A Book of Common Prayer

by Joan Didion

  Some weeks later Charlotte again mentioned the weekend she had taken Marin to see Tivoli before she was too old to like it. She said that because Marin had run a fever all weekend, a reaction to her smallpox vaccination, they had never left the Hôtel Angleterre. She had obtained a doctor who was very understanding and nice. The manager at the Angleterre had been very understanding and nice and had sent Marin a marzipan carousel to make up for not seeing Tivoli. In any case it had rained all weekend.

  One of two things was true: either Charlotte had gone with Marin to the Tivoli Gardens or Charlotte had wanted to go with Marin to the Tivoli Gardens.

  Type of Visa TURISTA. Occupation MADRE.

  10

  THE NEXT TIME I SAW CHARLOTTE DOUGLAS SHE GRABBED up a chicken on the run and snapped the vertebrae in its neck. I had taken her to the annual picnic for the children of the workers in the Millonario groves and the men were killing chickens with machetes but Charlotte’s kill was clean. There was no blood. She killed this chicken as efficiently and reflexively as she had field-stripped the cigarette at the Capilla del Mar.

  “All the children have red shoes,” she said to me and Elena as she handed the dead chicken to the man who had been trying to catch it. She had only smiled vaguely at the man’s attempt to congratulate her. She seemed entirely unaware that for a guest of the dueña to kill a chicken with her hands was at Millonario an event worth remark. Even Elena had forgotten her sulky pique at being in Millonario and was staring at Charlotte, speechless.

  “Red cardboard patent-leather shoes,” Charlotte said. “All of them. Why do the children wear red shoes?”

  “That chicken,” Elena said.

  “I mean you see them all over the tropics. Those red shoes.”

  “How exactly did you kill that chicken?” Elena said.

  “Not the right way at all, actually.” Charlotte’s expression did not change. “Actually they’re better if you bleed them live. Marin wanted a pair of red shoes once. When she was six. She cried, I wouldn’t buy them.”

  Charlotte looked away and lifted the hair off her neck.

  “I did have a baby who had red shoes,” she said after a while. She stood up then and rinsed her hands in a ditch and when she straightened up she dried her hands on her skirt and gazed for a long time at the men still killing chickens with machetes. “You ought to tell them, chickens are better if you bleed them live. There was no reason not to buy Marin those shoes.”

  Nationality NORTEAMERICANA.

  11

  A GOLD CIGARETTE LIGHTER ENGRAVED “D.N.C. ATLANTIC CITY ’64.”

  A letter of introduction from the Wells-Fargo Bank in San Francisco to the Banco de la República, collapsed two regimes back.

  A California drivers’ license, recently expired, and credit cards from American Express, Gulf Oil, the Ochsner Clinic in New Orleans, I. Magnin and Saks Fifth Avenue.

  $26 American and an equivalent amount in local currency.

  An unsealed envelope addressed only to a post-office box in Buffalo, New York. An unfinished letter describing the resemblance of the Capilla del Mar to the Tivoli Gardens.

  Two lipsticks, one broken pencil, a folded envelope containing four sulfathalidine and two salt tablets, a vial containing a scent predominantly gardenia, a fortune-cookie tape printed “A surprise is in store for someone you love,” and a frayed clipping of one day’s horoscope from Prensa Latina.

  This is a list of the items said to be in Charlotte Douglas’s possession (and later returned to the manager of the Hotel del Caribe) at the time of her death in the Estadio Nacional. The square emerald she wore in place of a wedding ring was neither listed nor returned. I took the gold cigarette lighter to Marin in Buffalo but Marin said she had no interest in the past. I do.

  TWO

  1

  THE WIND IS UP TONIGHT.

  Palm fronds clatter.

  Shutters bang against the sills but I cannot close the windows because the house smells of cancer. Gerardo is somewhere over the sea, due home on the midnight Air France. When I think of the sea here tonight I imagine the water abruptly receding, then swelling back in the tidal surge, la marejada, drowning the sea wall, silencing the dogs, softening my burning skin and rinsing my brittle hair and floating the Liberian tanker in the harbor across the submerged boulevards of Progreso primero.

  Sand-strewn caverns cool and deep

  Where the winds are all asleep.

  Wishful thinking.

  La marejada will not come tonight, nor will I die tonight.

  All that will happen tonight is that the generator will fail as usual and I will sit in the dark reciting Matthew Arnold as usual and when Gerardo arrives from the airport I will pretend to be asleep.

  Again as usual.

  Since Charlotte’s death Gerardo and I have had to learn how to make conversation by day and avoid it in the dark, how to pretend together that my indifference to his presence derives from my being asleep, or in pain, or hallucinating. I am not in such pain that I hallucinate but other people prefer to think that I am. When I speak above a whisper Gerardo and Elena and Victor and Antonio avert their eyes. Even Isabel and Bianca avert their eyes. Even the dim Mendana cousin they brought in from Millonario to nurse me averts her eyes, and crosses herself every time I vomit or ask for a rum-and-quinine or suggest that she is repeating herself. This particularly tedious Mendana was trained as a Sister of Mercy, left the order in 1944 but continues to wear her full habit around Millonario and at family deathbeds, and fancies herself the dispatch-rider between the rest of us and heaven. When I interrupt her accounts of local miracles on the third telling she consoles herself by dismissing me as “de afuera,” an outsider. I am de afuera. I have been de afuera all my life. I was de afuera even at the Brown Palace Hotel. It is a little more than a year now since Charlotte Douglas’s death and almost two years since her arrival in Boca Grande.

  Charlotte Douglas’s death.

  Charlotte Douglas’s murder.

  Neither word works.

  Charlotte Douglas’s previous engagement.

  Some of what I know about Marin Bogart’s disappearance I know from Charlotte. Some of it I know from Leonard Douglas. Some of it I know from having once seen Warren Bogart and some of it I know from having once seen Marin but most of what I know, the most reliable part of what I know, derives from my training in human behavior.

  I do not mean my training under Kroeber at California, nor with Lévi-Strauss at São Paulo.

  I mean my training in being de afuera.

  Nothing I know about Marin’s disappearance comes from the “pages” Charlotte apparently wrote during her first weeks in Boca Grande, the pages she was heard typing at night in her room at the Caribe, the pages given to me with her other personal effects by the manager of the Caribe. On those pages she had tried only to rid herself of her dreams, and these dreams seemed to deal only with sexual surrender and infant death, commonplaces of the female obsessional life. We all have the same dreams.

  2

  THE MORNING THE FBI MEN FIRST CAME TO THE HOUSE on California Street Charlotte did not understand why. She had read newspaper accounts of the events they recited, she listened attentively to everything they said, but she could make no connection between the pitiless revolutionist they described and Marin, who at seven had stood on a chair to make her own breakfast and wept helplessly when asked to clean her closet.

  Sweet Marin.

  Who at sixteen had been photographed with her two best friends wearing the pink-and-white candy-striped pinafores of Children’s Hospital volunteers, and had later abandoned her Saturdays at the hospital as “too sad.”

  Soft Marin.

  Who at eighteen had been observed with her four best friends detonating a crude pipe bomb in the lobby of the Transamerica Building at 6:30 A.M., hijacking a P.S.A. L–1011 at San Francisco Airport and landing it at Wendover, Utah, where they burned it in time for the story to interrupt the network news and disappeared.

  Ma
rin.

  Or so the two FBI men tried to tell Charlotte.

  Marin who had eaten coconut ice beneath the Great Banyan at Calcutta.

  Marin who had been flown to Copenhagen to see the lights at Tivoli.

  Marin who was at that moment, even as the two FBI men occupied Leonard’s Barcelona chairs, even as the fat FBI man toyed with one of Leonard’s porcelain roses and even as the thin FBI man gazed over Charlotte’s head at the 10′ by 16′ silk screen of Mao Tse-tung given to Leonard by one of the Alameda Three, skiing at Squaw Valley.

  Or so Charlotte tried to tell the fat FBI man.

  The thin one did not seem to be listening.

  I am talking here about a day in November one year before the day in November when Charlotte Douglas first appeared in Boca Grande.

  One amplification. Some of what Charlotte said about the months which followed Marin’s disappearance she did not even say to me. She said it to Gerardo.

  I would call that the least reliable part of what I know.

  Three or four things I do know about Charlotte.

  As a child of comfortable family in the temperate zone she had been as a matter of course provided with clean sheets, orthodontia, lamb chops, living grandparents, attentive godparents, one brother named Dickie, ballet lessons, and casual timely information about menstruation and the care of flat silver, as well as with a small wooden angel, carved in Austria, to sit on her bed table and listen to her prayers. In these prayers the child Charlotte routinely asked that “it” turn out all right, “it” being unspecified and all-inclusive, and she had been an adult for some years before the possibility occurred to her that “it” might not. She had put this doubt from her mind. As a child of the western United States she had been provided as well with faith in the value of certain frontiers on which her family had lived, in the virtues of cleared and irrigated land, of high-yield crops, of thrift, industry and the judicial system, of progress and education, and in the generally upward spiral of history. She was a norteamericana.

  She was immaculate of history, innocent of politics. There were startling vacuums in her store of common knowledge. During the two years she spent at Berkeley before she ran away to New York with an untenured instructor named Warren Bogart, she had read mainly the Brontës and Vogue, bought a loom, gone home to Hollister on weekends and slept a great deal during the week. In those two years she had entered the main library once, during a traveling exhibition of the glass flowers from Harvard. She recalled having liked the glass flowers. From books Warren Bogart gave her to read when she was twenty Charlotte learned for the first time about the Spanish Civil War, memorized the ideological distinctions among the various PSUC brigades and POUM militia, but until she was twenty-two and Warren Bogart divined and corrected her misapprehension she believed that World War II had begun at Pearl Harbor. From Leonard Douglas she had absorbed a passing fluency in Third World power, had learned what the initials meant in Algeria and Indochina and the Caribbean, but on a blank map of the world she could not actually place the countries where the initials were in conflict. She considered the conflict dubious in any case. She understood that something was always going on in the world but believed that it would turn out all right. She believed the world to be peopled with others like herself. She associated the word “revolution” with the Boston Tea Party, one of the few events in the history of the United States prior to the westward expansion to have come to her attention. She also associated it with events in France and Russia that had probably turned out all right, otherwise why had they happened.

  A not atypical norteamericana.

  Of her time and place.

  It occurs to me tonight that give or take twenty years and a thousand miles Charlotte Douglas’s time and place and my time and place were not too different.

  Some things about Charlotte I never understood. She was a woman who grew faint when she noticed the blue arterial veins in her wrists, could not swim in clouded water, and once suffered an attack of acute terror while wading in water where an artesian well churned up the sand. Yet during the time she was in Boca Grande I saw her perform a number of tasks with the same instinctive lack of squeamishness I had seen that day at Millonario. I once saw her skin an iguana for stew. I once saw her make the necessary incision in the trachea of an OAS field worker who was choking on a piece of steak at the Jockey Club. A doctor had been called but the OAS man was turning blue. Charlotte did it with a boning knife plunged first in a vat of boiling rice. A few nights later the OAS man caused a scene because Charlotte refused to fellate him on the Caribe terrace, but that, although suggestive of the ambiguous signals Charlotte tended to transmit, is neither here nor there. Similarly, during the cholera outbreak that year Charlotte volunteered to give inoculations, and she did, for thirty-four hours without sleeping, until the remaining Lederle vaccine was appropriated by one of Victor’s colonels. When the colonel suggested that as a norteamericana she might be in a position to buy back some of the vaccine Charlotte only smiled, took off the white smock she had borrowed from the clinic, and dropped it at the colonel’s feet. For the rest of that day Charlotte sat on the edge of the Caribe pool with her feet in the water and stared at the birds circling in the white sky. She did not wear dark glasses and by five o’clock the pale skin around her eyes was burned and puffy. For a few days Charlotte spoke to Gerardo about leaving Boca Grande, but within a week she had revised the incident to coincide with her own view of human behavior and assured me that the vaccine had been taken only so that the army could lend its resources to the inoculation program. I used to think that the only event in Charlotte Douglas’s life to resist her revisions and erasures was Marin’s disappearance.

  “Interesting portrait there,” the thin FBI man said, his eyes still on the 10′ by 16′ silk screen given to Leonard by one of the Alameda Three.

  “Warhol,” Charlotte said.

  “I would have guessed Mao.”

  “Mao. Of course.” Charlotte had no idea how one of the Alameda Three had happened to come by a Warhol silk screen. Or maybe it had not been one of the Alameda Three at all, maybe it had been one of the Tacoma Eleven or some Indian or Panther or heir to a motion-picture studio, Charlotte could never keep Leonard’s clients straight. They came in packs and they ate and they asked for odd drinks and they went through her medicine cabinet and they borrowed and did not return her sweaters and they never addressed her directly and she could never remember their names. She wished that she could. She also wished that Marin would walk through the door of the house on California Street with a tow ticket tied to her windbreaker.

  “You see you don’t know Marin,” she added finally. “I know her.”

  The fat FBI man coughed. The other examined a matchbook he had picked up from a table.

  “I mean I’m her mother.”

  “Of course you are,” the fat FBI man said.

  “I don’t quite follow what she’s saying about this Chinese couple,” one of the new FBI men said. It was almost time for lunch and Charlotte had not yet eaten breakfast and the house on California Street seemed to be filling with men who spoke to each other as if Charlotte were not there. “What Chinese couple.”

  “The Chinese couple who come to the house,” Charlotte repeated. “And do the Peking duck.”

  “I don’t quite follow what she’s talking about.”

  “She’s talking about caterers, Eddie, it’s not a point.”

  “Maybe if she could run through it again. Marin arrives from Berkeley. Start there. Day before yesterday. Approximately twenty hours prior to the bombing. Marin arrives from Berkeley to—”

  “To borrow a windbreaker.” Charlotte spoke by rote. “To go skiing.”

  “To borrow a windbreaker. But she doesn’t leave right away. She goes up to her room and she’s up there alone maybe three, four hours, ballpark figure, you aren’t sure which. Up in her room she—”

  “You wanted her to tell it, Eddie, let her tell it.”

  Charlot
te raised her voice. “She went through some things in her drawers.”

  “What things?”

  “I don’t know what things. She’s eighteen years old, I don’t go through her drawers.”

  “Mrs. Douglas mentioned a gold bracelet, Eddie, don’t forget the gold bracelet.”

  “You mentioned a gold bracelet, Mrs. Douglas.”

  “I said she found a gold bracelet she thought she’d lost.”

  “In a drawer.”

  “In a drawer, behind a drawer.” There was something about the gold bracelet Charlotte wanted not to think about. Marin had dropped the bracelet on the kitchen table and told Charlotte to keep it. Marin had called the bracelet “dead metal.” Charlotte wished suddenly that she had not mentioned the bracelet and she also wished suddenly that Leonard were not in Nicosia. Or Damascus. Or wherever he was. He had written out the cities and the hotels and the telephone numbers on a legal pad upstairs but Charlotte had not looked at it since he left. Her left temple was beginning to hurt and she resented the FBI men for remembering the gold bracelet.

  “Now we get to the part where I call the Chinese couple and ask them to do the Peking duck.” She could hear the edge in her voice but could not control it. “All right?”

  “We’re back to the Chinese couple, Eddie.”

  “Caterers,” the man the others called Eddie said.