The worm in Teach’s empty stomach turned again. Ellie Goings was the local minority affairs reporter. In her weekly column, she alternated between inspiring stories about African American achievement on the local scene and scathing tales of lives blighted by racism. Teach could have written her Tyrone column himself. In the Ellie Goings version, Teach would be a knuckle-dragging troglodyte, and Tyrone would be a composite of Heroic Black Youth.
Teach felt his naked toes hit the bottom. The bottom was cold and slimy. “Look, Ms. Turkel, do you have to do this? I mean . . . ?” What more could he say? He was begging.
“I’m sorry, Mr. Teach, but yes, I do. It’s news and the public has a right to know. And I’ve given you a chance to tell your side of it.”
Right, Teach thought, my side as seen by Marlie Turkel. And you aren’t finished with me yet.
“I’m surprised you don’t know anything about Mr. Battles’s athletic accomplishments. Don’t you read the sports page?”
“Not much,” Teach said, aware that his voice had gone dull, cold. “Tell me what’s in the sports page.” About our saintly Tyrone.
“A lot. He’s not just a football star who’s been contacted by over a dozen colleges and universities. He’s an honor student. His SAT scores are good enough for a full ride to college without football. He’s never been in trouble before. He’s really quite a remarkable young man.”
It sounded like she was reading from the screen in front of her, quoting herself. Teach thinking: And what am I, just your common, drunken, middle-aged white householder with an attitude about black people?
“There’s one other thing, Mr. Teach. Do you know anything about Tyrone’s family?”
“Only what you just told me. He does sound like an exemplary boy.” But a memory was waking up, turning over in the fetid loam of Malone’s Bar. What was it the cop, Delbert, had said? That boy’s family’s a walking history of the civil rights movement in this state.
“I see. Well, I guess I ought to tell you that Tyrone’s uncle is Thurman Battles. He’s an attorney, quite an important man here in town. His specialty is litigation involving violations of federal civil rights statutes. He’s been very successful in the courts.” The woman waited for a reaction. Teach not sure he could, or should, give one. Not sure what might be printed. Maybe he’d said too much already.
All Teach said was, “When?”
“Excuse me?”
“When will the article be in the paper?”
“Monday. It’ll be part of longer piece on local race relations.”
When Marlie Turkel said a polite goodbye, Teach sat alone in his kitchen sipping cold coffee. He could smell himself, the sweat of the last twenty-four hours heavy on him, the evil odor of bad surprises. He was confused, but one thing he knew was that he would wait as long as possible before telling Dean about his trouble. This was the morning after her triumph. He would do all he could to make it a good one, and that began with breakfast. Waffles were her favorite morning meal. He was halfway to the pantry for the batter mix when something occurred to him. He found the program for the recital on the hallway table where he had left it last night.
The names of the girls in the corps de ballet were familiar to him. Theirs were the family names engraved on the brass plaques outside the law offices and doctors’ offices in the better parts of town. In the program, he found what he was looking for. The new girl in the corps, the athletic, charming black girl who could have been running a hundred-meter dash or kicking her legs out in the arc of the long jump. The girl who had promised to place her body between Dean and temptation. Her name was Tawnya Battles.
TEN
Teach put two plates of waffles topped with fresh strawberries and two glasses of orange juice on a tray and carried them to the breakfast room. Buttery sunlight streamed through the French doors that let onto the back terrace. This was his favorite room on weekend mornings. He walked to the stairs and called, “Time for breakfast, Deanie.” And standing here he felt his heart rise with the remembered joy of mornings when Dean was little and it was Paige calling her down for a meal before driving her to school. The sounds and smells of those mornings flooded over him. The dizzying sweet waft of shampoo from Dean’s hair as she passed through the foyer and hurried toward the breakfast room. The heat of the crown of her head as he briefly rested his hand there. The rubber scuff of Dean’s sneakers on the ocher Spanish tiles. The bounce of her blond ponytail on the blue and green tartan of her Episcopal school jumper.
The radio came on upstairs, a rock station blasting the quiet morning, and over it, Dean’s tired voice called down, “Okay, Dad.”
Back in the kitchen, Teach poured himself a fresh cup of coffee and a glass of milk for Dean and carried these and a pair of scissors out to the breakfast room. He opened the French doors and smelled the hot, fragrant air of the garden. Paige had told him when they’d moved into this sixty-year-old Mediterranean Revival house that she wanted a walled garden like those she had seen in old St. Augustine. She wanted high, stuccoed walls bordered by shade trees. And there must be benches and oyster shell paths and a fountain. A fountain was the heart of a garden, she had said, just as the hearth was the heart of a house. She wanted to stand by the splashing waters of her fountain and look up at the Barcelona balcony letting into the bedroom she shared with her husband.
Teach had built the garden exactly to her specifications, and her only disappointment was a city ordinance limiting the height of the walls. Walking her oyster-shell paths, Paige could see into a neighbor’s window, or glimpse the straw hat that floated along on the head of Angel Morales, the yardman who worked this neighborhood. These things, she had told Teach, harmed the illusion of isolation she wanted in her garden, but the rest of what she felt in it was wondrous. She had planted Spanish bayonet and bird-of-paradise under the Jerusalem thorns along the ivied walls. Terra-cotta jugs of dendrobia hung from low tree branches.
With the scissors, Teach snipped a beautiful yellow and orange bird-of-paradise blossom. Back in the kitchen, he put it in a crystal vase just as Paige would have done and sipped coffee while he waited.
And then Dean stood in the kitchen doorway rubbing her eyes. Her honey-blond hair was matted to her scalp in what she called “bed head.” She wore a long T-shirt and razored jeans and was barefoot. Teach looked at her poor scarred feet. She was sixteen and her feet were forty, calloused and abraded from years of dancing. There was a scud of soap along her jawline and blond wisps framed her blurry blue eyes. Dean’s eyes, people always said, belonged to Teach. The eyes of his hangovers. Had Dean been drinking at Marty Flipper’s party? Better not to ask. Better not to tilt the fragile thing we are now, father and daughter so far from those mornings when a little blond head passed under my hand on its way to a warm winter kitchen.
Teach reached over and gently wiped the soap from her face. “I didn’t think you’d want coffee.”
“I do. With skim and a little sugar.”
And when had she started drinking coffee? Bringing back the cup, watching his daughter sip from it, make first a face of distaste, then of bored approval, Teach saw the spot of blood on the floor beside her chair. Smeared spots of it led across the tile to the chair where Dean sat now trying a sip of orange juice. When she glanced up out of the bleary vagueness that was adolescent morning, Teach had to turn away because his eyes were full of tears.
As he walked to the kitchen, he heard Dean behind him: “Wow, Dad, these waffles look great. You’re really jammin’ in the kitchen this morning. Kinda reminds me of when I was a kid.”