The Help. Part 32

"Oh no, she's been . . . very nice. Everything's fine." I glance down the hall, where I can hear their voices.

He sighs, stares off. "We've had a real hard year with Stuart. I guess he told you what happened."

I nod, feeling my skin p.r.i.c.kle.

"Oh, it was bad," he says. "So bad." Then suddenly he smiles. "Look a here! Look who's coming to say h.e.l.lo to you." He scoops up a tiny white dog, drapes it across his arm like a tennis towel. "Say h.e.l.lo, Dixie," he croons, "say h.e.l.lo to Miss Eugenia." The dog struggles, strains its head away from the reeking smell of the shirt.

The Senator looks back at me with a blank stare. I think he's forgotten what I'm doing here.

"I was just headed to the back porch," I say.

"Come on, come in here." He tugs me by the elbow, steers me through a paneled door. I enter a small room with a heavy desk, a yellow light shining sickishly on the dark green walls. He pushes the door shut behind me and I immediately feel the air change, grow close and claustrophobic.

"Now, look, everybody says I talk too much when I've had a few but . . ." the Senator narrows his eyes at me, like we are old conspirators, "I want to tell you something."

The dog's given up all struggle, sedated by the smell of the shirt. I am suddenly desperate to go talk to Stuart, like every second I'm away I'm losing him. I back away.

"I think--I should go find--" I reach for the door handle, sure I'm being terribly rude, but not able to stand the air in here, the smell of liquor and cigars.

The Senator sighs, nods as I grip the handle. "Oh. You too, huh." He leans back against the desk, looking defeated.

I start to open the door but it's the same lost look on the Senator's face as the one Stuart had when he showed up on my parents' porch. I feel like I have no choice but to ask, "Me too what . . . sir?"

The Senator looks over at the picture of Missus Whitworth, huge and cold, mounted on his office wall like a warning. "I see it, is all. In your eyes." He chuckles bitterly. "And here I was hoping you might be the one who halfway liked the old man. I mean, if you ever joined this old family."

I look at him now, tingling from his words . . . joined this old family. joined this old family.

"I don't . . . dislike you, sir," I say, shifting in my flats.

"I don't mean to bury you in our troubles, but things have been pretty hard here, Eugenia. We were worried sick after all that mess last year. With the other one." He shakes his head, looks down at the gla.s.s in his hand. "Stuart, he just up and left his apartment in Jackson, moved everything out to the camp house in Vicksburg."

"I know he was very . . . upset," I say, when truthfully, I know almost nothing at all.

"Dead's more like it. h.e.l.l, I'd drive out to see him and he'd just be sitting there in front of the window, cracking pecans. Wasn't even eating em, just pulling off the sh.e.l.l, tossing em in the trash. Wouldn't talk to me or his mama for . . . for months. months."

He crumples in on himself, this gigantic bull of a man, and I want to escape and rea.s.sure him at the same time, he looks so pathetic, but then he looks up at me with his bloodshot eyes, says, "Seems like ten minutes ago I was showing him how to load his first rifle, wring his first dove-bird. But ever since the thing with that girl, he's . . . different. He won't tell me anything. I just want to know, is my son alright?"

"I . . . I think he is. But honestly, I don't . . . really know." I look away. Inside, I'm starting to realize that I don't know Stuart. If this damaged him so much, and he can't even speak to me about it, then what am I to him? Just a diversion? Something sitting beside him to keep him from thinking about what's really tearing him up inside?

I look at the Senator, try to think of something comforting, something my mother would say. But it's just a dead silence.

"Francine would have my hide if she knew I was asking you this."

"It's alright, sir," I say. "I don't mind that you did."

He looks exhausted by it all, tries to smile. "Thank you, darlin'. Go on and see my son. I'll see y'all out there in a while."

I ESCAPE TO THE back PORCH and stand next to Stuart. Lightning bursts in the sky, giving us a flash of the eerily brilliant gardens, then the darkness sucks it all back in. The gazebo, skeleton-like, looms at the end of the garden path. I feel nauseous from the gla.s.s of sherry I drank after supper.

The Senator comes out, looking curiously more sober, in a fresh shirt, plaid and pressed, exactly the same as the last one. Mother and Missus Whitworth stroll a few steps, pointing at some rare rose winding its neck up onto the porch. Stuart puts his hand on my shoulder. He is somehow better, but I am growing worse.

"Can we . . . ?" I point inside and Stuart follows me inside. I stop in the hallway with the secret staircase.

"There's a lot I don't know about you, Stuart," I say.

He points to the wall of pictures behind me, the empty s.p.a.ce included. "Well, here it all is."

"Stuart, your daddy, he told me . . ." I try to find a way to put it.

He narrows his eyes at me. "Told you what?"

"How bad it was. How hard it was on you," I say. "With Patricia."

"He doesn't know anything anything. He doesn't know who it was or what it was about or . . ."

He leans back against the wall and crosses his arms and I see that old anger again, deep and red. He is wrapped in it.

"Stuart. You don't have to tell me now. But sometime, we're going to have to talk about this." I'm surprised by how confident I sound, when I certainly don't feel it.

He looks me deep in the eyes, shrugs. "She slept with someone else. There."

"Someone . . . you know?"

"No one knew him. He was one of those leeches, hanging around the school, cornering the teachers to do something about the integration laws. Well, she did something alright."

"You mean . . . he was an activist? With the civil rights . . . ?"

"That's it. Now you know."

"Was he . . . colored?" I gulp at the thought of the consequences, because even to me, that would be horrific, disastrous.

"No, he wasn't colored. He was sc.u.m. Some Yankee from New York, the kind you see on the T.V. with the long hair and the peace signs."

I am searching my head for the right question to ask but I can't think of anything.

"You know the really crazy part, Skeeter? I could've gotten over it. I could've forgiven her. She asked me to, told me how sorry she was. But I knew, if it ever got out who he was, that Senator Whitworth's daughter-in-law got in bed with a Yankee G.o.dd.a.m.n activist, it would ruin him. Kill his career like that." He snaps his fingers with a crack.

"But your father, at the table. He said he thought Ross Barnett was wrong."

"You know that's not the way it works. It doesn't matter what he believes. It's what Mississippi believes. He's running for the U.S. Senate this fall and I'm unfortunate enough to know that."

"So you broke up with her because of your father?"

"No, I broke up with her because she cheated." He looks down at his hands and I can see the shame eating away at him. "But I didn't take her back because of . . . my father."

"Stuart, are you . . . still in love with her?" I ask, and I try to smile as if it's nothing, just a question, even though I feel all my blood rushing to my feet. I feel like I will faint asking this.

His body slumps some, against the gold-patterned wallpaper. His voice softens.

"You'd never do that. Lie that way. Not to me, not to anybody."

He has no idea how many people I'm lying to. But it's not the point. "Answer me, Stuart. Are you?"

He rubs his temples, stretching his hand across his eyes. Hiding his eyes is what I'm thinking.

"I think we ought to quit for a while," he whispers.

I reach over to him out of reflex, but he backs away. "I need some time, Skeeter. s.p.a.ce, I guess. I need to go to work and drill oil and . . . get my head straight awhile."

I feel my mouth slide open. Out on the porch, I hear the soft calls of our parents. It is time to leave.

I walk behind Stuart to the front of the house. The Whitworths stop in the spiraling foyer while we three Phelans head out the door. In a cottony coma I listen as everyone pledges to do it again, out at the Phelans next time. I tell them all goodbye, thank you, my own voice sounding strange to me. Stuart waves from the steps and smiles at me so our parents can't tell that anything has changed.

chapter 21.

WE STAND in the relaxing room, Mother and Daddy and I, staring at the silver box in the window. It is the size of a truck engine, nosed in k.n.o.bs, shiny with chrome, gleaming with modern-day hope. Fedders Fedders, it reads.

"Who are these Fedders anyway?" Mother asks. "Where are their people from?"

"Go on and turn the crank, Charlotte."

"Oh I can't. It's too tacky."

"Jesus, Mama, Doctor Neal said you need it. Now stand back." My parents glare at me. They do not know Stuart broke up with me after the Whitworth supper. Or the relief I long for from this machine. That every minute I feel so hot, so G.o.dd.a.m.n singed and hurt, I think I might catch on fire.

I flip the k.n.o.b to "1." Overhead, the chandelier bulbs dim. The whir climbs slowly like it's working its way up a hill. I watch a few tendrils of Mother's hair lift gently into the air.

"Oh . . . my my," Mother says and closes her eyes. She's been so tired lately and her ulcers are getting worse. Doctor Neal said keeping the house cool would at least make her more comfortable.

"It's not even on full blast," I say and I turn it up a notch, to "2." The air blows a little harder, grows colder, and we all three smile, our sweat evaporating from our foreheads.

"Well, heck, let's just go all the way," Daddy says, and turns it up to "3," which is the highest, coldest, most wonderful setting of all, and Mother giggles. We stand with our mouths open like we could eat it. The lights brighten again, the whir grows louder, our smiles lift higher, and then it all stops dead. Dark.

"What . . . happened?" Mama says.

Daddy looks up at the ceiling. He walks out into the hall.

"d.a.m.n thing blew the current."

Mother fans her handkerchief on her neck. "Well, good heavens, Carlton, go fix it."

For an hour, I hear Daddy and Jameso throwing switches and clanking tools, boots knocking on the porch. After they've fixed it and I sit through a lecture from Daddy to never turn it to "3" again or it will blow the house to pieces, Mother and I watch as an icy mist grows on the windows. Mother dozes in her blue Queen Anne chair, her green blanket pulled to her chest. I wait until she is asleep, listening for the soft snore, the pucker of her forehead. On tiptoe, I turn out all the lamps, the television, every electricity sucker downstairs save the refrigerator. I stand in front of the window and unb.u.t.ton my blouse. Carefully, I turn the dial to "3". Because I long to feel nothing. I want to be frozen inside. I want the icy cold to blow directly on my heart.

The power blows out in about three seconds.

FOR THE NEXT TWO WEEKS, I submerge myself in the interviews. I keep my typewriter on the back porch and work most of the day long and into the night. The screens give the green yard and fields a hazy look. Sometimes I catch myself staring off at the fields, but I am not here. I am in the old Jackson kitchens with the maids, hot and sticky in their white uniforms. I feel the gentle bodies of white babies breathing against me. I feel what Constantine felt when Mother brought me home from the hospital and handed me over to her. I let their colored memories draw me out of my own miserable life.

"Skeeter, we haven't heard from Stuart in weeks," Mother says for the eighth time. "He's not cross with you, now, is he?"

At the moment, I am writing the Miss Myrna column. Once ahead by three months, somehow I've managed to almost miss my deadline. "He's fine, Mother. He doesn't have to call every minute of the day." But then I soften my voice. Every day she seems thinner. The sharpness of her collarbone is enough to tamp down my irritation at her comment. "He's just traveling is all, Mama."

This seems to placate her for the moment and I tell the same story to Elizabeth, with a few more details to Hilly, pinching my arm to bear her insipid smile. But I do not know what to tell myself. Stuart needs "s.p.a.ce" and "time," as if this were physics and not a human relationship.

So instead of feeling sorry for myself every minute of the day, I work. I type. I sweat. Who knew heartbreak would be so G.o.dd.a.m.n hot. When Mother's lying down on her bed, I pull my chair up to the air conditioner and stare into it. In July, it becomes a silver shrine. I find Pascagoula pretending to dust with one hand, while holding up her hairbraids at the thing with the other. It's not as if it's a new invention, air-conditioning, but every store in town that has it puts a sign in the window, prints it on its ads because it is so vital. I make a cardboard sign for the Phelan house, place it on the front doork.n.o.b, NOW AIR-CONDITIONED. Mother smiles, but pretends she's not amused.

On a rare evening home, I sit with Mother and Daddy at the dinner table. Mother nibbles on her supper. She spent the afternoon trying to keep me from finding out she'd been vomiting. She presses her fingers along the top of her nose to hold back her headache and says, "I was thinking about the twenty-fifth, do you think that's too soon to have them over?" and I still cannot bring myself to tell her that Stuart and I have broken up.

But I can see it on her face, that Mother feels worse than bad tonight. She is pale and trying to sit up longer than I know she wants to. I take her hand and say, "Let me check, Mama. I'm sure the twenty-fifth will be fine." She smiles for the first time all day.

AIBILEEN SMILES AT THE STACK of pages on her kitchen table. It's an inch thick, double-s.p.a.ced, and starting to look like something that can sit on a shelf. Aibileen is as exhausted as I am, surely more since she works all day and then comes home to the interviews at night.

"Look a that," she says. "That thing's almost a book. book."

I nod, try to smile, but there is so much work left to do. It's nearly August and even though it's not due until January, we still have five more interviews to sort through. With Aibileen's help, I've molded and cut and arranged five of the women's chapters including Minny's, but they still need work. Thankfully, Aibileen's section is done. It is twenty-one pages, beautifully written, simple.

There are several dozen made-up names, both white and colored, and at times, it is hard to keep them all straight. All along, Aibileen has been Sarah Ross. Minny chose Gertrude Black, for what reason I don't know. I have chosen Anonymous, although Elaine Stein doesn't know this yet. Niceville, Mississippi, is the name of our town because it doesn't exist, but we decided a real state name would draw interest. And since Mississippi happens to be the worst, we figured we'd better use it.

A breeze blows through the window and the top pages flutter. We both slam our palms down to catch them.

"You think . . . she gone want a print it?" asks Aibileen. "When it's done?"

I try to smile at Aibileen, show some false confidence. "I hope so," I say as brightly as I can manage. "She seemed interested in the idea and she . . . well, the march is coming up and . . ."

I hear my own voice taper off. I truly don't know if Missus Stein will want to print it. But what I do know is, the responsibility of the project lays on my shoulders and I see it in their hardworking, lined faces, how much the maids want this book to be published. They are scared, looking at the back door every ten minutes, afraid they'll get caught talking to me. Afraid they'll be beaten like Louvenia's grandson, or, h.e.l.l, bludgeoned in their front yard like Medgar Evers. The risk they're taking is proof they want this to get printed and they want it bad.

I no longer feel protected just because I'm white. I check over my shoulder often when I drive the truck to Aibileen's. The cop who stopped me a few months back is my reminder: I am now a threat to every white family in town. Even though so many of the stories are good, celebrating the bonds of women and family, the bad stories will be the ones that catch the white people's attention. They will make their blood boil and their fists swing. We must keep this a perfect secret.

I'm DELIBERATELY FIVE MINUTES LATE for the Monday night League meeting, our first in a month. Hilly's been down at the coast, wouldn't dare allow a meeting without her. She's tan and ready to lead. She holds her gavel like a weapon. All around me, women sit and smoke cigarettes, tip them into gla.s.s ashtrays on the floor. I chew my nails to keep from smoking one. I haven't smoked in six days.

Besides the cigarette missing from my hand, I'm jittery from the faces around me. I easily spot seven women in the room who are related to someone in the book, if not in it themselves. I want to get out of here and get back to work, but two long, hot hours pa.s.s before Hilly finally bangs her gavel. By then, even she looks tired of hearing her own voice.

Girls stand and stretch. Some head out, eager to attend to their husbands. Others dawdle, the ones with a kitchen full of kids and help that has gone home. I gather my things quickly, hoping to avoid talking to anyone, especially Hilly.

But before I can escape, Elizabeth catches my eye, waves me over. I haven't seen her for weeks and I can't avoid speaking to her. I feel guilty that I haven't been to see her. She grabs the back of her chair and raises herself up. She is six months pregnant, woozy from the pregnancy tranquilizers.

"How are you feeling?" I ask. Everything on her body is the same except her stomach is huge and swollen. "Is it any better this time?"

"G.o.d, no, it's awful and I still have three months to go."

We're both quiet. Elizabeth burps faintly, looks at her watch. Finally, she picks up her bag, about to leave, but then she takes my hand. "I heard," she whispers, "about you and Stuart. I'm so sorry."

I look down. I'm not surprised she knows, only that it took this long for anyone to find out. I haven't told anyone, but I guess Stuart has. Just this morning, I had to lie to Mother and tell her the Whitworths would be out of town on the twenty-fifth, Mother's so-called date to have them over.