The Condor Passes

by Shirley Ann Grau

  Maurice Lamotta smiled discreetly. “She wouldn’t even look at it.”

  Robert also noticed that the Old Man used the Depression to buy out all partners. There were no longer any business connections with his wife’s family. There were fewer social connections too. With Anna at work on one side, and the Old Man on the other, the D’Alfonsos were disappearing rapidly.

  “I’ve gotten honest in my old age, Robert.”

  Lamotta laughed out loud.

  “Now take the D’Alfonso family. They were ruined by Prohibition, completely ruined. They can’t imagine any way to make money except illegally. Cousin Andrew, I hear, is in trouble with the tax people. If they can prove one-tenth of what I know, he’s off to prison in Atlanta.”

  “He will have an uncle for company,” Lamotta said.

  “It’s hardly worth it,” the Old Man said.

  MARGARET GOT a divorce and moved to Paris to study at the Sorbonne. She never wrote letters but she dutifully sent a single postcard every Sunday.

  “Here’s another,” the Old Man said one morning in the office.

  Robert looked. “Same picture again. She’s been sending that one for the past year.”

  It was a Notre Dame gargoyle. The Old Man flicked it into the wastebasket.

  “I imagine she thinks it’s very funny.”

  “Oh,” said Robert, “I never thought of that.”

  The Old Man swung around and put his feet on the desk. The same battered oak desk, the same gray dingy office. The same windows, streaked with dirt, overlooking the dusty trees on Esplanade Avenue. The same river sounds coming through the open windows.

  “You still go out to your camp?” the Old Man asked the dusty window. “You still like it?”

  Robert felt his throat tighten, his chest grow smaller. Aware. Alert. “Sure. I was down a few days ago.”

  “Fishing good?”

  “I don’t know. I sat on the porch and looked around.”

  The Old Man swung his legs to the other side of the desk. “You handle your women very well.”

  “What?” Not believing what he heard, knowing he’d been caught.

  “Even so,” the Old Man said, “Anna knows. …”

  “Anna does not know.”

  “Anna guesses,” the Old Man interrupted. “She wants a child. It hurts her not having a child.”

  “She has never said a word.”

  The Old Man smiled slowly. “She knows that you are like my own son. She is very fond of her father and could never take his son away from him.”

  “That’s stupid.” Robert smacked his hand on the desk.

  “Because others know what you thought was a secret—” the Old Man went on smiling—” don’t rage. She is not stupid. She is doing just what I hoped she would.”

  Robert sat down and put his feet on the opposite corner of the desk. The Old Man immediately took his feet down.

  “If I have a woman now and then,” Robert said, “what’s wrong with that?”

  “Did I say there was?”

  “You said—” Robert stopped, remembering the Old Man’s words exactly, finding nothing accusing in them.

  “Maybe,” the Old Man said, “it is the only way to live with Anna?”

  Robert shook his head.

  Frightened, for the next six months he had no other woman. Until he was absolutely positive that his wife was far along in her pregnancy. Then he went on a hunting trip that lasted three days, with a night-club dancer named Willie Mae, a stenographer named Corinne, and a nurse named Tanya. And two cases of whiskey.

  FIVE MONTHS later Anna bore a son named Anthony, a chubby dark-haired baby who looked very much like her.

  MARGARET CABLED from Paris: “Coming home at once to see baby.” She did not actually arrive for almost a year.

  Margaret

  THE TRAIN LEFT MOBILE for the last slow two-hour crawl into New Orleans. Margaret sat at the window of her compartment and stared at the unbroken line of green marsh. Pure monotony, she thought.

  She tried walking the length of the train, but after her second trip, she was bored by the endless car doors. So she opened her very elaborate alligator case and began redoing her make-up. She worked slowly and carefully and she finished not more than ten minutes before the train pulled into the Canal Street Station.

  She checked herself in the full-length mirror behind the door. She was much thinner; her eyes, always dark and slanted, were accented by light make-up. Her curly hair was cut very short; it shadowed her head like a cap or the painted top of a china doll.

  She was not beautiful, but men’s eyes often followed her. “Only men with taste watch you,” Georges Légier said. They’d met one afternoon at the Rotonde, three or four tables filled with students, laughing and drinking. James Joyce was supposed to be there, but he wasn’t. Hemingway was supposed to be in town, but he didn’t appear either. Margaret was disappointed and impatient, until Georges Légier spoke to her. He was very tall, very thin, with dark deep-set eyes and a beaked nose; he was training to be a cook, and eventually, he said, he would go back to his father’s restaurant in Lyon. They spoke French for two weeks before she discovered he was from New York. And even that was an accident. One night, in his apartment, groggy and sweaty with sex, he reached to turn off the light and touched the frayed wire instead. “Jesus Christ,” he said, “Jesus Christ.”

  Margaret stared at him—burned finger stuck in his mouth, scowling—and she burst into laughter. “You son of a bitch.”

  He insisted that except for one mistake, she would never have known. “After all, my father was born in Lyon. I could have been French. And he does have a restaurant.”

  “That doesn’t make you French,” Margaret said. “That makes you a liar.”

  Margaret remembered: his naked chest, almost completely hairless, his scowl of concentration, his thin arms and shoulders, muscles showing through the pale skin like tangled knots of small rope. She remembered every inch of his body. “Bag of bones,” she told him scornfully.

  “You seem to like it.”

  “Don’t be so conceited. I’m just humoring you.”

  “Humor me some more. I’m beginning to like it.”

  Then one day, suddenly, he had to leave. It was a winter afternoon; the streets were foggy and misty and shiny as Margaret climbed the damp urine-smelling stairs to his apartment and pushed open his door. He was waiting for her, sitting at the table directly in front of the single window. Behind him the hazy gray sky was filled with twisted chimney pots. “I have to go home,” he said. “I’ve got my ticket.”

  An empty falling in her stomach. “Why?”

  “No more money. I didn’t think I’d last this long.”

  “You’re going to New York?”

  “Sure. And go to work for my father. Be a bus boy. Or the sauce cook, if I can talk him into it.”

  Margaret made a face. “I could lend you the money to stay.”

  “No, thanks.” He kissed her neck. “Anyway, the restaurant business in a depression isn’t really so great, and maybe I can help out.”

  “Why don’t we get married?”

  “No,” Georges said, “I’m not the marrying type.”

  “I’ll go back with you. I like New York.”

  “No.”

  She was on his ship when it sailed. “What the hell are you doing here?”

  With her wide bright childish grin she produced the cable from Anna. “My sister had a baby, I’m going to see. Isn’t that a coincidence?”

  He fingered the telegram as if it would explode. “Real? Or phony?”

  “You could say you’re happy to see me.”

  “You know,” he said, “I really am. I’m afraid I really am.”

  SHE LIVED with him for the next eight months in New York. She found a small apartment on Twelfth Street, close to the restaurant. Because his family lived so far uptown, he fell into the habit of spending most nights with her. “It’s just practical,” Margaret said. “You work
so hard.”

  Within hours of her arrival, she had secretly telephoned her father. “I’ve got to fill up a restaurant, Papa. Don’t you know people in New York? This has to work.”

  “We will see,” her father said.

  Immediately, the restaurant began to prosper. Margaret wrote her only letter: “Thanks, Papa. The best hoodlums in town now eat with us.”

  She asked again: “Georges, why don’t we get married?”

  “No,” he said.

  “Then I’m going home.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I don’t like this.”

  “You’re being foolish.”

  “No,” she said. “You have your key. And the rent is paid for this month.”

  When he came that night after work, she was gone. The apartment was dark, and her father’s telephone number lay in the middle of the dining-room table.

  WELL, MARGARET said to the junk heaps and filthy back yards of New Orleans; well, well, well. What if this doesn’t work? …

  She missed him already. She had been on the train for a little over twenty-four hours and she was aching with loneliness.

  Why?

  Georges Légier wasn’t handsome and he wasn’t rich. He wasn’t funny, he wasn’t serious. He didn’t talk much. He worked until he was yellow with exhaustion. He liked to go to baseball games.

  None of that was any explanation, really. When she thought about him like that, he seemed dull. But when she was with him, she felt excited and alive.

  It was, Margaret thought, simply sex. Whenever he touched her, even a hand on her elbow to cross a street, his fingers left their invisible prints, fiery prints. Her whole body twitched for him, throbbed. Her blood raced, stopped entirely, then raced again. And yet he was not extraordinary in his love-making. Though he thought he was. … Margaret smiled. He wasn’t the biggest, or the thickest, or the slowest. But there was a quality in him, an intensity. …

  Love, she said to the night-blackened mirror. It’s god damn love. How did I get mixed up with love? …

  HER FATHER was waiting. When she saw him, she felt the usual shift in her feelings. A lift, a jump, a tug. Pleasure, but not totally. Love, but not completely. Dependence. Fear, familiarity, identification. That’s part of me there, walking along. Tree from which I sprang. His spasm produced me. Shake of his body and here I am. …

  THAT NIGHT—familiar peat-smelling winter night—before she fell asleep, she thought: Papa won’t like what I have to do. But I have to just the same.

  All those months in New York, while she fitted herself into Georges Légier’s life, she was bothered by one fact: I am over twenty-one years old and I still get an allowance from my father. … I want my own money. …

  She stared at the cracks of her bedroom ceiling. There should be seventeen, she thought. When I had measles and lay here in the dark, I counted the cracks in the ceiling, and played that they were roads, and highways and rivers. … She counted again. There were still seventeen. Things didn’t change at all.

  She delayed speaking to her father. I’ve got time, she thought, lots of time, more than I want here in New Orleans.

  In the morning, first thing, she sent a telegram to Georges Légier: “Do you want me to come back.” Then she drove out for a weekend with Anna at Port Bella. She spent the entire time surveying the unfinished rooms, pacing off the measurements of the gardens, following a maze of sticks that marked the future walks.

  “Well,” she said finally, “you didn’t ask me, but if you want to know exactly what this place is going to look like, I’ll tell you—Ivanhoe’s castle, but a lot more expensive.”

  Anna, who sat in the shade of the half-finished porch, baby on her lap, playing with the fragile pink feet, smiled at her gently. “I suppose so.”

  “You like that?”

  Anna tickled the small face. “Yes.”

  “I saw you do this with your doll house in town.” Margaret spun around surveying the piles of raw lumber, the carpenters moving slowly up and down their ladders. “It took years.”

  “Don’t take it out on me,” Anna said. “It’s Georges you’re angry with.”

  “I don’t know what’s the matter,” Margaret said. “Even his family’s crazy about me. Everybody but him.”

  “Well,” Anna said soothingly, “wait awhile.”

  “I look good, I’m rich, I’m in love with him—what does the bastard want? You know, I heard his father ask him that same thing one day when they thought I couldn’t hear.”

  Anna said, “I think he will. I think he’ll have to.”

  TO HELL with love, Margaret thought. It’s an ache in my stomach, it’s a terrible feeling in my head, it’s a skin-crawling fear that I’ve done something wrong. I’ve forgotten the password. And the frog isn’t going to change into Prince Charming, the secret door isn’t going to open. And the world is going to end any minute.

  WHEN SHE got back to her father’s house in New Orleans, there was a telegram propped against the bisque figures on the living-room mantel.

  “Papa, why didn’t you tell me!”

  The Old Man stretched his legs. “You were gone.”

  “Here.” Her eyes shining so brightly that they were two-colored, she handed the paper to her father.

  “‘No. Quit. Georges,’” the Old Man read. “What’s to be happy in that?”

  “He answered,” Margaret said. “Don’t you see, he answered.”

  She wired back immediately: “Do you miss me.” There was no answer.

  She refused to listen to the silence. Twice a week, on Mondays and Fridays, she wired Georges Légier: “I am waiting.” Some telegrams she sent to the restaurant and some to his family’s house. She wanted them to know.

  She insisted on going to Robert’s fishing camp. “I’ve seen Anna’s great construction, now I want to see yours.”

  They went one cloudy afternoon. All the way Margaret hummed and sang “Valencia.” “Georges is crazy about that song.”

  “Not if you sing it like that.”

  “You sound just like Papa.” She stuck her nose out the window and sang loudly into the wind, “In my dreams it always seems. …”

  Robert drove steadily. “There it is, lady.”

  She shook back her hair, stopped singing, stared. “It looks like nothing to me.”

  “I didn’t say it was anything.” Robert got out the car. “You wanted to come.”

  “Well, let’s see inside.” She raced across the tall frost-burned grass and up the steep stairs.

  He followed, deliberately unhurried, brushing away the sticktights from his trousers.

  “Smells terrible in here,” Margaret said. “Half mildew and half new paint.”

  “I’ve never heard any complaints.”

  “I bet not.” She sauntered through the two rooms, looking. “What a big bed you have. And what was in the flowerpots?”

  The ones on the front porch. “Some pink flower.”

  “You buy them?”

  “Look,” he said with a flash of annoyance, “stop trying to start an argument.”

  “God forbid.”

  He slammed down the window he had just opened. “Okay, lady, do we go back? Or do we try the bed?”

  “We go back.” She’d dropped her purse on the table next to the oil lamp. She picked it up again. “I told you exactly; you just didn’t believe me. I wanted to see.”

  They drove in silence. Margaret amused herself by counting trees and passing cars and then she put her head back and closed her eyes. I wonder, she thought, if today there will be an answer for me.

  The small fearful voice that haunted her constantly replied: He has someone else. He will marry someone else and he will send you a wedding announcement. …

  She jerked herself upright to silence that voice. “You mad at me, Robert?”

  “Why should I be mad at you?”

  “Look, I’d have hopped into bed with you—why not? Georges won’t even answer, so how does that make me
feel? But you shouldn’t take things for granted.”

  Robert ignored her.

  She stared at his heavy dark profile. “If you just hadn’t been so sure.”

  “Typical female reasoning.”

  “I want to choose too. …” To have what men have. To initiate, to choose. Not to wait, not always to wait. For the sleek, preening male. Because I need him. I don’t want to need him.

  Her father now, look at him. Two daughters and he couldn’t care less. No penis, no use. He had to have a son, one way or the other. Even marry off his daughter to get what he wanted. … What was it the Chinese did, leave their girls out to die? All those squalling female ghosts wailing around the mountain. Did a baby stay a baby after it was dead, or were all ghosts the same? Maybe those girls even turned into boys, got in death what they missed in life. … And her mother who went on a procreative race to produce a male … while a blood disease frustrated her at every birth, and all she got was two insignificant girls. …

  “She killed herself breeding,” Margaret said.

  “What?” Robert turned.

  “My mother killed herself breeding.”

  “I know that,” Robert said.

  “All around the house it was: ‘Shush, Mother is resting, Mother is expecting another baby.’ I used to tiptoe around, scared out of my wits, forgetting that I didn’t even know what the hell she looked like.”

  Margaret crossed her legs and began a cigarette. She did not really like to smoke but it helped that uncomfortable angry fluttering in the tips of her fingers.

  (Aunt Cecilia at the funeral: “Sad, sad, that poor man left with just two daughters.” The child Margaret—in a black dress quickly made for the occasion—wondered what was so wrong with the nakedness of girls that the pronged belly of a boy could solve. …)

  She inhaled and coughed. “Robert, all this last year in New York I’ve been wondering. Do you think my father would let me come in business with him?”

  “No,” Robert said.

  “I just can’t sit around laughing at my own jokes.”

  “You asked me and I’m telling you, I don’t think he will.”