BETTER ANGELS

The pretty blonde girl was a TA sharing the graduate student office next door to me in the English Department at Duke; she was finishing up her M.A. and putting together her Ph.D. committee. I was a Visiting Lecturer on a one-year contract that was ending; my father, the judge, had arranged it for me, claiming I wasn’t sufficiently aggressive or driven.

“If you have to be a god-damned academic, at least I can pull some strings and see to it you’re a respected one,” he said.

The Honorable Richard Randolph Beverley, IV expected his sons to be distinguished. And Randolph Robert Beverley, my older half-brother, certainly was. A graduate of Duke University School of Law, he’d been a state senator for Fairfax County in our most blessed Commonwealth of Virginia, and was now serving his district as a second term U.S. Congressman. Rand Beverley was also ridiculously handsome, and had modeled for Prada in both New York and Milan. He had framed pictures of those days displayed around his home and office. He is recently engaged to Miss Sarah Laurent Chapman, whose family, Rand liked to gloat, once owned most of North Carolina. The engagement’s been written up in society pages in D.C. and throughout the South. The wedding will be an obscenely spectacular event. With the likely exception of my mother, absolutely no one will miss me if I’m not in attendance.

My birth certificate says Cary Randolph Beverley, III; but I’m “Trey” to family and friends. I’m not especially handsome; and despite the subscriptions my mother keeps renewing for GQ and Rake Magazine, I’m not especially well-groomed, either. I’m more of a Field and Stream kind of guy. When you add that to a Ph.D. in Jacobean literature, it’s clear I was never destined to set the world on fire.

As a child, I struggled with a terrible stutter, and when Mrs. Peters, the counselor from Potomac, suggested that I might be “on the spectrum,” the judge withdrew me from their school—making me the first Beverley in several generations who would not be a Potomac graduate. He practically tossed me bodily into a Quaker boarding school in rural Pennsylvania.

“Let him be an embarrassment at a distance,” dad said.

It was my mother, the former Melissa Tamsin Taylor, who visited often, saw to it that I had private tutors and speech therapy. But I suspect the stutter started to go away the minute I was no longer daily in the judge’s presence. My mother made sure that I was able to take part in art classes, literary clubs and social events. She paid for lessons at an equestrian center in Bucks County. As a writer for a venerable Southern lifestyle magazine, my mom had good friends and important connections in what was left of the magazine world. By the time I was a teenager, she helped me land summer internships, first with Guns and Gardens and then Atlantic Monthly, where I got to work with the literary editor. It was my mother who helped me recognize that I had writing talent and academic abilities, who supported and encouraged my love of music and literature and history. She did her best to undo the harm her husband did to me with his constant criticism and bullying. But, since she was bullied by the man herself, it was difficult for her to have sufficient power as a parent, or as a person. She discovered quickly in her marriage that there were good reasons the first Mrs. Beverley filed for divorce and was living happily single in Richmond. But Melissa had “married up” and knew her place; she understood very well her precarious status as a trophy wife. Her one consolation was that at some point the judge would notice the inevitable signs of her aging, and would trade her in for a younger model. She’d wait meanwhile, doing everything possible to create her own financial safety net and moving mountains whenever she could to protect her only child. It’s been nearly thirty years, though, and she’s still waiting and hoping for release.

I made it through boarding school, then through Vanderbilt undergrad and through the Ph.D. work at Duke, all with high honors that meant absolutely nothing to my father. I published a book with a respected academic press that was based on my dissertation about the abandoned women in Jacobean literature. I was awarded a very impressive research grant and planned travel to Belgium. I’d booked it for the late summer; the plan was to stay and teach, and complete the research and writing in a new area – the Reformation writers of Flanders and the Brabant. All of this was the source of my father and half-brother’s amusement and mockery around the dining room table at family holidays.

So, when this beautiful young woman began to say hello as I sat alone in my dreary office in the English Department, and as we gradually began some friendly conversation, I admit I was both baffled and flattered.

“You can call me Honey,” she said the first time we talked, with a coquettish turn of her shoulder and a dimpled smile. She was good at flirting in a way that left the more intoxicating thoughts lingering unsaid in the air.

“You can call me Dr. B,” I said, trying awkwardly to flirt back. It was pure coincidence since that’s what my students did call me.

Honey smiled, and seductively lifted a necklace out of her blouse to reveal a small, golden bee with a tiny topaz chip for an eye, dangling on a very thin gold chain. “How’s that for coincidence?” she said.

This action captivated me, I admit, creating an interesting fantasy about the two of us that played in my mind and snuggled its way in pretty deep. I was unused to women being seductive. Hell, I wasn’t even sure that I was reading the situation right. I worried that my stutter might return if I got too agitated.

She’d never been to Nashville, one of my favorite cities. We both liked root music and blue grass.

“I sing a little,” she said, turning shy as she said it.

“Me, too,” I said.

My favorites were the old guys: Merle, Waylon, Willie. The outlaws I wished I could be like.

Honey was hot enough to be one of those new-style female country singers. There is no more high hair or heavy makeup at the Opry. Her big blue eyes, great cheekbones, and long, silky blonde hair were just what Nashville liked these days.

She’d come from mountain folk, like my own mother did. A good bit of mother’s family was still living in the panhandle, in Boonsboro, Maryland. I went along whenever she visited; I loved the mountains and felt more at home with her people. I thought maybe that’s why I liked Honey so much. In addition to her looks, her flirtatiousness, and my loneliness, that is. I admit that I was very, very lonely. The visiting professorship paid next to nothing. It was my family’s money that rented me a furnished condo in a posh area of downtown Durham – two bedrooms, a den, a kitchen filled with high-end equipment. The dreadful artwork provided by the landlord was all abstract, with blurred lines and blocks of color, carefully matched to the furnishing. The condo was way too big for me. But, light flooded the empty rooms and sparkled through the crystals I hung from each window. Rainbows danced on the walls at varying times of day, as the sun traveled across the Durham skyline. It felt like life in other forms was present, and expressing itself in ways that didn’t make me feel mocked. I’d brought along my 5-string banjo, one of the first old Gibson Mastertones made in the 1920s, which had come down to me from my mother’s people, some of the family who came from Boonsboro to settle land on the Chesapeake. Aside from the work I did for teaching, research and writing, I spent hours playing along with old blue grass records, doing my best on classics like “John Hardy,” “Cripple Creek,” “Rocky Top,” even “Foggy Mountain Breakdown,” I enjoyed playing, but felt that I never got the fingering and styling quite right. More and more, as the semester wore on, I thought of Honey as I played, and wondered if my ability would impress her. I imagined her sitting there in the living room, on the big overstuffed sofa, admiring me and telling me so. But even in my own mind’s fantasies, I found it hard to accept her compliments.

As the semester wound to a close, when Honey showed up to wish me well, I finally summoned the courage the best I could and asked her, “Would you like to go out with me to celebrate the end of the semester?” I barely got the words out before my throat closed up. My heart was beating way too hard.

Her smile was like a bolt of pure pleasure that hit and splattered in my chest. “As long as it’s someplace real nice,” she said, exaggerating her drawl and employing her sweet little shoulder shrug again.

It turned out that Honey’s idea of “real nice” was not some Michelin star restaurant. It was a little-known roadside music bar outside Durham that served great BBQ and sweet potato fries. Her idea of nice had to do with good live music, easy atmosphere and great down-home food. I was more than happy to oblige.

She went back to her small office to gather up her things, and we headed out of the building. I had my briefcase and the few belongings I’d kept in the office, since a memo stuffed in my mailbox that morning made it clear that anything left behind after the last day of class would be “discarded to make room for new visiting faculty.” There wasn’t even the pretense of a “goodbye and good luck” from the very few full-time faculty, none of whom knew my name.

My car was a vintage two-seater, a burgundy red ’68 Austin Healey Sprite. I always parked it as far from all other cars as possible, to try and prevent scuffs and dents.

“The men in my family are into collecting cars,” I told Honey as we got closer to it. “We’ve got a garage that looks like a vintage car showroom. Kinda stupid, really.”

“But this is really nice,” Honey said. “I never rode in a car like this.”

“Well, it breaks down more than it drives,” I said. “But it sure looks good parked at a curb.”

It was warm enough for us to put the top down, and Honey insisted that she didn’t mind holding onto her hair to keep it from whipping around and tangling up.

I was doing my best to concentrate on the road. But I was nervous about Honey, there in the seat next to me. I’d never been with such a pretty girl. I didn’t want to fall back into any old anxious behaviors, start stumbling over my words, acting like a fool.

It was early when we pulled in at the Dark Note Bar & Grille, and I parked far away at the edge of the lot, as usual, anticipating that the night would bring in a lot more people. I put the top back up and locked up the doors, since Honey wanted to leave her bookbag and sweater in the car, and since I had my own briefcase and laptop stashed behind the driver’s seat.

The place was empty except for some people at the bar who all seemed to know each other and who paid us no mind at all. The stage was sitting empty since the musicians didn’t start up for a few more hours. We took a table at a far corner, as private as we could find, and I went up to the bar to get us some happy hour cocktails while Honey went to the ladies’ room.

It was one of the best nights of my life, for a while. Honey and I talked easily about everything from academia, our areas of study, our families, our interests and hobbies, our shared love of music. I had another month on the lease at the condo, and I was beginning to think that maybe, instead of heading to the family beach house for vacation, I could stay on in Durham. I even started fantasizing about Honey staying there with me. She’d be welcome to take the second bedroom; I wouldn’t force anything on her she wasn’t ready for. It even had its own bathroom with a whirlpool tub. We could have fun just hanging out.

But then, right in the middle of our good time, something started to go wrong with her. She got really pale and started slurring her words. We’d only had two drinks, and they were pretty weak, so I didn’t think it was the liquor.

“I’m gonna throw up,” she mumbled, getting up from the table unsteadily and stumbling back to the ladies’ room.

I thought maybe she could use her sweater, so I hurried out to the car to retrieve it.

By the time I got back, all hell had broken loose. Another woman was screaming about a dead girl in the bathroom and the bartender was on the phone calling an ambulance.

“I’m a nurse!” the woman hollered. “It’s an OD. She’s dead. Get the police on the phone!”

I stood, clutching Honey’s sweater in my hands; my legs wouldn’t move. I scanned the place quickly. Somebody had already taken our empty glasses from the table where we’d been sitting. I’d paid cash at the bar, and left another $50 with the bartender since I figured we’d have a few more drinks and then order some food. All this burned in my head as my legs came back to life, I backed out the door, walked quickly across the parking lot to my car, and drove away.

Back in my condo, I double locked my door, then called Rand and admitted what I’d done.

“I think I need to go back,” I said, feeling tears rise. “I don’t know what made me run.”

“You stay the hell where you are,” Rand said. “You need to think of the family.”

“Her family?” I said.

“OUR family, you idiot,” he barked at me. “How will this look? The brother of U.S. Congressman Beverley and a dead girl in some backroad honky-tonk bar?”

“Oh,” I said. “You mean I have to think about YOU.”

“And the judge,” Rand said. “Our family, Trey.”

“What if I broke the law, leaving like that?”

“You didn’t break any god-damned laws. Unless you had something to do with her dying.”

“I don’t even know if she’s dead,” I yelled into the phone. “What if she’s in the hospital?”

“Does this girl know how to find you?” Rand wanted to know.

“Well, she knows my name,” I said.

“Then I hope she is dead,” he said. “Otherwise there could still be a scandal.”

I should never have called Rand.

He did everything he could to scare the living shit out of me. He told me I had to get out of town. “You don’t want anybody putting this together,” he said. “If you leave now, just take back roads up to the Chesapeake house, to avoid surveillance cameras on the highways.”

Most of my belongings were already packed up, so I just needed to haul them to the car and take off. I did what my brother told me to do and stayed on the back-road routes heading north to Chesapeake Beach.

He promised to say nothing about what happened. “Sissy and I will be there tomorrow night. Melissa and dad are already there. Say nothing until I get there. We’ll talk then.”

I’d forgotten. This was my father’s 65th birthday weekend. The Chesapeake house would be crawling with guests for days.

“You ruin this for the judge and I’ll kill you myself,” Rand said.

My mother knew something was wrong the minute I walked in the door. It was nearly midnight, and she was in the kitchen, reviewing the weekend menus and double checking the party planner’s notes. The judge was in his study, which was fine with me. I had no interest in seeing or talking to him.

She had been sitting at the table, sipping some chamomile, surrounded by papers.

“Hey mom,” I said.

She looked up with a ready smile that froze the minute she saw my face. “What’s wrong?” she asked.

It all came spilling out. We kept so many secrets between us I knew that she’d never breathe a word.

“Oh, Trey,” she whispered. “Whatever possessed you? How could you leave that poor girl?”

I couldn’t even look her in the eye. “I left my better angels behind, and acted like a coward,” I admitted.

“What am I going to do? How do I make this right?”

She put her hands together as if she were praying and didn’t answer me right away. I sat watching her, feeling the full weight of my shame. She reached out and took my hand, and looked so sad and so disappointed; I’ll never get that look out of my memory.

“You did wrong,” she said. “But there’s no going back. We just need to find how to move forward.”

“Rand said to keep my mouth shut and think of the family.”

“Rand is your father’s monster,” my mother said. “His own mother doesn’t like him.”

I didn’t answer, but she knew I agreed.

She sighed. “But in this case, Trey, his advice might be right….for the time being.”

“What?” I said.

Close down Durham, and everything about it, my mother said. Keep your mind focused and just work. You did wrong, but I love you, she said. I always love you.

So, I tried to shut down the parts of my mind that were on fire. Long through the night and into the dawn, I worked at grading papers, recording grades, uploading the final grades online, officially finishing the last bit of work for Duke. Then I emailed my condo landlord to say that I was already gone and didn’t need a refund for the last month. I contacted the housekeeper with instructions for doing a final cleaning and promised to PayPal her the money for her services. As the sun was coming up and the earliest of the gulls were cawing to each other, swooping across the waves, I fell asleep in my clothes, on top of the blankets, emptied out of all but the rawest hollowness inside me.

Rand got there earlier than he said, without Sissy, and walked into my bedroom, waking me up with news.

“This is a big deal,” he said, by way of greeting. “Three dead. Dozens in the hospitals, all overdoses. Some counterfeit Xanax laced with fentanyl. One moron was dealing it from Sigma Chi. He’s in custody, with a search for more idiots out there peddling this shit. Warnings across the Triangle for all campuses to be on alert; but since it’s the end of the semester, there’s fear that a lot of students took their pills home with them, across the country.”

“What about Honey?” I said, my face buried in the pillow.

“The blonde at the Dark Note Bar & Grille? Yeah, she’s dead,” he said.

Just like that. No feeling at all.

I sat up. “Anybody say anything? The bartender? They could be looking for me.”

Rand shook his head. “They’re keeping quiet. This kind of thing is really bad for business.”

“For business,” I said. I looked out the window. The sky was a brilliant blue.

“Get showered. You look like shit,” Rand said. “This’ll blow over. Dad doesn’t need to know.”

“My mother knows,” I said.

He started in on what an idiot I was, and how I always make a mess of things. But when he started in on what a bleeding heart my mother was and how she’d influence me the wrong way, I told him to shut the fuck up.

“I’m not like you, Rand. This is going to haunt me for the rest of my life.”

“Knock it off,” Rand said.

People started arriving around noon. Some were staying the weekend. Others had their own homes nearby and would be coming and going. There were several events taking place on each day of the weekend, live music, catered meals. Then on Monday afternoon, a select group would be joining my parents on a private cruise. They’d be gone for two weeks.

“I don’t think I can back out without your father suspecting something,” my mother said. “Will you be okay? Can you just stay put here? Try to get yourself together?”

Honey’s face was flashing across TV screens every time a news bulletin broke in to interrupt the sports programming playing in my father’s den. She got more airplay because she was by far the prettiest of the three who died. Her real name, they said, was Emalee Logan, from outside Asheville. The family had come to Durham to take their child home. An uncle was interviewed who said they didn’t understand what happened. “She couldn’t have been at that place alone,” he said. “We just want to know, if there’s somebody out there who can tell us more about our beautiful girl.”

Sissy showed up with a few members of the Chapman clan. The housekeeper set them up in the guest bedrooms, and Rand took Sissy outside for some cocktails by the pool.

“Good to see you, Trey,” she said.

Rand hadn’t told her anything.

The first live band played classic rock and roll. Servers, dressed in 1950s poodle skirts and ponytails, walked through the crowd with mid-century style cocktails, canapes and hors d’oeuvres. People were already dancing. Some of them had changed in the cabanas and were wearing expensive bathing suits and jewelry, floating around in the pool, holding their cocktail glasses above the water. One couple was slow dancing on the diving board. The judge was the life of the party, moving from one place to another, being the ebullient host. I’d been home since the night before; he had yet to say hello to me. It wouldn’t be hard to keep my secret.

My mother alternated checking in with me and supervising the event, overseeing the catering, conferring with the party planner, supervising the photographer and videographer. There was to be a private screening of a new film, a young award-winning filmmaker from Atlanta was here to lend himself to the festivities. After that a huge barbecue and another live band – this one playing Big Band classics. Then a midnight bonfire on the beach.

Tomorrow would be the formal dinner to end the weekend celebrations. Tuxedos and gowns. A chamber music concert.

All weekend long, there were parades of the very best people society has to offer. Members of the legislature, the judiciary. Celebrities with southern roots were status invites, making guest appearances and moving among the guests, red-carpet smiles plastered to their faces.

I kept thinking that I saw Honey among the party-goers. Sitting by the pool. Dancing alone at the edge of the bandstand. She would bat her eyes and give me that cute little shoulder shrug, and then she’d be gone. I’d blink hard to bring her back, but no one would be there.

At the end of the night, when the revelers were all gone to the bonfire on the beach, I sat with my mother and Rand, at the edge of the pool. Sissy was already asleep upstairs. The pool was lit, and our long shadows floated on the water. The filter gurgled.

“I have Honey’s belongings in my room,” I said. “Her bookbag and her sweater. I want to take them to her family. I want to tell them.”

“No you don’t,” Rand said. “You’re not going to risk everything for some worthless papers and a Walmart sweater.”

“Trey’s right. It’s the decent thing to do,” my mother said. “But, Trey, promise you won’t do anything until we’re back from the cruise, okay? We can figure it out then.”

Puzzled, I stared at my mother. She wouldn’t meet my eye. The light and shadow played across her face. I understood.

Rand was still talking. “If you want to ship them back, fine. We’ll find a way to do it anonymously.”

I couldn’t speak. I could hardly breathe. Rand blew up. “Stop being a damned idiot, Trey! Leave well enough alone! This is the first time in your whole ridiculous life that you’ve done something our father would approve of!”

“That’s exactly why I hate myself,” I said.

My mother stood up and slowly walked away. She couldn’t bear the way I looked at her.

There was nothing more to say. Everything was twisted and blurred, and the world was melting around me.

I headed back to my bedroom. My mother was somewhere else now. The crowd was returning from the beach. Their voices filled the air. I stood, looking out my window, watching the judge. He was standing near the pool, near Rand, laughing, having a good time. I closed the curtain and stood in the dimness of the room. Through a small opening in the drapes, a sliver of moon illuminated Honey’s sweater, draped across the back of my bedroom wing chair. I walked over, lifting it into my arms. Sitting slowly, I held the sweater to my chest, breathing in the scent of Honey’s perfume and holding my breath. Holding her essence there as long as I could, within me.

Debra Leigh Scott (www.debraleighscott.com) is the Founding Executive Director of Hidden River Arts (www.hiddenriverarts.com). Her fiction has appeared in such literary journals as The Oxford American, The Chattahoochee Review, River City, Words of Wisdom, TPQ, The Abiko Quarterly (Japan), Purnev (Portugal), The Ashen Eye (Thailand), Adelaide Literary Magazine and Stoneboat. Her collection of short stories, Other Likely Stories, was published by Sowilo Press. She has since been at work on several novels, two new collections of stories, on growing Hidden River Publishing, a subsidiary of Hidden River Arts, and on a documentary/book project called ‘Junct: The Trashing of Higher Ed. In America.