Every day he reminded himself that he was the luckiest son of a bitch in the world. And that made him humble, and other men loved him for his humility and forgave him for his success. Taped to his dresser mirror was a little saying he had cut out of a newspaper, “EVERY DAY THE WORLD TURNS UPSIDE DOWN ON SOMEONE WHO THOUGHT THEY WERE SITTING ON TOP OF IT.”
He was thinking of the saying as he went back to bed. As long as nothing happens to her, he told himself. As long as she is safe.
Breakfast was terrible. Rhoda picked at her food, pretending to eat, trying to get her mother in a good mood. Her mother, whose name was Ariane, was a gentle, religious woman who lived her life in service to her family and friends. But she had spells of fighting back against the terrible inroads they made into her small personal life. This was one of those spells.
This was the third time in two years that Rhoda had run away from her husband and come home to live. Ariane suspected that all Rhoda really wanted was someone to take care of her babies. Ariane spent a lot of time suspecting Rhoda of one thing or another. Rhoda was the most demanding of her four children, the only daughter, the most unpredictable, the hardest to control or understand.
“What am I supposed to tell your husband when he calls,” she said, buttering toast with a shaking hand. “I feel sorry for him when he calls up. If you’re leaving town I want you to call him first.”
“Now, Ariane,” Rhoda’s father said. “We’ll only be gone a few days. Don’t answer the phone if you don’t want to talk to Malcolm.”
“I had an appointment to get a permanent today,” she said. “I don’t know when Joseph will be able to take me again.”
“Leave the children with the maids,” he said. “That’s what the maids are for.”
“I’m not going to leave those babies alone in a house with maids for a minute,” her mother said. “This is just like you, Rhoda, coming home brokenhearted one day and going off leaving your children the next. I don’t care what anyone says, Dudley, she has to learn to accept some responsibility for something.”
“She’s going with me to the mines,” he said, getting up and putting his napkin neatly into his napkin holder. “I want her to see where the money comes from.”
“Well, I’ll call and see if Laura’ll come over while I’m gone,” Ariane said, backing down as she always did. Besides, she loved Rhoda’s little boys, loved to hold their beautiful strong bodies in her arms, loved to bathe and dress and feed them, to read to them and make them laugh and watch them play. When she was alone with them she forgot they were not her very own. Flesh of my flesh, she would think, touching their perfect skin, which was the color of apricots and wild honey, flesh of my flesh, bone of my bone.
“Oh, go on then,” she said. “But please be back by Saturday.”
They cruised out of town in the big Packard he had bought secondhand from old Dr. Purcell and turned onto the Natchez Trace going north.
“Where are we going?” she said.
“We have to go to Nashville to catch a plane,” he said. “It’s too far to drive. Don’t worry about it, honey. Just leave it to me. I’ve got all my ducks in a row.”
“Did you call the doctor?” she said. “Did you call Uncle James?”
“Don’t worry about it. I told you I’ve got it all taken care of. You take a nap or something.”
“All right,” she said, and pulled a book out of her handbag. It was Ernest Hemingway’s new book, and it had come from the book club the day she left North Carolina. She had been waiting for it to come for weeks. Now she opened it to the first page, holding it up to her nose and giving it a smell.
“Across the River and into the Trees,” she said. “What a wonderful title. Oh, God, he’s my favorite writer.” She settled further down into the seat. “This is going to be a good one. I can tell.”
“Honey, look out the window at where you’re going,” her father said. “This is beautiful country. Don’t keep your nose in a book all your life.”
“This is a new book by Ernest Hemingway,” she said. “I’ve been waiting for it for weeks.”
“But look at this country,” he said. “Your ancestors came this way when they settled this country. This is how they came from Tennessee.”
“They did not,” she said. “They came on a boat down the river from Pennsylvania. Momma said so.”
“Well, I knew you’d have something smart-alecky to say,” he said.
“The first book I read by Ernest Hemingway was last year when I was nursing Malcolm,” she said. “It was about this man and woman in Paris that loved each other but something was wrong with him, he got hurt in the war and couldn’t make love to her. Anyway, she kept leaving him and going off with other men. It was so sad I cried all night after I read it. After that I read all his books as fast as I could.”
“I don’t know why you want to fill up your head with all that stuff,” he said. “No wonder you don’t have any sense, Rhoda.”
“Well, never mind that,” she said. “Oh, good, this is really going to be good. It’s dedicated ‘To Mary, With Love,’ that’s his wife. She’s terrible looking. She doesn’t wear any makeup and she’s got this terrible wrinkled skin from being in the sun all the time. I saw a picture of her in a magazine last year. I don’t know what he sees in her.”
“Maybe she knows how to keep her mouth shut,” he said. “Maybe she knows how to stay home and be a good wife.”
“Oh, well,” Rhoda said, “let’s don’t talk about that. I don’t feel like talking about that.”
“I’m sorry, honey,” he said. “You go on and read your book.” He set the speedometer on an easy sixty miles an hour and tried not to think about anything. Outside the window the hills of north Alabama were changing into the rich fields of Tennessee. He remembered coming this way as a young man, driving to Nashville to play ball, dreaming of fame, dreaming of riches. He glanced beside him, at the concentrated face of his beautiful spoiled crazy daughter.
Well, she’s mine, he told himself. And nothing will ever hurt her. As long as I live nothing will ever harm her.
He sighed, letting out his breath in a loud exhalation, but Rhoda could not hear him now. She was far away in the marshes near Tagliamento, in northern Italy, hunting ducks at dawn with Ernest Hemingway. (Rhoda was not fooled by personas. In her mind any modern novel was the true story of the writer’s life.)
Rhoda was reading as they went into the Nashville airport and she kept on reading while they waited for the plane, and as soon as she was settled in her seat she found her place and went on reading.
The love story had finally started.
Then she came into the room, shining in her youth and tall striding beauty, and the carelessness the wind had made of her hair. She had pale, almost olive colored skin, a profile that could break your, or anyone else’s heart, and her dark hair, of a thick texture, hung down over her shoulders.
“Hello, my great beauty,” the Colonel said.
This was more like it, Rhoda thought. This was a better girlfriend for Ernest Hemingway than his old wife. She read on. Renata was nineteen! Imagine that! Ernest Hemingway’s girlfriend was the same age as Rhoda! Imagine being in Venice with a wonderful old writer who was about to die of a heart attack. Imagine making love to a man like that. Rhoda imagined herself in a wonderful bed in a hotel in Venice making love all night to a dying author who could fuck like a nineteen-year-old boy.
She raised her eyes from the page. “Did you get Uncle James on the phone?” she said. “Did you ask him to find out about the doctor?”
“He told me what to do,” her father said. “He said first you should make certain you’re pregnant.”
“I’m certain,” she said. “I even know why. A rubber broke. It was Malcolm’s birthday and I was out of jelly and I told him I didn’t want to . . .”
“Oh, honey, please don’t talk like that. Please don’t tell me all that.”
“Well, it’s the truth,” she said. “It’s the reason we�
��re on this plane.”
“Just be quiet and go on and read your book then,” he said. He went back to his newspaper. In a minute he decided to try again.
“James said the doctor will have to know for certain that you’re pregnant.”
“All right,” she said. “I’ll think up something to tell him. What do you think we should say my name is?”
“Now, sweetie, don’t start that,” he said. “We’re going to tell this man the truth. We’re not doing anything we’re ashamed of.”
“Well, we can’t tell him I’m married,” she said. “Or else he’ll make me get my husband’s permission.”
“Where’d you get an idea like that?” he said.
“Stella Mabry told me. She tried to get an abortion last year, but she didn’t take enough money with her. You have to say you’re divorced.”
“All right,” he said. “I’ll tell you what, honey. You just let me talk to the man. You be quiet and I’ll do the talking.”
He lay back and closed his eyes, hoping he wasn’t going to end up vomiting into one of Southern Airlines’ paper bags.
He was deathly afraid to fly and had only been on an airplane once before in his life.
A taxi took them to the new Hilton. Rhoda had never been in such a fancy hotel. She had run away to get married when she was seventeen years old and her only vacations since then had been to hospitals to have babies.
The bellboy took them upstairs to a suite of rooms. There were two bedrooms and a large living room with a bar in one corner. It looked like a movie set, with oversize beige sofas and a thick beige tweed carpet. Rhoda looked around approvingly and went over to the bar and fixed herself a tall glass of ice water.
Her father walked out onto the balcony and called to her. “Rhoda, look out here. That’s an Olympic-size swimming pool. Isn’t that something? The manager said some Olympic swimmers had been working out here in the afternoons. Maybe we’ll get to watch them after a while.”
She looked down several stories to the bright blue rectangle. “Can I go swimming in it?” she said.
“Let’s call the doctor first and see what he wants us to do.” He took a phone number from his billfold, sat down in a chair with his back to her, and talked for a while on the phone, nodding his head up and down as he talked.
“He said to come in first thing in the morning. He gets there at nine.”
“Then I’ll go swimming until dinner,” she said.
“Fine,” he said. “Did you bring a swimsuit?”
“Oh, no,” she said. “I didn’t think about it.”
“Well, here,” he said, handing her a hundred-dollar bill. “Go find a gift shop and see if they don’t have one that will fit you. And buy a robe to go over it. You can’t go walking around a hotel in a swimsuit. I’ll take a nap while you’re gone. I’ll come down and find you later.”
She went down to the ground floor and found the gift shop, a beautiful little glassed-in area that smelled of cool perfume and was presided over by an elegant woman with her hair up in a bun.
Rhoda tried on five or six swimming suits and finally settled on a black one-piece maillot cut low in the back. She admired herself in the mirror. Two weeks of being too worried to eat had melted the baby fat from her hips and stomach, and she was pleased with the way her body looked.
While she admired herself in the mirror the saleslady handed her a beach robe. It was a black-and-white geometric print that came down to the floor.
“This is the latest thing in the Caribbean,” the saleslady said. “It’s the only one I have left. I sold one last week to a lady from New York.”
“It’s darling,” Rhoda said, wrapping it around her, imagining what Ernest Hemingway would think if he could see her in this. “But it’s too long.”
“How about a pair of wedgies,” the saleslady said. “I’ve got some on sale.”
Rhoda added a pair of white canvas wedgies to her new outfit, collected the clothes she had been wearing in a shopping bag, paid for her purchases, and went out to sit by the pool.
The swimming team had arrived and was doing warm-up laps. A waiter came, and she ordered a Coke and sipped it while she watched the beautiful young bodies of the athletes. There was a blond boy whose shoulders reminded her of her husband’s and she grew interested in him, wondering if he was a famous Olympic swimmer. He looked like he would be a lot of fun, not in a bad mood all the time like Malcolm. She kept looking at him until she caught his eye and he smiled at her. When he dove back into the pool she reached under the table and took off her wedding ring and slipped it into her pocketbook.
When she woke up early the next morning her father was already up, dressed in a seersucker suit, talking on the phone to his mine foreman in Tennessee.
“I can’t believe I’m going to be through with all this today,” she said, giving him a kiss on the forehead. “I love you for doing this for me, Daddy. I won’t ever forget it as long as I live.”
“Well, let’s just don’t talk about it too much,” he said. “Here, look what’s in the paper. Those sapsuckers in Washington are crazy as loons. We haven’t been through with Korea four years and they’re fixing to drag us into this mess in Vietnam. Old Douglas MacArthur told them not to get into a land war in Asia, but nobody would listen to him.”
“Let me see,” Rhoda said, taking the newspaper from him. She agreed with her father that the best way to handle foreign affairs was for the United States to divide up the world with Russia. “They can boss half and we’ll boss half,” he had been preaching for years. “Because that’s the way it’s going to end up anyway.”
Rhoda’s father was in the habit of being early to his appointments, so at eight o’clock they descended in the elevator, got into a taxi, and were driven through the streets of Houston to a tall office building in the center of town. They went up to the fifth floor and into a waiting room that looked like any ordinary city doctor’s office. There was even a Currier and Ives print on the wall. Her father went in and talked to the doctor for a while, then he came to the door and asked her to join them. The doctor was a short, nervous man with thin light-colored hair and a strange smell about him. Rhoda thought he smelled like a test tube. He sat beside an old rolltop desk and asked her questions, half-listening to the answers.
“I’m getting a divorce right away,” Rhoda babbled, “my husband forced me to make love to him and I’m not supposed to have any more babies because I’ve already had two cesarean sections in twelve months and I could have a legal abortion if I wanted to but I’m afraid to wait as long as it would take to get permission. I mean I’m only nineteen and what would happen to my babies if I died. Anyway, I want you to know I think you’re a real humanitarian for doing this for people. I can’t tell you what it meant to me to even find out your name. Do you remember Stella Mabry that came here last year? Well, anyway, I hope you’re going to do this for me because I think I’ll just go crazy if you don’t.”
“Are you sure you’re pregnant?” he asked.
“Oh, yes,” she said. “I’m sure. I’ve missed a period for three and a half weeks and I’ve already started throwing up. That’s why I’m so sure. Look, I just had two babies in thirteen months. I know when I’m pregnant. Look at the circles under my eyes. And I’ve been losing weight. I always lose weight at first. Then I blow up like a balloon.” Oh, God, she thought. Please let him believe me. Please make him do it.
“And another thing,” she said. “I don’t care what people say about you. I think you are doing a great thing. There will be a time when everyone will know what a great service you’re performing. I don’t care what anyone says about what you’re doing . . .”
“Honey,” her father said. “Just answer his questions.”
“When was your last period?” the doctor said. He handed her a calendar and she picked out a date and pointed to it.
Then he gave her two small white pills to swallow and a nurse came and got her and helped her undress and she climbed up
on an operating table and everything became very still and dreamy and the nurse was holding her hand. “Be still,” the nurse said. “It won’t take long.”
She saw the doctor between her parted legs with a mask tied around his face and an instrument in his hand and she thought for a moment he might be going to kill her, but the nurse squeezed her hand and she looked up at the ceiling and thought of nothing but the pattern of the tiles revolving around the light fixture.
They began to pack her vagina with gauze. “Relax,” the nurse said. “It’s all over.”
“I think you are wonderful,” she said in a drowsy voice. “I think you are a wonderful man. I don’t care what anyone says about you. I think you are doing a great service to mankind. Someday everyone will know what a good thing you’re doing for people.”
When she woke up her father was with her and she walked in a dream out of the offices and into the elevator and down to the tiled foyer and out onto the beautiful streets of the city. The sun was brilliant and across the street from the office building was a little park with the sound of a million crickets rising and falling in the sycamore trees. And all the time a song was playing inside of her. “I don’t have to have a baby, I don’t have to have a baby, I don’t have to have a baby.”
“Oh, God, oh, thank you so much,” she said, leaning against her father. “Oh, thank you, oh, thank you so much. Oh, thank you, thank you, thank you.”
He took her to the hotel and put her into the cool bed and covered her with blankets and sat close beside her in a chair all afternoon and night while she slept. The room was dark and cool and peaceful, and whenever she woke up he was there beside her and nothing could harm her ever as long as he lived. No one could harm her or have power over her or make her do anything as long as he lived.
All night he was there beside her, in his strength and goodness, as still and gentle as a woman.
All night he was there, half-asleep in his chair. Once in the night she woke up hungry and room service brought a steak and some toast and milk and he fed it to her bite by bite. Then he gave her another one of the pills, put the glass of milk to her lips, and she drank deeply of the cold, lush liquid, then fell back into a dreamless sleep.
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