Nine Women

  “Vicky, you are terribly drunk. You’re not making sense.”

  “I want your child,” Vicky said. “A child that’s you and me. Now tell me why that’s so stupid.”

  And with a slight movement and a small sigh, she turned face down and fell asleep. The mattress moved softly with her sudden increase in weight.

  Angela went into the living room. She felt strange and detached and very calm. She opened the curtains and stared at the city that stretched beyond the pale reflection of herself. She raised an arm, saluting herself in the imperfect mirror. She was breathing regularly and slowly, all anger and fear were gone. But the moving arm didn’t belong to her, nor did that figure reflected distantly back to her.

  Traffic flickered slowly through the leaf-obscured streets, lights were beginning to show in some of the distant hill houses, it would not be long until daylight.

  She sat at her desk and began a note to Mrs. Papadopoulous, saying that Vicky was not to be disturbed, no matter how long she slept. She herself would call the shop to tell them that Miss Prescott would be late, if indeed she came in at all today, please do not call, any decisions can wait until tomorrow.

  She watched the sky. Despite the brandy, she was not drunk, she wasn’t even tired. Her mind moved lightly, decisively, thoughts clicking like high heels on marble.

  When the first gray morning streaks showed, she would make coffee and scramble a couple of eggs. She would shower and dress, and go to her office earlier than usual. She would finish the paperwork there and then she would make an offer for that uptown carriage house, whose small walled garden would be a lovely safe place for a child to play.

  FLIGHT

  “THERE’S NOTHING YOU CAN do?”

  “We are fairly sure now that the primary site is the liver. That’s somewhat unusual.”

  “But you can’t help her?”

  “I am sorry. There is nothing at all we can do.”

  “I’ll go home now, Michael. It’s time.”

  “Mother, why not wait a bit longer?”

  “Tomorrow, I think. I’ll go tomorrow.”

  “It’s a long flight.”

  “It was just as long when I flew here to visit you, Michael.”

  “You were stronger then, Mother.”

  “There was more time then, too. Or I thought there was. Will you see to the tickets? I’ll go back the way I came, that flight through Dallas.”

  “Mother, please wait until you are stronger.”

  “I will not get stronger. You have talked to the doctors. And I know they are right.”

  “You could stay here. We are all here.”

  “I will take the plane home tomorrow, Michael … Now I am sleepy … Is it raining outside? I hear rain very clearly.” Water: whispering, giggling.

  She, the small child, waited for rain, watched across Mr. Beauchardrais’s pasture as the clouds gathered, black and silver. Heavy clouds with ball and chain lightning dancing between them, silently. The spiky clumps of pasture grass faded to pale yellow, glimmering, reflecting like water to the sky.

  She sat in the porch corner, wedged comfortably against peeling boards which were corded like the veins in her mother’s hands, her father’s arms. Sometimes she even imagined that the house’s blood flowed through those raised twisting networks in the wood.

  Mouse, people called her for her habit of sitting silent and still in corners. And Doodle Bug for the hours she spent under the house, crawling between the low brick foundation pillars, creeping cautiously through broken glass and slate to settle comfortably, flat on her back, at the center of the house, where the damp air smelled of mildew and tomcats and a heavy sweet stickiness that was the breath of the ground itself…

  While her mother’s feet thudded up and down across the boards overhead, she lay on her back and watched the spiders weaving thick gray webs around the water pipes. Watching for the Black Widow, small with a single red dot on its stomach … When it rained, neighborhood dogs and cats sheltered under the house, politely, deliberately ignoring each other. Huddled against the underside of the front steps, a calico cat fed her latest litter while two dogs slept, twitching and yelping in their dreams. …

  She sat cross-legged on the porch where the sun-bleached wood was so hard her small pocketknife could barely scratch a mark. She had to be very careful; if her parents caught her testing the strength of the boards, she would get a paddling for sure. As if the boards were something to be guarded, as if they were worth anything at all…

  She watched the rain. It began with a yellowish kind of darkness in the air, then a shiver while leaves rushed into the neatly swept hard clay yard and spun in rising circles. Just like the cartoons she saw on Saturday afternoons, when her mother had extra money to send her to the movies. (On good days her father walked to work and saved his carfare in a jelly glass on the kitchen counter. For her.) When those cartoon characters ran, they left swirls of motion behind them like the wind and the dead leaves.

  Rain meant her father rode the streetcar and no extra coins went into the kitchen glass.

  She settled back—no movie this week, that was for sure—and waited for the rain.

  On the tin roof, drops tapped, then knocked, then rattled like hailstones. A whispering, a hissing ran along the roof gutters to the cistern at the corner of the house.

  Her mother called loudly, “Willie May, come quick. Come help me.”

  In the backyard her mother was putting chicks and ducklings into the poultry shed. Willie May hated to touch them—the small bony bodies felt skeletal and evil in her hands. She held her breath as she hurriedly put the small blobs safely under shelter. They were so stupid that they would stand in the rain, gawking in curious confusion, and drown.

  Afterwards, back in the porch corner again, wet clothes plastered tight to shoulders, nostrils filled with the scent of her own dripping hair, she watched the air turn smoky gray. She sniffed the sweet moisture-laden dust and occasionally, after a close crash of thunder, she could smell the sharp, nose-tickling odor of ozone.

  Another time her mother called her. That once in September during the hurricane season. “Willie May,” her mother cried, voice shaking with fear and pain, “Willie May, help me.” The child she was carrying was born too soon, a small hairy boy who gasped a couple of times and was perfectly still.

  Willie May ran off into the rain, hiding in the heavy tangle of titi bushes and myrtle trees on the other side of the street. She shivered all over—not with cold, because it was September and very warm, and not with fear of the weather, because though the winds were high they were not nearly hurricane strength. She huddled against the trunk of a big wax myrtle, and rain and leaves and bark pelted down on her. Her arms and hands twitched, like a puppet, her body shook so hard that she could scarcely breathe. Perhaps she’d even stopped breathing for a while, because she found herself lying full length on the ground, one ear and eye pasted shut by soft oozing mud.

  It was still raining hard and the sky was darker, not with the greenish dark of a hurricane, but the gray dark of night. Looking out carefully from her shelter, across the empty ground, she could see that all the lights in her house were on.

  She went home then, because she had no other place to go. The deep gutters on each side of the dirt street were filled to the top (crawfish would like that, she thought), the water was ankle deep on the three loose boards that served as a bridge to her house. She inched her way across, carefully. The boards shivered and quaked, about to wash away. In the morning she would have to go hunting for them and put them back in their place. She’d most probably find them near the Duquesnay house where the ground rose just a bit. An Indian mound, people said, and children frightened each other with stories of walking ghosts.

  Out of the darkness her father said, “Willie May.”

  She hadn’t known he was there. His voice came from the dark corner of the porch by the living room window. She stared, dazzled by the bright square of light, saw nothing. Mosquitoes, a
ttracted to the moisture of her eyes, swarmed on her, and she blinked rapidly.

  “You ran off,” her father said, “when your mama called you. You left her and the baby died.”

  She wanted to say: I didn’t kill him.

  But no sound came out.

  “Your mama knew you were afraid when you saw the baby, but she thought you’d know enough to run to Rosie’s house.”

  No, she hadn’t thought of that. Never once thought of running the three blocks to her Aunt Rosie’s house and telling her. She’d thought of nothing but digging under the weeds and the bushes, hiding. Like a mouse gone back to earth.

  I’m sorry, she wanted to say.

  But again no words.

  The water-washed boards suddenly shifted sideways and she fell into the muddy night-black rushing water, coming up coughing and choking, crying with fear, scrambling up the bank of the ditch to the firm hard-swept mud of the front yard.

  Her father did not move. She would not have known he was there, except in the quiet night she could hear his breathing.

  “Mother, please stay. You’re comfortable here and the doctors are so good.”

  “I do not need doctors now.”

  “Mother, listen. We only want to take care of you. Don’t you understand. We love you.”

  Oh, I understand. The trap. The trap that caught my father and my mother and even me. But that was years ago, not now. No more love.

  She would run away again. Only, when she went to earth this time, it would be for good. And she would choose her own spot.

  “The baby didn’t die because of you,” her mother said.

  But Willie May knew better. She knew.

  “He died because he was born too soon. If I hadn’t strained and fought with that window because the rain was pouring in, and if the window hadn’t been stuck … He wasn’t your fault. But you shouldn’t have run away.”

  She hung her head and the old guilt and disgust settled in her stomach while her chest ached so much that she thought she too would die.

  “Your duty,” her mother said, “you don’t ever run away from your duty to your family. Not ever. Not until you die.”

  Willie May thought wearily, and with horror: You aren’t ever free. Something always holds you, stops you, brings you back.

  “Good evening, Mrs. Denham. Will you have your sleeping pill now?” The night nurse: round black face under a round white cap.

  “You still wear your cap, Nurse. None of the others do.”

  “The hospital doesn’t require it any more, Mrs. Denham.” She had a habit of repeating the patient’s name over and over again. Perhaps she had been taught to do that. “But I worked hard for this bit of organdy and I intend to keep on wearing it.”

  “I know what it is to work hard for something.”

  “Yes,” the nurse said.

  Then there were the usual little night sounds: rubber-shod feet thudding ever so softly, and the soft silky whispering of nylon-clad thighs moving up and down the halls.

  I did not come for this, she thought dully, I came to see my son, my only son who lives a continent away in a house with green lawns and dogwood blooming outside the windows, who has two sons, his images. I came to visit and I broke down on the road like an old car.

  She could smell the sickly sweet stench of her own skin. Her whole body had an aura of decay.

  The smell reminds me of something. Something years ago. I was young, but my skin still carried this smell.

  I have only to live until the morning. It is time.

  Time had so many different patterns. After her father died, when they were very poor with only his small pension to support them, Willie May went off to work at the Convent of the Holy Angels. Thirteen, tall and strong, and afraid. For three years she lived in a maze of echoing halls that smelled of floor wax and furniture polish and a laundry that smelled of steam and bleach and starch for the stiff white coifs and wimples the nuns wore. Three years of small hard beds in tiny rooms. Of weariness and sick exhaustion. Of prayers and echoing Gregorian chant. And a great emptiness. Occasionally in the garden as she swept the covered walkways, she could hear children shouting as they walked to school. She envied them and their living fathers whose hard-earned money sent them laughing along the sidewalks.

  Eventually her mother remarried, a police sergeant named Joseph Reilly, a widower nearly sixty. “Hello, Willie May,” he said, when she came back from the convent. “I married your mother.” “Okay,” she said. He smiled then, and it was settled.

  He liked to cook, and despite his name he cooked Italian style. Her mother was beginning to grow fat on spaghetti and sausage and peppers, all glistening with olive oil.

  He was a quiet man who spent every evening at home listening to the radio, sitting in his special chair (one he had brought with him to her mother’s house) with his feet propped on a stool. He was a kind man and treated her like his own child. Each birthday he bought her a pair of white gloves to wear to church, and every Christmas he gave her a box of Evening in Paris cosmetics, blue bottles held in shining white satin.

  There was no talk of her returning to school, the time for that had passed. On her sixteenth birthday she went to work at Woolworth’s, at the big store on Decatur Street. She sold potted plants and stood all day behind the counter near the front window, and when she wasn’t busy she watched the street outside. The cars and the big delivery vans and the green streetcars rocking unsteadily past on their small clacking iron wheels. Women in print dresses and hats, breathless and harried from the excitement of shopping. Office messengers with brown envelopes and packages and long cardboard tubes. Girls in navy blue school uniforms, arm in arm, and boys gathered at the corner by the traffic light. Bookies and numbers runners whose territory this was; she grew to recognize them and smile, and they lifted their hats to her in passing.

  As she watched she felt her quietness and her loneliness slipping away. She felt herself become a part of things, no longer a child looking in, but an adult and part of the busyness and bustle that was life. Her hands, broadened and thickened by the convent work, their nails clipped very short and square across, grew soft and slender, and she filed her nails into careful ovals. She buffed them too, until they had a high shine; she might have worn nail polish of a color to match her lipstick (they sold those sets at the cosmetic counter at the back of the store), but the management did not allow that.

  She had money of her own now, and the delicious expectation of each week’s pay. (Dutifully she gave half to her mother, the rest was hers.) Sometimes she would stand for long minutes, half-smiling, half-dozing, smoothing the bills between her manicured fingers, pressing the coins against her palms until they left their imprint on her skin.

  Every evening on the streetcar home, she stared through the dirty finger-smeared window, lulled by the steady rocking, and dreamed half-visions of the future. She had never done that before. She had met only one day at a time, fearful. Now she saw the future, a series of busy days. Beyond grimy windows the littered crowded streets were mysteriously inviting. She lived now in a state of great excitement, with a fluttering in her stomach, a feeling of endless energy, a sense that flowers were beautiful and rain was lovely, that colors were brighter than they had ever been before, that something wonderful was about to happen. She had no experience of it, but she thought this must mean that she was happy.

  One day John Denham walked past Woolworth’s big front window. They stared and blinked and then laughed at the sight of each other grown up. They had been children together; he’d lived two blocks away. In those half-remembered days before her father’s death, they had played and adventured together. “When you get off work,” he said, “I’ll be waiting for you.” He rode home with her on the streetcar, but he wouldn’t come near her house. “Your mama wouldn’t like me.”

  “Why not?”

  “She won’t like any boy hanging around you. I’ll see you after work tomorrow.”

  He did, every evening. They ta
lked the whole way home, nervously, rapidly summarizing the years. He told her that years ago his family had moved across town to share a house with his aunt. “Way out,” he said. “Nothing but swamps behind us. We used to go crawfishing a lot.” Once, he told her, he’d gone back to their old neighborhood and people said she’d gone off to the convent.

  “I thought you were going to be a nun,” he said.

  “Not me.” She held up her soft manicured hands, admiring them against the scratched varnish of the car seats. “Mama went to work but she couldn’t make enough to keep me and the house both, and then Father Lauderman heard that the convent needed somebody, and that somebody turned out to be me.”

  “They teach you anything?”

  “Sure. Cooking—would you believe they’ve got thirty-seven nuns there. And embroidery and crochet. And a lot of prayers.”

  “Okay,” he said, “say me a prayer.”

  “I get plenty enough prayers in church on Sunday,” she said. “Anyway, the next stop is mine.”

  He got off with her and they stood talking until a car came going the other way. He swung on, she walked home.

  And so she saw him six days a week. She learned that he still lived at home with his parents and his orphaned cousins and his grandmother. That he’d finished Jesuit High School and right away was lucky enough to get a job with the post office, delivering mail. “I like it,” he said. “I couldn’t ever stand being inside at a desk all day long.”

  “I like my job too,” she said.

  “What do you do on Sundays?”

  “Go to mass. Do my laundry and my ironing and be sure my clothes are ready for the week. And I help my mother with her garden, and in the evenings there’s always the radio programs.”

  “You don’t work much in the garden, not with hands like that.”

  “I didn’t know you noticed my hands.”

  “Sure I notice. I notice everything about you.”

  She felt pleased and shy.

  “But your Sundays don’t sound like any fun to me.”