Chapter Twenty-nine
In the middle of December, before the team’s first long road trip around the South, I drove out to Annie Kate’s house to give her a Christmas present. She was not in the house when I arrived, and I found her sitting alone on the rocks watching the sun set behind the Charleston skyline again. Behind us, the moon, a shimmering bright disc of winter chrome, was rising over the island, attended by the first pale stars of evening. She was wrapped in a blanket and I could see the vapor of her breath as I approached.
I had not known what to buy a girl I loved. In my lifetime, I had never brought any skill or imagination to the art of gift-giving. I could never match a gift with how I really felt. I had written my mother and told her I was in love with a girl. I told her everything about Annie Kate except that she was pregnant with another man’s child. That was my guilty secret and one that I would not share, not even with my mother. I told her that Annie Kate reminded me of her and that was true. All women I admired reminded me of my mother. I wanted her advice on what a son should give to the first girl he had ever loved. My mother wrote back with a list of suggestions: White Shoulders perfume, a good book (preferably a classic), a leather purse, or a gold chain. She preferred the gold chain and assured me it would make a lovely Christmas present for any girl, even a girl from an old Charleston family. My mother also told me I could invite Annie Kate home for Christmas and that she would be glad to write Annie Kate’s mother extending an invitation. Anyone that I loved, my mother assured me, she would love. Anyone that I loved, she already loved.
It was a gold chain I brought wrapped to Annie Kate on the rocks, to Annie Kate by the sea.
I handed her the gift and sat down beside her, pulling my overcoat collar high over my dress grays. She removed the wrapping and lifted the chain from the box. She held the chain up to the last light of the sun and the first hard blaze of moonlight, gold on gold and gold on silver. Then she put it around her neck and kissed me.
She smiled at me as she ran her finger around the chain, then darkened suddenly as though some switch had been thrown in her consciousness due to a failure of power and nerve. “You’re not doing this just because you feel sorry for me, are you, Will? You’re not loving me because you pity me? Because I’m pregnant?”
“I’ve told you before, Annie Kate,” I answered. “I would never have met you if you hadn’t been pregnant. Answer this truthfully. Would I have had any chance with you at all if you hadn’t been in trouble?”
“No,” she said, staring down at the rocks. “You’re right. I’ve been programmed since birth to marry in my own class. I got pregnant with someone from my own class and look where it got me. I don’t have one friend in the world who knows where I really am. Do you know, Will, that I have Charleston friends who write me in Santa Barbara? They send me letters to the house of my mother’s cousin, who sends them back to Charleston. I write back telling about college and all the new friends I’ve made. I tell of cute charming boys I go out with. I describe the mountains around Santa Barbara and tell of weekend trips to Big Sur and San Francisco. I send the letters back to my mother’s cousin and she mails them out to my friends. I’ve never been to California in my life. Everything I write and say is a complete and total lie. My whole life is one huge ugly lie.”
“You’re much too hard on yourself, Annie Kate,” I said. “You don’t come from a society where you can cheerfully and honestly admit that you got knocked up. You and your mother are simply protecting your future. If your boy friend keeps his mouth shut, no one will ever know. Why didn’t you just go to Santa Barbara and live with this woman, this mysterious cousin? Did y’all ever consider that?”
“My mother wouldn’t have gotten the satisfaction of looking down her nose at me, telling me daily that I had ruined her life and everything she’d tried to do for me, if I’d gone to California. She wouldn’t have been able to play her favorite role of the complete martyr. This way she gets to punish me a little bit each day. We both get to watch my betrayal of her grow a little bit each day. And we get to hurt each other a little bit each day. I sometimes go to bed at night and pray to God that I won’t wake up. I think my mother would secretly bury me at sea rather than explain why I was in Charleston.”
“Aren’t you being a little hard on your mother, too? I think she’s just trying to handle this in the best way she knows how.”
“All she can talk about is how this affects her life and reputation. She never stops to think how it’s affected me, how it’s killing me one day at a time.”
“What will you do with the baby, Annie Kate?” I said.
She turned on me furiously, screaming and out of control. “There is no baby. I’ve already told you that.”
“You can pretend there’s no baby and I can pretend there’s no baby, but at the end of nine months, you’re going to have to decide what to do with this phantom child who’s going to be feeding at your breast.”
“I would never breast-feed a child even if it were a normal child and not a bastard. I’ve always thought that women who breast-fed their children had horrid breasts. I bet the women in your family always breast-fed children. In my family, never! I had a colored wet nurse feed me.”
“I grew up with this strange idea that a woman’s breast was made for feeding children,” I said. “You pick up all kinds of weird ideas growing up outside of Charleston.”
“You’re trying to pick a fight with me, Will. You’re trying to make me feel squalid and low again.”
“No, I’m not,” I protested. “I’m trying to get you to face reality. To make some plans. I’m trying to get you to think about what you’re going to do with the child, Annie Kate. I’ve been trying since I first met you to get you to talk about it, and all you do is change the subject or pretend that I didn’t really ask the question.”
“It’s not a child to me, Will,” she said. “Can you understand that? I can’t let it be. It’s not alive inside me. If I thought about it as my child, I would start to love it. I have to protect myself. I have to think about it as something inanimate, something growing in me like a tumor or a plant, something that should have been cut out but wasn’t. You see, I can’t let this baby interfere with my life. I plan to have a wonderful life full of gay and happy times. Full of charming people.”
“What about the baby?” I whispered. “Are you going to put it up for adoption?”
“Yes,” she finally answered. “They’re going to take it from me as soon as it’s born. Does that satisfy you, Will? Does that answer your question? They’ll give it to a nice family. They’ve promised me that.”
“Jesus Christ,” I said.
“What do you want me to do with it, Will? Put it in a perambulator, dress it in pink or blue, and parade it up and down the Battery, waving to my friends?”
“I don’t know what to do,” I said. “I’ve never been faced with a decision like that, and I don’t know what I would do in your place. I’m sorry if I’ve upset you. It’s none of my business.”
“I sometimes pretend this is all happening to someone else, Will. Someone odious and despicable. I can’t believe that God would let something like this happen to someone He didn’t hate. I know that I sinned, but God knows that I’ve paid for that sin. I didn’t do anything to deserve this kind of punishment. Yet it’s so odd to have this thing growing inside me. Sometimes I hate it with all my heart. At other times I’m so full of love for it I could burst. It needs me so completely. It’s so trusting and absolutely dependent on me. It can’t help what I did. It’s happy inside me. I know that; I can feel that. It doesn’t even know that it’s going to come into the world as a bastard. A bastard descended from some of the oldest families in Charleston.”
“I wish there was something I could do, Annie Kate,” I said, taking her hands into mine again. “I’d do anything to help you.”
“Be my friend, Will McLean. Don’t leave me during all this, no matter how cruel or horrid I am to you, no matter what mean things I
say. Be my friend, but remember to keep your distance. I feel vile and unclean, and I don’t want to infect you.”
“Infect me, Annie Kate? I want to take it all. I want to feel every hurt you have, and I want us to beat them down together.”
We kissed again, a harder, more urgent kiss. I pressed her body against mine and felt her small breasts flatten against my chest and the pressure and weight of her pregnancy coming between us. Her child came between us, a symbol of both what divided us and what had brought us inextricably together. But touching the place where the child was made it no longer symbolic; it was real and palpable and material.
I had dreamed often of this child of Annie Kate’s. I had seen it run along the shore of Sullivan’s Island chasing migrating birds and suddenly released balloons. I could see this child clearly; it had no discernible sex, but it was a blond and airy thing, a sea-child who stood knee-deep in the surf and laughed at the flight of pelicans and the sprints of sandcrabs to their lairs. I could see it lifting from the beach stranded jellyfish, which would hang off its fingers like translucent laundry, and the child would not be stung. It would lift stingrays from the shallows without fear of harm. This would be a magic child, inspirited with the wisdom and cunning of sea life—and none of the old silent rancor of Charleston.
As we returned toward her house, stepping carefully over the rocks, I wondered about that child moving in the mysterious inland sea of Annie Kate’s body. I held her hand and realized that the blood I felt rushing through her wrist would soon be rushing through the brain of the fetus, that her body had become an aquarium and that her child was a swimmer in its lightless pool. We were three human hearts on that walk down the beach, three different views of the universe, three sets of aligned yet separate dreams. I wondered if I had dreamed in my mother’s womb. What would be the first dream in a newly created brain—perhaps some ancient common dream of the species, an image of fire or the first shuddering memory of stars or bison on the walls of caverns? Or do the dreams of mothers become the dreams of the half-children? Did I dream my mother’s dreams? Did I learn of roses and aircraft and snowfall because my mother’s dreams had traveled her body with their images intact and electric and full of messages from the outside world?
The beach house was a three-story Victorian structure painted a dark and depressing gray and set thirty yards back from the groin protecting the undermined beach. During very high tides, sea water made large pools in the grass. A third of the lawn was desiccated and whitened with deposits of salt and the skeletons of small fish that had come in with the tide through the rocks and escaped the patient investigations of the seabirds patrolling that sector of the island.
But there was something unique and extraordinary about this summer home of Annie Kate’s. It was the kind of house that invited the curiosity and the dread of the neighborhood’s imaginative children. Its rooms were tall and narrow, but each one had a different shape, giving the house an odd imbalance yet, at the same time, an odd symmetry.
There were two high porches with excellent views of the harbor. The lower porch had French doors that connected to the living room; the upper porch led to the master bedroom. The furniture could only be described compassionately as beach furniture, but it reflected an eclectic, practical consciousness at work over the years.
As we approached the house we could smell oak burning in the fireplace and caught an unobstructed view of Annie Kate’s mother rocking vigorously in front of the fire. Annie Kate dropped my hand quickly, and I moved laterally away from her.
“Mother!” she whispered unnecessarily.
“Oh, shit,” I said. “Do you mind if I have a heart attack?”
“Don’t you dare,” she commanded. “We didn’t do anything wrong. Do you think she might have seen us before the sun went down?”
“I’m going to tell her that you attacked me sexually while I was saying the rosary out there on the rocks.”
“She’s drunk,” Annie Kate said.
“How can you tell?”
“By the way she’s rocking. And because it’s after sunset. And because I’ve lived with her for twenty years.”
When we entered through the French doors, Mrs. Gervais turned her head and said, “Well, well. The two lovebirds.”
Annie Kate fired back, “Mother, you have absolutely no right to spy on me.”
“I wasn’t spying, darling. I just drove out to visit my daughter.”
“You don’t want to visit with me,” Annie Kate yelled. “You got drunk and wanted to come out here and tell me just one more time how I ruined your life and all your plans for me.”
“Every goddam one of them,” Mrs. Gervais hissed at the same time as she caught me staring rather pensively at her. I have a naturally pious stare and don’t mean a thing by it, as I could have told her, but it was not the proper moment for explanations. “What are you looking at, cadet? I can drink in my own home without some callow-faced merchant’s brat looking at me like I was dirt. Can’t I? Don’t I have that right?”
“I’m not looking at you, Mrs. Gervais,” I said foolishly, since I had not taken my eyes off her since I had entered the room.
“What do you want from my daughter, Will?” Mrs. Gervais asked, appraising me coldly with drunken, hostile eyes. This was the first time I had ever seen her drinking heavily, though Annie Kate had commonly made vague references to this weakness of her mother. I had only known her as a rather perfect specimen of Charleston society on the downward slide.
“I want to be her friend, Mrs. Gervais,” I said.
“That was a very affectionate way you have of expressing friendship.”
“I’m sorry,” I stammered, blushing and looking for a mildly graceful way to leave.
“You were spying on us, Mother,” said Annie Kate, bristling and outraged. “I refuse to let you spy on me or to interfere any further with my life.”
“Well, at least with this one, I don’t have to worry about your getting pregnant,” she said, staring morosely at her daughter.
“You drunken, filthy slut,” Annie Kate screamed, lunging for the bottle of vodka, which Mrs. Gervais had tucked carefully in the crook of her arm.
“Oh, so now it’s me that’s the slut. I would like to remind you, dear, and for the information of your pimply cadet, that your father and I were duly married in the eyes of the Lord a full three years before I brought you squalling into Charleston society. Calling your own mother a slut. After what you’ve done to me—after what you’ve done to the family name. To disgrace me and your dead father. He’s lucky to be dead. He’s lucky he didn’t have to face this.”
Annie Kate sobbed, turned away, and swiftly ran to the stairs.
When she was gone I said, “I’m glad you dropped by, Mrs. Gervais.”
“Don’t be impertinent with me, cadet,” she said. “Not with me, Cadet Will McLean. Poor stupid Will McLean. Did you know, Will, that God planned that the world was to be a vast orb of disillusionment and pain? He planned it that way and it pleased him to see that the plan was letter perfect,” she said, pouring herself a tall glassful of vodka.
“Why don’t you quit drinking that stuff, Mrs. Gervais,” I said.
“I own this house, cadet,” she snapped. “You have no right to issue orders or even make suggestions in my own house. I issue orders here. I order you out of my house. I order you not to touch my daughter again. I order you not to look at my daughter with those pitying, self-righteous eyes of yours. Get back to the barracks where you belong, Will.”
I turned to leave the house when she called my name with a despairing, disconsolate voice. “Will. It’s no one’s goddam fault. It’s not your fault. It’s not my fault. It’s not Annie Kate’s fault. I just don’t want any of us to get hurt any more. I’ve been hurting so long now, it seems natural to me.”
“It seems natural to me, too, Mrs. Gervais,” I answered, with my back still turned away from her. “I think I’m going to find out that you’re right. I hope you’re wrong,
but I don’t think so.”
“Come back here and look at me,” she commanded, as she took a huge swallow of vodka. “Look at my face, Will. Look at it closely, cadet,” she croaked as I approached her. “This face was once beautiful. I mean beautiful and not just pretty. Do you see what’s happened to it? Do you see how it’s been lined and ruined? It was so quick, Will, so quick. I was beautiful; then, suddenly, I was old. I don’t know how it happened or why it happened or what any of it means, but I want you to memorize my face and watch how cruelly the years will scratch and claw away at your own. And remember this moment, Will, remember it when you’re looking at your face in the mirror thirty years from now and seeing an ugly old man instead of a smooth-skinned cadet. It’s the quickness of it all that will surprise you. The incredible swiftness. It’s as if I’ve pulled down a shade on twenty years of my life,” she said, taking another enormous swallow of her drink. “I couldn’t stop it. I couldn’t slow it down. And I’ve worried about it every single day of my life since my twenty-eighth birthday. Isn’t that sad and stupid? Isn’t that human?”
I knelt down beside her and whispered, “I think you’re a fine looking woman, Mrs. Gervais.”
She looked at me with furious skeptical eyes and said in a slow, measured voice meant to wound, “Go to hell, cadet. I don’t need your condescension or your pity. I just need you to listen to my liquor talk and keep your mouth shut. I’m from Charleston, cadet, did you hear me? Charleston! And you aren’t from anywhere. I’m from Charleston and my family was on the second ship that arrived in this city. Do you know what that means? Do you have any idea what that means?”
“Yeh, Mrs. Gervais,” I shouted. “It means nothing. It doesn’t mean a goddam thing. You still get old and Annie Kate still gets pregnant just like any other poor bastard on earth.”
“If it means so little to you, cadet, then why do you hang around it so much? Why do you room with Tradd St. Croix? Why do you waste your time with Annie Kate? Can’t you find a girl to like you who isn’t pregnant and who isn’t desperate for friendship? Can’t you find a normal relationship? Or isn’t it true that you know a Charleston girl would never look at a cadet from the lower classes unless she found herself absolutely and completely alone? But I want to tell you a truth about this society you’re toadying up to—you wouldn’t be worthy of Annie Kate if she had twenty-five bastards and four of them were fathered by blue-gum niggers.”