The Promise of Rest

by Reynolds Price

  At the time I knew I loved her in a real way. I also knew I was built to need men, pretty much exclusively, and was headed that way at the first sign of promise. Ivory had more or less understood that from the start; and once she found she was carrying a child, we discussed her having the blood tests done to answer the question of whose child it was, but she wouldn’t hear of asking her ex to participate—the last thing she wanted was for him to think he had a claim on the baby; by then they were parting bitterly. He was incidentally also white. The other last thing she wouldn’t hear of was shedding the baby. Till then she hadn’t felt safe to get pregnant because her marriage had been so rocky. So I stayed near her till the child came safely and have ever since helped her each month with the bills. As I say, she’d pretty much understood from near the start of our friendship that I couldn’t spend my whole life with a woman, however fine, though I surely meant to honor the child if time proved him mine.

  In the fall of ’84, Ivory moved uptown to be near her brother in a better apartment. And that was when I got to know Wyatt. In fairly short order he and I seemed to understand that we were set for the long haul, despite our loud disagreements and crises, which mainly arose from the unavoidable fact that we were built as differently as Memphis and Mombasa. It didn’t hurt Ivory, not that she ever showed, not for long anyhow (though I’ve also suspected her of being the greatest actress since Eve). By then her and Wyatt’s good mother had taken the child to Long Island, except for occasional visits in town. So Ivory, Wyatt and Wade became a working family of three, with a likable weekend guest on occasion.

  What am I telling, or asking, you? First, the child may be half mine. Second, you owe me or Ivory nothing by way of moral or financial support. She will be the sole beneficiary of my insurance and the money I’ve got in my firm’s pension fund. I know you won’t dream of contesting that. She’s also got quite a decent job, Wyatt left her good money, and—knowing the Bondurant pride as I do—I’m certain she wouldn’t accept a dime further. No, I guess all I want is for you to know that Raven Wade Mayfield may have a son to live on beyond him, whatever he’s called and wherever he lives. You two may have a survivor on Earth. I wish I could leave you more than that. You’ll have to lean on memories, I guess. I’ve done that for months.

  I trust each of you will do whatever is right by your standards. I also wish I had the time and sufficient strength to admit here fully how very much pain I’ve caused you—and suffered for causing—how wrong I feel about all I’ll never get to do for Ivory and her likable boy. The strength to tell you just is not available in my body and won’t ever be.

  So love for now—and, sure, always—from

  Wade

  55

  THAT news reached Hutch the next afternoon. He had spent the morning alone in the house, whittling through the thicket of letters he’d got since Wade died. However kind, most of them had come from fellow writers—poets, novelists, playwrights—and their guaranteed eloquence had made each one a hardship to read: the words went so unerringly straight to the core of his pain. When he’d thanked as many as he could bear in a two-hour stretch, he turned to the all but mindless job of choosing from his own lifetime stock of poems for a New and Selected volume he meant to publish in ’95. That would be the thirtieth anniversary of his first small volume.

  He worked by writing the title of each of the poems from the past forty years on a separate index card. They came to a dauntingly thick stack of cards, nearly two hundred poems. But undeterred, Hutch dealt the cards out on the desk before him—grouping, rearranging and finally winnowing. At first he winnowed mercilessly, saving only the poems he suspected would last another fifty years, maybe even a century, as useful objects for a brand of reader scarcer nowadays than clean air to breathe. That left him with less than a twenty-page book. He shuffled his deck again and started a slightly more tolerant game, one in which he worked again to forgive himself for all he’d omitted.

  For years Hutch had known that, because he’d confined his work to verse and, specifically, brief lyric meditations—like the vast majority of American poets since Robert Frost’s narrative prime—he’d arrived at the edge of what might well be his last decade without having dug, with words at least, into ninety percent of what he’d seen in his family and the world and what he’d learned and deduced of the past that stretched behind him and the places he’d known. If, forty years ago, he’d tilted toward the novel and learned to convert his gift and his findings into sizable stories—and one of his teachers had urged that on him, fruitlessly—he might have something more to show now than what felt like a few dozen bright chips off enormous, deeply socketed stones that were long past his reach.

  In the midst of that, Maitland Moses arrived a little early for lunch. So Hutch gladly broke off and made colossal sandwiches which he and Mait ate with cold beer in the kitchen—it was far too hot tit sit on the terrace. Neither of them mentioned Mait’s behavior the last time they met, his volunteering for an early doom; they kept to milder subjects. Mait claimed that his friendship with Cam was strengthening steadily, and Cam was looking for a less demanding job than the hospice. As it was, they had so few nights together. They were homing in on the thought of sharing a larger apartment than Mait had presently, if they could afford it—after Wade’s death Mait had taken a job in the Duke Library, the manuscripts collection.

  Hutch began to tell Mait about his plan for a Selected Poems, asking his advice on what to exclude. And soon that had them moving to the study and fiddling again with the index cards. Finally Hutch asked Mait to lay out his own idea of a volume. “Keep all you think you’ll want to recall from an old friend’s work when you’re sixty years old and discard the rest.”

  Mait faced him squarely. “You know I don’t think I’ll get to be sixty?”

  “Don’t depress me again. Just do what I ask.”

  So while Hutch shelved a few dozen books that had come in the mail when Wade was dying—most of them new poems by friends and ex-students—Mait stood at the desk and played out the white cards carefully. In twenty minutes he turned to Hutch, grinning, and gestured to a wide star of rescued titles. “I gave you sixty-five, one per year for the age you’ll be in 1995.”

  From across the room Hutch said “Way too many.”

  “You haven’t even looked yet.”

  Hutch said what he suddenly felt in his gut. “I couldn’t bear to. So many dead little dinghies in the shallows.”

  Mait laughed his old high-low croak. “Now who’s being reckless? These are all trim craft, all still at sea; a few of them qualify as dreadnoughts at least.”

  Hutch shook his head in honest rejection, but he walked to the desk and studied the titles. In another two minutes he felt a quiet surge of surprise. There seemed at least an even chance that Mait had built, not simply a star of cards but an honorable—maybe better—showing for a lifetime’s witness and silent labor. Hutch knew it might all crumble in his mind in the next ten minutes, but for now he looked up. “Don’t let me destroy it.”

  “Sir?”

  “Remember it, Mait, just the way it lies. Don’t let me hack it up in self-loathing.”

  Mait was smiling still but he spoke, quite firmly, “Not on your life.”

  Before Hutch could ask him to gather the cards in order and keep them, the sound of a truck moved up the hill; and a Federal Express man brought Ivory’s letter with the separate news from Wade.

  Hutch asked Mait’s permission, then sat across from him and read both pages in a deepening calm. The peace surprised him more than the news in Wade’s few lines. Is it news at all? Have I always known it? As the words passed through him, Hutch knew he’d partly dreamed or guessed them—when? Ages since. It likewise strangely raised his spirits to meet, head-on, a fresh and surely insoluble mystery (Wade’s death had seemed such a terminus to questions of hope). When Hutch scanned both pages a second time, he held them toward Maitland.

  Mait grinned but stalled. “Secret dispatches?”
/>   Hutch shook his head No but insisted “Please read them.”

  Mait took what seemed like abnormal time; then looked up, solemn. “Is this as big a shock as I suspect?”

  “Strangely not.”

  “But it’s really weird, right?”

  “Weird—as in what? In a country as hopelessly sick on the subject of family as ours, with the whole millennium speeding down on us, this sounds like fairly old-time human news—surely nothing weirder than what goes on behind barely closed curtains in middle-class houses down every street I travel anyhow.”

  Mait said “You’ve got a point.”

  “I’ve got a lot more than a point, young pal.”

  “I guess you could do some DNA tests, if the mother would let you.”

  As calmly as he’d tracked the sight of the news, Hutch said “No, never.”

  “Won’t Wade’s mother really want to know?”

  Hutch waited. “Ann put up with me for four decades; I think she’s earned her spurs in the dire uncertainty department.”

  “But will you tell her?”

  Hutch hadn’t yet thought there might be a choice. Ann’s name after all was plain on the envelope, no smaller than his. But he wondered if he might not wait till after Wade’s memorial service, when Ivory and the others had come and gone, and then tell Ann. That way she could respond in the slow aftermath, with no threat of panic. So he said to Mait “I may hold off a day or two; but no, clearly Wade meant his mother to know.”

  “Then hadn’t you better tell her before the child’s mother comes down? She may have her own plans to tell both of you her side of the mystery.”

  Hutch saw Mait was right. He’d need to reach Ivory tonight, no later.

  56

  IT was nearly midnight, and again the mechanical man’s voice answered; but when Hutch spoke his name, Ivory picked up the phone. Her voice was tired but not unwelcoming. “I’m sorry I’ve missed your calls more than once. I’ve been at a friend’s.”

  Hutch said “Your message got here this afternoon.”

  “There were two separate messages, Mr. Mayfield.”

  “Both arrived, clear as day.”

  Ivory took a long moment. “No sir. Wade’s message to you is uncertain.”

  “How’s that?”

  Again she waited, this time for so long that Hutch thought she was gone. Then at last her voice came, with more life in it. “I’m assuming he told you about my son. Whatever else Wade said, the name of the father has never been clear—not to me at least. And if I don’t know, nobody else can. Nobody ever chloroformed and raped Ivory Bondurant.”

  “What’s the child’s last name?”

  “My name—Bondurant, as I just told you. I never gave it up.”

  “But you know Wade and I both have Raven as part of our names.”

  Her voice came like a speaking statue’s or a sleepwalking child’s. “I well understand where Raven comes from. Wade and Wyatt and I chose it together. All that meant to us that long summer was, we liked the name. It may seem odd from this far along; but we also thought it was mildly funny since, either way, the boy was half white—more than half; Wyatt and I are both quadroons.”

  Hutch said “Will it feel right to you and your mother if you bring him for the service?”

  “Young Raven? No, that hasn’t crossed my mind. He’s in day camp out on the Island, at Mother’s. He’s well settled in and has been for years.”

  Hutch saw himself barging through pitch-dark water with his eyes half blind. Why am I more lost, here with this creature who seems at least kind, than anyone near? But he told her still. “Wade’s mother and I would surely value the chance to meet Raven.”

  “That’s kind of you both. I’ve thought more about this than you’ve had a chance to, and I’ll have to say you’d be complicating your lives a good deal.”

  “How?”

  “Raven’s that fine a child.”

  Hutch said “How old is he, Ivory?”

  “Eight, going on eighty.” She managed a smile that colored her voice.

  Hutch could hear it. “Eight is one of my favorite ages. I honestly think I knew more good sense at eight than ever since.”

  Ivory said “Oh, me too—maybe nine with me.

  If you told me at nine I’d be sitting here tonight, having this talk with you ten thousand years off, I’d have no doubt said ‘Girl you’re stark-raving nuts.’ No, at nine I knew that the world was divided into Fair and Unfair, forget Good and Evil—”

  “And of course you were right. The average child is.”

  “I was way past average, if I do say so. I’d have never sat still while this whole mystery around a fine child turned half rank and fishy.”

  Hutch said “Well, no. Far stranger things turn up every day on the evening news or the afternoon talk shows—children waiting in pain for long decades, then crawling through fire to find a lost parent, cascades of tears.”

  “Mr. Mayfield, listen—I’ve never been lost. Neither has my son.” She was peaceful and still self-possessed as a heron.

  “Ms. Bondurant, I have never doubted that once, not one hot instant.” With that, Hutch suddenly felt he’d lost some final chance at continuance: another tack tor a dying story, the telling out of his and his family’s path on the ground, which was otherwise what now?—Wyatt’s dry ashes in a bowl.

  “Then thank you, sir. I’m glad you know.”

  “Shall I call you madam?”

  “Pardon?”

  “You’re calling me sir. I’m a U.S. citizen, nothing grander.” But for a harsh instant, he thought I’ve paid mine and many others’ way. That’s fairly grand.

  Ivory said “Sir, suh, oh suh. Maybe I’m just an old-timey girl—my mother’s child from old Virginny, one of the Pattersons from Patterson Hall.” No trace, though, of a smile or a sneer.

  “Remember I asked you to call me Hutch?”

  Again Ivory paused for a long breath, then “Hutch, Hutch, Hutchins.”

  Torn as he felt, in her rich voice finally, it sounded to Hutch like a chain of long-sought hopes amply rewarded, partly earned but never entirely—decades of pardon and boundless bigheartedness, the promise of rest. He understood he was hearing too simply. No human voice could give that much in that little time to any live soul. But for some reason, gently, he told Ivory “Thanks, sleep now, good night.” Then he suddenly found he’d said all he knew. Not waiting for an answer, he hung up quietly.

  THREE

  BOUND AWAY

  JULY-AUGUST 1993

  From fifty yards’ distance, the child was as striking as a palomino colt, a privilege to see; and he watched the car from the moment Hutch turned at the stoplight and drove through the greenery toward him.

  The day Ivory’s letter came, in mid-July, Hutch had reserved a room for her at the Washington Duke Inn, ten minutes from his house. She’d arrived by plane on Friday night and gone, at her insistence, straight to the inn. Now it was Saturday afternoon, a quarter past two, as Hutch came down the drive to the inn and saw them both, already waiting at the curb. Good as Ivory looked in a dark purple dress and a wide-brimmed straw hat, Hutch naturally focused at once on the child who stood beside her peacefully—a little small maybe for eight years old, in a tan summer suit with an open-necked white shirt, a face the excellent color of his mother, and with eyes as dark as any polished onyx.

  Hutch felt a swift flood of expectation—Ivory had never promised she’d bring the child—but he knew he must rein himself in hard. He thought firmly This child’s real, Hutchins. Get one thing right in your life, starting here. He stopped at the curb, got out at once and stepped toward the two.

  For a long moment they looked like the sudden embodiment of all Hutch had lost in his life till this moment—his own young mother whom he’d never seen, young Wade, young Strawson and even Ann herself in her own best days. As Hutch neared them though, they were only themselves, not echoes of others; and that felt like enough of a bounty. He knew not to rush the boy
at once, so he put out his hand to Ivory. “You’re a friend to be here. Wade’s mother will meet us at the chapel.”

  Ivory shook his hand, then touched the boy. “Hutch, this is Raven Bondurant, my son. Raven, this is Mr. Mayfield—Wade Mayfield’s father.”

  At close range the child was almost too good to see. Hutch refused the urge to hunt for Wade in the flawless skin of the face, the eyes, the black hair and lashes, the silent poise of his whole body in its raw linen suit and starched white shirt. Hutch bent a little and offered his hand. “That’s a handsome suit, my friend. Welcome down.”

  In general, children shake hands like the dead; but Raven Bondurant took hold of Hutch with surprising strength, though his eyes were fixed beyond him. “Brand new,” he said. He stroked both palms down his wide lapels.

  So Hutch opened both doors on their side of the car and stood while they chose the front or backseat.

  Ivory took the back.

  Raven slid up front; and when Hutch had joined them, asked the two to buckle their seat belts and then moved out, Raven said “Mother, this place is all green woods.”

  Ivory said “More trees than you’ve ever seen. Or may see again. This is how the Earth was meant to look. Son, on weekends at least. You remember it, hear? It’s vanishing fast.”

  Hutch thought It’s vanished already, long gone. These are stage-set trees. But remember me.

  Raven said a single word.

  Hutch said “Pardon?”

  The child’s face was pressed to the window on his side. He took his time before repeating the word. “Hideout.”

  Hutch said “You’re in hiding?”

  Again the child waited; then still not looking round to Hutch or Ivory, he said “This whole place is some kind of hideout.”