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Chapter 7

Susan

Legacy at Highwoods Preserve Assisted Living,

Tampa, Florida,3 July 2009

Martha’s baby would come early and be healthy despite his mother’s cancer. Today, eighty-seven years later, that baby was enjoying his life at Legacy at Highwoods Preserve, one of the finest assisted living facilities in New Tampa.

As Susan dialed the home where Luke lived, she was so excited her fingers tingled. She was going to meet Junior Harvey. She had called the home to see if Mr. Harvey was up to having company. “I know his son, Harry, and he thought the old fellow would like to hear me play my banjo.”

Mac couldn’t come with her. He had to make a trip to Macon for some legal matters related to turning over his medical practice to his son a year earlier. He flipped through a pile of legal forms. “You would think by this time the paperwork would be a done deal. Sheesh!” he complained. “I will miss you. Call me every night, okay?”

Susan missed him. She did call him every night and gave him a running detail of her day. It had been the first time since they were married two months before that he had not been with her. But Susan knew she had to meet the old man to pick his brain. There were too many unanswered questions. Was his father really someone named Luke Harvey, or could it possibly have been Luther Willson? You know, it fits! Daddy’s name was Harvey, a family name way back. Luke or Luther. But what could Junior reveal, especially if he had memory issues?

As she walked down the hallway to his room, carrying her little banjo, she was unusually nervous. His door was open, and she saw him seated at a card table playing solitaire. Seeing him in a typical retirement home setting calmed her nerves. She knocked on the doorjamb. When he turned to face the door, her heart jumped. Grandpa!

“Come on in, good-lookin’! Are we gonna go jammin’? See ya brought yer banjer!”

Susan was put at ease by the old man’s country lingo. “Got yer fiddle tuned up, Mr. Harvey?”

“What’s this mister business? Just call me Junior. And yeah, I was playin’ just a bit ago. The fiddle is in fine fettle.” He laughed at his alliteration. “Just let me get it out, and then we’ll go a-jammin’. I have forgotten your name again. My memory is terrible when it comes to names, but I can remember details from eighty years ago. Figure that one out. Forgive me if I call you good-lookin’, but you are.”

Susan played along with the forgetfulness. “Oh, it’s okay if you can’t remember my name. It’s Susan. I was named for my grandmother, Susanna Willson.” She purposely mentioned the name Willson to see if it raised any memory. Was the flicker of his eyebrow an indication that the name means something?

“I learned about you from your son, Harry. Thank you for seeing me today, Junior.”

They went to the common room together. Junior almost jogged down the hallway, and Susan did well to keep up with the spry eighty-seven-year-old. He still sported a fine shock of straight, white hair, like all the men in her family. He was tall and lean but not unhealthy in appearance. And yes, there was more than a resemblance to Grandpa Willson. She looked at his hands. Not gnarled with arthritis, well-cared-for nails, but with veins standing out beneath thinning skin and several minor bruises, indicating the fragility of aging skin. He wore loafers without socks, and his baggy pants were held up by old-fashioned black suspenders. Once seated facing each other on straight chairs, they tuned together.

“You’ll hafta tell me if it’s in tune. My ear isn’t as keen as it once was. We Harveys got music in us, but gettin’ older plays tricks on the ears and eyes. Can’t see well enough to read much either, but well, I know all the old ballads.

“Where’d you get that mountain banjer with frets? Sorta like the one Papa gave me, but that’n didn’t have frets. My son, Harry, has it now. You need to meet him some day. He actually makes money playing his banjer. Oh, that’s right, you said you know him.”

Susan grinned. Not as forgetful as Harry suggested.

Susan told him she was from North Carolina and knew all the old tunes from there. “Could we start out with my favorite, Junior? ‘Little Maggie?’”

“Oh my! Yes. You know that was Mom’s song. Her name was Maggie. And she said Papa always sang it as her song.”

At that, he began the fiddle playing, with a slide up the A string, and then double stops. She caught up with him, and they were lost in the music. Two oldsters, seventy and eighty-seven, feeling their youth surge with flying fingers and oblivious to the little audience that gathered, residents and personnel alike. A few people were tapping their feet to the music or clapping their hands in time.

Junior would suggest one song, then Susan suggested the next one. They played for thirty minutes without a break. He was enjoying himself so much; she didn’t want to stop. But her hands were hurting, and after all, she came not as much to pick her banjo as to pick his brain.

He had already forgotten Susan’s name. “Got lots more songs, good-lookin’, but maybe we can find us a cup of coffee and some doughnuts before we start up again. I don’t think this crowd will pay well, anyway. My papa used to lay out his derby hat for people to throw money in it. Sometimes he’d make nothing. Sometimes come home with a couple hundred dollars.”

There was coffee on the counter and some tables where they could sit, chat, and have their coffee. An attendant, having heard Junior mention doughnuts, brought them two plump glazed doughnuts. “Why, thank you, good-lookin’.” Harry was right. Junior used that name for every female.

Susan chose a table away from where others might hear the conversation. “Junior, what can you tell me about your mom. Harry, your son, tells me that she taught you the songs and fretless banjo. Did she teach you the fiddle, too?”

“Little Maggie. That’s what Papa called her. But you know, she wasn’t my real mom. She told me she had to bring me up after my mother died.”

That was significant news. Harry didn’t even know that. He had mentioned that he was confused about her last name being Lindsay.

“My real mother had cancer and died when I was too young to know her. It may have been as soon as I was born. Her name was Martha Lindsay Harvey. Mom always said I was a miracle baby, destined to be born a musician. Yes, she taught me fretless banjer, and I kinda picked up the fiddlin’ on my own. Tried to copy how Papa would play. Papa had a nice fiddle, but he was a banjo man. My fiddle was his. He played in the speakeasies back in the ’20s, but he never drank alcohol.”

That settled one question for Susan. “You say Luke Harvey played in the speakeasies? What else do you remember about him?”

“He wasn’t around very much after I was old enough to remember things. I only recall seeing him in the late ’20s, before the Depression. He would come to St. Pete right after Christmas, sell what banjers and fiddles he brought, and then go back to Tennessee. Every afternoon he would play either the banjo or the fiddle. I was named after him, you see, Luke Harvey Jr., and that’s why I’m called Junior.”

“Makes sense.”

“Papa. I remember his great shock of white hair and a neatly trimmed white mustache. He was tall like me. I guess I look like him. I see him in the mirror every morning. He would sing and play the fretless for hours, entertaining me. But with the stock market crash, no one had money to buy musical instruments, so he didn’t ever come back. It was like he plumb disappeared off the face of the earth. At first he would write to us, but then that stopped, too. There was one final letter that made Mom real mad. I don’t think Mom tried to locate him after that. I think he’s the reason she never got married.”

Whoa! Tennessee? Reason for not marrying? “Junior, are you certain Luke Harvey was from Tennessee? I thought Harry said he brought instruments from a luthier in North Carolina.”

“You know, that’s kinda funny. He talked about the man who made the instruments in North Carolina, but when Mom wrote to him, the address was in Johnson City, Tennessee. We just assumed he was from there.”

Susan knew this might be a touchy question, but she barreled ahead with it anyway. “Why do you think Mom didn’t marry because of him?”

“Oh, a couple of reasons. In the first place, she was madly in love with him, not that they were, well, you know. I don’t want to be indelicate. She used to say he spoiled her for any other man. Then, I recall a young fellow used to show up when I was only three or four years old. He was nice enough, if I remember, but Papa was there once when he came, and after that, we never saw him. I guess Papa ran him off.”

“What was your life like during the Depression? Did you and Mom have difficulty making ends meet?”

“Not too bad. Evidently, my real mother was well-off enough to leave a substantial house, and her money wasn’t tied up in the stock market or some bank that fell.” Junior shook his head with the memory. “When she died, it all went to Mom. We had servants when I was little, but Mom had to let them go. Eventually, the money in the bank dwindled to the point that we lived on what I call ‘Depression food.’ Dried beans and garden vegetables. Once in a while, she would get meat for us, but we survived and were healthy despite the shortages. When she died, I got the house, and now Harry has it.”

“So what did you do for your lifework, Junior?”

“Ha, ha! I was into fish. I started out on a fishing boat for the Jones Fish Company back as soon as I got out of the Navy, while getting a college education. I eventually worked my way up to vice president. I retired after Stella died.”

Susan had run out of questions to ask, but she thought, I probably know more than I think I do. She would try to put it all together before she drew any conclusions. She wondered: Will Grandma Zanny be looking in vain for Luther in heaven?