The Quiet Game
She is speaking softly so as not to wake Annie. Part of my mind is still with Sarah and my father, chasing a strand of meaning down a dark spiral, but I force myself to concentrate as the woman introduces herself as Kate. She is quite striking, with fine black hair pulled up from her neck, fair skin, and sea green eyes, an unusual combination. Her navy suit looks tailored, and the pulled-back hair gives the impression that Kate is several years older than she probably is, a common affectation among young female attorneys. I smile awkwardly and confirm that I am indeed myself, then ask if she is a lawyer.
She smiles. “Am I that obvious?”
“To other members of the breed.”
Another smile, this one different, as though at a private joke. “I’m a First Amendment specialist,” she offers.
Her accent is an alloy of Ivy League Boston and something softer. A Brahmin who graduated Radcliffe but spent her summers far away. “That sounds interesting,” I tell her.
“Sometimes. Not as interesting as what you do.”
“I’m sure you’re wrong about that.”
“I doubt it. I just saw you on CNN in the airport. They were talking about the Hanratty execution. About you killing his brother.”
So, the circus has started. “That’s not exactly my daily routine. Not anymore, at least.”
“It sounded like there were some unanswered questions about the shooting.” Kate blushes again. “I’m sure you’re sick of people asking about it, right?”
Yes, I am. “Maybe the execution will finally put it to rest.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to pry.”
“Sure you did.” On any other day I would brush her off. But she is reading one of my novels, and even thinking about Texas v. Hanratty is better than what I was thinking about when she disturbed me. “It’s okay. We all want to know the inside of things.”
“They said on Burden of Proof that the Hanratty case is often cited as an example of jurisdictional disputes between federal and state authorities.”
I nod but say nothing. “Disputes” is a rather mild word. Arthur Lee Hanratty was a white supremacist who testified against several former cronies in exchange for immunity and a plum spot in the Federal Witness Protection Program. Three months after he entered the program, he shot a black man in Compton over a traffic dispute. He fled Los Angeles, joined his two psychotic brothers, and wound up in Houston, where they murdered an entire black family. As they were being apprehended, Arthur Lee shot and killed a female cop, giving his brothers time to escape. None of this looked good on the resume of John Portman, the U.S. attorney who had granted Hanratty immunity, and Portman vowed to convict his former star witness in federal court in Los Angeles. My boss and I (with the help of then president and erstwhile Texas native George Bush) kept Hanratty in Texas, where he stood a real chance of dying for his crimes. Our jurisdictional victory deprived Portman of his revenge, but his career skyrocketed nevertheless, first into a federal judgeship and finally into the directorship of the FBI, where he now presides.
“I remember when it happened,” Kate says. “The Compton shooting. I mean. I was working in Los Angeles for the summer, and it got a lot of play there. Half the media made you out to be a hero, the other half a monster. They said you—well, you know.”
“What?” I ask, testing her nerve.
She hesitates, then takes the plunge. “They said you shot him and then used your baby to justify killing him.”
I’ve come to understand the combat veteran’s frustration with this kind of curiosity, and I usually meet it with a stony stare, if not outright hostility. But today is different. Today I am in transition. The impending execution has resurrected old ghosts, and I find myself willing to talk, not to satisfy this woman’s curiosity but to remind myself that I got through it. That I did the right thing. The only thing, I assure myself, looking down at Annie sleeping beside me. I drink the last of my Scotch and let myself remember it, this thing that always seems to have happened to someone else, a celebrity among lawyers, hailed by the right wing and excoriated by the left.
“Arthur Lee Hanratty vowed to kill me after his arrest. He said it a dozen times on television. I took his threats the way I took them all, cum grano salis. But Hanratty meant it. Four years later, the night the Supreme Court affirmed his death sentence, my wife and I were lying in bed watching the late news. She was dozing. I was going over my opening statement for another murder trial. My boss had put a deputy outside because of the Supreme Court ruling, but I didn’t think there was any danger. When I heard the first noise, I thought it was nothing. The house settling. Then I heard something else. I asked Sarah if she’d heard it. She hadn’t. She told me to turn out the light and go to sleep. And I almost did. That’s how close it was. That’s where my nightmares come from.”
“What made you get up?”
As the flight attendant passes, I signal for another Scotch. “I don’t know. Something had registered wrong, deep down. I took my thirty-eight down from the closet shelf and switched off my reading light. Then I opened the bedroom door and moved up the hall toward our daughter’s room. Annie was only six months old, but she always slept through the night. When I pushed open her door, I didn’t hear breathing, but that didn’t worry me. Sometimes you have to get right down over them, you know? I walked to the crib and leaned over to listen.”
Kate is spellbound, leaning across the aisle. I take my Scotch from the flight attendant’s hand and gulp a swallow. “The crib was empty.”
“Sweet Jesus.”
“The deputy was out front, so I ran to the French doors at the back of the house. When I got there, I saw nothing but the empty patio. I felt like I was falling off a cliff. Then something made me turn to my left. There was a man standing by the French doors in the dining room. Twenty feet away. He had a tiny bundle in his arms, like a loaf of bread in a blanket. He looked at me as he reached for the door handle. I saw his teeth in the dark, and I knew he was smiling. I pointed my pistol at his head. He started backing through the door, using Annie as a shield. Holding her at centre mass. In the dark, with shaking hands, every rational thought told me not to fire. But I had to.”
I take another gulp of Scotch. The whites of Kate’s eyes are completely visible around the green irises, giving her a hyperthyroid look. I reach down and lay a hand on Annie’s shoulder. Parts of this story I still cannot voice. When I saw those teeth, I sensed the giddy superiority the kidnapper felt over me, the triumph of the predator. Nothing in my life ever hit me the way that fear did.
“He was halfway through the door when I pulled the trigger. The bullet knocked him onto the patio. When I got outside, Annie was lying on the cement, covered in blood. I snatched her up even before I looked at the guy, held her up in the moonlight and ripped off her pajamas, looking for a bullet wound. She didn’t make a sound. Then she screamed like a banshee. An anger scream, you know? Not pain. I knew then that she was probably okay. Hanratty … the bullet had hit him in the eye. He was dying. And I didn’t do a goddamn thing to help him.”
Kate finally blinks, a series of rapid-fire clicks, like someone coming out of a trance. She points down at Annie. “She’s that baby? She’s Annie?”
“Yes.”
“God.” She taps the book in her lap. “I see why you quit.”
“There’s still one out there.”
“What do you mean?”
“We never caught the third brother. I get postcards from him now and then. He says he’s looking forward to spending some time with our family.”
She shakes her head. “How do you live with that?”
I shrug and return to my drink.
“Your wife isn’t traveling with you?” Kate asks.
They always have to ask. “No. She passed away recently.”
Kate’s face begins the subtle sequence of expressions I’ve seen a thousand times in the last seven months. Shock, embarrassment, sympathy, and just the slightest satisfaction that a seemingly perfect life is not so perfect after all.
“I’m sorry,” she says. “The wedding ring. I just assumed—”
“It’s okay. You couldn’t know.”
She looks down and takes a sip of her soft drink. When she looks up, her face is composed again. She asks what my next book is about, and I give her the usual fluff, but she isn’t listening. I know this reaction too. The response of most women to a young widower, particularly one who is clearly solvent and not appallingly ugly, is as natural and predictable as the rising of the sun. The subtle glow of flirtation emanates from Kate like a medieval spell, but it is a spell to which I am presently immune.
Annie awakens as we talk, and Kate immediately brings her into the conversation, developing a surprising rapport. Time passes quickly, and before long we are shaking hands at the gate in Baton Rouge. Annie and I bump into her again at the baggage carousel, and as Kate squeaks outside in her sensible Reeboks to hail a taxi, I notice Annie’s eyes solemnly tracking her. My daughter’s attraction to young adult women is painful to see.
I scoop her up with forced merriment and trot to the Hertz counter, where I have to hassle with a clerk about why the car I reserved isn’t available (although for ten dollars extra per day I can upgrade to a model that is) and how long I’ll have to wait for a child-safety seat. I’m escalating from irritation to anger when a tall man with white hair and a neatly trimmed white beard walks through the glass doors through which Kate just departed.
“Papa!” Annie squeals. “Daddy! Papa’s here!”
“Dad? What are you doing here?”
He laughs and veers toward us. “You think your mother’s going to have her son renting a car to drive eighty miles to get home? God forbid.” He catches Annie under the arms, lifts her high, and hugs her to his chest. “Hello, tadpole! What’s shakin’ down in Disney World?”
“I saw Ariel! And Snow White hugged me!”
“Of course she did! Who wouldn’t want to hug an angel like you?” He looks over her shoulder at me. For a few uncomfortable moments I endure the penetrating gaze of a man who for forty years has searched for illness in reticent people. His perception is like the heat from a lamp. I nod slowly, hoping to communicate, I’m okay, Dad, at the same time searching his face for clues to the anxiety I heard in my mother’s voice on the phone this morning. But he’s too good at concealing his emotions. Another habit of the medical profession.
“Is Mom with you?” I ask.
“No, she’s home cooking a supper you’ll have to see to believe.” He reaches out and squeezes my hand. “It’s good to see you, son.” For an instant I catch a glimpse of something unsettling behind his eyes, but it vanishes as he grins mischievously at Annie. “Let’s move out, tadpole! We’re burning daylight!”
THREE
My father served as an army doctor in West Germany in the 1960s, and it was there he acquired a taste for dark beer and high-performance automobiles. He has been driving BMWs ever since he could afford them, and he drives fast. In four minutes we are away from the airport and roaring north on Highway 61. Annie sits in the middle of the backseat, lashed into a safety seat, marveling at the TV-sized computer display built into the dashboard while Dad runs through its functions again and again, delighting in every giggle that bursts from her lips.
Coronary problems severely reduced my father’s income a few years ago, so last year—on his sixty-sixth birthday—I bought him a black BMW 740i with the royalties from my third novel. I felt a little like Elvis Presley when I wrote that check, and it was a good feeling. My parents started life with nothing, and in a single generation, through hard work and sacrifice, lived what was once unapologetically called the American Dream. They deserve some perks.
The flat brown fields of Louisiana quickly give way to green wooded hills, and somewhere to our left, beyond the lush forest, rolls the great brown river. I cannot smell it yet, but I feel it, a subtle disturbance in the earth’s magnetic field, a fluid force that shapes the surrounding land and souls. I roll down the window and suck in the life smell of hardwood forest, creek water, kudzu, bush-hogged wildflowers, and baking earth. The competing aromas blend into a heady gestalt you couldn’t find in Houston if you grid-searched every inch of it on your hands and knees.
“We’re losing the air conditioning,” Dad complains.
“Sorry.” I roll up the window. “It’s been a long time since I smelled this place.”
“Too damn long.”
“Papa said a bad word!” Annie cries, bursting into giggles.
Dad laughs, then reaches back between the seats and slaps her knee.
The old landmarks hurtle by like location shots from a film. St. Francisville, where John James Audubon painted his birds, now home to a nuclear station; the turnoff to Angola Penitentiary; and finally the state line, marked by a big blue billboard: WELCOME TO MISSISSIPPI! THE MAGNOLIA STATE.
“What’s happening in Natchez these days?” I ask.
Dad whips into the left lane and zooms past a log truck loaded from bumper to red flag with pulpwood. “A lot, for a change. Looks like we’ve got a new factory coming in. Which is good, because the battery plant is about dead.”
“What kind of factory?”
“Chemical plant. They want to put it in the new industrial park by the river. South of the paper mill.”
“Is it a done deal?”
“I’ll say it’s done when I see smoke coming from the stacks. Till then, it’s all talk. It’s like the casino boats. Every other month a new company talks about bringing another boat in, but there’s still just the one.”
“What else is happening?”
“Big election coming up.”
“What kind?”
“Mayoral. For the first time in history there’s a black candidate with a real chance to win.”
“You’re kidding. Who is it?”
“Shad Johnson. He’s about your age. His parents are patients of mine. You never heard of him because they sent him north to prep school when he was a kid. After that he went to Harvard University. Another damn lawyer, just like you.”
“And he wants to be mayor of Natchez?”
“Badly. He moved down here just to run. And he may win.”
“What’s the black-white split now?”
“Registered voters? Fifty-one to forty-nine, in favor of whites. The blacks usually have a low turnout, but this election may be different. In any case, the key for Johnson is white votes, and he might actually get some. He’s been invited to join the Rotary Club.”
“The Natchez Rotary Club?”
“Times are changing. And Shad Johnson’s smart enough to exploit that. I’m sure you’ll meet him soon. The election’s only five weeks away. Hell, he’ll probably want an endorsement from you, seeing how you’re a celebrity now.”
“Papa said another bad word!” Annie chimes in. “But not too bad.”
“What did I say?”
“H-E-L-L. You’re supposed to say heck.”
Dad laughs and slaps her on the knee again.
“I want to stay low-profile,” I say quietly. “This trip is strictly R-and-R.”
“Not much chance of that. Somebody already called the house asking for you. Right before I left.”
“Was it Cilla, my assistant?”
“No. A man. He asked if you’d got in yet. When I asked who was calling, he hung up. The caller-ID box said ‘out of area.’”
“Probably a reporter. They’re going to turn the South upside down trying to find me because of the Hanratty execution.”
“We’ll do what we can to keep you incognito, but the new newspaper publisher has called four times asking about getting an interview with you. Now that you’re here, you won’t be able to avoid things like that. Not without people saying you’ve gone Hollywood on us.”
I sit back and assimilate this. Finding sanctuary in my old hometown might not be as easy as I thought. But it will still be better than Houston.
Natchez is unlike any place in America, existing almost outside time, which is exactly what Annie and I need. In some ways it isn’t part of Mississippi at all. There’s no town square with a lone Confederate soldier presiding over it, no flat, limitless Delta horizon or provincial blue laws. The oldest city on the Mississippi River, Natchez stands white and pristine atop a two-hundred-foot loess bluff, the jewel in the crown of nineteenth-century steamboat ports. For as long as I can remember, the population has been twenty-five thousand, but after being ruled in turn by Indians, French, British, Spanish, Confederates, and Americans, her character is more cosmopolitan than cities ten times her size. Parts of New Orleans remind me of Natchez, but only parts. Modern life long ago came to the Crescent City and changed it forever. Two hundred miles upriver, Natchez exists in a ripple of time that somehow eludes the homogenizing influences of the present.
In 1850 Natchez boasted more millionaires than any city in the United States save New York and Philadelphia. Their fortunes were made on the cotton that poured like white gold out of the district and into the mills of England. The plantations stretched for miles on both sides of the Mississippi River, and the planters who administered them built mansions that made Margaret Mitchell’s Tara look like modest accommodations. While their slaves toiled in the fields, the princes of this new aristocracy sent their sons to Harvard and their daughters to the royal courts of Europe. Atop the bluff they held cotillions, opened libraries, and developed new strains of cotton; two hundred feet below, in the notorious Under the Hill district, they raced horses, traded slaves, drank, whored, and gambled, firmly establishing a tradition of libertinism that survives to the present, and cementing the city’s black-sheep status in a state known for its dry counties.
By an accident of topography, the Civil War left Natchez untouched. Her bluff commanded a straightaway of the river rather than a bend, so Vicksburg became the critical naval choke point, dooming that city to siege and destruction while undefended Natchez made the best of Union occupation. In this way she joined a charmed historical trinity with Savannah and Charleston, the quintessentially Southern cities that survived the war with their beauty intact.
It took the boll weevil to accomplish what war could not, sending the city into depression after the turn of the century. She sat preserved like a city in amber, her mansions slowly deteriorating, until the 1930s, when her society ladies began opening their once great houses to the public in an annual ritual called the Pilgrimage. The money that poured in allowed them to restore the mansions to their antebellum splendor, and soon Yankees and Europeans traveled by thousands to this living museum of the Old South.
In 1948 oil was discovered practically beneath the city, and a second boom was on. Black gold replaced white, and overnight millionaires again walked the azalea-lined streets, as delirious with prosperity as if they had stepped from the pages of Scott Fitzgerald. I grew up in the midst of this boom, and benefited from the affluence it generated. But by the time I graduated law school, the oil industry was collapsing, leaving Natchez to survive on the revenues of tourism and federal welfare money. It was a hard adjustment for proud people who had never had to chase Northern factories or kowtow to the state of which they were nominally a part.
“What’s that?” I ask, pointing at an upscale residential development far south of where I remember any homes.
“White flight,” Dad replies. “Everything’s moving south. Subdivisions, the country club. Look, there’s another one.”
Another grouping of homes materializes behind a thin screen of oak and pine, looking more like suburban Houston than the romantic town I remember. Then I catch sight of Mammy’s Cupboard, and I feel a reassuring wave of familiarity in my chest. Mammy’s is a restaurant built in the shape of a Negro mammy in a red hoop skirt and bandanna, painted to match Hattie McDaniel from Gone with the Wind. She stands atop her hill like a giant sculptured doll, beckoning travelers to dine in the cozy space beneath her domed skirts. Anyone who has never seen the place inevitably slows to gape; it makes the Brown Derby in L.A. look prosaic.
The car crests a high ridge and seems to teeter upon it as an ocean of treetops spreads out before us, stretching west to infinity. Beyond the river, the great alluvial plain of Louisiana lies so far below the high ground of Natchez that only the smoke plume from the paper mill betrays the presence of man in that direction. The car tips over on the long descent into town, passing St. Stephens, the all-white prep school I attended, and a dozen businesses that look just as they did twenty years ago. At the junction of Highways 61 and 84 stands the Jefferson Davis Memorial Hospital, now officially known by a more politically correct name, but for all time “the Jeff” to the doctors of my father’s generation, and to the hundreds of other people, both black and white, who worked or were born there.
“It all looks the same,” I murmur.
“It is and it isn’t,” Dad replies.
“What do you mean?”
“You’ll see.”
My parents still live in the house in which they raised me. While other young professionals moved on to newer subdivisions, restored Victorian gingerbreads, or even antebellum palaces downtown, my father clung stubbornly to the ash-paneled library he’d appended to the suburban tract house he bought in 1963. Whenever my mother got the urge to move to more stately mansions, he added to the existing structure, giving her the space she claimed we needed and a decorating project on which to expend her fitful energies.
As the BMW pulls up to the house, I imagine my mother waiting inside. She always wanted me to succeed in the larger world, but it broke her heart when Sarah and I settled in Houston. Seven hours is too far to drive on a regular basis, and Mom dislikes flying. Still, the tie between us is such that distance means little. When I was a boy, people always told me I was like my father, that I’d “got my father’s brain.” But it is my mother who has the rare combination of quantitative aptitude and intuitive imagination that I was lucky enough to inherit.
Dad shuts off the engine and unstraps Annie from her safety seat. As I unload our luggage from the trunk, I see a shadow standing motionless against the closed curtain of the dining room. My mother. Then another shadow moves behind the curtain. Who else would be here? It can’t be my sister. Jenny is a visiting professor at Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland.
“Who else is here?”
“Wait and see,” Dad says cryptically.
I carry the two suitcases to the porch, then go back for Annie’s bag. The second time I reach the porch, my mother is standing in the open door. All I see before she rises on tiptoe and pulls me into her arms is that she has stopped coloring her hair, and the gray is a bit of a shock.
“Welcome home,” she whispers in my ear. She pulls back, her hands gripping my upper arms, and looks hard at me. “You’re still not eating. Are you all right?”
“I don’t know. Annie can’t seem to get past what happened. And I don’t know how to help her.”
She squeezes my arms with a strength I have never seen fail. “That’s what grandmothers are for. Everything’s going to be all right. Starting right this minute.”
At sixty-three my mother is still beautiful, but not with the delicate comeliness that fills so many musket-and-magnolia romances. Beneath the tanned skin and Donna Karan dress are the bone and sinew and humor of a girl who made the social journey from the 4-H Club to the Garden Club without forgetting her roots. She could take tea with royalty and commit no faux pas, yet just as easily twist the head off a banty hen, boil the bristles off a hog, or kill an angry copper-head with a hoe blade. It’s that toughness that worries me now.