Honest Money
Susan Pepper Robbins
“No one could have made all this money honestly.” She was
on the front porch looking out at the wedding guests, not lowering her
voice. There were over two hundred, the biggest wedding in the
county, ever. Cars were parked up and down the highway for two miles,
washed, waxed, glaring in the June sun. Her favorite grandchild,
Howard—everyone else called him Dab, short for Dabney, his middle
name--had just married Irene, the richest girl he could find.
Dab did not have our grandmother’s problem with rich people. He loved them
all. I was helpless— embarrassed and proud of her for speaking out to
the guests who were used to her pronouncements. I was ashamed and
proud of Dab.
Later when things got really bad, Irene and Dab’s youngest
daughter, burst out crying in the dark yard as she walked with me to
the cars parked in the field after one of her parents’ parties, that
Irene had been “leaving bruises” on Dab. She called her parents Irene
and Dab. She was thirteen.
Grandma had worn her good church dress to Dab and Irene’s
wedding, the one she would be buried in so she wore it only for
special occasions, and this wedding was like a funeral so she did not
mind the wear and tear it was getting in the heat. She hated
weddings, watching lambs go to slaughter, but this one she said was
worse than terrible. And to miss it would be like not going to Dab’s
funeral. She expected him to be killed the way he drove. We all
expected it.
Good voile can stand the heat. It was 1956 in central Virginia. The wedding was in the small Baptist church that looked like a
Greek temple. Irene’s parents had given the land and the money to
build the church. We couldn’t all get in the church and those who did
almost fainted from the heat. Ninety-eight degrees that afternoon.
The bridesmaids looked about ready to die in their lavender organza
ballerina-length dresses. Their faces were almost lavender under
their matte makeup. No one had heard of air conditioning or big
ceiling fans in 1956. Heat was natural. We understood the world.
Irene was known for her tantrums—from first grade
through college. Dab knew about them. They were impressive, and he
liked being impressed. When things went wrong, she threw a fit, and
then things got better. I tried it once or twice at home with my
parents and brother Eddie “to no avail.” I loved that phrase and used
it often because it always seemed to fit the occasions I found myself
in.
Irene had thrown a big fit, we heard, when she told her
parents that she was marrying Dab Peyton, Howard Dabney Peyton, my
cousin. “Good luck” they’d said, then went on to warn her that she’d
have to take care of him all his life, which was true, running his
life or trying to with her tantrums and her money, but the money was
really land that no one wanted to buy. Still, Irene had the bearing,
the “carriage” she said of a woman who owned many farms, who had won
ribbons at horse shows, even at The Garden when she was eighteen. The
farms were not called farms but places as in the old Jennings Place,
the Stillman Place, the Walton Place. We lived on farms, but as Irene
would say bitterly many times, “But they're places on the river.”
In his mid-seventies, after a life of hard drinking that
kept his law practice inefficient and poor, Dab stopped drinking
because of Irene’s major tantrum which she called an intervention—one
that brought her a small stroke and then death two years later. She
blamed Dab for the stroke and held the sagging left side of her face
against him, pointing to it and saying she owed her ruined beauty to
him. Then, she’d point to Dab, who’d throw his arm around her
shoulder and say to whoever was hearing the story, “But look at this
other side. It’s perfect.”
I was Irene’s friend, and after she married Dab, she
claimed me as her cousin, or as mama said, her whipping post. Being
five years older, Irene did not worry that I would not understand what
she told me about her life with Dab and later about her sessions with
her doctor; she was sure I couldn’t, being who I was, part of Dab’s
family, but I would have to do, she said. I was all she had to work
with as a friend. She wanted me to understand that she’d wanted to
marry Dab, period. Forget the fact that he had about five girlfriends
at the time, two of them putter-outers and that she knew he’d keep on
having girls on the side, and he did—several during their long
marriage. Once I saw Dab in his own house at a Christmas party
pushing a married woman--plump, glasses, permed hair—up against a
wall and kissing her down her neck while she tried or seemed to try
pushing him off her.
Irene could not forget the fact that he was poor and worst of
all, never would make any real money. He screwed up the drug case
that would have moved him to the big time, that is, to Richmond money.
Our family, I was learning and not just from Irene,
ruined the people we married, so Irene was a good test case: how much
more could we ruin her? How would we know what we’d done and what had
already been done? She said for years that Dab’s and my grandmother
had started the devastation at the wedding when she stood on the porch
and spoke to the crowd as if she were Agrippina watching Christians
being eaten by lions, a favorite scene in “Quo Vadis” with all of us.
Someone had told Irene what Grandma had said and she quoted it often,“No honest person could have made this much money.” But later, Irene
found out that Grandma had only been a small part of her problem and
to her credit, she acknowledged that it was her own father who had
ruined her. This fact took years to discover and more years to adjust
to, but the one thing she never accused him of was dishonesty about
money, and she never forgave Grandma or any of us in Dab’s family. We
were not let off the hook. It was true that Grandma thought money
made people dishonest and Irene thought that money was a measure of
goodness or smarts at least. These two ways of thinking about money
crashed into each other, and the crash started at the wedding even
though it must have started long before that hot day in June.
I had not set my rifle sights on my first husband though
I knew him from school. I was learning a great deal at Irene and
Dab’s wedding that hot afternoon, not that I realized what was
happening to its full extent. To me, back then, it was a perfect
afternoon, and I was a helpless dangling puppet girl, dancing in the
hot sun, thrilled and embarrassed. Irene was perfectly wrong for Dab,
but she looked beautiful in her Montaldo’s gown, as plain in its ivory
sleeves that came down to points over her hands that were hard as
leather gloves from holding the reins of her blue ribbon winning
horses. I couldn’t see the wrongness of things then, but Grandma
always could. She and Irene had that in common even though they
thought different things were the wrong things. I had to learn the
hard way.
Our family had never had any money, and Irene pointed out
to me three months after the wedding, we never would have any, the way
we carried on about the starving Armenians and Korean orphans. We
thought we still lived in a big house handing out corn bread and sacks
of flour, giving the ex-slaves’ great-grandchildren sides of bacon.
In fact, Grandma did live in a ten room house, but the back porch was
falling away, the screens billowed out of it, the broken milk
separator stood guard by the door. Grandma wouldn’t have curtains or
rugs, reminding us that some people didn’t have roofs. She said“rooves” not “rufs” the way our fifth grade teacher had corrected me,
but I kept loyal to “rooves.” Her house had a heating system—heat
registers cut in the ceilings above the wood stoves in the dining room
and living room so that the heat rose up in wavery ribbons to the
frozen bedrooms. When she shook hands with a person she would report
later how hard the person worked. Soft hands meant a person didn’t
work.
My family also had a big house on the river as Irene always
said, but it had only a wood stove in the kitchen as its heating
system. My parents had hard hands and were poor, so I felt proud of
their honesty, but I fell into the trap that Dab had. I married my
school friend who had a future in banking—me who majored in Latin and
loved every minute of it. Irene said I was an idiot, and later I
could see that she was right. The banker went crazy and shot himself
so I didn’t get any of the insurance because when I found him
bleeding, I called the rescue squad who called the police who wrote “self-inflicted” on their report.
_____
Susan Pepper Robbins lives in rural Virginia where she grew up. Her
novel was published when she was fifty: One Way Home, Random House,
1993. Her fiction has won prizes (the Deep South Prize, the Virginia
Prize) and has been published in journals. She teaches writing at
Hampden-Sydney College.
©
Susan Pepper Robbins