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FOUR
All my life, whenever problems of great import required discussion—health, family, money, marriage—the library was the place it was done. Yet my positive feelings about the room far outweigh my anxieties. The ash-paneled library is so much a part of my father’s identity that he carries its scent wherever he goes—an aroma of fine wood, cigar smoke, aging leather, and whiskey. Born to working-class parents, he spent the first real money he made to build this room and fill it with books: Aristotle to Zoroaster and everything in between, with a special emphasis on the military campaigns of the Civil War. I feel more at home here than anywhere in the world. In this room I educated myself, discovered my gift for language, learned that the larger world lay not across oceans but within the human mind and heart. Years spent in this room made law school relatively simple and becoming a writer possible, even necessary.
Dad enters through a different door, carrying a bourbon-and-water brown enough to worry me. We each take one of the leather recliners, which are arranged in the classic bourgeois style: side by side facing the television. He clips the end of a Partagas, licks the end so that it won’t peel, and lights it with a wooden match. A cloud of blue smoke wafts toward the beamed ceiling.
“Dad, I—”
“Let me start,” he says, staring across the room at his biographies, most of them first editions. “Son, there comes a time in every man’s life when he realizes that the people who raised him from infancy now require the favor to be returned, whether they know it or not.” He stops to puff on the Partagas. “This is something you do not yet have to worry about.”
“Dad—”
“I am kindly telling you to mind your own business. You and Annie are welcome here for the next fifty years if you want to stay, but you’re not invited to pry into my private affairs.”
I lean back in the recliner and consider whether I can honor my father’s request. Given what my mother told me, I don’t think so. “What’s Ray Presley holding over you, Dad?”
“Your mother talks too much.”
“You know that’s not true. She thinks you’re in trouble. And I can help you. Tell me what Presley has on you.”
He picks up his drink and takes a long pull, closing his eyes against the anesthetic fire of the bourbon. “I won’t have this,” he says quietly.
I don’t want to ask the next question—I’d hoped never to raise the subject again—but I must. “Is it something like what you did for Sarah? Helping somebody at the end?”
He sighs like a man who has lived a thousand years. “That’s a rare situation. And when things reach that point, the family’s so desperate to have the horror and pain removed from the patient’s last hours that they look at you like an instrument of God.”
He drinks and stares at his books, lost in contemplation of something I cannot guess at. He has aged a lot in the eighteen years since I left home. His beard is no longer salt-and-pepper but silver white. His skin is pale and dotted by dermatitis, his joints eroded and swollen by psoriatic arthritis. He is sixteen years past his triple bypass (and counting) and he recently survived the implantation of two stents to keep his cardiac vessels open. All this—physical maladies more severe than those of most of his patients—he bears with the resignation of Job. The wound that aged him most, the one that has never quite healed, was a wound to the soul. And it came at the hands of another man.
When I was a freshman at Ole Miss, my father was sued for malpractice. The plaintiff had no case; his father had died unexpectedly while under the care of my father and five specialists. It was one of those inexplicable deaths that proved for the billionth time that medicine is an inexact science. Dad was as stunned as the rest of the medical community when “Judge” Leo Marston, the most prominent lawyer in town and a former state attorney general, took the man’s case and pressed it to the limit. But no one was more shocked than I. Leo Marston was the father of a girl I had loved in high school, and whom I still think about more than is good for me. Why he should viciously attack my father was beyond my understanding, but attack he did. In a marathon of legal maneuvering that dragged on for fourteen months, Marston hounded my father through the legal system with a vengeance that appalled the town. In the end Dad was unanimously exonerated by a jury, but by then the damage had been done.
For a physician of the old school, medical practice is not a profession or even an art, but the abiding passion of existence. A brilliant boy is born to poor parents during the Depression. From childhood he works to put food on the table. He witnesses privation and sickness not at a remove, but face to face. He earns a scholarship to college but must work additional jobs to cover his expenses. He contracts with the army to pay for his medical education in exchange for years of military service. After completing medical school with an exemplary record, he does not ask himself the question every medical student today asks himself: what do I wish to specialize in? He is ready to go to work. To begin treating patients. To begin living.
For twenty years he practices medicine as though his patients are members of his family. He makes small mistakes; he is human. But in twenty years of practice not one complaint is made to the state medical board, or any legal claim made against him. He is loved by his community, and that love is his life’s bread. To be accused of criminal negligence in the death of a patient stuns him, like a war hero being charged with cowardice. Rumor runs through the community like a plague, and truth is the first casualty. His confidence in the rightness of his actions is absolute, but after months of endlessly repeated allegations, doubt begins to assail him. A lifetime of good works seems to weigh as nothing compared to one unsubstantiated charge. Smiles on the street appear forced to him, the greetings of neighbors cool. Stress works steadily and ruthlessly upon him, finally culminating in a myocardial infarction, which he barely survives.
Six weeks later the trial begins, and it’s like stepping into the eye of a hurricane. Control rests in the hands of lawyers, men with murky motives and despicable tactics. Expert witnesses second-guess every medical decision. He sits alone in the witness box, condemned before family, friends, and community, cross-examined as though he were a child murderer. When the jury finds in his favor, he feels no joy. He feels like a man who has just lost both legs being told he is lucky to be alive.
Could the present-day blackmail somehow be tied to that calamitous case? I have never understood the reason for Leo Marston’s attack, and I’ve always felt that my father—against his nature—must have been keeping the truth from me. My mother believes Ray Presley is behind the blackmail, and I recall that Judge Marston often hired Presley to do “security work” when I was in high school. This translated into acting as unofficial baby-sitter for Marston’s teenage daughter, Olivia, who was also my lover. I remember nights when Presley’s truck would swing by whatever hangout the kids happened to be frequenting, its hatchet-faced driver glaring from the window, making sure Livy didn’t get into any serious trouble. One night Presley actually pulled up behind my car in the woods and rapped on the fogged windows, terrifying Livy and me. I still remember his face peering into the clear circle I rubbed on the window to look out, his eyes bright and ferretlike, searching the backseat for a sight of Livy unclothed. The hunger in those eyes …
“Does this have anything to do with Leo Marston?” I ask softly.
Dad flinches from his reverie. Even now the judge’s name has the power to harm. “Marston?” he echoes, still staring at his books. “What makes you say that?”
“It’s one of the only things I’ve never understood about your life. Why Marston went after you.”
He shakes his head. “I’ve never known why he did it. I’d done nothing wrong. Any physician could see that. The jury saw it too, thank God.”
“You’ve never heard anything since? About why he took the case or pressed it so hard?”
“To tell you the truth, son, I always had the feeling it had something to do with you. You and Olivia.”
He turns to me, his eyes not accusatory but plainly questioning. I am too shocked to speak for a moment. “That … that’s impossible,” I stammer. “I mean, nothing really bad ever happened between Livy and me. It was the trial that drove the last nail into our relationship.”
“Maybe that was Marston’s goal all along. To drive you two apart.”
This thought occurred to me nineteen years ago, but I discounted it. Livy abandoned me long before her father took on that malpractice case.
Dad shrugs as if it were all meaningless now. “Who knows why people do anything?”
“I’m going to go see Presley,” I tell him. “If that’s what I have to do to—”
“You stay away from that son of a bitch! Any problems I have, I’ll deal with my own way.” He downs the remainder of his bourbon. “One way or another.”
“What does that mean?”
His eyes are blurry with fatigue and alcohol, yet somehow sly beneath all that. “Don’t worry about it.”
I am suddenly afraid that my father is contemplating suicide. His death would nullify any leverage Presley has over him and also provide my mother with a generous life insurance settlement. To a desperate man, this might well seem like an elegant solution. “Dad—”
“Go to bed, son. Take care of your little girl. That’s what being a father’s all about. Sparing your kids what hell you can for as long as you can. And Annie’s already endured her share.”
We turn to the door at the same moment, each sensing a new presence in the room. A tiny shadow stands there. Annie. She seems conjured into existence by the mention of her name.
“I woke up by myself,” she says, her voice tiny and fearful. “Why did you leave, Daddy?”
I go to the door and sweep her into my arms. She feels so light sometimes that it frightens me. Hollow-boned, like a bird. “I needed to talk to Papa, punkin. Everything’s fine.”
“Hello, sweet pea,” Dad says from his chair. “You make Daddy take you to bed.”
I linger in the doorway, hoping somehow to draw out a confidence, but he gives me nothing. I leave the library with Annie in my arms, knowing I will not sleep, but knowing also that until my father opens up to me, there is little I can do to help him.
FIVE
My father’s prediction about media attention proves prescient. Within forty-eight hours of my arrival, calls about interviews join the ceaseless ringing of patients calling my father. My mother has taken messages from the local newspaper publisher, radio talk-show hosts, even a TV station in Jackson, the state capital, two hours away. I decide to grant an interview to Caitlin Masters, the publisher of the Natchez Examiner, on two conditions: that she not ask questions about Arthur Lee Hanratty’s execution, and that she print that I will be vacationing in New Orleans until after the execution has taken place. Leaving Annie with my mother—which delights them both—I drive Mom’s Nissan downtown in search of Biscuits and Blues, a new restaurant owned by a friend of mine but which I have never seen.
It was once said of American cities that you could judge their character by their tallest buildings: were they offices or churches? At a mere seven stories, the Eola Hotel is the tallest commercial structure in Natchez. Its verdigris-encrusted roof peaks well below the graceful, copper-clad spire of St. Mary Minor Basilica. Natchez’s “skyline” barely rises out of a green canopy of oak leaves: the silver dome of the synagogue, the steeple of the Presbyterian church, the roofs of antebellum mansions and stately public buildings. Below the canopy, a soft and filtered sunlight gives the sense of an enormous glassed-in garden.
Biscuits and Blues is a three-story building on Main, with a large second-floor balcony overlooking the street. A young woman stands talking on a cell phone just inside the door—where Caitlin Masters promised to meet me—but I don’t think she’s the newspaper publisher. She looks more like a French tourist. She’s wearing a tailored black suit, cream silk blouse, and black sandals, and she is clearly on the sunny side of thirty. But as I check my watch, she turns face on to me and I spot a hardcover copy of False Witness cradled in her left arm. I also see that she’s wearing nothing under the blouse, which is distractingly sheer. She smiles and signals that she’ll be off the phone in a second, her eyes flashing with quick intelligence.
I acknowledge her wave and wait beside the door. I’m accustomed to young executives in book publishing, but I expected something a little more conventional in the newspaper business, especially in the South. Caitlin Masters stands with her head cocked slightly, her eyes focused in the middle distance, the edge of her lower lip pinned by a pointed canine. Her skin is as white as bone china and without blemish, shockingly white against her hair, which is black as her silk suit and lies against her neck like a gleaming veil. Her face is a study in planes and angles: high cheekbones, strong jawline, arched brows, and a straight nose, all uniting with almost architectural precision, yet somehow escaping hardness. She wears no makeup that I can see, but her green eyes provide all the accent she needs. They seem incongruous in a face that almost cries out for blue ones, making her striking and memorable rather than merely beautiful.
As she ends her call, she speaks three or four consecutive sentences, and a strange chill runs through me. Ivy League Boston alloyed with something softer, a Brahmin who spent her summers far away. On the telephone this morning I didn’t catch it, but coupled with her face, that voice transforms my suspicion to certainty. Caitlin Masters is the woman I spoke to on the flight to Baton Rouge. Kate … Caitlin.
She holds out her hand to shake mine, and I step back. “You’re the woman from the plane. Kate.”
Her smile disappears, replaced by embarrassment. “I’m surprised you recognize me, dressed like I was that day.”
“You lied to me. You told me you were a lawyer. Was that some kind of setup or what?”
“I didn’t tell you I was a lawyer. You assumed I was. I told you I was a First Amendment specialist, and I am.”
“You knew what I thought, and you let me think it. You lied, Ms. Masters. This interview is over.”
As I turn to go, she takes hold of my arm. “Our meeting on that plane was a complete accident. I want an interview with you, but it wouldn’t be worth that kind of trouble. I was flying from Atlanta to Baton Rouge, and I happened to be sitting across the aisle from you. End of story.”
“And you happened to be reading one of my novels?”
“No. I’ve been trying to get your number from your parents for a couple of months. A lot of people in Mississippi are interested in you. When the Hanratty story broke, I picked up one of your books in the airport. It’s that simple.”
I step away from the door to let a pair of middle-aged women through. “Then why not tell me who you were?”
“Because when I was waiting to board, I was sitting by the pay phones. I heard you tell someone you didn’t want to talk to reporters for any reason. I knew if I told you I was a newspaper publisher, you wouldn’t talk to me.”
“Well, I guess you got your inside scoop on how I killed Hanratty’s brother.”
She draws herself erect, offended now. “I haven’t printed a word of what you told me, and I don’t plan to. Despite appearances to the contrary, my journalistic ethics are beyond reproach.”
“Why were you dressed so differently on the plane?”
She actually laughs at this. “I’d just given a seminar to a group of editors in Atlanta. My father was there, and I try to be a bit more conventional when he’s around.”
I can see her point. Not many fathers would approve of the blouse she’s wearing today.
“Look,” she says, “I could have had that story on the wire an hour after you told it to me. I didn’t tell a soul. What better proof of trustworthiness could anyone give you?”
“Maybe you’re saving it for one big article.”
“You don’t have to tell me anything you don’t want to. In fact, we could just eat lunch, and you can decide if you want to do the interview another time or not.”
Her candid manner strikes a chord in me. Perhaps she’s manipulating me, but I don’t think so. “We came to do an interview. Let’s do it. The airplane thing threw me, that’s all.”
“Me too,” she says with a smile. “I liked Annie, by the way.”
“Thanks. She liked you too.”
As we step into the main dining space of the restaurant, a smattering of applause starts, then fills the room. I look around to see whose birthday it is, then realize that the applause is for me. A little celebrity goes a long way in Mississippi. I recognize familiar faces in the crowd. Some belong to guys I went to school with, now carrying twenty or thirty extra pounds—as I did until Sarah’s illness—others to friends of my parents or simply well-wishers. I smile awkwardly and give a little wave to cover the room.
“I told you,” says Caitlin. “There’s a lot of interest.”
“It’ll wear off. As soon as they realize I’m the same guy who left, they’ll be yawning in my face.”
When we arrive at our table, she stands stiffly behind her chair, her eyes twinkling with humor. “You’re not going to pull my chair out for me?”
“You didn’t look the type.”
She laughs and takes her seat. “I wasn’t before I got here. Pampering corrupts you fast.”
While we study the menus, a collection of classic Cajun dishes, I try to fathom how Caitlin Masters wound up in the job she has. The Examiner has always been a conservative paper, owned when I was a boy by a family which printed nothing that reflected negatively upon city worthies. Later it was sold to a family-owned newspaper chain which continued the tradition of offending as few citizens as possible, especially those who bought advertising space. In Natchez the gossip mills have always been a lot more accurate than anything you could find in the Examiner. Caitlin seems an improbable match, to say the least.
She closes her menu and smiles engagingly. “I’m younger than you thought I’d be, aren’t I?”
“A little,” I reply, trying not to look at her chest. In Mississippi, wearing a blouse that sheer without a bra is practically a request to be arrested.
“My father owns the chain. I’m doing a tour of duty down here to learn the ropes.”
“Ah.” One mystery cleared up.
“Okay if we go on the record now?”
“You have a tape recorder?”
“I never use them.”
I take out a Sony microcassette recorder borrowed from my father. “The bitter fruit of experience.”
Our waitress appears and takes our orders (crawfish beignets and iced tea for us both), then stands awkwardly beside the table as though waiting for something. She looks about twenty and, though not quite in Caitlin Masters’s league, is quite lovely. Where Masters is angles and light, the waitress is round and brown and sultry, with the guarded look of the Cajun in her eyes.
“Yes?” Caitlin says, looking up at her.
“Um, I was wondering if Mr. Cage would sign a book for me.”
“Sure,” I tell her. “Do you have one with you?”
“Well—I live over the restaurant.” Her voice is hesitant and terribly self-conscious. “Just temporarily, you know. I have all your books up there.”
“Really? I’d be glad to sign them for you.”
“Thanks a lot. Um, I’ll get your iced tea now.”
As she walks away, Caitlin gives me a wry smile. “What does a few years of that do for your ego?”
“Water off a duck’s back. Let’s start.”
She gives me a look that says, Yeah, right, then picks up her notebook. “So, are you here for a visit, or is this something more permanent?”
“I honestly have no idea. Call it a visit.”
“You’ve obviously been living a life of emotional extremes this past year. Your last book riding high on the best-seller list, your wife dying. How—”
“That subject’s off limits,” I say curtly, feeling a door slam somewhere in my soul.
“I’m sorry.” Her eyes narrow like those of a surgeon judging the pain of a probe. “I didn’t mean to upset you.”
“Wait a minute. You asked on the plane if my wife was traveling with me. Did you know then that she was dead?”
Caitlin looks at the table. “I knew your wife had died. I didn’t know how recently. I saw the ring …” She folds her hands on the table, then looks up, her eyes vulnerable. “I didn’t ask that question as a reporter. I asked it as a woman. If that makes me a terrible person, I apologize.”
I find myself more intrigued than angered by this confession. This woman asked about my wife to try to read how badly I miss her by my reaction. And I believe she asked out of her own curiosity, not for a story. “I’m not sure what that makes you. Are you going to focus on that sort of thing in your article?”
“Absolutely not.”
“Let’s go on, then.”
“What made you stop practicing law and take up writing novels? The Hanratty case?”
I navigate this part of the interview on autopilot, probably learning more about Caitlin Masters than she learns about me. I guessed right about her education: Radcliffe as an undergrad, Columbia School of Journalism for her master’s. Top of the line, all the way. She is well read and articulate, but her questions reveal that she knows next to nothing about the modern South. Like most transplants to Natchez, she is an outsider and always will be. It’s a shame she holds a job that needs an insider’s perspective. The lunch crowd thins as we talk, and our waitress gives such excellent service that our concentration never wavers. By the time we finish our crawfish, the restaurant is nearly empty and a busboy is setting the tables for dinner.
“Where did you get your ideas about the South?” I ask gently.
At last Caitlin adjusts the lapels of her black silk jacket, covering the shadowy edge of aureole that has been visible throughout lunch. “I was born in Virginia,” she says with a hint of defensiveness. “My parents divorced when I was five, though. Mother got custody and spirited me back to Massachusetts. For the next twelve years, all I heard about the South was her trashing it.”
“So the first chance you got, you headed south to see for yourself whether we were the cloven-hoofed, misogynistic degenerates your mother warned you about.”
“Something like that.”
“And?”
“I’m reserving my judgment.”
“That’s kind of you. Do you like Natchez?”
“I do. It’s not sterilized or Disneyfied like Williamsburg. It’s still funky. Gossip, sex, whiskey, and eccentricity, all behind a gossamer veil of Southern gentility.”
I chuckle. “A woman I grew up with decided to move back here after working ten years as a film producer in Los Angeles. When I asked why, she told me she was worried that she was losing her mind, and knew that if she did it in Natchez, no one would notice.”
Caitlin laughs. “That’s exactly it! What about you? Do you like it?”
“That’s like asking someone if they like their mother. I’ve been away for years, but no one who grows up here ever really leaves this town behind.”
She makes a note on her pad. “I was surprised it’s such a haven for gays. But the contrasts are disturbing. You’ve got a real race problem here.”
“So does Los Angeles.”
“But this is a purely white-black race problem.”
“And your paper contributes to it.”
She reddens. “Would you care to elaborate on that?”
“Sure. The Examiner has never dug beneath the surface, never urged people toward their better natures. It was always too afraid to upset the white elite.”
“You think I don’t know that?”
“You talk like you don’t.”
“Trust me, I do. Let me ask you something. I’ve been following local politics pretty closely, and there’s something funny going on.”
“Like?”
“You’d think Shad Johnson, the black candidate, would be making race a major issue, trying to mobilize every black vote.”
“How’s he playing it?”
“He’s not even mentioning race. He’s in the former money capital of the slaveholding South, thirty percent of the black population receives some form of public assistance, and he acts like he’s running for mayor of Utopia. Everything is New South, Brotherhood of Man. He’s running as a Republican, for Christ’s sake.”
“Sounds like a shrewd guy.”
“Will African Americans vote for him if he sucks up to the white vote like that?”
I can’t help but laugh. “If Johnson is the only black man in the race, local blacks will vote for him if he buggers a mule at high noon on the courthouse lawn.”
Two pink moons appear high on Caitlin’s cheeks. “I can’t believe you said that. And I can’t believe Johnson would stand for the way things are. The things I hear around here … sitting in restaurants, riding in cars with people. I’ve heard the N-word a thousand times since I’ve been here.”
“You’d hear it in Manhattan if you rode in the right cars. Look, I’d really rather not get into this. I spent eight years in the Houston courts listening to more bullshit about race than I ever want to hear.”
She shakes her head with apparent disgust. “That’s such a cop-out. Racism is the most important problem in America today.”
“Caitlin, you are a very rich, very white girl preaching about black problems. You’re not the first. Sometimes you have to let people save themselves.”
“And you’re a very white guy putting black men on death row for state-sanctioned murder.”
“Only when they kill people.”
“Only when they kill white people, you mean.”
A surge of anger runs through me, but I force myself to stay silent. There’s nothing to be gained by pointing out that Arthur Lee Hanratty is a white supremacist, or that I once freed a black man who had been mistakenly put on death row by a colleague of mine. You can’t win an argument like this. We stare at each other like two fighters after a flurry of punches, deciding whether to wade in again or rest on the ropes.
“Hanratty’s an exception,” Caitlin says, as though reading my mind.
This lady is dangerous. It may be a cliché, but her anger has brought color to her cheeks and fire into her eyes, and I am suddenly sure that a string of broken hearts lie in the wake of this self-assured young woman.
“I want to understand this, Penn,” she says with utter sincerity. “I need to. I’ve read a hundred books by Southern writers, Southern journalists, everything. And I still don’t get it.”
“That’s because it’s not a Southern problem.”
“Don’t you think the answer must be wrapped up in the South somehow?”
“No. Not the way you think, anyway. It’s been thirty years since the last vestiges of segregation were remedied under the law. And there’s a growing feeling that blacks have done damn little to take advantage of that. That they’ve been given special breaks and blown it every time. That they don’t want an even playing field but their turn on top. White America looks at the Vietnamese, the Irish, the Jews, and they say, ‘What’s the problem with the blacks?’ The resentment you hear around this town is based on that, not on old ideas of superiority.”
“Do you feel that way?”
“I used to. I don’t anymore.”
“Why not?”
“The Indians.”
“Indians? You mean Native Americans?”
“Think about it. Indians are the only minority that’s had as much trouble as blacks. Why? Both races had their cultures shattered by the white man. All the other groups—Irish, Italians, Vietnamese, whatever—may have come here destitute, but they brought one thing with them. Their national identities. Their sense of self. They congregated together in the cities and on the plains, like with like. They maintained their cultural identities—religions, customs, names—until they were secure enough to assimilate. Blacks had no chance to do that. They were stolen from their country, brought here in chains, sold as property. Their families were split, their religion beaten out of them, their names changed. Nothing was left. No identity. And they’ve never recovered.”
“And you parallel that with Native Americans?”
“It’s the same experience, only in reverse. The Indians weren’t stolen from their land, their land was stolen from them. And their culture was systematically destroyed. They’ve never recovered either, despite a host of government programs to help them.”
Caitlin stops writing. “That’s an interesting analogy.”
“If you don’t know who you are, you can’t find your way. There are exceptions, of course. Bright spots. But my point is that whites don’t look at blacks with the right perspective. We look at them like an immigrant group that can’t get its shit together.”
She takes a sip of tea as she processes this perspective. “Does Shad Johnson have the right idea, then? Should Natchez simply sweep its past under the rug and push ahead?”
“For Johnson, it’s the smart line to take. For the town … I don’t know.”
“Please try to answer. I think it’s important.”
“If I do, we go off the record.”
She doesn’t look happy, but she wants her answer. “Okay.”
“Faulkner thought the land itself had been cursed by slavery. I don’t agree.” I pause, feeling the writer’s special frustration at trying to embody moral complexities in words. “Have you ever read Karl Jung?”
“A little, in college. Synchronicity, all that?”
“Jung didn’t try to separate good and evil. He knew that both exist in every human heart. He called the propensity to evil the Shadow. And he believed that trying to deny or repress the Shadow is dangerous. Because it can’t be done. He believed you have to recognize your Shadow, come to grips with it, accept it, and integrate it.”
