Home In The Morning Read online

  HOME IN

  THE MORNING

  Mary Glickman

  For Stephen,

  My windy boy and a bit

  CONTENTS

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  THIRTEEN

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Ride on Moses

  I’ve been traveling all this day

  Ride on Moses

  To hear the good folks sing and pray

  Want to go home in the morning

  They pray’d so long I couldn’t wait

  Ride on Moses

  I knew the Lord would walk that way

  Want to go home in the morning

  Then ride on, ride on,

  Ride on, Moses

  Ride on, King Emmanuel,

  Want to go home in the morning

  When I got there, Satan was there

  Ride on Moses

  I’m goin’ to take the golden car

  Want to go home in the morning

  I lay my old sins on the shelf

  Ride on Moses

  And stand right up and shake myself

  Want to go home in the morning

  ONE

  Spring, 1995

  JACKSON SASSAPORT WAS NAMED FOR both the capital of Mississippi and his uncle Yakov, signifying him instantly as Southern and Jewish and, as such, the perfect husband, a man chivalrous and loquacious at once. He had no ability to mislead his wife and harbored far less the desire to do so, for his sensibilities were especially fine. Stella was a trial of a woman, a virago of passionate pursuits who regularly forgot him. Everyone said she was fortunate to land him. And land him she did. After many years, he remained famously devoted to her. To watch her thrash on her dressing room couch in her party clothes on a night that represented the triumph of her career distressed him almost more than it did her to present him with that unholy spectacle: tendrils of red hair flashing like whips, the pulsing veins of her long pale neck, her lips gone white from clamping together to stifle a ragged moan that escaped as a dull murmur of grief. He watched her tantrum helplessly, afraid to touch her.

  When she could speak, Stella said: I am not going if she’s there, and that’s that. I cannot. I will not. I won’t.

  She was still for the moment, so he rushed forward and dropped to one knee before the tufted chaise where she sprawled, defiant in mauve taffeta and blue silk.

  That’s ridiculous, he said, in his dark Mississippi drawl, as soothing a tone as man can muster. This is your night. Everyone will be there. Your family. Your brothers, your mama. Mine.

  Precisely! Precisely! Stella bolted upright. Her oval eyes went round with anger and impatience. Dear dotty Mother, who waited how long for this night? Forty-eight years? She gave up on me in ‘67. Her mind’s been gone since ‘92. She thinks it’s our wedding anniversary. The boys. They don’t respect me. They’re both divorced. I can see them now, sitting with Katherine Marie jolly as clams lettin’ her spike them up. Your mama? She’s been waiting for me to fall on my face since the day we met. No. I’m not going. I’m not.

  She rose from the chaise and glided to the bed, where she fell back against the comforter and a flotilla of pillows. Her gaze fixed on the ceiling as she muttered. Gawd. That heifer. Gawd.

  Her legs were spread and uncovered, as were her arms. In love with her more than thirty years, Jackson Sassaport was moved by the sight. He got on the bed too, made to stroke her in consolation. Taking a chance—any false move when Stella was like this could be disastrous—he kissed her, and because he remained in love with her after thirty years, he could not ignore her breasts or her backside when she relaxed a little, and that’s why Stella was late for her own party. No matter what Katherine Marie said later on, it had little to do with her, less than a jot.

  Always the gentleman, Jackson let his wife doze a few minutes afterward while he washed up and put his pants back on then located her panties and shoes, laying them out on the chaise while she repaired her face. She left the bathroom impeccably groomed and in a clearly improved mood, although her eyes were red. Leaning on her husband’s shoulder while she slipped on her heels, she said: Long as I have you, Mr. Sassaport, I’ll be ok. They enjoyed a quiet connubial embrace. Why don’t you leave Katherine Marie to me? he murmured in her ear. I’d be honored by the opportunity. Stella declined. I can handle her. I was just upset at the thought of seeing her at first. It wasn’t pleasant news. She squared her shoulders, filled her chest with air. I’m ok now. I can handle her.

  She gave her hair a final brushing. He smiled at her back. This was the Stella Sassaport he knew, loved. He couldn’t help himself. Strong, exceptional women of mercurial natures peppered his family tree, they were the sum of the dalliances, flirtations, and romances of his youth. They were the women who fed, clothed, coddled, trained, excited, enchanted, and tortured him from the hour of his birth until the day he escaped into Stella Godwin’s arms, or so he thought on his wedding day. On that day, he felt he’d married his anti-mother/auntie/cousin/crush, but before the first decade was out, he became convinced he’d married the same old she-wolf in the clothing of a different sheep. He experienced an epiphany on this point quite literally at the hand of the self-same Katherine Marie whose name on the faxed final guest list had thrown Stella into her fit. Jackson’s epiphany, like all epiphanies, had a self-evident truth at its core: It was too late to change. Years too late. Whatever Stella was, and there was much that terrified him, he was hers, every ounce of him. If she was like all the others, well, so be it. At least she’d surpassed her type. Nonetheless, he still recalled Katherine Marie’s words exactly. They visited him at the oddest times, when nothing particular was going wrong, when Stella rested between projects, when life was quiet, when life was good.

  You’ve been corrupted! Katherine Marie charged that night, stabbing a bony finger into his chest. It’s insane you can’t see what she’s done to you! Changed you into a lowlife weasel! My dear white Southern gentleman manqué. You are a fraud! No true gentleman would do what you’ve done! For what? For her!

  Her tirade was a startling event to Jackson, especially in its naked display of feminine venom, but Stella laughed, hugging herself when he told her about it. She nearly rolled off the bed. For a time, he was insulted she wasn’t insulted on his behalf. In those days, Katherine Marie was Stella’s latest enthusiasm, a fact of life Jackson Sassaport could either like or lump. Epiphany underscored.

  Jackson Sassaport was of the Savannah Sassaportas, seven generations, three states, and a vowel removed from their patriarch, Baruch Sassaporta, a colonist trader with a fleet of three tall ships that made the family fortune. Baruch’s people were from Portugal by way of London, thanks to the Inquisition. Jackson’s great-granddaddy, another Yakov, not recognized by Baruch Sassaporta’s direct heir when some Slavic blood finagled its way into the Portuguese strain, had wandered through Georgia and Alabama before setting up shop in Hinds County, Mississippi, with his brother, Yosel. Both men married clever, ambitious women who bred like rabbits and ran them like overseers. Bella and Hannah were the architects of the Anglicization of the name Sassaporta, an appellation the locals had trouble with as they were not familiar as Savannah folk were with the venerable names of colonial shipping, making two syllables of the “port” and dropping the “a” altogether, at least it seemed to the brothers and their wives, although the “poh-art” was followed by an exhalation of breath that would have been taken by more musical ears for a delicately aspirated “a.” At the insistence of
those two balabustas, Sassaporta’s Dry Goods became Sassaport Clothiers, Yakov became Jack, and Yosel became Joe. In subsequent generations, Sassaport Clothiers begat Sassaport Furniture which begat Sassaport Lighting which begat Sassaport Plumbing Fixtures which begat Sassaport General Emporium which begat Sassaport Grocery until even a Sassaport Fish and Tackle was added to the register. By the time Jackson came along, there wasn’t a citizen of Hinds County who did not have a Sassaport product in his larder, his living room, his closets, his bath, his garage. Jackson’s father was a third son and not obligated to join the family business. He became a physician. Jackson chose the law.

  It was not what his father intended. Dr. Howard Sassaport expected to establish a medical dynasty just as his grandfather had sired a retail one. This feat was meant to enshrine his name in the family narrative at a par with Jack and Joe, its heroes, the husbands of Bella and Hannah, they whose names were invoked repeatedly in the rearing of children, the constant discussions at the uncles’ roundtable on the expansion of market, and at holiday gatherings. In his grandiose moments, the doctor imagined himself as revered by the progeny as the great Baruch Sassaporta himself. Unfortunately, he chose Missy Fine as his bride, selected for her wide hips and thick bones, which he fancied indicated that a sturdy mother slept within them, awaiting his seed to waken her destiny. The daughter of a man who wholesaled shoes from factories up north, Missy Fine was plump and pretty, black-eyed, chestnut-haired, a bored, fierce-minded creature who dreaded more than anything else winding up like her mother behind a counter in some frigid warehouse figuring sums in a green eyeshade. When Dr. Howard Sassaport came to call, she saw her way out of four generations of shopkeeping. With a desperate energy the smitten doctor failed to notice, she divined his dreams and promoted his cause convincingly. Big families are the Lord’s greatest blessing, she avowed to him on moonlit nights until his ring was on her finger, then after popping out a paltry two doctoral candidates in seven years, she declared she was too frail to go through that ordeal again. She abandoned the nursery, leaving her second boy in the care of the hired help and Jackson to flounder on his own, retired to the kitchen, and did not come out until she’d gained forty pounds three months later. Making do with the boys he had, Dr. Sassaport was ripe for colossal failure.

  Jackson was the eldest. When he was small, the idea of following in his father’s footsteps appealed, largely because the man was rarely home while his son was awake. His person was entirely mysterious to the boy. Of the doctor’s activities, Jackson was aware only that they were adorned with his mother’s most intense respect. He knew Daddy helped sick people, but Jackson was always in perfect health himself— even childhood diseases passed over him like the Angel of Death in Egypt—so he had only the vaguest notions of what sick meant. By five, he’d had his share of scrapes and bruises, but he had no experience of wounds that gushed or festered. In his imagination, sick people had stomachaches or coughed like Cook.

  If he’d bothered to share this perception, others could be excused for thinking the boy a bit slow, especially since he and Mama brought a covered supper to Daddy’s office every Thursday night. On Thursdays, Dr. Sassaport kept evening hours at the office, principally for the sake of local laborers too poor to take time from day work so that the goiters choking their throats could be measured or the thick yellow veil masking the whites of their eyes assessed. They tended to wait until thirty minutes before the knife was indicated before limping up to the doctor’s front door (or its rear, as custom demanded for some). Charity day, Mama called it, and at first Jackson thought “charity” was the proper name of the day of the week between Wednesday and Friday. Yet the child could not be blamed for these ideas. When they brought Daddy supper, they entered the office through the side door, which led directly into his examining room. If Daddy had a patient with him, he did not allow them over the threshold. On the occasions they were granted entry, Jackson found nothing unusual in the place. It might as well have been an office in the bank or Uncle Tom-Tom’s insurance company except for its tart, tangy smell, which the boy found similar enough to what Sukie used to scrub the floors at home to consider it only occasionally.

  When Jackson achieved the age of five, his father deemed it high time for the boy to be introduced more intimately to the medical arts. His mother disagreed. He’s too young for harsh realities, Mama said. Human beings can’t stomach much of it. Daddy countered: I can and I do. So will my son. If I acquaint him with reality during his tender years, he’ll take the nasty bits of life a heap more easily later on, Missy. I want him to grow a strong stomach. Hell, I want it crisscrossed with scars. Trust me, sweetheart. It’ll help him more later on than it’ll harm him now.

  Asking for trust in such a situation was a dicey business with Missy Fine Sassaport. She trusted nothing but her own mind and—it should be admitted at the git-go—that curious entity’s homegrown conclusions were cast in stone as soon as they sprung from the gray matter and propelled themselves into the dull, waiting world. Studying her husband, gauging his determination, she drew in her chin making two of it. She crossed her arms above her chest using that colossal mass as a shelf on which to deposit her certitude.

  You’re wrong, she declared emphatically in a tone that brooked no contradiction.

  I’m the daddy, woman. I’ll do what I see fit.

  Missy Fine Sassaport snorted her contempt.

  Take the child, then. Ruin him if you need to. But when you return him to me, if that child’s in any way damaged, he is mine, ya hear? Mine.

  She quit his company in a huff, marching upstairs for a lie-down, as she was tired from shopping all day and had no intention of wasting her precious energies on the losing side of a cockeyed dialectic.

  That same night a terrible pounding on the back door roused the household after everyone had gone to bed. It woke Jackson immediately and his father as well. Mama snored on even after Sukie, who slept in the kitchen on a cot near the stove, bounded upstairs and burst into the master bedroom without knocking to relay the news that there was an emergency down by River Road, a matter of life and death, life and death! The doctor raised a hand to quiet her, got out of bed, and put on his pants. Grabbing his black bag and a suit jacket as the times were yet formal about such matters whether at three a.m. or four in the afternoon, he hurried into the hall, nearly taking a header down the staircase after bumping into Jackson, who’d wandered from his bedroom to see what the commotion was about. Daddy righted himself, regarded his son. Get your chinos on, boy, he ordered, and your corduroy shirt. You’re coming with me. Don’t forget your shoes.

  It was a boneheaded move, the move of a man still angry over an afternoon’s spat with his wife. The doctor had no idea what he was taking the boy to, only that there was an accident, a wound to be closed. How long it been open?, he asked the one who had been sent to fetch him. Just a short while, Doctor. A short while. Forgetting in his heat the appetite of his patients for falsehood and deception, it seemed to Jackson’s daddy that a fresh wound was not a bad introduction to the healing profession for a child. The shame of it was he knew better. For fifteen years, he’d taken histories from patients that were fairy tales from beginning to end. “Mama wasn’t feeling well last Thanksgiving” would prove after further investigation to translate: “Mama was riddled with cancer and starved at home for six months before she was dispatched by a merciful Lord.”

  Hastily attired, off the pair went into the dark, humming night. Daddy’s Studebaker followed a rickety red pickup down the three or four roads Jackson knew and then down a tree-lined strip of dirt he did not. After several lefts, a few rights, the road got darker and bumpier, which conditions might ordinarily have frighted the boy but on this occasion caused only exhilaration. He was, after all, out and about in the dead of night in the brilliant company of a personal god. For reasons unknown to him, reasons he suspected were seriously grown-up, Daddy had requested his presence on an important errand. What could be more exciting, more intoxicating?
Then there was the way Daddy spoke to him, in tones unheard before: hushed, seductive tones meant to color the experience awaiting him. You are about to have your eyes opened, child of mine, for they have been closed, Daddy said. You are about to be welcomed into a world of miracle and mystery where I will guide you to the foot of the mountain it will be your joy to climb. Mama thinks you’re too young, but we know better, don’t we, Jackson. Mama is only a woman, and this is the business of men. Are you not a man, if a small one? Are you not a man?

  Up until that moment, Jackson felt for certain he was not a man, but if Daddy said so then he must be. His narrow chest puffed up, his neck went straight and long to support a head swollen with pride.

  Yes, Daddy, I am a man. I am.

  Dr. Howard Sassaport laughed from deep in his proper belly and its sound, full and rich, filled up the cab of the Studebaker wrapping around the boy in a thick, affectionate cloak. Jackson near burst with happiness.

  The pickup stopped, the Studebaker also. Before the headlights dimmed, Jackson caught sight of a tar-paper shack set near the banks of the Pearl, then all went black except for the small yellow glow of oil lamps lit within. He got confused for a bit thinking they were fireflies, very large ones, flickering where the shack stood, maybe hovering in front of it. Daddy said: Alright, Jackson. Follow me and keep your eyes open. Look and listen, child. That’s all you need to do the first time. Keep a good distance back from the sickbed. But look and listen to everything. Can you do that?

  Jackson nodded with all the gravitas a five-year-old can achieve. They got out of the car, Jackson jumping from his high seat. His feet sloshed into mud. He took a deep breath of air that was familiar and yet not: a moist air, noisy with insects, heavy with peculiar scents. Crabapple, he thought, like Mama’s favorite tree mixed with the lively stench of gumbo mud and underneath something else that caused his nostrils to pinch. A gaunt black woman stood at the entrance to the shack, holding a lamp aloft so they could wend their way safely through a pile of junk, a tiny vegetable garden. The pinching smell got stronger with his every step until he was nearly suffocated by the time they entered the place. Yet bravely, because Daddy expected such, he crossed the threshold with his eyes open and his senses pricked.