Starcarbon

by Ellen Gilchrist

  “What are you doing in town, Daniel,” Manny said, trying to bring the evening back into some order. “Crystal said you came on business?”

  “I came down here to talk to all of you,” Daniel began.

  “Well, great,” Crystal said. “I was just thinking what to cook for dinner when you called. This is a real treat. An unexpected dinner party in the middle of the week.”

  Jessie closed her eyes. She knew the stages of Daniel’s drinking like she knew the beating of her own heart. The most dangerous thing of all was when he grew quiet. It was the harbinger of disaster. The death of safety, the death of peace. I should get up and leave right now, she thought. I could say, King, take me out of here and he would. I can leave. All I have to do is stand up and walk away. She looked down into her lap. Folded and unfolded her hands.

  “I hear you’re trying to save the little son-of-a-bitch that broke into my daughter’s house in the middle of the night and tried to kill your baby. Is that right, son?” Daniel leaned toward King. “I came down here to find out about that. You want to tell me that I’m wrong.”

  “I’ve known him for years, Daniel. Yes, I’m trying to help him. We all are. All he did was come to see K.T. He wanted to see the baby. He wasn’t trying to kill anyone.”

  “He had a gun with him. Or was Helen wrong about that too?”

  “Oh, please,” Crystal said. “Let’s talk about something else. Could we please just leave this alone. Tomorrow we’ll explain it to you, Daniel. He’s the nephew of our housekeeper. We couldn’t call the police. They would have sent him to Angola.”

  “Angola is a terrible place.” Crystal Anne was standing up. “I have to go to the bathroom, Daddy. Will you show me where it is?”

  “I want you to see my new office anyway.” Manny put his hand on Daniel’s arm. “You come down in the morning and we’ll explain it all to you. We have the young man in a clinic in Texas. It isn’t whatever you think has happened.”

  “So you’re trying to help this nigger that broke into my daughter’s house and tried to kill her baby. That’s the crap you got going on down here in New Orleans. Goddamn, Manny, I thought you had some sense. I wouldn’t have let Jessie marry this boy and move down here except I thought you had enough sense to protect her. Letting her live in that little frame house on the edge of a black neighborhood. I wouldn’t treat your daughter that way if you sent her to me. I want them out of that neighborhood tomorrow. That’s what I came down here for, to buy my daughter a decent house.” He waved his hand to the black waiter, who had been listening and would be very slow in waiting on this table. That was clear from the expression on his face. THE TYRANNY OF A DRUNK IN A RESTAURANT.

  Crystal Anne was standing up. She was facing Daniel. “You shouldn’t yell so loud,” she said, “and don’t say racial things. You’ll hurt somebody’s feelings.” She turned on her heels and walked toward the hall leading to the bathroom. Crystal jumped up and followed her. Manny was on his feet.

  Don’t move, King thought. Until you decide exactly what to do.

  I think I’ll kill myself, Jessie decided. Wherever I go, it’s like this, someone is always getting drunk, always screaming, screaming, screaming.

  “Daddy,” she said. “Please don’t do this. Don’t do it here. Don’t yell at anyone. Don’t yell at King. Don’t yell at me.” She began to cry, very softly at first, then terrible sobs. King took her arm and pulled her up beside him. “I’m taking Jessie home,” he said. “Daniel, don’t say another word to her. If you say one more word, I’ll kill you. I mean it, Daniel. You can trust me.” Then the waiter was beside him and two more behind him and Manny held Daniel’s arm and King and Jessie made their escape through the side door out onto Saint Ann Street.

  At two that morning Jessie started bleeding. At four she started hemorrhaging and at four-fifteen the ambulance came and took her to Touro Infirmary and she bled away the fetus that would have been her daughter. “I’ll be like Anna,” she wept into King’s arms. “I’ll lose all my babies. I was probably lucky to have K.T. Go on home and take care of him. Don’t leave him alone for a minute.”

  “He’s with Momma,” King said. “He’s with Momma and Manny and Crystal Anne.”

  At ten the next morning Daniel showed up at the hospital with an armload of flowers but Jessie would not let him come into the room. “I lost my daughter,” she said, when he appeared in the door. “I’m never speaking to you again, Daddy. Go away. I never want to see you again as long as I live. Doctor Kaplan said I don’t have to do this anymore.” As if on cue, Doctor Kaplan appeared behind Daniel in the door and came around him and went to the bed and sat beside it and took Jessie’s hand. “Are you okay, honey?” she asked. “Are you doing all right now?”

  “It was a girl,” Jessie said. “It was my daughter. Now she’s gone. I’ll be like Aunt Anna. I’ll bleed my daughters and sons away.”

  “Nonsense,” Doctor Kaplan said. “It was a miscarriage. That’s all. Nature knows what it’s doing. There will be plenty more babies if you want them. You’re a strong and healthy girl.”

  Then Jessie began to cry again and Daniel laid the flowers on a chair in the hall and walked down to the elevator and got on it and went down to the first floor and out onto the street. It was very bright and lively on Prytania Street in the hot summer morning light. Daniel stuck his hand into his pocket and felt his money clip. He felt his car keys and his hand brushed against his balls and he walked on down the street and stopped at a doughnut shop and bought a Coke for his hangover and thought about his life, now officially over, and went out to the airport and got on a plane and flew on home.

  Back at Daniel’s house, Spook was walking around the empty swimming pool picking up leaves and scraping mold off of corners and muttering to himself. Goddamn little kids, I’m not writing another check to that service until they come out here and get this thing right. We ought to fill the damn thing in and plant some flowers in it. Nobody’s here anymore. Nobody swims in it. Nobody uses it for a goddamn thing.

  Poor Daniel. He’s finished now. Some days I wish he’d go on and shoot himself like his granddaddy did and get it over with. Spook climbed the steps from the shallow end and walked over and sat down in one of the four-hundred-dollar yard chairs by the bath house and thought about it. He lay back in the chair. Then he sat up and put his elbows on his knees and his head in his hands. “Father in heaven, it’s a sinner pleading with you. Would you tell me what the hell I’m supposed to do here, please? Would you tell me where I’m supposed to start and don’t tell me to clean out this goddamn swimming pool because I’ve already done that and if I hear any more about it I might get me some dynamite and blow it up.”

  The phone was ringing in the house. Spook could hear it but he wasn’t going to answer it. It was Helen tuning in on the trauma. It was Helen, standing by a window in her living room looking out on the streets of Boston and biting her lower lip. She had on a white cotton blouse and a little red pleated skirt and a pair of white sandals and she was calling everybody up.

  “We were prisoners,” Crystal said, when Helen finally got her on the phone. After trying everyone in the family, she had finally gotten hold of Crystal. “If Jessie hadn’t started crying. If Crystal Anne hadn’t gotten up, I guess we would still be sitting there letting that drunken fool hold us hostage. Well, she lost the baby, I guess you know that. Is that why you’re calling?”

  “What baby? She was pregnant? What are you talking about?”

  “She was three months pregnant. No one knew. King had only known a few days. She had menstruated twice so maybe it was inevitable. It might have been a bad pregnancy anyway. The doctor had said he wanted to do an amnio. She’s pretty hysterical about it though. If you call her, be careful what you say. She thinks it was a girl.”

  “Crystal Anne was there? In the mélee? God, I’m sorry about that. I feel responsible for this, Crystal. I shouldn’t have said anything to Daniel. I didn’t mean to. He called me about something and I
was just rattling on. Oh, God, I’m so sorry. I think it was my fault.”

  “It wasn’t your fault. It’s Daniel’s fault for being drunk. I don’t think Jessie will ever forgive him.”

  “Where is he now?”

  “He’s in Charlotte. If you want my advice, leave him alone. He’s got a nice woman who loves him. Let her deal with this. We have spoiled him to death all his life. Let him get away with murder.”

  “That’s Daniel. He can always find a woman to tell him anything he does is all right. He was so beautiful to look at when he was young. Such a wonderful dancer.”

  “It’s a curse, that kind of beauty.”

  “You should know.”

  “I know.” They were silent then.

  “Blessed and cursed,” Crystal said finally. “All of us. Well, maybe things are looking up. For some of us. I don’t give a damn what happens to Daniel now. I’ve had it with Daniel. That was the last straw.”

  “I think this was all my fault.”

  “Helen, it wasn’t your fault. That’s how alcoholics make people feel. Like they did something wrong. You didn’t do anything wrong. You just said it to the wrong person, you said it to a drunk.”

  “Where did you learn all this, Crystal? You’re getting so wise. I think of you dancing in that white dress at the Christmas cotillion that year you came to visit us in Charlotte and everyone fell in love with you. Anna said you were the prettiest girl who ever lived. I wish she could know you now. Anyway, that’s embarrassing. I don’t want to embarrass you.”

  “I’m going to a psychiatrist, Helen. I’m trying to find out what went wrong so I can fix it.”

  “What went wrong?”

  “Good and bad. It isn’t only me. It’s the whole family. All of us. Starting with my father’s mother and my great-grandfather’s slaves and going back to when my father’s father beat him and then he beat Phelan and turned Phelan into a killer. The way Phelan adores women, loves women to death. That’s because Daddy was such a tyrant and Mother was the only hope he had. All those old bastards in north Alabama, those beautiful, powerful old Scots. They beat their sons and scared their daughters to death. It’s worse than the Victorians and I had that too on Mother’s side. It’s the same for all of us. Why do you think Daniel drinks?”

  “He had asthma when he was a child. He used to get sick before basketball games. He couldn’t breathe.”

  “Did you hear what you just said?”

  “What?”

  “Before basketball games. I bet your daddy was standing over him expecting him to be a star.”

  “Yes.”

  “Helen. I have to go. The baby’s crying. I’m taking care of K.T. He just woke up. But I’m glad you called. Come and see us. Come see Jessie. She really loves you. She misses you.”

  “Should I call her or not?”

  “What will you tell her?”

  “What Mike tells me. We live in a rich country and we have roofs over our heads and a Constitution that works and food to eat. This is not a tragedy no matter how much we want to believe it is. He always says that to me.”

  “He sounds wonderful.”

  “He is. He reads Yeats out loud to me. He knows most of it by heart.”

  “Food to eat and a poet to love. How’d you get so lucky, Helen?”

  “I don’t know. I think it’s some sort of mistake but I don’t want to give it back. Like someone gave you too much change and you feel good when you give it back. But this isn’t like that, is it?”

  “I’ll ask my shrink. Love you, Helen. I have to go and get the baby.”

  Helen hung up the phone and went into the kitchen to see what she could cook for supper. There was a quotation stuck with tape on the refrigerator door. Every day Mike put a new one there. Yesterday it had said, “WRITE AS IF YOU WERE DYING.” Today it was lines from a poem.

  Though I am old with wandering

  Through hollow lands and hilly lands,

  I will find out where she has gone,

  And kiss her lips and take her hands,

  And pluck till time and times are done

  The silver apples of the moon

  The golden apples of the sun.

  Later that night, much much later, Helen lay in Mike’s arms and tried to tell him the things Crystal had said. She tried to make him see the plantations in North Carolina and Alabama. Told him about the old wills that they had seen as children leaving the slaves to one another. Been cursed by seeing. Told him about the dogs and horses and the fox hunts and the field trials. The antiques and rings and chandeliers and the huge houses. “The niggers, as they were called,” she ended. “All we ever heard anyone call black people, but my grandmother called them darkies. It’s so complicated and it began so long ago and we have inherited so much sadness, but also, the sort of minds that made Anna a great writer. So I don’t understand. But I want to understand. I want to be like Crystal and spend my life trying to understand.”

  “Have you ever been to Scotland?” Mike asked.

  “No.”

  “Then you must go. The next time I go to Dublin I will take you. It started before you think it did, Helen. It started long ago in those Orkney Islands, if that’s really where your people came from.”

  “They say it was. Half Irish, half Scots, part Welsh, you can’t blame things on the past. That’s the problem, blaming things on other things. We have to take our lives now, and do something with them now. I’ve been thinking about it all day and that’s the main thing I believe.”

  “I thought you said you wanted to spend your life trying to understand the past.”

  “No. I didn’t mean that. I want to spend my life like this, with you.” She snuggled down into his chest, lay her hand upon his arm. What had she read that day? “We have some happy days and some unhappy days, some great loves and barren spaces. We have this life, this instantaneous blossoming. Will I ever learn not to choose among its moments, will I ever learn to walk its hollow lands and hilly lands?”

  “You know that thing you put on the refrigerator today? About silver apples and golden apples?”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s very strange. I was reading some of Anna’s essays. And she said that too, about hollow lands and hilly lands. I thought when I read it, I’ve seen that somewhere and there it was, on my refrigerator.”

  “It’s from a famous poem. It’s a vast metaphor for me, for the muse and also, the richness of life, the thing we overlook from day to day, the feast we forget to partake of.”

  “That’s what the essay says. That’s what Anna thought it was about. I want to see the rest of the poem. Will you show it to me tomorrow?”

  “I will sing it to you while you go to sleep.” And he did and she did and the night passed and it was another day.

  Chapter 48

  ARMAGEDDON,” Georgia said, when she heard the story of Richard and the citizen’s arrest and why Olivia had to spend three extra days in New Orleans, causing her to miss an exam. “Okay, write me a thousand-word essay on the incident and we’ll call it even. You’re the only one in class who listens, much less knows what I’m talking about. I don’t think any of them can read.”

  “Armageddon?” Olivia rolled the word around in her mind.

  “It’s what Tolstoy said in War and Peace. When things got so bad for the peasants that they lost all civilized sense, they became highwaymen. What’s the difference between that and auto theft? Oh, well, enough of that. Are you going to North Carolina in the fall? Is Bobby registered? Can I help with that?”

  “I don’t think I’m going back. He wants to go to Montana and show it to me. So I think I’ll do that. Armageddon. Yeah, that’s the word for it. King showed us the project where Richard grew up. It looks like someplace that was bombed in a war. And right in the middle of it are these sweet little children with ribbons in their hair. I can’t forget seeing that.”

  “You want to go for a walk. Let’s chuck all this and walk awhile.”

  “We co
uld walk out to the cemetery and see where my mother’s buried. It’s out by the old Indian village, the Sah-Ke-Lah. You want to see it?”

  “Sure. Why not?” It was the sixth time Olivia had proposed going to see her mother’s grave.

  They were in the school cafeteria. They put their trays on the conveyor belt and left the building and began to walk. “So how are things with you and Zach?” Olivia asked. “Did you ever let him make you come?”

  “Yeah, the other night. I thought, What the hell. I’m only punishing myself. All that bullshit he believes about the twins getting better. He thinks he can make me like them. It’s just a terrible pathology and I’m caught up in it. It’s a tarbaby and I can’t get loose. I get a hand free or a foot free, and then I get sucked back in. But it’s better, it’s getting better. Look at that cloud formation, will you? It’s so good to be outside. People should stay outside. You don’t get in trouble outside.” Georgia laughed up into the air and began to walk faster. She had been a marathon runner in the 1970s. She was hard to keep up with when she had a theory forming in her mind.

  Chapter 49

  THIS time they were definitely going to kill her. “She’s going to move in here and take up all the room,” Taylor said. “All we have to do is fix the car. You fix it so the brakes go out.”

  “He doesn’t really like her.” Tucker had been all for killing her the week before. Now he was chickening out. “She isn’t even here now.”

  “She’s coming back. She’s going to marry him and be our momma.”

  “Dallas Anne is our momma. I hate her too, Taylor, but we might get caught.”

  “I say we fix the car.”

  “It’s Dad’s MG. Why do we want to wreck his car?”

  “We could wait till they switch. He said he was going to trade back with her this weekend.”

  “Is she coming this weekend?”

  “She never comes when we’re here. That’s how much she hates us.”