Windchill Summer

by Norris Church Mailer

  —

  When the ceremony was over, Lucille and I sat fanning ourselves in the limo with our shoes off and the doors open, waiting for Jim Floyd and Mr. Wilmerding to finish up so the grave diggers could fill in the grave. G. Dub, Bean, and Tripp said they were going off to take a walk somewhere while they waited for the crowd to thin out and the road to open up. I had lost Baby in the shuffle, but now saw her over by the edge of the graveyard, standing next to a new-looking cream-colored Cadillac, talking to the very man who had put the rose in Carlene’s hands at the funeral. He was wearing sunglasses, and they seemed to know each other real well.

  “Look who Baby’s talking to, Lucille.”

  She turned and squinted in the late-afternoon sun. “My Lord and stars! It’s that guy! What is he doing with Baby? Let’s go and get introduced.”

  We walked as nonchalantly as we could over the graves to where they were standing by the car.

  “Oh! Hi, Baby. We didn’t see you standing here,” Lucille said, wide-eyed and innocent, like we had just been strolling by and happened to bump into them. Baby rolled her eyes at me, but the man grinned when he saw Lucille. Most men do.

  “Introduce me to your friends, Baby,” he said. She looked as if she really would rather not.

  “Y’all, this is Franco O’Reilly. He knew Carlene from the restaurant. Franco, these are my friends Cherry Marshall and Lucille Hawkins. Mrs. Hawkins.”

  Lucille took a few steps closer, which was harder than it sounds, because she was wearing her Barbie shoes—open-backed spike heels that she ordered from Frederick’s of Hollywood—and the ground was soft. She held out her hand. Franco took it and held it just a moment too long.

  “Hello, Franco. It’s so nice to meet you. That’s an interesting name. Are you part Italian?”

  He laughed. “Totally Irish. Actually, my name is Frank. When I met Baby, she understood my name as Franco Reilly. I will be Franco forever to Baby, Mrs. Hawkins.”

  “Call me Lucille. Can we call you Franco, too? It’s cute.”

  “You can call me anything you want to, Lucille.”

  I wasn’t crazy about the way this was going.

  “I wish the circumstances were different for our meeting, Mr. O’Reilly,” I said, with a stone face. “Did you know Carlene well?”

  He stopped smiling then, and remembered where he was.

  “Not too well. Of course, I saw her from time to time at the Water Witch. It’s one of my favorite stops on my trips. I’m in sales. Restaurant supplies. Vending machines. Pinball machines and jukeboxes.”

  “Wait a minute,” Baby said. “I thought you and Carlene dated. That’s definitely what she told me, after I left the job. That she was dating you.”

  He looked really uncomfortable.

  “Well, yes, you might call it dating, but it was nothing serious. She was a sweet kid, but it was more of a friendship than anything. I felt bad for her, being a single mother and all. It seemed like she never got a break.”

  “She sure didn’t get one this time, did she?” Baby said.

  “No, she didn’t.” He looked down at the ground, as if he couldn’t meet her eyes.

  We just stood there for a minute. The silence was really awkward.

  “Well, it looks like the crowd is beginning to thin out,” he finally said, jingling his car keys. “I had better be on the road. It was really nice meeting all of you.” He looked at Lucille while he said it.

  Lucille looked like she would have liked to stay, but I pinched her on the arm and we turned and left. When we had gotten a few hundred feet away, I sneaked a look back. He was still standing there, watching us as we walked back to the cars. He was smiling again.

  18.Baby

  “Is Bean with you, Baby?” Manang called to her from the kitchen as she came in the front door after the funeral.

  “No, Manang. He’s gone.”

  “Come in and help me with the girls, please. It will be time for dinner soon.”

  Connie and Sunnie were in the backyard playing in the dirt. The late-afternoon sun rays filtered through the trees, washing the grass and the children in golden light. Baby stopped at the back door and watched them for a minute, awestruck by the beauty of the little girls, their black heads close together as they made mud pies. They seemed poignantly alive after her long afternoon with death. They squealed and ran to her, and she gathered them up, carrying one on each hip, then took them inside and gave them their bath. After dinner, while Baby and Pilar did the dishes, Manang put the little ones to bed and sang to them, in her thin, slightly off-key voice; it was an old Filipino song she used to sing to all the children, in Tagalog. Baby had long ago forgotten what the words meant, but the song filled her heart with the sad memory of something beautiful that was lost. She would have had such a different life if they had never come to America—worse in some ways, but maybe better in others.

  When Pilar finished in the kitchen, she went to her room, but Baby sat outside on the steps, smoked a cigarette, and listened to Manang sing. The song and the sweet starry night brought back half-buried memories.

  Even though she had been only four when they left, pictures of the Philippines were clear—frozen in her mind, as an ancient fern in the ice of a glacier.

  The house they once lived in was like a tree house, sitting up on stilts in the jungle. On one side, a long set of wooden steps led up to a porch, and latticework crisscrossed around the bottom. The sides were open to the breeze, covered only with woven mats that rolled down when it rained, and nobody had much privacy. Nobody really cared about having any. The people could sit on their porches and look at the treetops, or lean out and pick a guava or a sweet rambutan for breakfast. Baby remembered that when the floors were swept, the dirt just fell through the cracks in the boards. They would have laughed at the idea of a dustpan. Or a bathroom. Or a washing machine. Or at most of the things that everyone here took for granted and thought they couldn’t live without.

  The one memory that was not clear to Baby was her mother. She remembered odd things, but they were mixed up, as if they were not memories but dreams, woven with bits of old stories Manang used to tell her. Manang was the Tagalog word for “Auntie,” and in truth, Manang was Baby’s aunt, Auwling, the older sister of Maeling, her mother—her Nanang—who had died when Baby was three.

  Auwling never tried to hide this from Baby and, as she got older, would tell her stories about her mother, making them sound like almost like fairy tales, although unlike happily-ever-after, sometimes these stories ended badly.

  Auwling loved her younger sister very much. Maeling had been the most beautiful girl in the village, more beautiful even than her imposing older sister. She had an airy disposition, and her voice was clear and lovely. Maeling would sing as she washed the clothes in the stream that bubbled over rocks near their house and needed nothing much to make her laugh, while Auwling was serious and quiet and thought singing was noisy and unnecessary.

  Dionisio Moreno was so in love with Maeling that he could hardly wait until her sixteenth birthday to ask for permission to marry her, which her mother was eager to give, as her own husband had died two years before and it was hard to rear the girls alone. Dionisio was a good catch—older and settled, and he owned his own fish store. Maeling was also in love with him, which was not necessary for the match but a bonus.

  Since it would have been improper for them to be alone before they were married, or even to hold hands, the courtship was conducted from a distance. Somehow, that made it more exciting. Every look was filled with meaning, every chance brush against an arm a thrill. In the evenings, Dionisio would sit under Maeling’s window, play his guitar, and serenade her with a harana.Sometimes she would join him in the song, and all the neighbors would stop whatever they were doing and listen to their beautiful harmonies. Except for Auwling, who would find some excuse to leave the house. She told everyone she thought it was too sentimental and ridiculous.

  But there was another reason. She herself was in
love with Dionisio, but she knew he couldn’t see her for the radiance of Maeling.

  Finally, on Maeling’s sixteenth birthday, they were married. In nine months, a baby girl was born. They named her Maria Babilonia. She was a happy baby, and the household revolved around her every move. Auwling, despite herself, was fond of the baby, holding her for hours and even humming to her when she thought no one was listening.

  Then the Japanese came. The people knew, of course, about the war, but it was far away, always happening elsewhere, in places like Manila or Bataan. And the Americans, while beaten at first, were now winning. Soon there would be no threat at all from the Japanese. Everyone knew this except the Japanese, who set up a camp not far from the village.

  With the coming of the Japanese, everything changed. Women were afraid to go to the stream and wash clothes, or to go out by themselves at all, because pretty girls like Maeling and Auwling were often kidnapped and placed in Japanese “comfort camps,” to service the low needs of the Japanese army. Such girls were considered dead by their families. Many of them died of disease, but even if they managed to escape, they could not become clean again and rejoin their families after suffering the debasing attentions of the Japanese soldiers. No decent man would marry such a girl. The best they could hope for was to endure the torture and hope they were allowed at least to remain in the Philippines rather than be sent to Japan to become a Japayuki, or a prostitute.

  After Maeling and Auwling’s mother first caught sight of the soldiers, she went to the stream and scooped up a bowl of mud, brought it into the house, and smeared it over the faces of her beautiful daughters.

  “When you go out, you must wear this mud at all times, daughters. Learn to walk slowly and bend your shoulders, as an old woman does. The Japanese will think you are old and ugly and will leave you alone. And whatever you do, you must never, never, go away from the house by yourself.”

  When the Japanese soldiers filed by along the jungle trails, the family would lower the mats down the sides of the house and give the baby pieces of guayabana or papaya to suck to keep her quiet. No one wanted to take a chance that some soldier would come and investigate, to see to whom the baby belonged.

  Then at other times, when no soldiers had been near for days, it was almost possible to believe life was normal. This was the most dangerous time, their mother would warn. “You must not let down your guard, even for a moment,” she told the girls.

  But Maeling was like a bright bird that hated its cage. Leaving her baby with Auwling one day, she went to get fresh water from the stream. The day was warm and her face, covered in mud, had begun to itch. She looked carefully among the thick trees of the jungle and, seeing no one, scooped handfuls of water over her face. The water felt so good! It had been such a long time since her face had felt sunlight. Seeing that she was alone, she became bolder and lowered her blouse and splashed her shoulders, under her arms, and her breasts. Then she dipped her head, washing her hair as well. And when she brought her head up from the water, long hair dripping, she looked into the face of a smiling Japanese soldier.

  After Maeling was stolen away, Dionisio, in his grief, wanted to kill all the soldiers and die himself, but his friends restrained him. Then, despite the danger to himself, he joined the American army as a scout. He went out each night in stealth to do what damage he could, all the while searching for his missing wife. He learned to move through the jungle without making a sound and to decapitate soldiers with one swift blow of a machete, quickly, quietly. Before anyone knew he had been there, like a ghost, he was gone.

  Night after night, Dionisio went out with the Americans, leaving the women alone. For them, the time went slowly while they waited for his return, and Grandmother—Lula—told stories to make the hours pass more quickly. As Lula spoke, Auwling would sit and pick pieces of coconut out of their shells or sew while Maria Babilonia sat on Grandmother’s lap.

  “Out in the depths of the jungle, far into the green dark trees where no men have dared to go, live the Aswang,” Lula would begin. Babilonia listened, her chocolate-colored eyes wide.

  “In the heat of the day, the Aswang sleep in boxes hidden underneath the cool ground, but at night they awaken to eat and the food they eat is the blood of human beings.”

  “Lula, must you tell those stories? Look at Babilonia. She is paralyzed with fear,” Auwling said.

  “She should know about the Aswang. So she can avoid them.” Grandmother, however, drew Babilonia closer under her arm as she continued:

  “In a village not too far from here, not so many years ago, lived a man who was large and handsome. He had square white teeth and a pleasing laugh and was a fisherman who, all day long, hauled in heavy nets of fish, so his back was strong and broad.

  “He worked so long and hard that he had no time to take care of a wife and family, but there were times when he needed the companionship of women, and then he would go to the beer house to relax from his labors. One night while he was drinking, a female Aswang, flying over the house, heard his laugh, which was loud and healthy. It pleased something inside her. Dropping down from the sky as quietly as a bat, she crept up to the window and saw him dancing with an ugly woman. She was jealous and desired him for herself.”

  Lula stopped, as if listening. Only the sounds of the jungle could be heard, and after a moment, she continued:

  “Later that night, just after the man had gone home to bed feeling a little light-headed from the beer and tired from dancing with the ugly woman, when he was in that moment between twilight and sleep, he heard a haunting, eerie song come floating through his window. It was beautiful and sad, and spoke of the pleasure of love, and the pain. The man raised himself up on one elbow and listened. In his drowsy state, he could not be sure if someone was really singing or if it was only part of his dream.

  “But he heard it again. The song was coming from across the clearing. He got out of bed and crossed the floor to the open window. There, in the silver light on the edge of the jungle, he saw the Aswang, beautiful beyond belief. She was tall and slender, her hands long and graceful. Her jet-black hair floated in the breeze, alive to the slightest whisper of air. Her gown glowed as if it were spun from cobwebs of moonlight, shimmering with each willowy movement of her body. She sang with such a sweet, clear voice that he was hypnotized. Leaving his house, he walked across the clearing and into the jungle toward the woman, who held her arms out to him, beckoning, as she retreated into the darkness.

  “Farther from the village she led the man until they were lost in a leafy bower. Then she turned to him, and he fell into her arms and embraced her. She stroked his hair tenderly, kissed his ruddy cheek, then sank her teeth into his neck, drinking all of his blood.

  “As the man fell to the ground, the Aswang rose above the tops of the banana leaves and floated back to her village, rosy and happy—full of the man’s good blood.

  “The fisherman’s friends, missing him the next morning, searched all day for him, and when they found his pale, empty body, they took it out to sea on his boat. They tossed it overboard, burying it beneath the waves, to be forever with the children of the fishes who had given themselves to be his living.”

  As Lula told the story, Babilonia was afraid to move. She looked down at the floor and saw something glitter between the cracks. It could have been an eye. She looked again and saw it blink. Most definitely it was an eye, and it was looking right at her. She screamed and pointed at the floor. “Aswang!”

  “Lula, see what you have done! You’ve frightened her!” Auwling crossed the room and picked Babilonia up in her arms.

  “Under the floor!” the child sobbed.

  “There is nothing under the floor, Babilonia,” Lula said, trying to hush the child.

  “I told you, Lula! You and your Aswang! I’ll go and look, Babilonia. Don’t cry. It was just a story.” Auwling gave the girl back to her mother and, taking a lantern, went outside.

  The night was dark, without even the twinkle of stars. Au
wling held the lantern low and looked closely at the ground for snakes. When she found none, she kneeled and peered between the crisscrossed slats underneath the house. The light flickered into the darkness and shone upon a crouched figure. It was a woman wrapped in a dirty cloth tied with a sash. Her hair was matted, her face bloated and bruised.

  “Auwling!” the woman whispered. “It is—me your sister, Maeling! The Japanese have thrown me out to die. Don’t come near me! I am filled with disease. You must not tell Dionisio I am here. I only wanted to see my little Babilonia again before I die.”

  “Maeling, come inside. Lula will help you.” Auwling started to crawl toward her sister.

  “No! Stay back! I will not have my child see me like this, or my husband. Let him remember my beauty. It is better they think I am dead than to be shamed by what I have become. You must not tell them I was here.”

  “Please, Maeling!” Auwling was shocked and agitated that her sister did not want to be helped. “I cannot leave you out here like this—”

  “If you love me, you will do as I ask. Go now, Auwling. Let me rest for a while and I will go. Do not dishonor me. Take care of Babilonia and Dionisio. It is what I want. It is too late for me. I am dead. Your sister is dead. Say it, Auwling. Say, ‘My sister is dead.’”

  Auwling looked at her for a moment, torn between love and duty. Then she stood upright, tears streaming down her cheeks. She spoke to the darkness:

  “My sister is dead. My sister is dead, and her husband will be my husband; her child, my child. I will take care of them. The Japanese took my sister away and she is dead.” And she turned and climbed the stairs back into the house.