shake my head. “I don’t know.”
“That boy’s long dead and gone. Nothing anybody can do will help him now. But it could hurt a lot of people. Those two poor women. The town. Your mother. You and Annie most of all. You did the right thing, son.”
I look up at my father, searching for the man Georgia Payton said he is.
“You did,” my mother insists. “Don’t dwell on it. Go wake Annie up. I’m going to make French toast.”
The couch in my father’s medical office has heard many terrible truths: revelations by the doctor (you’re sick; you’re dying; they couldn’t get it all), confessions by the patient (my husband beats me; my father raped me; I want to die), but always—always—truths about the patient.
Today the truth about the doctor will be told.
I can imagine no other reason for the sudden summons to his office. It requires a conscious effort to control my anxiety as I sit on that worn leather couch, waiting for him to finish with his last patient of the day.
After the Payton women left our house this morning, Dad took his old pickup truck to work so that Annie and I would have the BMW. Having no desire to endure the glares of the local citizenry, I spent the morning in the pool with Annie, marveling at how well she moved in the water and fighting a losing battle to keep her skin covered with sun block. Mom and I had tuna sandwiches for lunch, Annie a bowl of SpaghettiOs. When the two of them drove downtown to buy Annie new shoes, I retired to the library and read T. Harry Williams’s Huey Long on the sofa until I fell asleep.
The telephone woke me at four-thirty p.m. I hated to chance answering it myself, but I thought it might be my mother.
“Penn?” said my father. “Can you drop by my office about five? Alone?”
“Sure. What’s up?”
“I think it’s time we had a talk.”
“Okay,” I said, trying to sound casual. “I’ll see you at five.”
I went to the bathroom and showered off the chlorine from the pool, then dressed in chinos and a polo shirt. Dad’s office is only a couple of miles from the house, so I read another twenty minutes in Huey Long. When I fell asleep, the Grand Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, speaking from the “imperial klonvocation” in Atlanta, had just announced that he was going to Louisiana to campaign against Huey because of his pro-Negro policies. The Kingfish stormed into the press gallery of the state senate while the legislature was in session and announced that if that “Imperial bastard” crossed the Louisiana state line, he would shortly depart “with his toes turned up.” The Klan leader wisely elected not to test the Kingfish’s sincerity. As humorous as it seemed in retrospect, Long could all too easily have backed up his threat. I could see how dictatorial power might be an asset in solving sticky problems like racism. Of course, that road also leads to the crematorium ovens.
When I got to my father’s office building, I used his private door. I’d known Anna, his chief nurse—an attractive black woman—for most of my life, but I was too curious to spend even ten minutes reminiscing about old times. I sat on the couch opposite his desk and waited in the lingering haze of cigar smoke.
During his first fifteen years in Natchez, Dad practiced in a sprawling downtown house. This was the era of separate waiting rooms for “colored” and white, but his only nod to this convention was a flimsy wooden partition set up in the middle of the room. On any day you could find whole families—white and black—camped out in that great room, kids playing on the floor, parents eating from bag lunches and waiting to see the doctor on a first-come, first-served basis. His new office, convenient to both hospitals and sterile as a hypodermic needle, runs like any other doctor’s—almost. He has rigidly scheduled appointments, a gleaming laboratory, and modern X-ray facilities, but he still routinely brings everything to a standstill by spending whatever time he feels a patient needs for examination, commiseration, or just plain conversation.
At last his strong baritone filters around the door. The volume tells me he is bidding farewell to a geriatric patient. Old people comprise the bulk of his practice now, as his “patient base” has aged with him. Anna leans in and gives me a smile, then closes the door behind Dad. He squeezes my shoulder as he walks past and sits in the big chair behind his desk.
This is how I picture him in memory: white lab coat, stethoscope hanging loosely around his neck, ensconced behind mountains of incomplete medical records, drug samples, and junk mail. He reaches into a small refrigerator behind his desk and takes out a Dr Pepper, which he offers to me. When I decline, he pops the top and takes a long pull from it, his eyes watering from the sudden shot of carbonation.
“I’m in a bad spot, Penn,” he says in a frank voice. “I apologize for being an ass the other night. It’s not easy for a father to admit weakness to his son.”
I nod awkwardly, imagining a future when I am certain to fall short of Annie’s idealized image of me. “Dad, there’s nothing you can tell me that will change my opinion of you. Just tell me what’s going on so we can deal with it.”
He clearly doubts my statement, but he’s made up his mind to talk. “Twenty-five years ago,” he says, “your Aunt Ellen got into some trouble.”
My mind is spinning. When he said “twenty-five years ago,” I thought he was going to start talking about Del Payton. But Payton was killed thirty years ago. The shift to my mother’s younger sister, Ellen, throws me completely.
“She was divorced and living in Mobile, Alabama. Ellen was about your age now, I guess. Dating a guy there. He was a year or two younger than she was. Name was Hillman. Don Hillman. Your mother and I didn’t know it at the time—at least I didn’t—but Hillman was abusing Ellen. Beating her, controlling every word and action. Your mother finally convinced her that the relationship was going to end badly no matter what she did, and Ellen tried to break it off. Hillman didn’t take it well. I advised Ellen to go to the police. Then I found out Hillman was the brother of a cop over in Mobile. A detective. This was 1973. Nobody’d heard of stalking laws.”
“I hope you brought her here.”
“Of course. She stayed with us for a summer. You remember, don’t you?”
I do. For most of one summer our hall bathroom became an exotic world of hanging stockings, lacy underwear, cut-glass perfume bottles, and blue Noxema jars.
“Hillman called the house a few times after the breakup. Late, drunk out of his mind and railing, or else hanging up. One night when he didn’t hang up, I told him if he came to Natchez making trouble, he’d be a long time getting back to Mobile. The calls stopped. After a while Ellen wanted her own place, so I rented her an apartment at the Windsor Arms and got her a job at the Jeff Davis.”
He takes another slug of Dr Pepper. “As soon as she got her own place, strange things started happening. Slashed tires, eggs on her door, more juvenile crap. One morning she found her cat at her door with its throat cut. I called the Natchez police, but they couldn’t find Hillman anywhere in town.” He closed his eyes and sighs. “Then he raped her.”
A shudder of horror accompanies my amazement. Families are mazes of secrets, and none of us ever knows them all.
