The Day's Heat

By Roberta George

 

Set in the early sixties against the backdrop of impending national integration, the novel follows Lee James, a dark-skinned, Catholic, Lebanese girl who comes to a small south Georgia town.

Lee has already seen the partiality shown her younger, fairer sister Ray, and experienced prejudice even in the Catholic church that she dutifully attends with her two daughters, who both have their father's blonde hair and blue eyes.

She must confront the prejudices of her husband's family and the community toward her nationality and religion, at a time when there were no birth control pills, no internet, no cell phones, and when a woman's place was in the home. Lee struggles with her own growth as a wife, mother, and an individual in an unfavourable place and time.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Impress Books
• Release date: Sep 9, 2021
• ISBN: 9781911293309

Book preview

Chapter 1

We who have borne the burden of the day’s heat.

Matthew 20:12

Well, well, Jezebel, Lee thought. You’ve done it again.

Determined to keep her eyes on the street, determined to be a conscientious driver—after all, three-year-old Lilith was in the backseat—Lee kept both hands on the steering wheel of the ’55 Plymouth. The small white school bus, with the name St. Anthony’s plastered on its side, had already picked up Cassie at 7:30 a.m. So now, at 9:00, Lee was driving past the boxy stucco houses, past the rectangular ranch-style brick veneers, and across Ashley Street, the one busy intersection in Strickland, Georgia. She recited out loud:

There was a little girl,

Who had a little curl,

Right in the middle

of her forehead.

And when she was good,

She was very, very good,

And when she was bad,

no period—no period.

The last line, the no period, no period part of the doggerel version of the nursery rhyme repeated over and over in her mind. The verse, the odd horror of someone else’s predicament, seen some eight years ago written on the back of a bathroom door of Mount De Sales Academy, echoed like an irritating commercial ditty.

In the backseat, Lill, who had been chanting the verse all along, sang it correctly: And when she was bad, she was horrid.

Lee took one hand off the steering wheel and slid it down over her right breast, down over her waist and stomach, stopping just above the rise of her pubic bone. She pushed her fingers deep into the flesh, her fingernails bending, to feel the rounded, soft-hard lump that had formed in the last few days, and then felt back up to her waist. Thicker already, she thought, and her breasts felt fuller, too, exactly as described in The Mother’s Handbook: With each succeeding pregnancy, the early signs will be more noticeable, especially fullness and tenderness of breasts. And she had all the other indications: the darker nipples and a dark line running from her navel down to her black pubic hair. "Linea nigra"—also from the Handbook—a deposit of brown pigment on the body, or if on the face, the mask of pregnancy.

God! As if she needed her olive skin to be any darker or to have any more hair! Still it was strange to see the dusky skin of her abdomen and those fine hairs she’d never known existed before pregnancy, show from her navel, like a directing signal, and ending in the neat inverted-black triangle between her legs—the cause of all her problems.

Do you shave it that way? Charles had asked the first night of their honeymoon. Naked, his pale, longish body shone in the light left on in the bathroom. He sat back on his heels and looked down at her, the way one might examine a strange, fuzzy animal.

What? Lee asked, trying to match his detachment. She pulled up on her elbows.

Do you shave it? You’re so smooth right up to the edge here? He drew his thumbnail along the curly black hair across the rise of the pubic bone to the fold at the groin where the hair tapered into a perfect angle.

No, of course not, she said. It just grows that way.

You’re plum beautiful, he said softly, and Lee knew, as she had not known before, that Charles had not seen many naked girls. Still, I’d have laid money you shaved it.

No such overwhelming interest in my hair or body now, Lee thought, and looked up to see the stop sign at Patterson Street. She wondered ruefully how, so unaware, she’d driven the ten blocks from her house to the school without an accident. Well, she’d been trying to pay attention and it must have worked automatically.

Damn! Pay attention! Lee ordered out loud. The last thing you need now is an accident. The words reverberated under the car’s curved roof.

From the floor of the backseat, catching her mother’s intonation exactly, Lill interrupted the nursery rhyme and called softly, "Use your damn inside voice, Mommy. Pay ’tention, pay ’tention," she murmured, as if giving an example.

Lee ignoring the curse word, smiled. She was always telling her daughter, Inside voice, pleeeese. She called to the backseat, Mommy’s just trying to concentrate, my critical darling. Remember Churchill’s words on getting work done: ‘When you tie your shoes, tie your shoes.’

Sister Aberdeen at Mount De Sales Academy had been in love with Churchill anecdotes and sayings, and although Lee had snickered with the other goosey teenage girls at an old nun’s passion for a dead English statesman, strangely now, Lee found all kinds of reasons for using the quotes.

Tie your shoes, tie your shoes. Lill’s childish treble held a singular concentration that said more than the words.

Are you undoing your laces back there, young lady? Lee stretched and unsuccessfully tried to reach behind the front seat. Undressing in the car was her daughter’s newest trick, practiced ever since her older sister Cassie had started kindergarten. But the little girl was squeezed down flat, mole-like, on the back floor, and Lee couldn’t reach her. Rising up to look in the rearview mirror, she could see her daughter’s bare white shoulders twisting. The child’s jacket and tee-shirt were off, and Lill was determinedly working away at the shoelaces, which Lee had tied in double knots that morning for just that reason: to keep trousers and underwear on until they arrived at school. Thank goodness it wasn’t her turn to pick up the doughnuts.

Resigned, Lee settled back, determined to drive the rest of the way carefully and not have a wreck. See, she told herself. Three whole minutes must have passed without thinking about being pregnant. It was the only way to endure: concentrate on the moment and not worry about a month from now when she’d have to tell Charles and his family or even eight months from now when she’d have another child with no insurance to pay for the hospital or the doctor.

She turned the dusty green car at the corner, and the October leaves from the pecan trees of St. Anthony’s swirled in brown and yellow eddies behind it. The trees, twenty feet tall, shedding twigs and leaves, stood far apart. It was hard to tell they were planted in rows except when one looked beyond the asphalt playground and saw them stretching out, foreshortened into progressively smaller lacy-gray cutouts. The spiked limbs, branching at every angle, were practically bare, except for the open pods at the ends, five-pointed dark stars showing they had cast their seeds, the pecans.

Unexpectedly—Had it been a full seven years?—Lee yearned for an Atlanta fall: the chilly break in the air, the weeks of tarnished gold and red on the oaks, all so different from Strickland’s mild autumn and its evergreen pines. Here, in Strickland, Georgia, only a few miles from the Florida line, south Georgia’s thin summery warmth just went on and on until the mottled foliage gave up and fell off. It fulfilled her father Abram’s tired joke about south Georgia’s seasons: Almost summer. Summer. Still summer. And then Christmas.

Two men stood under the trees, raking the leaves into small piles. Father Palmer, tall and straight in his priest’s uniform of black pants and shirt, and the school’s janitor, Ralph, whose splayed brogans and slouch hat made him into a bent scarecrow of crumpled layers, an elderly man of color.

Of color, her mother’s phrase.

Am I ‘of color,’ too, Momma? Is Daddy ‘of color’?

At an age almost too young to remember, Lee questioned when she had realized that of color meant dark skin and black, kinky hair, like the thick-armed men who worked for her equally dusky father.

Good grief no, child! Colored means nigra. Her mother—burnished red hair the same shade as her lipstick—gave the word its genteel southern pronunciation. Colored is an entire race. We’re Lebanese, honey. Caucasian through and through, and don’t you forget it. Why, you and your father have blue eyes!

The words, the sour-faced concern, etched the conversation on the clear glass of memory, and it was through that glass, scratched with her mother’s protests, that Lee had looked at colored people ever since. As a teenager, she’d explained, Dad’s eyes and mine are navy blue, Momma. So dark, everyone thinks they’re black. And they think we’re colored, too, with our tight curly hair, our olive skin.

Lee felt now more than saw that the priest and the janitor had turned to watch as her car drove past St. Anthony’s trees and auditorium into a parking place a row past the front of the kindergarten classroom. In the sliding doors, taped full of crayoned pictures of turkeys and jack-o’-lanterns, decorations for Thanksgiving, she clearly saw the two men in the distance, reflected in the glass. They were small and, like an artist’s perspective, she was larger in the foreground. This was the moment she aimed toward every morning, balancing the day on this action, lever and fulcrum. Father Palmer would turn and wave as she stepped out of the car onto the school grounds, and there would be a connection of eyes, a gathering of the molecules of air into a conduit of something tangible between them. He waved. She waved back.

Knowing the priest was watching, she watched herself, too, mirrored in the glass, a thin, ponytailed brunette. But why had she pulled her hair so starkly back that morning? It made her nose look like a hawk’s beak. And the brown wrinkled corduroy pants and the long loose tan sweater—droopy, unkempt, nondescript… She ran out of critical words. Damn, why hadn’t she put on something decent, or at least clean, before leaving the house? A face wash and a little lipstick wouldn’t have hurt either. But the memory of the morning’s difficulties came back in a rush.

Earlier, she’d been a hibernating bear, one that hated to leave the warm cave of blankets on her side of the bed. Only the memory of The Mother’s Handbook notation—A great need for sleep is another sure sign of pregnancy—had pulled her out of the narcotic hormonal trance that had engulfed her every night and morning for the past week. No need letting Charles know any sooner than necessary. In a weird way he had taken note of how sleepy she had been the last time, and eight months of his monotone answers and disgruntled expression had been more than enough punishment when she was pregnant with Lill.

Lee inhaled, pulled herself up thinner, and walked quickly to the back door of the car, opened it, and began putting the tee-shirt on her daughter. Father Palmer’s wondering why I didn’t dress you at home, she complained to the little girl, seeing, just as she bent, that the priest had returned to raking the bunched leaves onto a smoldering pile.

Oh, dear, there she was at it again, thinking she could read people’s minds. Father Palmer probably didn’t even remember her, much less have an opinion on how she took care of her children. To him, she was just another woman of the parish, one who brought her children to school, picked them up, worked the bake sales and lunch programs—the Marthas of the church, holding down their places; the opposites of the Marys, the nuns. Then why this vibration, Lee wondered, this shiver of feeling in the air every morning, every time she saw him?

Lee roughly pulled on her daughter’s tee-shirt and miniature pea jacket, a bargain for two dollars at the thrift shop.

Why in the hell do you have to take off your clothes every morning? she whispered fiercely into the little girl’s face, at the same time wondering why in the hell she couldn’t stop cursing in front of her children. But along with the curse came thanks that Lill had been unable to take off her shoes and throw one out the car window. The toddler never threw both—always just one—which meant an hour of fruitless searching. Two pairs of eight-dollar white high-tops lost in the last three months.

Lill, a half-smile of victory, making her plump cheeks even rounder, seemed accustomed to her mother’s roughness and intense questions. With her mussed short blond hair and seaman’s jacket, she looked the sly, cherubic sailor.

Thanks for not taking off your shoes, John Paul Jones. Lee gave her daughter a loud smacking kiss.

My name is Lilith, the child whispered, her lips pink velvet petals, narrow and soft.

Lee turned for one last look across the yard before she headed toward the auditorium where the children’s lunches were being prepared and where she volunteered to help two days a week. Seeing the piles of burning leaves, she gave Father Palmer credit for harvesting the pecans. Admirable. Old Father Kennedy would have let them go to waste, left them for the gray squirrels to store or for the school children to take home in their lunch boxes or for cars to smash under their tires. No matter to him. He was old and burned-out with parish business. But the young priest and the janitor had made $1,500 last year picking up the nuts—a figure reported in the parish bulletin.

What a shame, Father Palmer’s first visit with her had been such a bad beginning. If she hadn’t been so doped up, she’d have put on her bed jacket right away, and she wouldn’t have laughed at him for smelling those plastic flowers.

I hear you have a beautiful baby girl, the young priest had said, entering the semi-private room at Strickland County General and smoothing his straight black hair back with both hands.

Unaware of her thin nightgown, Lee, still hazy and talkative, still smelling the sick, sweet anesthetic high up in her nose, had triumphantly raised her arms above her head in a boxer’s grip. Yes, a beautiful, perfect angel. I don’t care if she’s not a boy. Old man Bettlemain ordered a boy, you know. I say, plenty of time for boys. Right now, she’s the one I want.

Of course, there was no explaining to the priest the euphoria, the victorious glee Lee felt after five hours of labor, after being brave and strong.

You’re one tough cookie, Lee Bettlemain, brave and strong, Dr. Yuller had said, and don’t you forget it.

How could she forget? It was what she had prepared for, for eight solid months, exactly as she had with Cassie. Determined not to whine and complain as her mother Darcy had about her pregnancies, Lee started the long walks, the naps, the stretching exercises from The Dick Reed Natural Childbirth Book, the vitamins, and the right food: milk, orange juice, brown bread. She’d never felt better.

A look of something—alarm? confusion?—had narrowed Father Palmer’s water-gray eyes. Was he just uncomfortable, a new priest making his first rounds? Was it the mention of another baby so soon?

Your roses are lovely. The priest pushed his face into a bouquet of artificial yellow flowers, and Lee came out of her jubilant daze, but by then it was too late. They’re fake! he said and jerked back as though a plastic bee might sting him.

I know. Giggles, like the champagne bubbles at her parents’ New Year’s Eve parties, rose in her throat at the priest’s stiff-backed, insulted confusion. I thought they were real roses myself at first. She was trying to smooth things over, to make the new, young priest like her. He was more striking than a priest should be—his black hairline a perfect V on his forehead, the opposite of the dark V of his beard—even more good-looking close up than up on the altar: more like a prince from a storybook or the movies, or a dream. But she couldn’t stop her gurgling laugh. Even knowing it was a drugged release, her explanation was strangled. She bent forward, put her hands over her mouth, and felt her full breasts swing against the insides of her arms, felt the thin material covering her dark nipples. Oh, god, that’s why he’d looked so flustered, why he’d plunged his face into the flowers. Where was that damn bed jacket that Claire, her mother-in-law, had given her?

But before she could rummage in the bed clothes to find the jacket, Father Palmer, a deep flush showing at the edges of his perfect hairline, had backed toward the door, bowed in farewell, and left the room.

That was three years ago. Since then, Lee had attended Father Palmer’s eleven o’clock Mass every Sunday and listened to his sermons intently, as if in a classroom that would require remembering and tests, but still the uncomfortableness and something more lingered between them. Did he think she’d shown her breasts on purpose, that she was one of those crazy women who chased after priests as a challenge? Yet she registered his pale eyes searching her out on the back row where she sat during Mass, and on those mornings when she drove past with her daughters, his head turned, and he waved.

Lee took Lill’s hand—the child’s fingers curved inward into a small warm paw—and she closed the car door. At the same time, she caught sight of the priest and janitor start an agitated trot across the schoolyard toward her. Ralph dragging his rake and in a galumphing, half-hitched way seemed to be trying to catch up with Father Palmer.

Lee turned, waiting to see what had happened, why they were coming toward her. Don’t rush, she told herself, controlling an urge to run like a child out into the middle of the yard to find out. Still, as the priest and janitor made their way toward her, Lee knew something was terribly wrong. Against her resolve to wait, she started toward the two men, calling out, What’s the matter?

Closer, she could see the priest’s hand cupped over his mouth and bright red blood seeping out between his fingers. Ralph was right behind.

Oh lady, oh lady, Ralph moaned, I done gone and knocked Fadder’s toof out with my rake handle.

Father Palmer stopped and leaned against the car’s hood; his gray eyes were wide and strangely composed above the bloody hand. Immediately, Lee put Lill back into the car’s backseat and closed the door. The little girl bounced, making the seat into a trampoline. Let me out, out, was her muted call from behind the window glass.

Without thinking, Lee went to the priest, and ordered, Open your mouth, please. Let me see. She said the words in exactly the tone she used when giving Cassie and Lill bad tasting medicine. Open up!

The priest took his hand away dutifully, opened his mouth, and bent toward her. She stood on tiptoe to look.

Blood was caked around and in the lines of his lips and ran down into the dark hair on his chin. The upper left front tooth was missing, completely gone, nothing but a triangle of bleeding flesh in the gum and a huge gaping space in between the other teeth.

Where’s the tooth? Lee asked, turning to the old colored man.

Ralph answered, motioning with his rake. Out there some’eres. Pro’bly in one of them bresh piles, Lady.

Content to let the janitor explain, Father Palmer replaced his thick hand back over his mouth as if by hiding the injury it no longer existed or mattered. Only his head, inclined toward Lee, and his other hand balancing himself on the fender gave a token admission of pain and confusion.

Go find it. Right away! Lee ordered. So what if she sounded bossy.

Ralph dropped the rake, and, as though glad to make up for the accident, glad for something to do besides stand and explain, he turned and ran back across the yard.

Lee opened the front door of the car. Sit here, she said to the priest.

Again, just as he had opened his mouth to her demand, he came forward obediently and lowered himself onto the seat. His dark-trousered legs stuck straight out before him.

Stay here. I’ll be right back and take you to a dentist. Lee grabbed up her daughter, who had stopped jumping and was now trying to crawl over the seat onto the priest. Come on, little gal. You’re going to kindergarten.

Instantly, the child stopped her struggle, and Lee, feeling somehow outside herself, hiked Lill up on her hip and half-ran, half-walked across the short span of asphalt to the school room. Even as she crossed the sidewalk, she was recalling an article in the Ladies Home Journal: What To Do In an Emergency. The section was meant for emergencies with children and described a lost tooth. If at all possible, Lee remembered reading, replace the tooth in the gum and hold it there until you can take the child to a dentist. Back then, Lee had laughed out loud at the idea of trying to hold a tooth in Lill’s mouth and drive at the same time. But now, she thought, at least Father Palmer can hold his own tooth in—that is, if the janitor could find it.

Please, may I leave Lilith with you for a while? There’s been an accident, Lee told Mrs. Thornton, the kindergarten teacher. I’ll explain later.

The frizzy haired, worried-eyed teacher wore a black apron of thanks giving decals and nodded as though emergencies that couldn’t be explained were perfectly common at 9:00 in the morning. There was also a sweeping impression of soft inquisitive faces turned upwards, a field of white blossoms below them. Lee set her daughter down amid the low tables and chairs full of small bodies.

In less than a minute, she was back to where Father Palmer sat, exactly as she’d left him on the front seat of the car. Ralph had returned, too, and held out the priest’s tooth to Lee. I found it right directly, Lady, right on top of the bresh pile where it landed. Good thing we ain’t started burning yet. It would a been fried proper.

Carefully taking the enamel prize from Ralph’s soot-ringed fingers, Lee saw that the tooth was yellowish and square, a miniature shovel on one end and a curved talon of bloody root on the other. Not at all what she expected, but then what had she expected? All the loose teeth she’d ever seen had been baby teeth: small translucent porcelain things, the roots disintegrated to release them from the gum. This skeletal object that she held between her thumb and forefinger was large and ridged, and had all the qualities of a tusk—it was a grown-man’s tooth.

Father Palmer, skin waxy-pale above his dark mustache and beard, gazed off in the opposite direction as if at something of great importance was out under the trees. His hand was still clamped over his mouth.

Lee wiped the tooth on the underside of her sweater, as the article had advised: Rinse or wipe the tooth if possible. Then she held it behind her, where the priest couldn’t see, and said softly, Father, you’re going to have to let me put it back in. She spoke as one did to a small, hurt child.

Father Palmer’s wide smooth forehead wrinkled, and a sound, somewhere between protest and groan, came from behind his hand. Aggg.

I read it in a medical book, Lee lied. She knew that the Ladies Home Journal would have no credibility with this tall, imposing man.

In a curious reaction, the priest drew his legs up, set his heels on the edge of the car’s frame, and rested his elbows on his knees, arms extended. His black shirt sleeves, rolled halfway up his dangling forearms, revealed a swell of muscles under a network of dark hair. He spread his knees, an indication for her to come closer. She would rather he stood up again; still she stepped between his legs and took his chin in her palm. It’ll be easier if you close your eyes, she said, taking the man’s jaw with all its whiskers into her hand. The dark line of beard stood out markedly against his pale skin, and the prickly ends of hair and a tremor in the chin moved against her fingers. Now, in some sort of second-by-second perception, she was calm enough to notice that he had taken off his white Roman collar and there were irregular wet stains down the front and under the arms of the black shirt. A faint, not unpleasant scent reached her, an aroma she’d known forever, of all men after a day’s work: her father, his construction workers, her plumber husband.

The priest looked directly into Lee’s eyes, then lowered his fringed eyelids, and opened his mouth.

Not expecting this sudden cooperation, Lee wondered if she could really replace the tooth. The blood in the gum looked set, and the root seemed far too large to fit into such a small space. You will just do it, Lee assured herself, the way she’d once pulled a nail out of Cassie’s foot. Afraid of hurting her daughter, but also afraid of making her fearful, Lee had said silently, over and over: Pull it out, pull it out. Now, she told herself silently, Put the tooth back in, put it back in.

The nail had come out after one determined tug, and the root of the tooth eased back in as soon as she pushed it past the first bit of resistance in the gum. Hardly believing the inch-long piece of enamel could slip so smoothly into place, she pushed a little more and tapped with her fingernail to line it up with the other teeth. A trickle of blood ran from her fingers, down her hand, down her elbow.

Oooh, Ralph, who had been leaning close, said, and stepped back.

The priest’s gray eyes opened wide, and his glance flashed from Lee’s face to Ralph’s and back again.

Here, keep your teeth together, and hold your hand just like you had it before, Lee told the priest. She took his arm and directed him to turn and sit facing forward in the car. A bulge at the man’s temple said he was clenching his teeth tightly together.

Ralph cheered, You gonna be jest fine, Father Palm. She done put that ole toof right back where it belongs. As good as new, Miss Lady. Right, ma’am?

Right, Lee answered, and walked to the driver’s side of the car, got in, and closed the door. She leaned across the priest to close the other door, making sure to keep the back of her arm to him—not to touch him with her breast—then she drove in the direction she’d already chosen—to her own dentist, Dr. Obermon.

The stunned look on the priest’s face, the blood around his hand, the clerical black shirt and pants, and Lee’s stained sweater—red—brought a frantic immediacy into the immaculate white of the dentist’s office. Blood! They didn’t have to wait. At once Father Palmer was shown through a door into a treatment room, a small cubicle, one of three.

Dr. Obermon, white-haired, white-smocked, who seemed a logical extension of his pristine office, said, You did the hard part, Mrs. Bettlemain, finding that tooth and getting it back where it belonged. And then unexpectedly, he asked, You want to see the rest?

Lee nodded, followed, explained that actually Ralph, the janitor, had rescued the tooth. She also noted that Father Palmer, in easing into the back-leaning chair, had again raised his eyebrows and was again wrinkling his forehead. He’s squeamish, she thought. He couldn’t look at his own tooth and, now, certainly doesn’t want me to see what the dentist will do. But Lee wanted to see. She could have told the priest that squeamishness was something quickly cured by pregnancy and childbirth. Something he’ll never know about, she amended, and chose a place against the wall where she could look on and not be in the way.

Take some deep breaths, Dr. Obermon instructed and fit a black triangle of mask over Father Palmer’s jutting nose. It’s nitrous oxide, Father. It’ll calm you. You’re upset, more than you realize, the dentist explained.

In seconds, Father Palmer’s face, body, and spatula-like fingers eased. His fingernails, somehow like the tooth, were square and slightly yellow. From Lee’s viewpoint against the wall, all life seemed to seep out of the man’s long arms and legs stretched out on the reclining chair, and his thick-soled black shoes, still sooty from the burning pecan grove, fell to either side.

The smell of the gas cloyed, reached Lee’s nose in sticky pungent threads, and caused a scratchy retching at the back of her throat. A golden haze sprang in at the sides of her vision and she knew she had to sit down at once or else faint. A white chair, the curved metal back like one from an ice-cream parlor, was in another corner. She stepped to it cautiously, eased down, and tried to breathe in slow, even inhalations. Her head swam, and the room started to spin. She bent forward, head over knees, and bowed in submission. Okay, you win, she silently told the little kernel deep inside her body. I’m pregnant, she admitted and gave in to the reality that she’d been trying so hard to deny. This