellowship, my uncle Stegman was somewhat left out of all this. Now that he has accepted Christ as his personal savior, he is always calm and smiling. It is interesting to try and picture my aunt and uncle upstairs together in their bedroom: smile, smile. Even in the dark. The effect on my aunt has been considerable. She trembles a lot of the time and has lost weight.

Henry Two comes in with the corn sticks. Henry One, his father, is quite old and living on social security in a little house on the highway to Saint James Island. Henry Two, who once worked as a dining room steward at the Officers Club on the navy base at Charleston, took Henry One’s place a few years ago, but unenthusiastically. Working for old city families is not what it used to be. Henry Two remembers the trouble his father had getting his government money, as my aunt was always resentful about keeping withholding-tax records and FICA payments.

Henry Two is about sixty now and very black, like most of the Gullah people of the coast. Today he acts as though he is afraid. He comes in with the plate of corn sticks and goes around the table in a wide circle and does not look at me. There are those who pretend to be afraid, but Henry Two is not fooling. His people all come from the islands and he has heard about me for years. He does not even like Julian very much. He certainly does not like us to come for lunch.

Thick as thieves, my aunt says again. These days she tends to pick at things. It’s all very well to be close, and God knows kinfolk should be affectionate—I was raised in favor of that. After all, blood is thicker than water. But that doesn’t mean it can’t be overdone. Of course, when everybody lived out in the back end of nowhere and had only their relations for company, it was a different matter. God knows what went on. My aunt takes the bread plate in her hand and stares at it. If you all didn’t behave like there was nobody else on earth but yourselves, you’d make lots of nice friends. You probably would have gotten married by now.

My cousin stops eating his soup and looks up.

Not to each other, I hope.

Well, to somebody. My aunt puts a corn stick on Julian’s plate and regards him thoughtfully. People stopped thinking about Julian getting married a long time ago.

Don’t look at me. I have learned to cope with this line of talk.

Oh, honey, I don’t mean it that way, my aunt says. My goodness, you can get married anytime you’ve a mind to. It’s not too late.

Julian cackles into his soup. No, she couldn’t, Mamma, even if she wanted to. And it’s not the polio thing, either. You know perfectly well Frankie scares hell out of people. She cultivates it. Look—look at her face.

There is nothing wrong with my face. I have an agreeable expression that says that I am amused, that I maintain my sense of humor about things. I believe in full employment for the handicapped as long as they get along with other people and know their place.

Frankie is a ferocious old maid and she likes it, Julian continues. She wants to live in a country parsonage like the Brontës, all mystery and thwarted passion, and scare hell out of people. Don’t you, hon?

My aunt is shocked. This is not what she expected to talk about at lunch. She has never gotten used to Julian, even though it’s been going on for years.

"Julian, you don’t have to talk like that! Franklin is a darling sweet girl, she’s our darling sweet girl and one of the most intelligent people you would ever want to find. She was brilliant at school. We all love her. My aunt is sinking deeper into the mire. Her nice little face betrays her. She casts about, finds the plate of corn sticks in her hand. Here. Why don’t you have some more bread and hush up." Julian and I only laugh.

Later when we leave the house, Julian says not to mind his mamma. She is only worried about money and Uncle Stegman. This is not wholly true, but I say nothing. Julian carries a shopping bag with canned goods and odds and ends of food and half a loaf of Wonder bread. Henry Two has cleaned out the refrigerator, glad to get rid of us.

It was Julian’s remark about the Brontës which upset my aunt. She’s depressed these days about time, and old families in decay. Uncle Stegman’s conversion to evangelical religion has been quite a blow, now at this moment when she needs him. My uncle was going along quite steadily as a nominal Episcopalian until suddenly he began to meet during lunch hours and Wednesday evenings in places like the Sheraton Hotel and the YMCA for prayer and Christian fellowship. No one knows exactly how this came about except my uncle, and he only smiles. A lot of religious literature comes for him in the mail now, and he collects it in a stack in the bottom of the hall closet. The hardware business is in bad shape, but my uncle doesn’t say much about it. At night he reads his Bible in front of television while my aunt is trying to watch Tic Tac Dough and The Price Is Right. My aunt is taking Valium.

Julian’s mother and stepfather live in the old DeSaussure house on Victory Boulevard, which was once a very fashionable city thoroughfare. The victory in the name commemorates World War I, not II. The boulevard is a double lane with plantings of palmetto trees in the median strip, some of them now very old. At the time the street was developed, there was a vogue for building big houses in the Greek Revival style, and northern tourists on their way to Florida still mistake them for the real thing and stop their cars to take color snapshots of white columns and antebellum porches built in 1920. Most of the houses are, however, like my aunt’s, with turrets and Dutch bungalow eaves and roundabout porches with straight-backed rockers on them. When Henry Two was in his teens, he started to work for old Mr. Bernard DeSaussure, clipping hedges and mowing grass. Henry One was houseman then and drove the great Pierce Arrow touring car.

In the last few years many of the houses on Victory Boulevard have been torn down for commercial development. There is a Shell service station two houses down from my aunt’s, and a block beyond that the street breaks suddenly into the Beachview Shopping Plaza and a Sears Roebuck store. Victory Boulevard is now State Highway 122 and the main artery to the suburbs. There is so much traffic the exhaust fumes are killing the old palmetto trees in the median.

It’s not hard to see why my aunt is depressed. If she wants to keep the DeSaussure house in the face of all this progress, she will probably have to break it up into small apartments as some of her neighbors have done. Its value decreases year by year. The DeSaussures were one of the first families to settle on the Georgia-South Carolina coast. The Huguenots staked out great chunks of the wilderness, and nearly all of them got rich, at least for a time. Now there’s hardly a piece of land owned by their descendants. In fact, there’s not much land owned by people who were here a hundred and fifty years ago. My aunt will tell you the Yankees seized it all for taxes after the Civil War and the people from Atlanta bought it from the Yankees in the 1950s.

In this decade there isn’t much left of the DeSaussure money except some ancient shares of railroad stock, the Victory Boulevard house, and my uncle Stegman’s failing hardware business. Julian owns my grandfather Jefferson’s place downtown. I own the acres on Saint James Island, which no one has discussed seriously for years. I have to borrow money every year to pay the taxes on what I hold and on what Julian has and is in danger of losing.

However, my aunt worries unnecessarily. She still has many good years to live and is in good health. But in two years my uncle Stegman will die of a rupture in the wall of the abdominal aorta, a condition he has now and of which he is aware, and my aunt will sell the Victory Boulevard house and the hardware business and move to Boca Raton, where she will buy a condominium, spend her time taking care of the children of one of Julian’s sisters who lives nearby, play bridge, and drive her car, which I think will be some sort of pared-down version of a Cadillac.

CHAPTER TWO

It does no good to criticize Julian and me. We are the way we are, and whatever the pattern, it was set a long time ago. My aunt is partly to blame, for she was always dedicated to Julian’s sisters, first launching them properly in grade school and ballet classes and then Azalea Heights High School, where the girls played various instruments in the band and qualified for music scholarships to college. Each year Julian’s sisters were prominently featured in the annual Chamber of Commerce Ponce de León Historical Days. My aunt spent whole months at the sewing machine. Julian, who is the oldest, was solitary and not attractive, even as a baby. We did, as my aunt says, spend a lot of time under the back stairs and in the oleander hedge. It was an era which looked on noiseless and furtive children as good children. We attracted little attention.

I can’t see that there’s any cause to complain. If there’s one person whom I can talk to and count on, it is my cousin Julian. Julian is no more like the DeSaussures or the Jeffersons than I am like my mother’s Irish relatives, the Connerys. If there are some things which we have done, and which I now look back on with some distaste, it only goes to prove that children should not be left together too often and unsupervised.

I come down on the bus from Durham, North Carolina, and arrive at the bus station late Monday afternoon. It’s raining and Julian is illegally parked at the taxi stand and in a great hurry. We hardly speak. He throws my suitcases into the back of the Volkswagen and leaves me to struggle in as best I can. Only when we turn into Macon Street does he say anything.

I am tired. It’s been seven and a half hours on the bus from the university.

You look like death warmed over.

Very funny. The city is soft with winter rain and chill. The old business district along Macon does not look any better with great plastic Christmas garlands strung from one side to the other. The downtown area of the city has been subjected to spotty urban renewal in the past few years. There are new mercury vapor lamps, and the old arcade has been turned into a pedestrian mall. But a stretch from Bull to Dover along Macon is a solid line of discount houses and record shops, and only Woolworth’s is familiar. The Riverside Theater shows X-rated movies. In front of Woolworth’s a milling crowd of young blacks holds up hand-lettered signs.

What’s that?

Julian is busy driving and will not look.

Is it a demonstration?

There’s always a demonstration, dammit. We have a couple of black aldermen now. We’re supposed to have a black mayor in a few years. That’s what everybody says. Isn’t that something, now? As soon as we get a black mayor we’ll be as progressive as Atlanta.

One hears, but finds it difficult to believe. The city hasn’t had a black mayor since Reconstruction.

Macon ends at a series of city squares and becomes Tattnall. The parks were laid out in General Oglethorpe’s time. Some of the fountains have been restored. The city has provided benches and wooden litter cans on concrete platforms. The old cotton empire mansions line the squares with curving stairs and ironwork verandas. The city has approved the money to replace the streetlights with gas replicas.

You can’t buy a back alley down here for less than forty thousand, Julian says.

Then you must be making money.

He turns his head and gives me an unfathomable look.

If I had anything to sell, I would. Everything’s scarce, especially the real stuff. Some of the dealers go up to Canada and buy up French Canuck junk and bring it back to pass off as ‘Southern Rural’ and ‘Southern Primitive’ and stuff like that.

What’s French Canuck junk?

Let’s go and look at the house, he says quickly. You’ve got more property now than a dog’s got fleas, you know that? Maybe there’s some salable stuff in there.

I doubt it.

Annie Moss’s house is between the street and the river in a flatland of small buildings that used to be factories and railroad shops. We drive along in the rainy twilight to the squeak of windshield wipers. Annie Moss’s house stands alone surrounded by vacant lots. The yard never had any grass. The dirt was swept with brooms, country style. Now someone has tossed a broken tricycle in the front. Julian stops the car and we sit looking at it. This is my great-grandmother’s house, now mine. We do not have any desire to get out. It’s almost too dark to see.

God, it’s awful, Julian says.

It has never been what you might call attractive. In the last century this district had a stockyard and a slaughterhouse for General Sherman’s army when he occupied the city, and after that the Irish moved in with their dismal wooden tenements. The red brick Roman Catholic church, Saint Brendan’s, has also been torn down. Julian never visited Annie Moss’s house. There was nothing there for children.

He says, Maybe you can get it zoned for business.

There’s a wholesale appliance warehouse across the street. Aluminum twirlers are stretched from the corners of the building to the utility poles. A bay wind is sweeping across the flats. Somewhere a sign creaks.

I remember very little of Annie Moss’s house. I doubt if there’s anything inside to interest Julian. There’s a kitchen in back with an enameled table and an old refrigerator. She had not gone upstairs in years. There are three bedrooms up there all closed off, full of discarded furniture. She was always very lame and lived entirely downstairs. She was lame when she came to this country from Ireland, lame when she married, lame when she gave birth to five children, none of them now living. In later years she didn’t want anyone to come and visit her. She still collected money from the bars and rode the city buses to collect the apartment rents. She was afraid some of the Connerys would try to take her money and her businesses away from her and put her in a nursing home.

My mother never went to Annie Moss’s house except to borrow money. The first time was when I was just back from Warm Springs, all crutches and braces up to my chin like a little poster girl, and Annie Moss came out on the front porch to watch while they unloaded me from the car. I remember her look. I was too young to remember she was lame herself.

Tayula Poulard says your great-granny was a witch. They all think that’s where it came from.

I say nothing.

It’s true, she says. They all believed she had second sight. All the people on the island were deathly afraid of her.

Tayula Poulard was never afraid of anybody in her life.

It’s fully dark when we start back, still raining. It’s not far from Annie Moss’s desolate house to the downtown squares and restored mansions with long windows and glittering ceiling lights. Behind the windows people are having cocktails