Savannah
by Ryan Burden

1

She stood dead still in the center of the crowded station, her wide blue eyes shot with fear. The expression clashed awkwardly against the milk-smooth lines of her childish face.  At the far end of the platform the man who looked like Maxwell was peering absent-mindedly into a trashcan.  His hand kept rising at regular intervals, as though he was preparing to reach in and recover something he’d accidentally tossed.

To the crowd he was a bum, a bit-player in the mildly amusing procession they watched while waiting for their trains.  She wanted to explain it to them—if they only knew what it was to bury someone and find them again not three hours later, digging inexplicably in a train-station trashcan, they wouldn’t look at her with such accusatory stares.  What was to them a common bum was to her a physical reprisal, proof that the complicated exorcism of his funeral had unexpectedly failed her.

The bum cried out, an unintelligible hiccup of joy, and drove both arms deep into the can.  The thought convulsed her, a sudden hemorrhaging of past ignorance: He’s looking for his ticket, the bastard.  She hugged her loaded birkin to her hip and beat a path through the crowd toward the platform, fighting to keep her eyes from the grotesque scene by the trashcan.  When she reached the train she was heaving, bent almost double with the effort of holding her heavy bag up off the floor.  With a blunt, breathless “here,” she jabbed her ticket at the conductor. 

He glanced over her pleasantly, apparently without any notice of her haste.  “Take your bag?” he asked.

“No.”  She headed past him into the cool interior of the car, tossing back an absent-minded “thanks” as she went.  She could feel the conductor’s eyes on her backside, maybe just interested by her struggles with the bag, though she didn’t exactly think so.

It was Sunday, and the train was packed with sun-baked weekenders making their unhappy journey back home.  Most of the children wore bright shirts with pictures of riverboats or stenciled live oak, and many were clutching little green bags of candy from the shops around the market. In June Savannah belonged to these people—the squirrel-eyed inheritors of a proud city gone to seed.  During her three years of marriage they had been an escape, a kind of thoughtless pastime—and she had needed one, too, having been all winter numbed by the constant narrations of a man with nothing to occupy his present but oneiric meditations on the past.  Maxwell, of course, had hated them.  He called them ‘bennys’, and refused to go out at all past their one quiet little block in Mayfair.  But she saw them differently.  She enjoyed their blithe exaggeration of personality, their insane wonder at anything even slightly rare.  For them, it seemed, the past did not exist.  For them there was not even a present; only a future realized with unashamed simplicity in the next crowded bar, the next dimly lit waterfront restaurant.  Even now, with Maxwell and his torturing fondness for personal histories finally laid to rest, she could not think of these tourists without a pang or two of jealous awe.

The people at the front of the car were staring up at her with their heads cocked, amused by the girl in black who had so suddenly appeared in their midst.  With the trained understanding of her age she knew that the man in the gray jacket would ask to take her bag, probably dropping a casual “miss” or even “hon,” as he did it.  She avoided his gaze and struggled on alone to the back of the car.  There was a whole row open next to the toilets, behind a couple of kids and a man in a parachute of a T-shirt who was trying like anything to ignore them.  A boy about her age was already standing by the open seats.  He smiled, a sloppy, Labrador smile.  “Thanks,” she said, then flopped into the middle of the row and looked up at him with mild surprise: Oh, you’re still here?  He cocked his head at her, considered for a moment the tight black dress and the glassy firmness in her eyes, and moved on.  “Take a goddamn picture,” she said. 

After some maneuvering the bag was finally settled on the seat beside her, though her shoulder still ached with the memory of its weight.  She’d had to bring everything with her, a cache that had seemed so small distributed throughout the few large rooms of Maxwell’s house.  She’d thought of leaving it there, to slowly absorb the smell of old man and naphthalene, and molder eventually away along with the creaking furniture and faded curtains.  Her things were all old things, anyway, things that a different person, a timid girl of nineteen, had loved.  But at last the idea of leaving them had struck her as too sentimental, as though the mere thought of them being there would force her to remember her mistake. 

She spent a quick glance to make sure her admirer had gone, then reached into the bag and pulled out a little black notebook.  There was a thin gold pen stuck into the binding and she used this to smooth over the pages, thinking very seriously that this time it would have to start with death.  She told herself that the noisy weekenders had already faded—there was only the clean blank page and her mind, uncomfortably stuffed, like the stinking trashcans along the platform.  She didn’t need to think about Maxwell anymore.  She thought:  He’s not even a ghost to me now.  He’s not even something less than a ghost—he’s just nothing.  The way she imagined the memory of one grey squirrel would be to another.  This she felt very surely.

She turned without thinking to the window, but the bum was gone.  All along the platform the waiting passengers were standing, strangely organized, laid out from door to door in perfect triangular spaces.  They stared back at her disinterestedly, at a face bright as any other young woman’s, though smoothed almost to the absence of feature.  A boy had once told her she had the face of a china-doll, its over-whiteness not merely painted but baked in, before the mold was struck.  She had asked him if he thought a person could really be that way, conceived of all at once and without pre-condition in an instant like lightning hitting sand.  It didn’t matter, he’d said.  “In the end everyone decides for themselves how they want to have been made.  It’s part of free will, I think.  The right to remake your past.”  Without knowing it she had taken this as she’d thought it should be taken:  like a pretty bauble in a shop-window, a curiosity to be glanced at once and then forgotten.

But she remembered it now, as she stared through her reflection at the waiting passengers, lined up neatly like mourners in suspended procession.  She tried to imagine her childhood as a great, ineffable blank—a period of nothingness that stretched backward, starting from the moment she’d turned from her mother’s grave and met Maxwell, and he had asked her on the spot to marry him.  He hadn’t looked old, then, but wise and well-conditioned in a grey suit that matched the silver streaks in his hair.  At that point she really hadn’t thought fifty was that old, but then she hadn’t seen him yet in the shower.  That was when she’d realized her mistake, and she didn’t like to remember it.  Everyone had the right to reinvent their past: After all, you can’t do anything with the future.  The future just comes, exactly as it wants to. 

From the ineffable blank she would awake into his fleshy embrace, clutching at his back and breathing deep the sharp pine scent of his aftershave: If it had been like that, I could have loved him to death.

The whining electric notes of Beethoven’s Fifth.  The kids in the seat in front of her peered over to see what was going on.  She waved them down with some annoyance as she found her phone and flipped it open.  John’s gravelly voice swelled immediately against her ear.  “Mary, It’s John.”

“I know.”

“How are you?”

“All right.  Except the train’s late.  We haven’t even left yet.”

“Oh, good!”  he spouted, but recovered quickly, returning to his respectful, solace-in-the-face-of-adversity voice.  “I know you want to get away—as you should—but I thought I’d better let you know that it might be in your interest to come back to the house, at least for tonight.”

“Why?” she said.  “Did they put him in the wrong hole?” 

There was a moment of silence on John’s end.  “Um, no, it’s just that I’m here with the lawyer—I don’t know his name—in any case it looks like Max left you something, after all.  Kind of a lot, actually.”

It only took her a few seconds to think this through: Just money.  They can wire it.  “So can’t I just talk to him on the phone?” she said.  “I don’t really get why I have to talk to him at all.  Just wire it.”

“Well, yes we could do that, if you’d like.  I know this is hard for you, but you have to understand I’m trying to protect your interests.”

“Thank you.”

“They’re talking about a nephew in California—some hotshot bastard.”  She’d known about the nephew, a man in his mid-twenties, just a few years older than she was.  Maxwell had shown her pictures, once, that he’d had to dig out of a rotten old chest under the cellar stairs.  He’d been in some foreign school when she and Max had married, learning to be a missionary, or mercenary, or something like that.  She remembered that he had looked very good in the pictures.  She had lain awake that night thinking of how it would feel to be a missionary’s wife.

“It doesn’t matter, does it?” she asked.  “I mean, he has a right to something.  Can’t we just split it?”

There was a brief silence on the other end, as he appeared to give this proposal serious thought.  “Not unless you were married,” he said then.  “Or unless he agreed to it, which I doubt he would.  People aren’t that generous, usually.”  There was an unmistakable waver of regret in his voice.  She guessed it had something to do with her leaving, but was too far removed now to feel anything in return.

“Well I can’t come now,” she said.  “My Dad’s waiting for me.”  She played it in her head once first, to get a feel for how it should sound, and then said, “I’m sure you can take care of anything.  I mean, anything that comes up while I’m gone.  Am I right?”

For a moment there was only the snowy muffled sound of his hand on the receiver.  “All right, Mary.  You’re right.  I knew I shouldn’t be bothering you with this so soon, but the damn lawyer was pushing me—making it seem urgent.  Look, don’t worry about a thing.  I’ll do everything I can.”

“219 Coleman,” she said.  “In case you need me.”  With a brief shudder and a general commotion from the scattered tourists, the train began to move.  People on the platform blurred together and vanished, giving way to the dust-and-gravel yards, the sloped red roofs of the section houses along the track.  The kid with the Labrador smile was staring at her again from a few rows up.  It was three or four hours to Charleston, depending on how many more times they were delayed, and she didn’t feel much like making enemies.  This time, she just moved over by the window and tried to ignore it. 

When she had gotten home from Max’s funeral there had been a note from John waiting, along with a worn-out copy of Dubliners.  Both had been placed carefully at the foot of her bed, winking up at her with unmistakable intent:  He’s making himself welcome even before the old stud is buried.  She had, on occasion, flirted with John in Max’s presence.  She’d thought it was harmless, just a game, a way of keeping her muscles stretched and her young mind sharp.  Besides, they were old men; neither had seemed uncomfortable and so she hadn’t thought that it could do her any harm.  She imagined that for them sex was just a fond memory, recalled with the same grim nostalgia they attached to the memories of outhouses and killing chickens on Sunday.  It would seem noble and sincere in the graduated light of reminiscence, but not something that you’d want to return to.  Of course they knew that cold reality—real presence—would make it just as unbearable as it had been in the past.

The smell of the paper-mill was like that.  It was strange that, as a child, she’d hardly noticed it.  It was something she’d been born into, like the worn-leather touch of her father’s hands, the moldering wood-and-plaster scent of her first home, mingled in a permeating though disassociated way with the fecund smell of the salt-marshes breezing through her bedroom window; like the fetid rot-gut stench of her mother’s dying breath.  That one was not a memory that could be recreated, as she guessed that some weren’t.  As the speakers called out stations for Charleston she tried to block out the smell of the mills with her hand, telling herself that she only needed time to get used to it.

 

2

Her father was waiting for her in the little L-shaped room that stuck off the kitchen, a room he had built all of glass from an online kit and that he would not quit calling his greenhouse.  He had been asleep when she entered, and was just extracting himself from an uncomfortable-looking steel and black leather armchair.  The chair had come with the house, abandoned by the previous tenant in the exact center of the room, like a perky flight attendant welcoming him to the cool, controlled cabin of a bachelor’s life.  “Mary,” he yawned.  “You didn’t tell me the train would be late.  I was getting worried.”

“You don’t look worried,” she said.

“Well, you’re here now, aren’t you.”  He was happy to see her, the way he would have been happy with pot roast for dinner.  Suddenly, without even the usual cursory sting to let her know that it was coming, Mary began to cry. 

While it lasted she had the incredible sense that it was not she who was crying, but someone else—a whole separate person with her own thoughts, her own desires, fears, and sadnesses.  She felt ashamed without knowing why.  She could look down on it objectively and see that it was a kind of grief, a sudden awakening of emotion that had been with her, dormant, long before the train, long before she stood beside her husband’s grave and wondered why she felt nothing.  And though she told herself it had nothing to do with Maxwell: Because he’s gone, now, not even a ghost; she knew that his death had awakened it, so that it stood now in a clear place in the dim twilight of her soul, where she could see its shape, if not yet its substance.

Her father was at her breast, holding her close to him, valiantly trying to sibilate her away into silence.  When he saw that her tears wouldn’t stop he said, “I’m sorry I couldn’t be there.  I wanted to, but you know there was just too much… anyway, he was a good man, Mary.  Everybody says so.”  He sniffed hard and strained out, “It takes some time to get away from the past.”  To Mary this seemed a very smooth addition, almost unconscious, the way her mind might fill in the question mark at the end of a sentence.  A moment later she thought:  Not for me, it doesn’t.  For her there was no Maxwell left besides the one in her little black notebook, a Maxwell trapped there on the page, where she could re-visit or discard him as she liked. 

“Hell,” he said, trying anything now to lighten the mood, “an old billy-goat like that with a girl like you, at least you know he died happy!”

Mary immediately quit crying and stared up at him, appalled.  He wore the same Labrador smile as the boy on the train:  Not even a goddamn weekender, just a stupid kid trying like hell to play with the big-boy’s toys.  “Shut up,” she whispered, and pushed aside the sudden pain.  It would have to be faced, and probably soon, but she couldn’t do it here.  Not in her father’s arms.

“I’m sorry,” she said, but the other person was still inside her, pushing out silent tears.  “Too little sleep, I guess.” 

He laughed, obviously happy now that the crisis had passed.  “There ya go!” he exclaimed amiably.  “You know, when your mother died—it’s terrible that I’m laughing at it, but you know—some things are like that.  I get emotional and I guess I laugh instead of screaming.  Anyway, I must’ve slept fifteen hours a day for a month.”

“Sounds healthy.”

He smiled ruefully and waved her off.  “They say all that crap about escape and repression—it helped me.  Your brain does more than you think, you know, when you’re asleep.”

“And it doesn’t even feel like work.”

“Nope.  Listen, Beth set up the guest room for you.  I’ll see you in the morning though, right?  Pancakes on me.” 

She pushed him away from her so she could wipe the drying tears off her eyes.  “Yeah, seeya then,” she said.  He kept on smiling and moved away toward his chair, and she didn’t even think to ask until she was halfway out the door. 

“You going somewhere tonight?”

He’d picked up his magazine again and was flipping idly through it, looking for where he’d left off.  “Well, I wasn’t planning on it, since you’re here.  But then Beth surprised me with tickets to see Aide-Memoire.  It’s one of those ‘local artist’ types, I think.”

“Andre Nast,” she informed him.

“I’m sorry, babe, it was too late to cancel.  I guess it worked out, though, since you’re tired anyway.”  As though he’d had a sudden thought, he dropped the magazine and screwed his watch up under his nose.  “Shit!” he said, “I guess I’d better get going, actually.”

The afternoon light filling the greenhouse had gone a dull red.  It glanced softly off the polished side-table and made her father’s bare teeth strange to look at.  She turned away and was caught, for a moment, by the fake wood paneling that covered his workbench; its knotty grain like the elongated eddies of a blocked stream.  It was then she realized just how long it had been since she had stood here, holding back tears, loving and hating at once.

 

3

The stale salt smell of the sea.  It had come to her like this, sometimes, in Savannah—dropping in through her bedroom window like an exhausted traveler, somewhat worn by the journey but still exuding the old, invincible odor of home.  She woke all at once, automatically searching herself for some lingering retainer of the shame she had felt the night before.  The episode itself had shamed her; she didn’t like to cry, hated to let her emotions run away from her like a stupid schoolgirl, and she hated it most when she did it in front of her father, who was always so calm.  She lay in bed and searched her mind like a trash heap, desperate to find nothing but the usual collection—half-discarded insecurities, petty grudges and gnawing self-doubts.  After a good five minutes of this she was more unhappy than she had been, but comforted that she’d come up empty-handed.  And on the outside there was just the soft rise and fall of her chest as she breathed the soft sea air, and the invigorating sense of starting fresh. 

She showered quickly and went to answer the small, still call of frying bacon that was trailing upstairs from the kitchen.  He was standing close to the crackling stove, flipping pancakes.  As a rule her father didn’t cook much, and it occurred to her that this was only the second time in her life that she’d seen him make pancakes.  The first had been the day after her mother died.  Mary was ten at the time and had only hazy memories of the burial, but she remembered the morning after well.

“How was the play?” she asked. 

He turned calmly from the pan and winked.  He’d looked sick, then—what she’d thought was sadness but knew now had more likely been a bad hangover.  He’d made her a stack of pancakes tall enough for a black-dirt farmer and after he set them down he just stood there staring at her for a while, with his eyes real wide like he might be about to pass out.

“You know how they are around here.  All bark and no bite.”

“Did Beth say that?”

And after he’d stared at her like that for a long time he leaned forward, slowly, across her pancakes and kissed her on the mouth, holding for a second or two until she started to get annoyed by the sand-paper scratch of his stubble against her lips.

He shot her a cool glance over his shoulder.  “Yes, she did.  Does that make it any less true?”

“I didn’t say it wasn’t true.”

“I was about to suggest you go see it sometime.  Apart from the acting, it’s a damn good play.”  He turned quickly and shoved a plate full of bacon and eggs across the table.  “Pancakes, too.  Be ready in a minute.”

Then he had just pulled away and gone back into the kitchen, still with that gone look in his eyes like a man who is remembering very hard.  Even then Mary had been pretty sure he didn’t remember doing it.  But in a strange way, it had helped.

“I’m not hungry,” she said.  Normal cakes, she thought: that’s what they are, just a swell Sunday morning, despite.

“You have to eat at least two.  They’re already in the pan.”  She shrugged and started in on the bacon.  “There’s another showing tonight.  You should take Sammy Horowitz.  He asks about you.”

“Sammy Horowitz?  I thought he was in jail.” 

 “Just county for a summer.  He’s a banker or some crap, now.  Asks about you all the time.”

She pushed a slice of bacon to the other side of the plate, then pushed it back again.  Through the steam coming up off the stove her father looked a little like the ancient, mischievous ghost in Nast’s play.  She’d seen it a year ago in Savannah with a tourist-boy she’d allowed to follow her in.  There wasn’t much of it she remembered, but it was strange that, at the time, she’d been struck by how much the actor playing the ghost reminded her of her father. 

This thought brought the sadness back, suddenly as before, a whining, soul-crushed little girl crying up at her from the darkness.  This time she managed to keep from crying, struck silent by the possibility that there were hundreds of these little ‘switches’ scattered throughout her brain, all wired together since long before the train and now, by some mysterious, unexpected connection, all positively humming with current.

“You know Dad, I did think about leaving him,” she said.  Her father kept scraping at his pancakes, and she saw that it hadn’t had the effect she’d been hoping for.  “Well, you didn’t,” he said simply. 

“No.  I was used to it, I guess.”

“Used to it?  I don’t know how you could have gotten used to it.”  He still worked calmly away at his pancakes.  “You were young and you made a mistake.  That’s all of it.”

“Maybe,” she said.  He grunted, as though in agreement.  “I’m going to take a shower,” he said.  “Eat your pancakes.”

“Dad?”

He was already halfway up the stairs, the last chewed-looking, half-burnt pancakes dashed aside next to the sink.  “Oh, there’s a message for you.  I think it’s a lawyer or something.”  He was looking into her, feeling her out the way he used to do when she was little and tried to lie.  For a second she was scared he’d try to kiss her again, and consciously this time.  But he only stared a moment, then turned and made his melancholy exit.

 

4

The lobby of the Commodore’s Inn was surprisingly new for a hotel that had been built ten years before Sherman.  Mary would have been happy for this, but behind the Zippo-polished brass and spring fresh carpets she could smell the long history scrubbed clean—a leather and antiseptic smell that reminded her of her of a psychiatrist’s office. 

John saw her immediately from the bar, where he’d been sitting quiet as a model in the pale light of a banker’s lamp.  He crossed the long green carpet and greeted her with a hesitant kiss, apparently unaware that she accepted it not because she wanted to, but because she didn’t care.  It was just flesh on flesh, after all, and she had grown used to that, too.

“I don’t want you to think I followed you up here,” he began, “Well, I did follow you.  But I don’t want you to think I followed you for the wrong reasons.”

She had a date that night with Sammy Horowitz.  It had been Mrs. Horowitz who answered the phone, and when she found out who was calling Mary had noticed a distinct note of disapproval in her voice, the kind that would probably have led to the dull thud and hum of a dead line if Sam had been just a few years younger.  She didn’t like to think of herself as naive, but for a moment Mary honestly didn’t know what she had done.  It wasn’t until Sam picked up and said in the beer-soaked, river-rat drawl she’d blissfully forgotten, “Mary Bennett!  You sure Daddy won’t be mad?” that she’d known he didn’t mean her father.  And for the first time in nearly five years she had felt like the one obsessed, the shy little girl scribbling furious hearts in a tattered notebook but never daring to write a name. 

It was the same unaccustomed embarrassment that overwhelmed her now, in the shade of John’s sweet, toothy grandpa-smile.  Only this time she didn’t know why.

“And what would those be?” she asked.  Her lips felt heavy as she twisted them into a firm smile.

“I mean, Mary, that you stand to inherit a good deal of money.  Not a fortune, or anything, but still nothing to scoff at.”  He let go of her and looked away toward where the Commodore’s staff was setting out breakfast.  He was suddenly nervous, his gaze rapt and distant, as though he envied their carelessness.  “Look at me,” he said, “I’m acting like a goddamn kid.”

Mary laughed—she couldn’t help it—but it seemed to put him a little more at ease. 

“Mary, I came here to ask you something, and when I ask you I don’t want you to think it has anything to do with money.  I’m comfortable enough, I don’t need anything—monetarily.”

It hadn’t really surprised her when Sam said he hated plays.  She’d never pegged him for the theatre-type, and hadn’t banked on the saving graces of a prison Shakespeare troupe.  But when she’d told him why she’d come back he said yes anyway, muttering something apologetic about how his grandma died the year before, so he knew how she felt.  At that point Mary knew she would be paying, but it didn’t really matter.  All she had wanted in the first place was a night like summer in Savannah, some mild amusement and a clean hotel room where she didn’t have to think about who she was with: just flesh on flesh and nothing at all in-between. 

John cleared his throat loudly.  One of the hotel staff started. 

“I’m sorry,” she said.  “Just spaced.” 

“I know you loved Maxwell,” he said, taking this just the way he wanted to.  She didn’t bother to break in.  “I loved him too, of course.  It’s difficult but—through that love, I think, I came to love you, Mary.”  He knew he was rolling, now, no turning back.  As though it were a scripted shift, he switched on the unwavering, pragmatic stare.  It was the same stare that Maxwell had used at her mother’s funeral:  And that is the problem, she thought.  The tourists are always there when you need them, but you just can’t count on something like this.  You can’t just call it up whenever you want to. 

“It’s an awkward situation, I know,” he continued.  “I wish I hadn’t loved you, sometimes.  I used to go out after seeing you and tell myself I’d find someone new—someone to take my mind away so you and Maxwell could be happy, and never have to know.  But then that’s just the way it was.  I hid it for Maxwell, of course.  He would have done the same for me.  But now—at my age there really isn’t time to wait out grief, Mary.  I think Max would have understood.  It takes a long time to—well, to be ready again, and men like me just don’t have that time to take.  Can you understand that?”

Mary nodded childishly.  Sammy Horowitz was probably out buying a fifth of sugary wine and a box of off-brand condoms.  He was probably telling the clerk, who would be an old friend, about the Bennett girl who was finally ready for a real man. 

John was still talking, leading up slowly but in a sure and confident manner to the inevitable question, the one he’d come all the way from Savannah to ask: Because he thinks he doesn’t have much time left.  She stepped forward and put a light hand against his chest.  She had it dead center and the flesh felt soft and dry.  Beneath it his heart went on thudding with strong and steady beats, so different from the weekend boys with their fluttering, panting hearts, like excited dogs. 

“Just let me go get my bag,” she said.

He was stayed for a moment by this interruption, his mouth hanging half-open and his eyes all clouded over.  But he recovered like the man that he was, in a quick thud of forced acceptance.  “Mary, I came here to say something to you.  Now you have to let me say it.”

“No.”  Her voice was flat and uncaring.  “The answer is yes, John.  Just please, don’t say it.”

He nodded slowly, obviously confused but just as obviously believing it was enough that she had said yes.  She wondered briefly if she would be standing in much the same place three years further on, perhaps watching his ghost pick through the chewed-over leavings of a continental breakfast.

 

RYAN BURDEN is a still-aspiring writer from Charleston, SC (by way of NJ). This is his fourth short story publication, along with work currently appearing in The Quills Quarterly and The Legendary.

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