“I ain’t the queen of England, kiddo. But I’m expensive, and he can afford me.”
“There’s plenty of men with money. Good men. I think Dr. Sevras could afford you.”
“Oh, yes, the good doctor. Would his wife abide that? Certainly, he would if he could. Certainly. They all have it in them, darling. Each and every one.”
Irving doesn’t know what she means. He thinks she’s talking crazy, from the loss of blood. He’s tired now, wipes his face.
“Keep your hand up at your heart.” He’s heard that keeping something raised will help you not lose so much blood. But she’s asleep now. He reaches over and tries to prop her hand up on her chest. His knuckles brush her breast, and heat rushes through his body. The hand falls to her lap. It’s heavy, the rag now a dark red. He hits a pothole in the road, a deep one, and the car jumps. He grips the wheel with both hands. He turns a corner in the road and the headlights pass over a field. In it, he sees what seems like a hundred pairs of eyes. Deer, a herd of them, standing still and ghostly, the stern, solid gaze that a parent should have, that steadfast attention. And with all of those eyes on him, he wonders what his parents would think of him, driving a stranger’s car, a stranger he left perhaps bleeding to death on a doctor’s lawn, Delphine at his side, asleep, hopefully not still seeping blood. He wants them to be proud of him. He wishes they were here. He lets himself think that they’ve sent this mindful herd of deer, with their coats and eyes shining. And although he knows it’s not true—his mind is talking like in a dream—it’s the first time in a long time that he’s felt like someone is watching over him, that he is being cared for.
9
The ride has been fine. Only at night did she think of all those horrible things, those dark, awful pictures that flash up in her mind. She remembers her notion that memories are constantly falling away, droplets from a leaky faucet, and she hopes that Henry will disappear quickly, tapping away into a silver drain.
Alma and Roxy slept in a motor cabin, because Roxy had her mother’s money and insisted. The room was tidy, with two narrow beds, a nightstand with a thin drawer to hold a Gideon Bible, and a bathroom down the hall that they shared with the other guests, an old couple who called each other Mother and Father, and a family with squalling infant twins. But even there at night, it wasn’t so bad, because there was much else to take in—the tall mirror; the writing desk; the tightly made bed; Roxy, too long for it, her feet like two white bass sticking out over the edge; and the smell that seeps into dreams of Bon Ami cleanser and body after body, a series of engravings on the motel’s persistent memory. It makes her dream of the hosiery factory, not Henry at all, but the thousands of hose she turned over the flexed wooden pedestal foot.
During the day, she seemed to have energy only for telling made-up stories to Roxy of a happy farm-girl childhood, her joyous clean children, the kindly nuns, and the lively show people. She didn’t mention the factory, but she wondered only for as long as she would let herself, only for a brief second, if she would have to go back to Mrs. Bass’s steamy office, the shocking white part of her hair, her snapping teeth, to ask for her job back. When she was talking to Roxy, there was no need to think of the factory, because Henry was going to come home after the possibility in Florida paid off and they’d be plenty rich. In fact, it’s Alma’s idea that Roxy stay on at the boardinghouse if she wants to. Mr. Bucci can move in with Wall-Eye. Now that the bear is dead, he doesn’t need his own room, and then Roxy can settle in and look for a job.
Roxy says, “Yes, that sounds good to me.”
And it’s decided.
It’s night when they drive through Marrowtown and climb up the valley’s other side toward Alma’s road lined with tall hedges. At one point in a turn, Alma looks down on the city collected in the dark pit, the domed church, its spindly steeple, factories belching smoke, the outlines of buildings, homes; they look like tawdry hummels, dimpled with light, ugly, shoddy gimcrackery, gathering black dust, too loveless to be wiped clean. It is dark, but she can feel the dressing of ash, the murky photographic gray that leeches color, the drained fading. The sun will rise, lazing through the filtered air, grainy, piqued. The air’s familiar soot blows in the windows. The wheel accepts its tackiness.
She’s been gone only a week and a half, but the hedges appear, taller, overgrown, and then the house, stricken, tilted. There are no cars in the yard. The house is too quiet and dark. Alma knows right away that something is wrong. She kills the engine. The headlights cut off. The yard pools in darkness. She jumps out of the car, leaving Roxy, and runs up to the door, which has been left open. The house gapes before her, a rib case, and it seems to breathe like a laboring lung. She runs from room to room, calling, “Irving? Irving? Mr. Bucci?” No one answers. When she walks into her own bedroom, a blackbird lifts off the bed and starts circling wildly. It rushes at her, its dark body hoisted by the sudden hysteria of wings beating against the ceiling. She freezes. The bird panics her, a deep childhood panic, keen and real. She remembers collecting coal that had fallen off the train cars. An aching hunger, cold, birds riding winds overhead. One winter morning, she stared up at them and fainted, awoke to snow lighting down on her face. She’d wondered if she’d died of hunger and come back to life. The bird flaps wildly out of the room. Alma runs down the stairs, out the front door, to Roxy, her tall, hulking frame standing alone in the yard.
Alma doesn’t know where she is. She doesn’t recognize anything here. Over her shoulder, the house is lit up. She’d turned on lights as she went through, and now it looks as if each room is burning.
Roxy looks at her earnestly. “What’s gone wrong? Something’s gone wrong. Where’s everybody?”
And Alma feels again like she’s been let go in the world. Like a zookeeper in some ultimate act of pity has snuck in to let her loose. She thinks that it never was her house, her life, but another woman’s, a woman who might have looked the same, who wanted something desperately, and maybe this was the thing she wanted after all. Not anything more, just less, just freedom. It is painful; her chest feels like a struck gong, shivering. And yet, she thinks, when someone dies, isn’t there something ecstatic about it? She feels, for a moment, that she can drive off with Roxy and tell a new story, become someone else, and it will be equally true.
Roxy looks up at the house. She says, “Where’s the little children, the ones you said would be just stepping out of their bath?”
Alma looks at her. At the car. The tilted steps that lead to the porch. Where are they? “The nuns,” she says. “This was where Irving was to be, and the show people. The other two are with the nuns. Remember?”
“And Irving and the show people?”
“I don’t know,” she says. “I don’t know what’s happened. I feel all turned about.” Alma stares at her feet, the buckles too tight, her flesh on the tops of her feet squeezing up from the cutouts. She starts walking, but not toward the car, not toward the house—out in the direction of a thin line of trees and what lies beyond it, the neighbor’s field. But she stumbles, catches herself with the fat palm of her hand. Roxy coughs, rubs her arms to keep warm, maybe a sign of nervousness. Alma rubs the dirt from the palm of her hand. Her hand. It is her own hand. She would recognize it anywhere.
It’s the middle of the night—clear, starry, the moon as bright as a lamp—but when Alma rings the bell, she hears the immediate shuffling of feet. It isn’t the young spry nun who’d met her before, but an old woman, so bent over from her hardened bones that she has to look straight up—her eyes like something surface-bobbed, and eyebrows raised—to see Alma’s face. The door isn’t so heavy for her. She is oddly strong, toughened, wizened to this tight angle of calcification. It’s still unsettling to Alma that they’re so well prepared to welcome her. She wonders what else they’re prepared to find at this hour of the night. Suddenly Alma sees the convent as a place that welcomes disasters, the small disasters of lust, and she sees herself as one of their emergency cases. She wonders what sh
e must look like to the nun who’s so tidy in her black habit, just floating hands and face. Alma must seem a mess of hair and flesh, and the pale dizzy print of her dress, the design of her shoes, her bare legs—still bare. How can that be? She wonders what it must be like for the nun each time she opens the door to a blustering, colorful stranger, slightly breathless with panic. Alma rubs the palm of her hand to get off the dirt stain.
“Please, come in,” the old nun says. “Are you expected?”
She wonders how many people come in the middle of the night for scheduled appointments. “I’m here to pick up my children. Lettie and Willard.”
“There will be paperwork. Follow me.”
And so she takes Alma down the darkened tile hallway to Sister Margaret’s office. This time the hall is empty. There are no boxes or piled cans, but there’s still the stink of old clothes and used things, and, more strongly, ammonia, its high stink constant. Alma wonders what contagion they’re dousing with it; perhaps every kind. Germs shed from all the worn shoes that shuffle anxiously to the office door, the scabby, lice-ridden children left with only a knock at the door. Alma wonders if her children will be returned, sickly, dull, with red-crusty eyes, a deep contamination of some unruly disease usually reserved for the motherless.
The nun turns on the light, opens the door for her, shows her the seat. Alma remembers that she’d refused the chair, and then needed it, and, too, that it was soft, comforting. She won’t sit this time, however. She would like to do this as quickly as possible.
The old nun nods, says, “I’ll go wake and ready the children.”
Sister Margaret walks into the room. She looks like she’s dressed quickly in the dark. Her habit is slightly askew, and her fine orange hair, curly wisps of it, stick out around the wimple’s frame. But she retains her stiff primness, her awkward cordiality.
“I’ve been expecting you,” she tells Alma. “I’m happy to see you back.”
Alma says, “Well, here I am.” But it seems that the nun is saying two things, that yes, she expected her, but at the same time didn’t really, not absolutely. There’s relief that she’s made it, “happiness,” in fact. She remembers now how it was the last time, the nun saying one thing but meaning something else, and how she intimidated Alma with her measured comments.
Sister Margaret motions for her to sit. She feels, again, that she doesn’t want to, but, also, doesn’t want to appear odd about refusing the seat twice, so she sits. Again, it’s too yielding. Alma scoots to the chair’s hard front edge, which gives her a sense of mooring. Sister Margaret waits until she’s settled, then begins. “We would like to keep Willard. He’s doing well. I think he likes the regimen. He’s learning a great deal.”
“Excuse me?”
“He’s stopped going to the bathroom in his pants. He’s learned to write his name and to pray. He likes structure. He’s thriving.”
Alma stiffens, doesn’t know what to say. She glances around the room, distracts herself for a moment, wondering how Roxy is faring in the car, if the old nun is preparing both children. She had said children, not child, right? She looks up at Jesus, still there, suffering eternally. “I want to see my children,” Alma says. She stands up and walks over to the window. She pulls the curtain back with her hand, and Roxy is there standing by the car.
“Of course. They’re on their way. If you want to take Willard home with you, there’s no problem with that. But he wants to stay.”
“Did you put that in his head? He’s dim-witted. He’ll believe what you tell him.”
“You can ask him yourself,” Sister Margaret offers.
“And Lettie? Have you turned her against me, too?”
“We haven’t turned anyone against you. Willard loves you, but he needs this environment. He’s a boy with potential, more than you think, I suspect. And Lettie, well, she needs you. She’s a desperate child with desperate needs. It’s in her best interest to be by your side.”
“You know these aren’t wild children that you have here. They haven’t been raised by the hair on their head. I’m a good mother. And they have a good father.” She wants to go on and say that she’s a proper married woman. But is she still?
The nun begins again. “Let me ask you plainly: Where is the father of the children? Why did you need us in the first place?”
“He’s seeking out a possibility in Florida. He stayed on.”
“I’ve heard many stories of need. Many. Please accept what is being offered. It’s a gift.”
“I don’t need your gifts.”
Sister Margaret stands. “Let us take care of Willard. You will always be his mother. We cannot offer him that. But what more can you do for him? You may not need our gifts, but he does.”
Just then, the door opens. Willard and Lettie are ushered in by the bent nun. Both of the children are clean, the way Alma had been picturing them. Willard’s hair is slicked back, neatly combed, and Lettie has just washed her face, her cheeks pink. The old nun must have awakened them, dressed them, and tidied them up. Lettie stands there shyly for a moment and then runs at Alma, wrapping her arms around the broadest part of her hips. “Where’s Daddy?” she asks.
“He’s stayed on in Florida to finish up business. But he sent me on home because I was so homesick for my babies.” But this isn’t true. She’s guilty of not being homesick for her babies, of thinking mostly of herself, the sweet air, her own fancifulness.
Willard says, “Mama, look at this!” He holds up a paper of a drawing of flowers and the sun with his name scrawled on it. His fleshy face beams, exuberant. It warms Alma’s heart to see his fine letters, his bright yellow sun, so yellow it’s as if he doesn’t know he lives in a cloud of ash. He’s proud. When was the last time she saw him so full of himself? She wishes she could be that happy. For the first time in her life, she thinks of Willard as limitless, of Lettie as her fragile one. And Alma, what does she feel? She’s envious of the nuns, their orderly lives, their uniforms, rituals, the impeccable order they’ve gathered around themselves. She thinks of the baby born dead, the sheet it was wrapped in, and how empty her body felt. There is that familiar ache inside of her. Is it hunger, or only the memory of hunger, the fear of it? It has been a long trip. She’s weary. She wants to be a child, to be taken care of. She wants her own mother. After they took the baby away, after Henry took it out, her mother was there. Her mother put a cold rag on her face and wiped her forehead, her hair. She asked her mother if it was a boy or a girl, and she said, “It doesn’t matter now, does it?” Alma asked where Henry was taking it. And her mother said, “Hush now. Everything’s going to be all right.” Willard is there holding the picture up like he’s selling a Sunday paper. Does she even deserve him?
“It’s beautiful,” she whispers. “It’s beautiful.”
Alma drives to her mother’s house in silence. Coolness seeps into the car as they pass trees in the dark. She imagines the witch-hobble shrubs, the delicate white petals, clinging to the forest’s kept shade. Lettie knows to be quiet. Yet there’s something about her that is so relieved—in a heartbroken way—that she doesn’t have to say anything, and Alma can feel her sighing presence. Lettie’s adoration is almost a consolation for having left Willard behind, but not truly. Irving is missing. Her husband gone. Her house empty, but for an angry, hawking black bird. There’s little money left rolled up in her liver-pill bottles. Without Henry and the boarders, it won’t last, and there’ll be nothing to replace it.
Roxy stares out the window. Her body with its long, thick bones doesn’t seem to fit in the car, much less in Alma’s life, a teetering thing, nothing like the stories she told on the trip north. She wishes Roxy weren’t here to see these ugly truths, one after the other. She reminds Alma, just by sitting there quietly, that Alma never was a happy farm girl or the perfect mother of her children. Alma rides on, a new steeliness rising up in her. And somehow she would like to blame Roxy for it, but she can’t. Not quite. Poor girl, she has nothing. She belongs in this car
, hunched and silent, lovesick for her dead mother.
Alma doesn’t recognize the car in her mother’s yard. She’s alarmed, but this time she doesn’t run. She marches solemnly to the house, Roxy and Lettie behind her. She isn’t eager to know what’s gone wrong here. She opens the door and finds Irving and Sir Lee’s girlfriend, the pretty, pouty thing he rides around with, Delphine, one of her hands wrapped in a bloody rag. She’s reclining on the old sofa, looking gaunt and shaken. Her eyes sag darkly; her thin brow is pinched. She runs the fingers of her good hand over her dry lips. Irving has found an old apple and has bitten into it jaggedly. He looks up, astonished, caught. He seems ashamed. His pants are stained dark. They look stiff with dried blood.
“What happened?” Alma says, looking around the room and then walking past them to her mother’s bed in the back of the house.
Irving calls out, “Momma, don’t go on back there.”
But she’s already in the room. Her mother’s shoes are sitting neatly beside the nightstand, her whittled body hidden by the puff of her wool coat, two of the buttons buttoned. Alma barely recognizes her mother’s soul-sifted body. Her face is white, drawn, her mouth blue. There’s no hint of the stitched pain she’d worn for years, the hard lines around her mouth, the grooves in her forehead. Her hand is clamped down on a piece of paper; a frame and its family photograph sit on the covers beside her. Alma doesn’t have to pry the paper from her mother’s hand. She knows that the picture is a pencil drawing of the Prophet. Alma’s heart feels swollen. It aches in her chest, which is suddenly too small to contain it, that familiar ache grown large. Her cheeks heat, an angry blush. Didn’t Alma know her mother was sick, dying? Shouldn’t Alma have insisted on taking her in? The stubborn old woman would have said no. Part of Alma hates her mother, this rootedness. But Alma lifts her head, stares at the ceiling. Her throat is tight, puffed. She sobs, letting her head fall to her chest. Her mother is gone, and she takes so much with her. They didn’t speak of the past, but there were things that only they knew about each other. She touches her mother’s soft hair, strokes it. She recalls how, by the roadside squatting to take a pee, she suddenly felt free of her childhood, that she was no longer the nigger-lover’s daughter. And she imagines now that this was the moment her mother died, Alma with her skirt hoisted, piss spraying onto her shoes, her bare skin. And now she may never know about the baby. She never did ask Henry about it. They never spoke of it. If she tried to, he’d say, “We’ll have more. We’ll have so many one day we won’t be able to keep count.” She would like her mother to wrap her in her arms and tell her that everything is going to be all right. But it seems now that her mother is the dead baby, her baby. Her mother is the dead baby to be wrapped and taken away. Alma staggers, suddenly dizzy. She kneels beside the bed, folds her hands in prayer, but instead of praying, she looks around the room. Everything is dusted in dog hair, but the dogs have run off. Their scent rises up alongside the smells of bowels, decay, like under-earth, like the death-rot stench of wet leaves. She wipes her eyes and pinches her nose. She won’t cry anymore. Her mother wouldn’t approve of it, anyway. Strength, that’s what her mother would expect of her. Alma says to herself, My mother is dead. My mother is dead. But it doesn’t seem true. She stands up and walks unsteadily back into the parlor.