Against the Ruins Read online

  “It’ll be yours someday, kiddo.”

  It was a moment unlike any other in our lives, and adrenalin love for you both hurtled through my veins. I’d been afraid your father hadn’t really wanted children, so this baptism filled me with joy.

  That night William and I lie in our bed across from the reinstated brown metal oil stove that I’ve covered with bright purple cloth. The full moon outside the window slips through the filmy white curtains, making the roses in the claustrophobic wallpaper twist and turn. He leans over, gives me a quick kiss, turns away. I wish he’d put his arms around me the way he did on the magical dreamy night you entered my belly. I feel ready for a second child. How often do a husband and wife usually make love? I have no idea. I move closer to him and slip my arm around his back and think about our early days together. He’ll love me soon—

  While William sleeps, I picture you in the next room nestled into your small child’s bed beside the four windows overlooking the backyard. You with the sand on your shirt: you are the proof of how lucky we are, of how good our life is. Tonight there is no potter’s field below our beds. Tonight an ancient carousel sings to us and colored ponies trot in circles all night long.

  Chapter Four

  I hear you asking again if I’m in pain. Do stop fretting. Who enters or leaves the world without pain? Or lives in it, for that matter. I told you years ago to reconcile yourself to my death—you kept saying you didn’t think you could bear it. I made my way through breast cancer, diabetes, and all the rest; I was tired and wanted my death to be about me. Maybe I did resent it that you rarely came home. And when you did, you acted like nothing here quite suited you.

  When you were in your twenties and—dare I say it—quite judgmental, it was clear I hadn’t lived up to your expectations. Wasn’t bold enough, enlightened enough, something enough. You acted the same way about your hometown; you couldn’t wait to exit stage right to New York. Columbia wasn’t evolved enough, liberal enough, interesting enough—you kept saying the city had no “aesthetic intention.” What on earth did that mean? Columbia’s no visual stunner, I admit that: what the Civil War didn’t take, its citizens often have, showing a remarkable penchant for sacrificing historic structures to the gold coins of the twentieth century. But Elmwood Park—with its ghostly old houses and dramatic history—fed the vivid imagination that makes you creative. Think about it. We were bookended by the Seaboard Coastline railroad tracks, the Broad River Canal, Elmwood Cemetery with its sleeping Confederates, and the high brick walls of the state mental hospital. You grew tall crossing rivers, walking train tracks, tramping wide streets and haunted graveyards. Fertile soil for an artist, if you ask me. Only lately have I realized this difference between us: in my way, after years of making so many dear friends, I came to belong to Columbia. You belong—always—to Lincoln Street.

  Myself, I don’t care much for drama.

  Uta Moazen, the only original owner on Lincoln Street, helped anchor me to Columbia that first year; by now I knew she’d lost her arm because she’d not seen a doctor soon enough about an infection. One day I was outside weeding around the hydrangeas when Uta—wearing a flowing blue caftan—appeared and said, “Come with me, Louise.” I followed her up her steps; she had a commanding presence it was difficult to say no to. We landed in a living room crowded with glass-globe lamps and Victorian chairs upholstered in gold brocade. Ringlets bobbing, Uta led the way through rooms bulging with heavy furniture. I noticed a pretty green glass jar sitting on the dining-room mantel. Uta paused and nodded toward it. “Now that’s a story, all right.”

  I waited for her to explain, but she didn’t.

  Soon we were in a storeroom crowded with more ornate furniture. Uta—who didn’t look her seventy-five years—pointed and said, “You don’t have a dining-room table, and I’m not using this one. I want you to take it over to your house.”

  I stared. Six feet of quarter-sawn oak burnished to a rich dark sheen, thick turned legs. Some scratches but not bad ones. Smaller but almost identical to the table in Brantley.

  “It’s lovely,” I said, “but I couldn’t think of borrowing it.”

  “Silly goose, I’m not lending it to you, I’m giving it to you. It’s downright rude not to accept a gift.” She paused. “Louise, did it rain on your wedding day?” When I said no, she said, “That’s good. You know rain at a funeral means smooth passage to heaven. Not good at weddings.”

  She talked me into the table, which didn’t take much urging, I admit. While we dusted it off, she said, “When you start school, get to know the janitor. Max Wells, a very fine man. He did me a big favor once.” She hesitated, looked at me thoughtfully. “If you ever need help of any kind, don’t hesitate to ask me.”

  Later that morning, the milkman and Uta’s yard-man moved the oak table into our dining room. I polished it until it glowed. This sounds silly, so much fuss about a table—you know I’ve never put much stock in material things. At first William didn’t want to accept the gift, but I convinced him. To me that table represented both the past and the future. Noisy family meals were the heartbeat of my childhood, and someday you’d have siblings and we would sit here together in the same way. So several times that day I returned to the dining room to run my hand across the smooth oiled surface. Eventually I took out my mother’s silver flatware and set the table with the mismatched patterns of lovely aged luster, once touched by hands I longed to remember.

  Soon it was August, the sweltering damp hell of late August. You’ve been away so long maybe you don’t remember what a South Carolina August is like. Imagine too many people locked in a steam room together for weeks. In 1957, legislators going up and down the steep stairs of the State Capitol had their white shirtsleeves pushed up like blackjack dealers; many used folded newspapers to fan themselves as they sat in the stunned heat of the house and senate chambers. At noon they went over to the Capitol News Stand lunch counter, where oscillating metal fans only circulated the hot air people came inside to escape. The Elite Epicurean restaurant ran out of ice. The lunch counter at McGregor’s Drugstore had no more ice cream. People floated down city streets like slow-moving barges and plopped down on bus-stop benches, thinking they’d go to the “air-cooled” movie house if only they had the energy.

  Despite the heat, I was excited as I walked up Aiken Street wearing a jersey print dress. I took a right at the corner, and the impressive visage of Laidlaw Junior High appeared—an Olympus of learning, a progressive school housed in a square three-story brick palace. The first junior high in South Carolina, which taught new subjects like photography, sat on a five-acre former plantation site studded with thirty massive magnolia trees. Steep granite stairs led to the second-floor bay entrance of pointed arches and Gothic window tracery. A hulking, imposing façade—a face with hooded eyes, almost the frown of nineteenth-century tintypes. I liked the sense of history in its bricks and doors and porticos. Collegiate architecture let the world know that education was serious and important.

  My parents couldn’t send four children to college during the Depression but found a way to give each boy one year and the only girl—in case I never married—a degree. Walking into Laidlaw, I’m thinking about tomorrow, your first day in the first grade. My footsteps echo on the terrazzo floor and I breathe in the musty old-books smell; schools were living history, they filled me with hope for the future. I thought of them as the House of Life, the wing of the Egyptian temple where books were kept and writing was taught. I was young and idealistic. I opened the windows and sat down at my scratched oak desk with creaky drawers. It was Teachers Work Day and various colleagues dropped by—a fellow English teacher named Clarice, who lived in Elmwood Park, and the short, wiry social-studies teacher whose room was next door, who said I shouldn’t worry if I heard a loud crash, that when her students weren’t paying attention she stood on her trash can to lecture. She’d fallen off twice.

  The princi
pal also comes by, Edward Hindeman, a bald man wearing a narrow tie and wire-rim glasses. A broad-shouldered man—“Do call me Ed”—with a hunter’s alert watchfulness. He sits in a student desk and asks if I need anything. After I request two dictionaries, he takes out a checkered handkerchief and wipes his forehead.

  “I’d like to tell you a little about our school, Mrs. Copeland. We get our children from Elmwood Park, from Earlewood, and from Black Bottom. The Bottom children are poorest—tin-roof shotgun shacks on dirt roads, not much electricity or plumbing, barbed wire separating the white and colored sides. We have many underprivileged students, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t good children. The other thing is—well, public schools are in changing times right now. I’m sure you know what I mean.”

  I did. It hadn’t been long since the South Carolina legislature’s “Segregation Session”—which made it illegal for state employees, including teachers, to belong to the NAACP or to any pro-desegregation organization. Local government officials were threatening to close the public schools rather than integrate, and in nearby Camden a group of whites had attacked a white school bandmaster who endorsed integration.

  Ed Hindeman looks at me carefully. “I have to ask all new teachers. Down the road, how would you feel about teaching Negro students?”

  “I’ve always been a big fan of Mrs. Roosevelt.”

  He smiles, looks relieved. “We’re going to like having you here, Louise.” He heads for the door, adds, “Now let’s pray the Asian flu doesn’t show up.”

  My hands start shaking. “I saw the newspaper. Is it really serious?”

  “I hear it could be.”

  When the door closes behind him, I get up and focus on preparing my room. Eventually there’s another tap at the door, and the smallest adult man I’ve ever seen limps in and says, “I’m Max, Mrs. Copeland. Max Wells. Janitor and all-around handyman. I’ve come to see if you’re needin’ anythin’.”

  The man’s smile, all sparklers, lights up a rough-hewn dark tan face marked by acne scars. Blue-green eyes, a slight variation in the left, turquoise stones that don’t quite match. He might be four and a half feet tall, and he wears gray work pants and a spotless white shirt.

  “I never grew taller,” he says without embarrassment. “But I’m strong. You need something lifted, you call me. I’m always near the hall broom closet.”

  After Max and I shake hands, he asks, “You like flowers? Of course you would.” A shock of curly silvered hair falls into his eyes. “Behind the baseball field, they let me have a garden there. I don’t have enough room in the Bottom so I made one here. Sometimes teachers like to walk in my garden on their free period. It’s—well, restful. You look like a fine lady that might like a peony or gardenia. No, maybe a camellia. You can tell a lot about somebody by the flowers they likes—like. Or resemble.”

  He waves and heads toward the door, his gait uneven, calling over his shoulder, “English teachers are my favorites. I only got to eighth grade, but they let me use the library here and I done a fair bit a’ readin’ over the years.” At the door he turns around, points at the books on my desk. “I read that story about the white boy and the colored man on a raft. I studied that English grammar book too, the one you teach outta.”

  “Have you read the novel Tale of Two Cities?” I ask. “It’s about a remarkable man. You can tell a lot about people by the books they read.”

  “Well thank you, ma’am, for that suggestion. I just might look into it.”

  As the door closes, I hear him murmur, “Hydrangea. Gives so many blooms, lasts all summer. Big old friendly flower, pretty too. Yep, that’s it. If the weather holds, it can carry us right through to December. Just don’t cut it—wilts in an instant.”

  Like I said—or I think I said it, maybe I didn’t—it was Max Wells who first mentioned to me your father’s visits to Elmwood Cemetery. This was the day you and I were on a bus headed downtown to buy you new shoes. As the bus passed Laidlaw, a woman two rows back called out to no one in particular, “That there’s the worst school in the whole city. Half them kids’ daddies is locked up in the state pen. No sir, I wouldn’t let no child o’ mine set foot in that school.”

  I feel my cheeks burn and whirl around. “Do you know anyone who goes to that school? Have you seen how children behave there? I teach at that school and I’m proud to work there.”

  The other woman makes a snorting noise. I face forward, embarrassed by my outburst. You stare at me in puzzled, impressed surprise.

  Soon we’re walking down Main Street, past Belks and Tapps department stores, passing khaki-clad soldiers from Fort Jackson who flood downtown every weekend. Just short of the Capitol News Stand, we turn into a stone building and walk down an arcade of polished granite floors; I sigh over the cost of your Buster Brown oxfords, you of the narrow feet. Soon we’re sitting at Woolworth’s lunch counter. You’re slurping a chocolate milkshake and I’m gazing, a little longingly, at bright scarves on a nearby rack, when a group of black men in suits and ties walks in and sits down on the padded metal stools. A thin waitress in a hairnet runs to the back of the store. Soon the manager marches forward, his face purplish, and says, “This counter is not open today.” He puts a white sign on the counter, black letters: Closed.

  A man wearing a red tie says, “I’m sorry to hear that, sir. I’m sure you won’t mind if my brothers and I wait until you reopen. We’re very hungry.”

  Each of the men takes out a newspaper and begins to read.

  It’s hard to believe the demeaning racial “rules” in place then. Nonetheless, fearing an altercation, I drag you to the front door. Out on the street a silent parade passes—men in suits and fedoras, women in Sunday dresses wearing shiny high heels and carrying Bibles. They march down Main Street looking straight ahead, moving as one; they seem to know a tempo that unites them. Traffic has stopped in all directions, irritated white people get out of their cars and stare, some shout at the procession. I stand still, watching, holding your hand, searching the faces of the women beneath their best hats. Brave women.

  Near McGregor’s Drugstore a short man steps out of the procession. Max Wells in a neatly pressed 1940s suit. With a white rosebud in his lapel.

  “Mrs. Copeland, it’s good to see you.”

  “I admire all of you,” I say, and nod toward you. “I’d like you to meet my daughter Lyra.”

  Max leans down in courtly fashion and shakes your hand. “I am pleased to make your acquaintance, Miss Lyra. You have a lovely name. Names are important. I’m Maxmillian H. Wells. I am the janitor at your mother’s school.”

  You study Max’s suit. “You clean the school?”

  “I do. I’m also the gravedigger at Elmwood Cemetery. If you’ll pardon my sayin’ so, I’m a man of prodigious talent.”

  You’re processing what a gravedigger might be as Max straightens back up and says to me, “I met your husband by accident last week. At the cemetery. A man came by and asked about the Confederate graves, and he was wearing an army medal. Star on a ribbon. I knew I’d seen the man before—he picked you up after school one day and had this pretty little girl with him.”

  It takes me a moment to answer. Wearing his war medal? “My husband is interested in—in history.”

  “I find history right meaningful myself,” Max says. “For instance—‘It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.’ ” He smiles broadly, then his voice grows more serious. “I hope you’ll forgive the effrontery—nice word, isn’t it—I just added it to the word notebook I keep—but I had the feeling your Mr. Copeland was, well, not quite all right that day.”

  “He’s been studying very hard. He’s a student at the seminary.”

  “Well, isn’t that fine.” Max nods. “I’ll be going now.” He limps down the street to catch up with the group.

  “Mama, is Mr. Max a colored man?”
/>   “I don’t know, sweetheart. Maybe part of him is.”

  What does he mean “not quite all right”?

  “He looks funny. He’s too short.”

  “Would you want him to say you look funny? He might think blonde hair is not quite right.”

  You ponder this as we walk to the bus stop. As the bus heads toward Elmwood Avenue, I wonder—was William really wearing his Bronze Star?

  Intensive-care units are too busy—sometimes I can’t sleep for all the attention, nurses coming in at all hours of the night. Occasionally I can feel your father standing beside my bed. I imagine he’s staring at the monitors. Sometimes you and he murmur to each other; even now, your estrangement is obvious—I wish that wasn’t so. I tried for years to keep the peace.

  I just remembered this other thing that happened on Lincoln Street. Funny how the mind jumps around. It was an Indian summer night that first year—September maybe—and I was lying in bed beside your father, he was sound asleep for once, and I could hear the wind whispering outside the window. I knew the moon was full even though William now insisted on pulling the shade tight at night. I couldn’t sleep so I got up, put on my housecoat, and tiptoed to the front door. And there it was, the moon on our steps, beckoning me. So even though it was late and I’d be exhausted the next day, trying to teach those preteens the difference between who and whom, I opened the front door and slipped out onto the porch and sat down on the steps beside the hydrangeas—they were cobalt in the moonlight—and I held one to my face. It was soft and beautiful, and I was doing this when I happened to look up and lo and behold there was Rosa Truesdale sitting on her steps directly across from me, smoking a cigarette. She waved, I waved back, and she sauntered across the street, cigarette between her teeth. She was not afraid of looking any kind of way, Rosa wasn’t, and she said howdy, wasn’t it a right magnificent night, and I said yes it was, and she gazed at me for a moment and I saw she’d been crying. I never did know why, though I can imagine. Then she said in a very non-Rosa voice, “Louise, I’m right sorry for us both.” Before I could say a word—I wasn’t sure if I was insulted or not—just like that she turned and went back across the street and opened her door and disappeared.