On the day of my husband's annual fund-raising gala, I
was down by the river liberating rats.
There were two of
them on this day, massive, stolid, blunt-snouted beasts who bore no more
resemblance to common house mice than beavers, or the nutria from the
bayous of my childhood. Rattus rattus they were, or, more familiarly,
European black rats. I looked them up in Webster's Unabridged when
Pom first designated me their official executioner. I figured that if
you're going to drown something, the least you can do is know its proper
name. That was a fatal mistake. Name something, the old folk saying goes,
and you have made it your own. Rattus rattus became mine the instant
I closed Webster's, and after that I simply took the victims caught
in Pom's traps down to the river and, instead of drowning them, let them
go. Who, after all, would know? Only the dogs went with me, and, being
bird dogs, they were uninterested in anything without wings. The leaden-footed,
trundling rats were as far from the winged denizens of God's bestiary
as it was possible to be. My hideous charges waddled to freedom unmolested.
There were two and
three of them a day in those first steaming days of June. Pom was delighted
with the humane traps. The poison put down by the exterminating company
had worked even better, but the rats had all died in the walls and for
almost a month before we tried the traps the house smelled like a charnel
house, sick-sweet and pestilential. We'd had to cancel several meetings
and a dinner party. The exterminators had promised that the rats would
all go outside to die, but none of them had, and Pom was furious with
both man and beast.
"Why the hell aren't
they going outside?" he said over and over.
"Would you, if you
could die in a nice warm pile of insulation?" I said. "Why on earth did
either of us believe they'd go outside? Why would they? They probably
start to feel the pain almost immediately. They're not going to run a
10K with arsenic in their guts."
I hated the poisoning.
I hated the thought of the writhing and the squeaking and scrabbling and
dying. I never actually heard it, but somehow that was even worse. My
mind fashioned grand guignol dances of death nightly behind my Sheetrock.
I took to leaving the radio on softly all night, in fear that I would
hear. The only result of that was that I would come awake at dawn with
my heart jolting when the morning deejay started his drive-time assault
and would lie there blearily for long seconds, wondering if it had been
the phone I heard, or Pom's beeper, or Glynn calling, or some new banshee
alarm from Mommee upstairs. Only when I had listened for a couple of minutes
did it sink in that I was hearing Fred the Undead blasting Atlanta out
of bed and onto the road.
As early as I wakened
on those mornings, Pom was invariably up earlier and was almost always
gone to the clinic by the time I padded into the kitchen in search of
coffee. I would find his usual note propped up against the big white Braun
coffeemaker: "Merritt: 3 more, 2 in lv. rm. and 1 in libr. Call A. about
Fri, I think there's something. Blue blazer in cleaners? Worm capsules,
2 @. Mommee restless last night, check and call me. Home late, big bucks
in town. See you A.M. if not P.M. XXX, P."
Translated, this
meant there were three new captives in the rat traps, and I was to dispatch
them in the river. Then I was to call his secretary, Amy Crittenden, who
loved him with the fierce, chaste passion of the middle-aged office wife,
and see what our plans were for Friday evening; Pom frequently made social
arrangements for us and forgot to tell me, so Amy became a willing go-between.
I liked and valued her and seldom chafed at her fussy peremptoriness,
though I was not above a moment's satisfaction when I was able to say,
"Oh, Amy, he's forgotten we have plans for Friday. You really need to
check with me first." Then I was to locate his blue blazer and fetch it
from the cleaners if it was there, which meant that the Friday mystery
evening was casual and funky, like a rib dinner down in the Southwest
part of the city, to show the flag in the affluent black community there.
Much of Pom's clinic's work was done in and for the black communities
south of downtown, and he endured the socializing as coin that paid for
the free clinical work that was his passion. Pom was as impatient with
the River Club as he was with the rib dinner, but knew better than anyone
the necessity for both. In the twenty years that the network of Fowler
clinics had been in operation, he had become a consummate fund-raiser.
He was an eloquent speaker, a tireless listener to fragile egos, and without
vanity himself, a rare thing indeed in a physician. The day his board
of directors and auxiliary discovered this was the day that he began to
move, imperceptibly at first, out of the office and onto the hustings.
Because he was unwilling to surrender even a moment of what he considered
his real work, diagnosing and healing the poor, he solved the conflict
by simply getting up earlier and earlier to get to the clinic and coming
home later and later. Now, two decades later, I virtually never saw him
by morning light and often not by lamplight, either. Of course he didn't
have time to get his blue blazer out of the cleaners; of course I would
do it for him. It was in our contract, his and ours. He would care for
the poor and the sick; I would care for him and our family. If this grew
tedious at times, I had only to remind myself that Pom and I were in a
partnership beyond moral reproach. Caretaking, any sort of caretaking,
was my hot button. The smallest allegation of moral slipshoddiness was
my Achilles' heel.
Next, the note bade
me give the two bird dogs who lived in the run down by the river their
worm capsules, two each. Samson and Delilah were liver-spotted setters,
rangy and lean and sleek, seeming always to vibrate with nerves and energy
and readiness. Pom had grown up bird hunting with his father, the Judge,
on a vast South Georgia timber plantation, and he thought to take the
sport up again when we bought the house on the river five years before,
so he kept a brace of hounds in the river run at all times. But he had
yet to get back out into the autumn fields with them, even though he belonged
to an exclusive hunting club over in South Carolina, on the Big Pee Dee
River. He did not spend much time with the dogs, and did not want me to
make pets of them. It spoiled them for hunting, he said, and it wasn't
as if they were neglected or abused. Their quarters were weatherproof
and sumptuous, their runs enormous, and he ran them for a couple of hours
on weekends, or had me do it, if he couldn't. Besides, they were littermates,
brother and sister, and they had each other for company. I will take them
the pills in late afternoon when I decant the rats, I would think. Then
I can spend some time with them and no one will be the wiser.
It had not yet struck
me, at the beginning of that summer, how much of my time was spent doing
things about which no one was the wiser.
Mommee restless:
Nothing ambiguous about that. Glynnis Parsons Fowler spent her entire
married life in her big house on the edge of the great plantation and
ruled her husband, sons, and household help with an iron hand in the lace
mitt of a perennial wiregrass debutante. As far as I know she was never
called Glynnis in her life; her adoring Papa called her Punkin, her sons
called her Mommee, and her husband Little Bit, but despite the cloying
nicknames and her diminutive stature, she was a formidable presence always.
Even now, ten years widowed and five years into Alzheimer's, two of them
spent under our roof, she ruled, only now with mania instead of will and
wiles. A restless night meant muttering and shuffling around her room
at all hours, which Pom, no matter how weary, never failed to hear and
I, no matter how well rested, seldom did. The note meant that he had had
to get up and calm her again, and I whose task this was, had not . . .
again. I knew that Pom had no thought of shaming me about this. The shame
I felt was born entirely within me. I should have heard her. I will spend
the morning with her, I would think, and Ina can go for the groceries
and dry cleaning.
Finally, the note
told me that someone with the potential for major financial support for
the clinic was in town, and Pom was wining and dining him, and might be
taking him somewhere afterwards for a nightcap. Many of the clinic's benefactors
were from the smaller cities across the South, and liked to see what they
thought of as the bright lights of the big city when they came to Atlanta.
Not infrequently, that meant one of the glossier nude dancing clubs over
on Cheshire Bridge Road. The first time Pom had come in very late from
one of those evenings I whooped with helpless laughter.
"Oh, God, I can just
see you with huge silicone boobs on each side of your face, hanging over
your ears," I choked. "Even better, I can see you with huge silicone boobs
over your ears and half an inch of five o'clock shadow, glaring out from
the front page of the Atlanta Constitution. 'Prominent physician
caught in raid on unlicensed nude dancing club.' What would Amy say?"
Excerpted from Fault Lines © Copyright 2009 by Anne Rivers Siddons. Reprinted with permission by HarperCollins. All rights reserved.
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