Phillip looked at me out of the corner of his eye. I knew he was again asking me if there were other men in my life. But when? I wondered. Jimmie didn’t like to be alone, not even for a second, and he made sure I was never alone. “ ’Fraid the bogeyman will get me,” he said, kissing my nose, when I asked him why he avoided solitude so diligently. Jimmie rarely—no, Jimmie never gave straight answers to personal questions. He lived in the here and now; he lived in the world around him, not inside his head. He wasn’t one for pondering why people were the way they were; he accepted them, and liked them or didn’t.
“I was a virgin when I met him,” I said softly to Phillip, “and there’s only been Jimmie.” But I looked away when I said it, for I knew that there was a secret between Jimmie and me. Only I knew it, though. Atlanta couldn’t know—could she?
But she did.
By eight, my comfortable, safe world as I knew it had collapsed. I don’t know how Atlanta heard about Jimmie’s plane going down so soon after it happened, but she had. And in the time between when Atlanta was told and the press heard of Jimmie’s death, she had accomplished more than in all the other forty-eight years of her life combined.
When Phillip and I returned from our crazy shopping expedition, we were greeted at the front door of what I’d thought of as my house by men carrying guns, and I was told I wasn’t allowed to enter. I was told that, as Jimmie’s only surviving relatives, Atlanta and Ray now owned everything.
When Phillip and I got back into the car, he was shaking his head in wonder. “How did they find out about the will? How did she know James left it all to them? Look, Lillian,” he said, and I noted that up until Jimmie’s death, he’d always called me Mrs. Manville, “I don’t know how she found out, but I’ll find the culprit who told and . . . and . . . ” Obviously, he couldn’t think of anything horrible enough to do to someone on his staff who’d leaked the contents of Jimmie’s will. “We’ll fight this. You’re his wife, and you have been for many years. You and I will—”
“I was seventeen when I married him,” I said quietly. “And I didn’t have my mother’s permission.”
“Oh, my God,” Phillip said, then he opened his mouth to begin what I assumed was going to be a lecture on my irresponsibility. But he closed it again, and rightfully so. What good would it do to lecture me now that Jimmie was gone?
The next weeks were horrible beyond anything I’d ever imagined. Atlanta was on TV just hours after Jimmie’s death, telling the press that she was going to fight “that woman” who had so enslaved her beloved brother for all those years. “I’m going to see that she gets everything she deserves.”
It didn’t matter to Atlanta that Jimmie’s will stated I was to get nothing. Not even the farmhouse was mentioned in the will. No, Atlanta was out to avenge all the things she imagined I’d done to her over the years. She didn’t just want money; she wanted me humiliated.
Yes, of course she’d found out that my marriage to Jimmie h
adn’t been legal. It couldn’t have been difficult. My sister knew. She and her husband had divorced because she couldn’t bear to stay in Morocco, but her husband wouldn’t give up all that cash and luxury. My sister blamed me for her divorce. Maybe she called Atlanta and volunteered the information that I wasn’t legally married to Jimmie.
However she found out, Atlanta waved my birth certificate before the press, then showed them the photocopy of my marriage certificate. I was only seventeen when we’d married, but I’d lied and said that I was eighteen, and therefore legally in charge of my own fate.
No longer did I have Jimmie to protect me from the press. Now every reporter who’d been mistreated by him—i.e., all of them—dug through his archives and pulled out the most unflattering photos of me he could find, then slapped them across every communications media there was. I couldn’t look at TV, a magazine, or a computer screen that didn’t feature all my chins and the nose I’d inherited from my father. I’d told Jimmie about a thousand times that I wanted to have my over-large nose “fixed.” “Removed!” is what I said, but Jimmie always told me that he loved me as I was, and, eventually, the right hook of my nose didn’t seem to matter.
When I heard what was being said about me, my ugly nose was the least of my concerns. How can I describe what it felt like to see four respected journalists—three men and a woman—sitting around a table, discussing whether or not I had “trapped” James Manville into marrying me? As though a man like Jimmie could be trapped by anyone! And by a seventeen-year-old girl whose only claim to fame was a handful of blue ribbons won at the state fair? Not likely.
Lawyers talked about whether or not I was legally entitled to any of Jimmie’s money.
But when the will was finally read and it was seen that Jimmie had given it all to his brother and sister, I was suddenly the Jezebel of America. Everyone seemed to believe that I had somehow ensnared dear little Jimmie (the youthful Salome was the comparison used most often) but that he had found out about it and had used his will to give me “what I deserved.”
Phillip did his best to keep me away from the press, but it wasn’t easy. I wanted to get on a plane and go away, to hide from everything—but that was no longer an option. My days of jumping on a plane and going anywhere in the world I wanted were over.
For six weeks after Jimmie’s death, while the courts dealt with his will and the press hashed and rehashed everything they heard, I stayed locked inside Phillip’s sprawling house. The only time I left during those horrible weeks was when I went to Jimmie’s funeral, and then I was so shrouded in black draperies that I may as well not have been there. And I most certainly wasn’t going to give the press or Atlanta and Ray the satisfaction of seeing me weep.
When I got to the church, I was told that I couldn’t enter, but Phillip had anticipated such an event, and seemingly out of nowhere, half a dozen men the size of sumo wrestlers appeared and surrounded me.
That’s how I entered Jimmie’s funeral: walking in the midst of six enormous men, my face and body covered with black cloth.
It was all right, though, because by that time I had realized that Jimmie was actually never coming back, and nothing anyone did mattered much. And, too, I kept imagining that farmhouse he’d left me. One time Jimmie had asked me to describe where I’d like to live, and I’d talked of a cozy little house with a deep porch, tall trees around it, and a lake nearby. “I’ll see what I can do,” he’d said, smiling at me with twinkling eyes. But the next house he’d bought was a castle on an island off the coast of Scotland, and the thing was so cold that even in August my teeth were chattering.
After the will was probated, I made no move to leave Phillip’s house. With the press still hovering outside and with Jimmie gone, it didn’t seem to matter where I was or what I did. I took long showers, and I sat at the table with Phillip and his family—his wife, Carol, and their two young daughters—but I don’t remember eating anything.
It was Phillip who told me that it was time for me to leave.
“I can’t go out there,” I said in fear, glancing toward the curtains that I kept drawn night and day. “They’re waiting for me.”
Phillip took my hand in his and rubbed his palm against my skin. For all that I no longer had a husband, I still felt married. I snatched my hand away and frowned at him.
But Phillip smiled. “Carol and I have been talking, and we think you should . . . well, that you should disappear.”
“Ah, yes,” I said, “suttee. The wife climbs onto the funeral pyre and follows her husband into the afterlife.”
From the look on Phillip’s face, he didn’t appreciate my black sense of humor. Jimmie had. Jimmie used to say that the more depressed I was, the funnier I was. If that was so, I should have gone onstage the day of his funeral.
“Lillian,” Phillip said, but when he reached toward my hand again, I withdrew it. “Have you looked at yourself lately?”