Tempting Fate

Joe nodded. “Yes, ma’am.”

“You ask Naomi Hazen if she wants you to go.”

“It’s Mr. Witt who’s sick—”

“And it’s Mrs. Hazen who’ll have to live with the consequences of what you do—whether her sister decides to come home or whether she doesn’t.”

So that evening Joe and Zeke walked over to West Main Street, and Naomi met them on the porch and she didn’t say she wanted them to go to New York and she didn’t say she didn’t want them to go. Which was good enough for Joe. The next morning he and Zeke packed up his Chevy and headed north.

As he walked on the cracked sidewalks of his childhood, Zeke could hear Joe’s laugh, and for the first time in years it sounded real and alive and immediate to him. It was as if his brother were there with him, not as the man he’d become—a man Zeke didn’t know—but as the boy he’d been, another boy’s big brother, idolized and imperfect.

He’d come to the West Main Street branch of the Cedar Springs Free Public Library. Jackson Witt’s father had donated the land for the building not long after he’d helped the town establish a pure-water supply after an outbreak of typhoid fever in 1904. Jackson himself had left the library a hefty endowment. The dirt wasn’t settled good over his grave when Naomi carted down the oil portrait he’d had painted of himself and donated it to the library, not, Zeke had always felt, out of generosity, but because she couldn’t stand to keep it hanging in her house.

Inside, the library smelled as it always had, of musty books and polished wood. Zeke found himself glancing around for a gawky kid in jeans and dangling shirttail, looking to books as a way out of his poverty and isolation. Go for it, Joe had always told him. Do some good in the world.

He had wanted to.

“May I help you?” the middle-aged woman behind the oak desk asked. She sounded tentative. Zeke suddenly realized he must look even more tight-lipped and grim than usual. And hot. The air-conditioning was set a notch below sweltering.

He tried to smile. “Thank you, but I can find my way.”

A hint of his old middle Tennessee accent had worked its way into his voice. The woman seemed somewhat reassured. He went to the local-history section, just across from Jackson Witt’s portrait above the fireplace. On one shelf were a Bible signed by Andrew Jackson and a pair of boots reputedly worn by Davy Crockett. Below them, in a locked glass box, was the red-feathered hat Mattie Witt had worn in The Gamblers. Some newcomer to town had bought it on auction and donated it to the library. There was also a copy of two unauthorized biographies of her famous sister.

On the bottom shelf—Zeke had to kneel—was the flag, properly folded, that had draped Joe Cutler’s coffin. Naomi had taken it after the funeral when Zeke didn’t want it.

He rubbed his fingers over the coarse fabric.

Twenty years later, and he still missed his brother.

“We’re not like other folks, brother. We never will be.”

Even in Cedar Springs the Cutler brothers hadn’t been like anybody else. They were a couple of country boys whose daddy had died when a tractor fell over on him when Zeke was a year old, and whose mama did the best she could, working overtime at the mill.

After Saratoga, Joe had enlisted in the army. After he shipped out to basic, their mother cut herself so badly on the card machine at the mill that she’d bled to death before Doc Hiram could get to her. He’d cried when he told Zeke, who’d just turned fifteen. Joe came home on emergency leave but went back, convinced the best way—the only way—he could help his younger brother was to stay in the army. Zeke went to live with a second cousin, and Joe wrote to him every week; every week Zeke wrote back, and Naomi Hazen and Doc Hiram were there for him, too, all through high school.

He’d failed them all. Joe, Naomi, Doc. And himself.

Two weeks after Zeke had started Vanderbilt on scholarship, Joe Cutler was killed in Beirut. He was just twenty-three years old.

On the shelf next to the flag was the slim volume that had come out after his death. Zeke picked it up. The book had won a Pulitzer Prize. It was the story of a solid southern boy who’d become a soldier with good intentions, then was “corrupted,” transformed by a system and a world he didn’t understand. The book explained how Joe Cutler had taken a stupid risk, disobeyed orders and got his men and himself killed. He hadn’t lived up to his own expectations of heroism. His story was all the more searing and memorable for its banality, depicting an ordinary soldier who’d lost faith in his country, his men, himself.

Had that downward spiral started in Saratoga?

Quint Skinner, the man who wrote Joe’s story, was himself an army veteran and had served with Joe, considered him a friend. Skinner had tried to interview Zeke at Vanderbilt. They’d ended up in a fistfight, and not long after Zeke quit Vanderbilt altogether.

Worse was giving up the dream he’d had of his brother, the dream of what he’d wanted to do for Joe when he came home, of repaying him for all he’d sacrificed. How he’d wanted them to be real brothers again. But maybe that was every brother’s dead dream.

The book’s presence on the library shelf next to the flag had to be Naomi’s doing. She’d believed in Joe Cutler as much as Zeke had, and maybe she still did. But he could hear her say she also believed in truth and fairness.

On his way out, Zeke stopped at a big clay pot on the library steps and plucked a marigold, its orange color as deep and dark as the center of a Tennessee summer sunset. He wondered if somewhere beyond the subdivisions and fast-food chains two brothers were out on the creek fishing for their supper, waiting for the sun to go down so they could light their campfire and tell ghost stories and pretend they wanted to be men.

He climbed the steps onto Naomi’s front porch. She was in a rocking chair, crocheting as she watched the cars go by. She glanced at him but didn’t say a word.

He tossed the crumpled marigold blossom over the porch rail. His shirt had stuck to his back, and he picked up the picture and the envelope with the blackmail letter in it and tucked them into his back pocket.

“I shouldn’t have written,” Naomi said.

“You did the right thing.” He tried to smile to reassure her but couldn’t. “I don’t know if there’ll be anything there for me to find at this late date, but I’ll go to Saratoga.”

She started to say something, stopped, and finally just nodded as she slowly, almost painfully with her gnarled fingers, continued to crochet.

Three

Mattie Witt could feel the high ozone levels of the summer city air in her sinuses as she sat on the front steps of her Greenwich Village town house. Her whole face ached, even her teeth. New York was so damn hot in August. She’d read that in the old days people from the southern end of Manhattan would come to Greenwich Village during the summer to escape yellow fever. At least that was no longer the case.

She neatened her skirt around her knees. Her long, loose broadcloth dress reminded her of long-ago summers in Tennessee, when the heat—there’d been no air conditioners and precious few fans—had never bothered her. The warm brick step ground into her bottom. She walked forty-five minutes every morning but at eighty-two didn’t have the muscle tone she’d once had.

Across the street a woman chatting with the mailman spotted Mattie and waved. It was an effort, but Mattie waved back. Normally by late afternoon her front steps would be crowded with friends and neighbors, indulging in the time-honored Greenwich Village tradition of stoop-sitting. Today they seemed to sense her need to be alone and stayed away.

The woman went through her courtyard to the back entrance of her building. The mailman continued on his way. In the many years since Mattie had left Hollywood and moved east, she had come to love the crooked tree-lined streets of Greenwich Village, with their brick town houses and lamplights and long history. She appreciated the variety of people there—artists, actors, writers, doctors, bankers, garbage collectors, drunks, nurses, students, secretaries—and the tradition of tolerance, independence and nonconformity. Everyone knew her, the aging movie star who’d introduced generations of Greenwich Village kids to the fun of kite flying. It was no big deal that she was a film legend. There were other legends in the neighborhood.

But in her heart, no matter what she did or where she went or how long she stayed away, home for Mattie would always be Cedar Springs, Tennessee.

She could feel the warm air on her face, the pressure of her inflamed sinuses.

Dani, Dani. What am I going to do?

Her granddaughter’s sheer, stubborn, incorrigible Pembroke nature worried Mattie. Dani would have to find out where that damn key had come from, how it had gotten onto the rocks.

But perhaps she should.

One of Dani’s friends in New York had stopped by with the article on her and Pembroke Springs and groaned as she’d handed it to Mattie. “Couldn’t she have taken a shower first?” But overall it was a good piece. Dani was as unpretentious and as totally honest as ever. Maybe she wasn’t as smooth and as prepared as she could have been, but her energy shone through every quote.

But those gate keys…

Feeling stiff and old, Mattie climbed slowly to her feet. She had to use the rail. She went back inside, where a ceiling fan, much like the one she remembered in her father’s house in Cedar Springs, helped keep her front room cool. She’d pulled the drapes to keep out the hot sun. The room seemed dark, crowded, too much like the Witt front parlor on West Main Street a thousand miles—a thousand years—away. Mattie concentrated on the roses and Prussian blue of her decor, colors her father would never have chosen. She caught her breath before going upstairs.

In her small feminine bedroom she sat on the edge of her four-poster bed. A lace-curtained window overlooked the hidden garden behind her town house, where she spent many peaceful, solitary hours among her roses, hollyhocks, morning glories and asters. She had a good life here. Few regrets.

She opened the old Bible on her bedstand. Even before she could talk, her father had taught her his favorite psalms. She remembered them all. They were a part of her. On dark nights they’d come to her, sometimes in her mother’s almost-forgotten voice, or Naomi’s, even her father’s. Never in the voice of the child she’d been. It was as if that girl had never existed.

With a trembling hand she set aside the obituary of her father from the Cedar Springs Democrat that Joe Cutler had sent her, and the letter she’d received from his commanding officer telling her of Joe’s death three years later, because Joe had asked him to. That was before Quint Skinner, that snake, had written his book.

She came to the photograph Joe had taken of Lilli and herself going up in the balloon that warm, clear August night. “I thought you’d want it,” he’d written.

Mattie switched on her clock radio, just to have something to listen to. Frank Sinatra was singing.

“There’s nothing romantic between Nick and me,” Lilli had assured her mother-in-law during their balloon ride over Saratoga. “I’m not infatuated with him or anything like that—it’s just that no one understands me the way he does.”