Through the legal system, Roosevelt had cut the I AMers off from the postal system saying that they knowingly published untruths. Fury was unleashed against him for this as Edna’s followers fought back.
Anissa called out, “Edna Ballard says Roosevelt will go to hell.”
“Oh Lady, cut it out!” a man wearing a business suit remarked in passing, but when Anissa turned pursue him, he was swallowed by the crowd.
She continued to preach. “But now Roosevelt has killed more people—including the Japanese—than the Nazis have. He continues to bomb POWs, and the bastard thirsts for more.” She waved a fist in the air. Then she started in on alcohol, war, meat and popular music, and worked back to her usual pitch against Roosevelt and his mannish wife.
The daily paper printed articles reporting their own abhorrence of the I AMers—and by natural extension, Anissa and Nicasia. The locals joined the fracas calling Edna a meddler and urging her to move her flock to the station platform for the overnight train back to Chicago. Wars within a greater war. Fires inside clouds.
Anissa, defending Edna Ballard, redoubled her efforts. And in a fit of moral superiority, she even called her late husband’s house to notify Phyllis that she might as well keep the blasted shotgun. Guns, in fact, were a worse offense in the I AM lexicon than both meat and liquor. But probably not sex.
The phone rang and rang deep into the Florida night. But too late.
Phyllis herself had had a change of heart. If she’d apologize, Anissa might be guaranteed the return of her gun. And Phyllis, when she came to a decision, rarely wavered. Russell had always said that she was a girl who stuck to her guns.
With only four gallons of rationed gas per week, and not a prayer of ever being able to purchase a rail ticket, she had already set out from West Palm Beach on her bicycle, a Schwinn. Santa Fe was over 1,500 miles away and Phyllis saw no reason the trip to deliver the hand-chased Churchill side-by-side should take more than seven weeks. Thirty miles a day seemed perfectly reasonable, more when she could coast downhill.
Anissa’s phone call would have made no difference to her. She had made up her mind.
Florida
Even when she slept, she felt observed. Hidden eyes watched her as she made pin curls of her profuse red hair. Gossips screeched about her as she smoothed her hands over her breasts beneath her lime-colored silk nightgown. The town wags picked her to shreds. Russell heard them and bought her French gowns and silk stockings, not for her birthday, but just because… He was a gentleman. His final gesture had been the house.
“I had no idea about it,” she’d said. In his new will, she was the residual beneficiary.
“He did it secretly without my knowledge.” But she had known. He’d told her he was thinking of doing this. Reminding him of it was tedious, but her timing had been good. Any more delay and she’d have been right back where she’d started, grateful for a desk job in Dawson Creek.
She knew how Anissa reviled her. Ahh, Anissa had the Sword of Saint Germain up her ass! Bloody woman! Still legally married, she’d been his primary beneficiary and had retained her huge house on the lake, plus the war bonds and the lumber camp. That camp might have been Phyllis’ anchor-to-windward. She would have kept it and sold the Florida place when the goddamned war was over and the going prices for winter homes bounced back. In its way, Dawson Creek was more like Scotland—without her horrid family.
Florida was too dull for her—too much selfishness and trivia. The rich winter people flooded south from the Industrial Giants, fencing themselves off against the prehistoric, bigoted Floridians. They came mindlessly hating all the Niggers and Cubanos who had the bad luck to occupy that flat swampy peninsula, appended as it was to the United States like an uncircumcised penis.
They certainly never came for each other, for they caviled and complained against each other as well—they only came for the sea which was exquisite. The sea, as it washed over the reefs, its color turned green, like her own green eyes. And it stretched out as a beckoning thoroughfare before her, past Greenland and on to a heroic welcome in Aberdeen, and the newly enlightened Scots. Scotland always welcomed prodigals with money in their pockets. It would again.
She paused in her assessment. If her mother apologized, must she forgive her? Phyllis knew darkly that as a baptized Christian she was obliged to offer forgiveness to any bloody creep who was contrite. But forgetting? She might never forget, who could? Who would not harbor ill feelings? However, if her mother’s apology was sincere, Phyllis would be required to extend some form of moral forgiveness to her puritanical mum. The whole dark and starving neighborhood was puritanical, drawing the line across sex, nothing else.
No line through drinking yourself into a foul humor every night and when the small matter of Phyllis’ being fugged by her history teacher was found out, they all went berserk. That such a small pleasure was blown out of proportion pointed out how stuffy and intolerant Scotland was. Here in the States it has been her experience that you had plenty of permission to sleep around but not with a Negro. Being high-minded, she found that a failing.
The ground was still fresh on Russell’s grave when she had called his sister, Doris, for reassurance about her inheritance. And Doris gave it readily, insisting that Phyllis keep the money, even implied—of all things— that she’d earned it. She used the word, services.
“Try to forget about Anissa. Just keep what was given to you and be glad. It’s rightfully yours.” So Phyllis accepted what Russell had wanted her to have and tried not to fancy that the lumber camp should have been hers as well.
Money became her; it seemed to make her brainier even though she thought she had been endowed with sufficient and amazing attributes. So she dressed the part of a widow—ring, pearls, hair done, high heels. Still, no one telephoned. No one wrote notes to her. The mail she received was on legal-sized paper with letterheads and rosters of associates’ names, some dead, some still living.
The neighbors had forgotten their courtesy.
Phyllis’ heart rushed when a personal letter in her Aunt Marjorie’s tight penmanship finally arrived, asking after her well being and sending months-old news from Aberdeen. Her aunt in Santa Barbara again encouraged her to come and stay. “Yes, I’d be more than happy to find you a place here. I’m so sorry to hear about Russell’s passing over. I know that you were fond of him.” Phyllis, with a three-minute egg timer placed by the phone, called to thank her for being such a brick and to lay out her plans.
“Family is family!” Marjorie exclaimed. “I hate to take up time on an expensive call but you must hear me out. Your plan is absolutely daft. You’ll not make it even the first quarter of the way.”
“You don’t know me very well,” Phyllis retorted. “I’m determined to get there on my own. Texaco advertises friendly stations with clean restrooms never farther apart than forty miles or so and if I need a safe place, I’ll jolly well rely upon the Texaco Man Who Wears the Smile. I can’t see any other way.”
“I beg you not to do it. Just wait a few more months; they say it will all soon be over. You can then travel comfortably by train. Why won’t you please just wait a few months?”
“Because I’m planning to bicycle,” she replied. “If the war ended today, the trains would be even more jammed with the returning soldiers.” What choice did she really have? Hers was only an “A” sticker on the windshield of the Lincoln Zephyr and of course she had no access to public transport; she was a visiting civilian. Further, she had no contacts in the States other than Aunt Marjorie who had taken a position with a family, nannying their two adopted children.
That was the sum total of her choices.
Dawson Creek was a closed book.
“Certainly, your young niece may join you with the children!” merrily