The Last Girls Read online

  LEE SMITH

  The Last Girls

  A NOVEL

  A SHANNON RAVENEL BOOK

  Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill

  This book is for my beloved husband, Hal—

  pilot, shipmate, and running buddy on the

  continuing journey . . . and for Jane and

  Vereen Bell, who went down the river with us

  in the summer of 1999.

  THE MISSISSIPPI is well worth reading about. It is not a commonplace river, but on the contrary is in all ways remarkable. . . . It seems safe to say that it is also the crookedest river in the world, since in one part of its journey it uses up one thousand three hundred miles to cover the same ground that the crow would fly over in six hundred and seventy-five. . . .

  It is a remarkable river in this: that instead of widening toward its mouth, it grows narrower; grows narrower and deeper. From the junction of the Ohio to a point half way down to the sea, the width averages a mile in high water: thence to the sea the width steadily diminishes, until, at the “Passes,” above the mouth, it is but little over a half a mile. At the junction of the Ohio the Mississippi’s depth is eighty-seven feet; the depth increases gradually, reaching one hundred and twenty-nine just above the mouth.

  —Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi

  Sometimes life is more like a river than a book.

  —Cort Conley

  Contents

  June 10, 1965. It’s Girls A-Go-Go Down the Mississippi

  Mile 736. Memphis, Tennessee. Friday, 5/7/99. 1645 hours

  Mile 736. Memphis, Tennessee. Friday, 5/7/99. 1900 hours

  Mile 736. Memphis, Tennessee. Friday, 5/7/99. 2210 hours

  Mile 736. Memphis, Tennessee. Saturday, 5/8/99. 1400 hours

  Mile 730. West Memphis, Arkansas. Saturday, 5/8/99. 1800 hours

  Mile 674.5. Harbert Point Light. Sunday, 5/9/99. 0710 hours

  Mile 664. Prairie Point Towhead. Sunday, 5/9/99. 0800 hours

  Mile 597.4. Montgomery Point. Sunday, 5/9/99. 1600 hours

  Mile 585. Rosedale Bend. Sunday, 5/9/99. 1700 hours

  Mile 516. Fanny Bullit Towhead. Sunday, 5/9/99. 2200 hours

  Mile 437.2. Vicksburg, Mississippi. Monday, 5/10/99. 0500 hours

  Mile 437.2. Vicksburg, Mississippi. Monday, 5/10/99. 0900 hours

  Mile 437.2. Vicksburg, Mississippi. Monday, 5/10/99. 1015 hours

  Mile 437.2. Vicksburg, Mississippi. Monday, 5/10/99. 1600 hours

  Mile 435.7. I-20 Highway Bridge. Monday, 5/10/99. 1920 hours

  Mile 364.2. Natchez, Mississippi. Tuesday, 5/11/99. 0600 hours

  Mile 364.2. Natchez, Mississippi. Tuesday, 5/11/99. 1335 hours

  Mile 364.2. Natchez, Mississippi. Tuesday, 5/11/99. 1205 hours

  Mile 364.2. Natchez, Mississippi. Tuesday, 5/11/99. 1810 hours

  Mile 229.4. Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Wednesday, 5/12/99. 1035 hours

  Mile 229.4. Baton Rogue, Louisiana. Wednesday, 5/12/99. 2300 hours

  Mile 265.5. St. Francisville, Louisiana. Thursday, 5/13/99. 0842 hours

  Mile 265.5. St. Francisville, Louisiana. Thursday, 5/13/99. 1015 hours

  Mile 155.1. Vacherie, Louisiana. Friday, 5/14/99. 1200 hours

  Mile 139.2. Dutch Bayou, Louisiana. Friday, 5/14/99. 1400 hours

  Mile 128.0. Bonnet Carre, Louisiana. Friday, 5/14/99. 1640 hours

  Mile 130.2. Killona Landing. Friday, 5/14/99. 1700 hours

  Mile 109.0. Waggaman Light. Friday, 5/14/99. 2100 hours

  In All Ways Remarkable, the Rest of the Girls—

  Acknowledgments

  June 10, 1965

  It’s Girls A-Go-Go Down the Mississippi

  PADUCAH, Ky. (AP)—“We can’t believe we’re finally going to do it!” were the parting words of 12 excited Mary Scott College students about to begin their “Huck Finn” journey down the Mississippi River on a raft.

  The adventuresome misses weighed anchor at 1:15 p.m. today, bound for New Orleans, 950 miles south. Their departure was delayed when one of the “crew” threw an anchor into the river with no rope attached, necessitating a bikini-clad recovery operation, to the crowd’s delight. “Hey, New Orleans is thataway!” shouted local wags as the ramshackle craft finally left land, hours later than planned.

  Their skipper, 74-year-old retired river-boat captain Gordon S. Cartwright, answered an ad that the girls had run in a riverboat magazine, writing them that he would pilot their raft down the river for nothing. He plans to make eight or nine miles an hour during daylight, tie up at night, and reach New Orleans in 10 or 12 days.

  “I’ve carried more tonnage, but never a more valuable cargo,” said the captain.

  The girls include Ruth d’Agostino of New York, N.Y.; Margaret Burns Ballou of Demopolis, Ala.; Lauren DuPree of Mobile, Ala.; Courtney Gray of Raleigh, N.C.; Jane Gillespie of Richmond, Va.; Susan Alexis Hill of Atlanta, Ga.; Harriet Holding of Staunton, Va.; Bowen Montague of Nashville, Tenn.; Suzanne St. John of New Orleans, La.; Anna Todd of Ivy, W.Va.; Catherine Wilson of Birmingham, Ala.; and Mimi West of Silver Spring, Md.

  The raft, named the Daisy Pickett, was built by a Paducah construction company under Captain Cartwright’s supervision. Resembling a floating porch, the Daisy Pickett is a 40-by-16-foot wooden platform with plyboard sides, built on 52 oil drums and powered by two 40-horsepower motors. It cost $1,800 to build. The raft has a superstructure of two-by-fours with a tarpaulin top that the “sailors” can pull up over it, mosquito netting that they can hang up, and a shower consisting of a bucket overhead with a long rope attached to it.

  Living provisions are piled in corners of the raft, with army cots around the walls for sleeping. Some girls will have to sleep on the floor each night, or on land. A roughly lettered sign spelling “Galley” leads into a two-by-four-foot plywood enclosure with canned goods, hot dog buns, and other odds and ends of food supplies. The girls will take turns on “KP duty” and have a small wood-burning stove in one corner.

  The Daisy Pickett left flying two flags, an American flag and a hand-painted flag sporting a huge yellow daisy.

  Mile 736

  Memphis, Tennessee

  Friday 5/7/99

  1645 hours

  HARRIET THINKS IT WAS William Faulkner who said that Mississippi begins in the lobby of the Peabody hotel. Waiting to check in at the ornate desk, she can well believe it. Vast and exotic as another country, the hushed lobby stretches away forever with its giant chandeliers, its marble floors, its palms, Oriental rugs and central fountain, its islands of big comfortable furniture where gorgeous blond heiresses lean forward toward each other telling secrets Harriet will never know and could not even imagine. Oh she has no business being here in Memphis at all, no business in this exclusive lobby, no business going on this trip down the river again with these women she doesn’t even know any longer and has nothing in common with, nothing at all. As if she ever did. As if it were not all entirely a coincidence—proximity, timing, the luck of the draw, whatever. Harriet has read that they assign roommates now strictly by height, a system that works as well as any other. And in fact she and Baby were exactly the same height (five feet six inches) and exactly the same weight (125 pounds)—though Lord knows it was distributed differently—when they were paired as roommates at Mary Scott College in 1963. They could wear each other’s clothes perfectly. Harriet remembers pulling on that little gray cashmere sweater set the minute Baby took it off, Baby coming in drunk from an afternoon date as Harriet rushed out for the evening; she remembers how warm and soft the cashmere felt slipping down over her breasts which no boy had ever seen. That was freshman year.

  Oh this is all a dreadful mistake, Harriet realizes now as her heart starts to pound and she tries to breathe slowly and deeply in the freezing fragrant air
of the Peabody hotel. She anchors herself by looking up the nearest column, so massive, so polished, really she is quite insignificant here beside it. Insignificant, all her unseemly heaving and gasping and emotional display. Harriet gazes up and up and up the slick veined column stretching out of sight into the dark Southern air of the mezzanine at the top of the marble staircase that leads to all those rooms where even now, cotton deals and pork-belly futures are being determined and illicit lunchtime affairs are still in steamy progress. Oh, stop! What is wrong with her? Everything Harriet has worked so hard to get away from comes flooding back and she has to sit down on a pretty little bench upholstered in a flame stitch. She really can’t breathe. She’s still getting over her hysterectomy anyway. She gasps and looks around. The walls are deep rose, a color Harriet has always thought of as Italian, though she has never been to Italy. The lighting, too, is rosy and muted, as if to say, “Calm down, dear. Hush. Everything will be taken care of. Don’t worry your pretty little head . . .”

  A black waiter appears before her with a silver tray and a big grin (Doesn’t he know how politically incorrect he is?) and asks if he can bring her anything and Harriet says, “Yes, please, some water,” and then he says, “My pleasure,” and disappears like magic to get it. The big corporation that runs this hotel now must have taught them all to say “My pleasure” like that, Harriet is sure of it. No normal black boy from Memphis would say “My pleasure” on his own.

  But was it William Faulkner who said, “Mississippi begins in the lobby of the Peabody hotel”? Or did somebody else say it? Or did she, Harriet Holding, just make that up? At fifty-three, Harriet can’t remember anything, sometimes of course it’s a blessing. But for instance she can’t remember the names of her students five minutes after the term is over, and she can’t remember the names of her colleagues at the community college if she runs into them someplace unexpected such as the Pizza Hut or Home Depot, as opposed to the faculty lounge or the library where she has seen them daily for thirty years.

  Yet suddenly, as if it were only yesterday, Harriet can remember Baby Ballou’s beautiful face when she married Charlie Mahan in the biggest wedding Harriet has ever seen, to this day, and they were all bridesmaids: Harriet and Anna and Courtney, suitemates forever, and now they’re all gathering again. Oh, it’s too much! Just because Harriet took care of Baby Ballou in college does not mean she has an obligation to do so for the rest of her life.

  Harriet can’t remember why she ever consented to do this anyway, why she ever called Charlie Mahan back when he left that message on her voice mail, considering it was probably all his fault anyway. Yet Charlie Mahan is still charming, clearly, that deep throaty drawl that always reminds Harriet of driving down a gravel road, the way she and Baby used to do when she went down to Alabama visiting. Joyriding, Baby called it. Harriet has never been joyriding since. Just driving aimlessly out into the country in Baby’s convertible, down any road they felt like, past kudzu-covered barns and cotton fields and little kids who stood in the yard and silently watched them pass and would not wave. Just drinking beer and listening to Wilson Pickett on the radio while bugs died on the windshield and weeds reached in at them on either side, towering goldenrod and bee balm, joe-pye weed as tall as a man. Like everything else in the Deep South, those weeds were too big, too tangled, too jungly. They’d grow up all around you and strangle you in a heartbeat, Harriet felt. A Virginian, Harriet had always thought she was Southern herself until she went to Alabama with Baby Ballou. And now here she is again, poised on the lush dark verge of the Deep South one more time.

  Harriet thinks of the present the bridemaids gave Baby the night before her wedding, sort of a joke present but not really, not really a joke at all, as things have turned out: a fancy evening bag, apricot watered silk, it had belonged to somebody’s grandmother. “Everything you need to live in the Delta,” they had printed on the accompanying card. Inside the purse was a black silk slip and a half-pint of gin. Harriet could use a drink of gin herself just thinking about Baby’s thin flushed face with those cheekbones like wings and her huge pale startled blue eyes and the long dark hair that fell into her face and how she kept pushing it back in the same obsessive way she bit her nails and smoked cigarettes and did everything else.

  “Here you are, ma’am,” the waiter says, coming back with a beaded crystal goblet of ice water, but when Harriet fishes in her purse for a tip, he waves his hand grandly and glides off singing out “My pleasure!” in a ringing gospel voice. Harriet fights back an urge to laugh because she knows that if she does, she will never, ever, stop.

  A scholarship student all through school, Harriet often identified more with the blacks she worked alongside in the college dining room than with some of her classmates who had never worked one day in their privileged lives. A black person will tell you the truth. As opposed to rich white Southerners who will tell you whatever they think you’d like to hear. They will tell themselves this, too, before they go ahead and do whatever it was that they wanted to do in the first place.

  A beautiful coffee-colored nurse presided over the examination that decided Harriet’s recent hysterectomy, shining a flashlight thing around inside Harriet while three white male doctors stood in a row and said “Hmmm” and “Humn” gravely and professionally. One of them, apparently her primary doctor, looked like he was twelve years old. The doctors were looking at her reproductive tract on a television screen set up right there in the examining room. Harriet, feet up in the stirrups and a sheet wrapped primly around the rest of herself, was watching this television, too. It was truly amazing to see her own uterus and ovaries and Fallopian tubes and everything thrown up on the screen like a map. It was a miracle of modern medicine and so, oddly enough, it was not personally embarrassing to Harriet at all. In fact, it was like she wasn’t even there. The doctors discussed the mass on her ovaries, which they couldn’t actually see, due to the fibroid tumors in her uterus. “Hmmmmm,” they opined significantly. Then the doctors withdrew, walking in a straight white line out the door to consult privately among themselves.

  The nurse, who had said not a word during the entire examination, turned to Harriet. She cocked her head and raised one elegant eyebrow. “Listen here, honey,” she announced, “in my line of work, I’ve seen about a million of these, and I want to tell you something. If I was you, I’d get the whole fucking thing took out.”

  Harriet did just that. She’d been bleeding too much for years anyway. (Somehow the phrase “bleeding heart liberal” comes into her mind.) But a person can get used to anything and so she had gotten used to it, used to feeling that tired and never having much energy and having those hot flashes at the most inopportune times.

  “Didn’t all these symptoms interfere with your sex life?” the young doctor had asked her at one point.

  “I don’t have a sex life,” Harriet told him, realizing as she spoke that this was true. It has been true for years. The phrase “use it or lose it” comes into her mind.

  Well, the truth is, she didn’t mind losing it. In many ways, it has been a relief, though Harriet always thought she’d have children eventually. She always thought she’d marry. Harriet is still surprised, vaguely, that these things have not happened to her. It’s just that she’s been so busy taking care of everybody—first Jill, then Mama, then starting the COMEBACK! program at her school, sponsoring the newspaper and the yearbook; and, of course, her students have been her children in a way. She sees them now, sprinkled all across the Shenandoah Valley, everywhere she goes. “Hello, Miss Holding! Hello, Miss Holding!” their bright voices cry from their strangely old faces. She can’t remember a one of them. Time has picked up somehow, roaring along like a furious current out of control . . .

  If she hadn’t had the hysterectomy, would she ever have agreed to Charlie Mahan’s request, would she have gone along with this crazy scheme? Somehow she doesn’t think so. But it’s true that things started seriously slipping over a year ago, even before she consulted the gy
necologist. She just didn’t feel like herself. Her mind started wandering, for one thing. For instance, she might arrive in Charlottesville for a meeting without even the faintest memory of having driven all the way over there, what route she took, and so forth. She might walk from her living room into her kitchen and then just stand there, wondering what she’d come for, what she’d had in mind. Her friend Phyllis called it the Change. A big, bossy woman who teaches accounting at the college with Harriet, Phyllis has already gone through the Change all by herself, pooh-poohing doctors and eating huge handfuls of ginkgo baloba and ginseng from the health food store in Roanoke.

  “You’ve got to go with the flow, change with the change,” she advised Harriet. “Try some zinc.”

  “Or maybe a man,” Harriet surprised herself by saying. The words flew right out of her mouth.

  “Why, Harriet!” Phyllis was as surprised as she was. Phyllis herself doesn’t want a man, she has announced, because if she got one now, she’d probably just end up taking care of him, and then he’d die on her. Men are like mayflies, Phyllis says.

  But Harriet had found herself thinking about them anyway. Sometimes she woke up at night with her body on fire, thinking about them. She did not tell Phyllis about this. Harriet always liked men; she used to have dates with them, too, mostly decorous dates that stopped when they got too demanding. Or, to be accurate, that’s when Harriet stopped seeing them. And they were nice men: the new minister at the First Methodist Church, a widower; the academic dean of her college, whose wife ran off with her yoga instructor; and, once, her own dentist, who asked her out for dinner while he was in the middle of performing a root canal on her upper left canine. Of course, she nodded yes, leaning way back in the chair like that. Why, he could have drilled right straight on up into her brain. Not that he would have, Henry Jessup—he turned out to be a very sweet man, actually—a dreamy, poetic sort of man, for a dentist, who had moved back here from Cleveland to take care of his aging parents. He really liked Harriet, too. For some reason he thought she was very funny; he really “got a kick out of her,” or so he said. He took her on hikes, to picnics and outdoor bluegrass festivals. But anytime Henry Jessup tried to say anything serious, Harriet’s mind flew right straight up in the air and perched in a tree like a bird. Finally he gave up. His parents died, and he returned to Cleveland.