A Book of Common Prayer

by Joan Didion

  “Just so thoughtful of you to drop by, Warren.” Lucy Fayard’s voice carried clear and thin as glass. “Morgan and I long to have you for a whole evening one time soon. You and your friend. You’re most definitely included, Miss Bailey.”

  The girl from Tupelo smiled wanly and tied on a scarf as if instructed to make her goodbyes.

  “Here’s-your-hat-what’s-your-hurry.” Warren Bogart held out his glass to be filled. “Take that bandana off, Chrissie, don’t mind your hostess. Mrs. Fayard’s been learning West Texas manners.”

  “Just shush about that,” Lucy Fayard said.

  “Just don’t start about that,” Adele Fayard said.

  “Lucy doesn’t associate with West Texas trash,” Morgan Fayard said. “I don’t allow Adele to filthy this house with him. Grace doesn’t know what we’re talking about and it’s rude to continue, in fact I forbid it.”

  As a matter of fact I knew precisely what they were talking about, because the last evening I had spent with the Fayards had been devoted exclusively to a heated discussion of this same “West Texas trash.” It had appeared then that Adele Fayard was seeing a man from Midland of whom her brother did not approve. It appeared now that Lucy Fayard was seeing him as well, and that Morgan did not yet know it. Very soon now either Lucy or Adele would allude to one of Morgan’s own indiscretions. All evenings with the Fayards were essentially Caribbean, volatile with conflicting pieties and intimations of sexual perfidy, and in that context were neither very difficult to understand nor, in the end, very engaging.

  “That West Texas trash doesn’t enter this house,” Morgan Fayard said, ignoring his own injunction.

  “My mistake then,” Warren Bogart said. “I thought I met him here.”

  “I should say, your mistake,” Lucy Fayard said.

  “You are certainly set on making it difficult, Warren.” Adele Fayard smiled. “Just as difficult as can be?”

  “Set on making what difficult, Adele.”

  “You know perfectly well what’s difficult, Warren.”

  “Difficult for you and your discourteous sister-in-law to continue to extend me your famous hospitality during my dying days? That about it, Adele? Or is it my mistake again.”

  “What dying days you talking about,” Morgan Fayard said. “Nobody dying here.”

  “You’re all dying. You’re dying, your wife and sister are dying, your little children are dying, Chrissie here is dying, even Miss Tabor there is dying.”

  Warren Bogart watched me as he lit a cigar. I had not been introduced to him as Grace Tabor.

  “But not one of you is dying as fast as I’m dying.” Warren Bogart smiled. “Which I believe allows me certain privileges.”

  “Frankly he didn’t behave any better when he wasn’t dying,” Adele Fayard said.

  “Frankly it’s not ennobling him one bit,” Lucy Fayard said.

  The girl from Tupelo laughed nervously.

  “ ‘Sunset and evening star and one clear call for me!’ ” Morgan Fayard cried suddenly. “ ‘And let there be no mourning at the bar when I put out to sea.’ Learned that at Charlottesville.”

  “Not any too well,” Warren Bogart said.

  “No mourning at the bar, Warren. Lesson there for all of us.”

  “It’s ‘moaning of’ the bar, Morgan. Not ‘mourning at’ the bar. It’s not a wake in one of those gin mills you frequent.”

  “I don’t guess George Gordon Lord Byron is going to object.”

  “Wrong again, Morgan. You don’t guess Alfred Lord Tennyson is going to object. You recite it, Chrissie. Stand up and recite. Recite that and ‘Thanatopsis’ both.”

  The girl looked at him pleadingly.

  “Stand up,” Warren Bogart said.

  “I must say,” Lucy Fayard said.

  “Shut up, Lucy. I said stand up, Chrissie.”

  The girl from Tupelo stood up and gazed miserably at the floor.

  “Speak up now, or I’ll make you do ‘Evangeline’ too.”

  “ ‘Sunset and evening star—And one clear call for me—And may there be no—’ ”

  The girl’s voice was low and wretched.

  Warren Bogart picked up his drink and walked over to me.

  “It is Miss Tabor, isn’t it?”

  “ ‘Twilight and evening bell—And after that the dark—’ ”

  The girl was speaking with her eyes shut. All three Fayards sat as if frozen.

  “It was,” I said finally.

  “I believe you did research of some sort with my old friend Mr. McKay. In Peru.”

  “In Brazil.” At the end of each line the girl would open her eyes and look at Warren Bogart’s back as if he alone could save her. “If you’re talking about Claude McKay it was Brazil.”

  “Somewhere down there, you may be right.”

  “I am right. I was there. What exactly are you doing to that child.”

  “Chrissie? Chrissie’s brilliant, you should talk to her, she’s very interested in anthropology, took some courses in it at Newcomb. Does some homework before she speaks. Mr. McKay would have been devoted to her. He had a place in Maryland, you probably know it, I used to drink with him there before he died.” He glanced across the room at the girl, who had fallen silent. “Straighten those shoulders, Chrissie, don’t slouch. ‘Thanatopsis’ now.”

  “ ‘To him who in the love of nature holds—Communion with her visible forms—’ ”

  The girl’s voice was so low as to be inaudible.

  “Would have been devoted to her,” Warren Bogart repeated. “May he rest in peace. An American aristocrat, Claude McKay. One of the last. Gentleman. Well-born, well-bred.”

  The evening was hot. I was tired. When I am tired I remember what I was taught in Colorado. When I remember what I was taught in Colorado certain words set my teeth on edge. “Aristocrat” is one of those words. “Gentleman” is another. They remind me of that strain I dislike in Gerardo. As a child Gerardo once described the father of a classmate as “in trade” and I slapped his face.

  “Last of a breed,” Warren Bogart said, watching my face. “Used to speak about you. You should meet my good friend Miss Tabor, he’d say.”

  The last time I could recall seeing Claude McKay I had accused him of publishing my work under his name. I wondered when Warren Bogart would get around to Charlotte.

  “I never thought I’d run into you here at Lucy’s,” he said.

  I have never had patience with games.

  “I expect you did,” I said.

  The girl from Tupelo had finished reciting. The room was silent. Warren Bogart was fingering his cigar and watching me warily.

  “Warren,” the girl said. “I finished. I’m through.”

  “Do ‘Snowbound,’ ” Warren Bogart said. “There’s nobody here wouldn’t be improved by hearing ‘Snowbound.’ ”

  “I just won’t allow this,” Lucy Fayard said.

  “I’d advise you to save that tone of voice for West Texas,” Warren Bogart said.

  “What’s this he’s saying about West Texas,” Morgan Fayard said.

  “Just nonsense, Bro.” Adele Fayard stood up. “He’s talking nonsense.”

  “I’m asking certain people in this room a question, Adele.” Morgan Fayard pushed his sister back into her chair with the heel of his hand. “And I believe I’m owed the courtesy of a reply.”

  “What’s the question, Bro?”

  “Goddamn West Texas trash.”

  The girl from Tupelo began to cry.

  Dinner was announced.

  No one moved.

  “This is a fucking circus. A freak show.” Warren Bogart turned to me. “Doesn’t this put you in mind of some third-rate traveling circus? Some Sells-Floto circus passing through that country you people run so well? Doesn’t it?”

  “No,” I said. “It puts me in mind of the Mountain Brook Country Club in Birmingham, Alabama.”

  Warren Bogart looked at me and then away. “You’re in over your head,” he said f
inally, and that was all he said.

  Trout was served in the dining room. Lemon mousse was served in the dining room. Coffee and praline cookies and pear brandy were served in the dining room. The dining room was hot and we could not seem to leave it. Lucy and Adele Fayard described their most recent Junior League project in compulsive detail. Lucy and Adele Fayard described dinner as we ate it. Lucy and Adele Fayard described a pet cobra they had seen drink Wild Turkey-and-water at a party the night before.

  “I told Morgan,” Lucy Fayard said, “ ‘Look there, Morgan, I believe that cobra is taking some drinks.’ ”

  “I said to Morgan,” Adele Fayard said, “ ‘Mark my words, Morgan, that cobra’s going to have itself a season in New Orleans.’ ”

  Morgan Fayard sulked. Warren Bogart remained in the living room with the girl from Tupelo. We could hear them at the piano. Warren Bogart seemed to be making the girl play, over and over again, the song that was always played in New Orleans at Mardi Gras. She played it badly.

  “ ‘May the fish get legs and the cows lay—’ That’s an A-flat, Chrissie, you missed the flat. Start over.”

  “Dare he sing that song,” Morgan Fayard said.

  Lucy Fayard raised her voice. “You’re forgetting your duties, Morgan. Grace’s glass is empty? You ever get ground artichokes down there, Grace? To put around game?”

  “Not forgetting my duties,” Morgan Fayard muttered. “Fine one to talk.”

  “ ‘May the fish get legs and the cows lay eggs—If ever I cease to love—May all dogs wag their—’ No. No, Chrissie. No.”

  “The irony,” Morgan Fayard said. “You talking about duties.”

  “We should ship some down to you,” Lucy Fayard said. “Ground artichokes. To put around game. Morgan. Grace’s glass.”

  “Actually,” I said, “I have to leave.”

  “See now what you’ve done, Morgan. Making us all suffer at this stuffy table instead of taking our coffee in the living room like civilized beings, no wonder Grace wants to leave.”

  “Not going out there to be insulted,” Morgan Fayard said.

  “ ‘May the fish get legs and the cows lay eggs—If ever I cease to love—May all dogs wag their tails in front—’ ”

  “Got no right to sing that song,” Morgan Fayard said.

  “He has too a right,” Lucy Fayard said. “He’s from here.”

  “Not from here at all. He’s from—” Morgan Fayard spit the words out. “Plaquemines Parish. That’s where he’s from. Where he left a—”

  “I don’t guess Mardi Gras is your own personal property,” Lucy Fayard said. “Just because your mother was Queen of Comus. Which Adele, incidentally, was not.”

  “—Where he no doubt left a promising future as assistant manager of a gasoline station, that’s the kind of trash you—”

  I stood up.

  Something about the presence of Warren Bogart was causing the Fayards to outdo even themselves.

  “You back on West Texas?” Lucy Fayard said. “Or you still on Warren.”

  “It’s a tacky song anyway,” Adele Fayard said. “Mardi Gras comes, I go out of town with the Jews. Do sit down, Grace.”

  “I won’t tolerate this.” Morgan Fayard slammed his fist on the table. “I will not tolerate having my little children exposed to this trash.”

  “Unless I’m very much mistaken your little children are at school in Virginia,” Adele Fayard said. “Which makes your tolerance the slightest bit academic?”

  “I been hearing certain things about you in the Quarter,” I could hear Morgan Fayard saying as I left the dining room. “Sister.”

  “I understand you’ve been leaving your own visiting cards at a certain address in the Quarter,” I could hear Adele Fayard saying as I walked through the living room. “Bro.”

  “ ‘May the fish get legs and the cows lay eggs—If ever I cease to love—May the moon be turned to green cream cheese—If ever I cease to love—May the—’ ”

  Warren Bogart looked up from the piano.

  “Pretty little song, isn’t it.”

  I said nothing.

  “Tell Charlotte she was wrong,” he said.

  3

  HERE AMONG THE THREE OR FOUR SOLVENT FAMILIES in Boca Grande we have specific traditional treatments for specific traditional complaints. Nausea is controlled locally by a few drops of 1:1000 solution of adrenalin in a little water, taken by mouth with sips of iced champagne. Neurasthenia is controlled locally by a half-grain of phenobarbitone three times a day and temporary removal to a hill station. In the absence of a hill Miami or Caracas will suffice. I have never known a treatment specific to the condition in which Charlotte Douglas arrived in Boca Grande, but after that one meeting with her first husband I began to see a certain interior logic in her inability to remember much about those last months she spent with him.

  One thing she did remember was when and where she left him.

  “I don’t want to leave you ever,” she remembered saying to him in Biloxi.

  “How could I leave you,” she remembered saying to him in Meridian.

  She left him at ten minutes past eleven P.M. on the eighteenth of July in the bar of the Mountain Brook Country Club in Birmingham.

  I’m dizzy and my head hurts, the girl had said.

  I think she should see a doctor, Charlotte had said.

  She doesn’t need a doctor, Warren had said. She’s drunk and she needs a sandwich.

  Sometime in the next several minutes, at the very moment when Warren hit both the waiter and Minor Clark, Charlotte got up from the table and walked in the direction of the ladies’ room and kept walking. She did not risk waiting to call a taxi. She just walked. She had been wearing a sweater in the bar but the night outside was hot and she dropped the sweater in a sand trap and kept walking. Once she was off the golf course she paused at each intersection to assess the size of the houses and the probable cost of their upkeep and then she walked in whichever direction the houses seemed smaller, the lawns less clipped. She had a fixed idea that she would not be safe until she had reached a part of town where people sat on their porches and on the fenders of parked cars and would be bored enough to take her side if Warren came after her. When it began to rain her feet slipped in her sandals and she took off her sandals and walked barefoot. She knew exactly what time it had been when she left the Mountain Brook Country Club because Minor Clark had said the girl did not need a sandwich, she needed a doctor, and Warren had ordered a sandwich and the waiter had said it was ten minutes past eleven and the kitchen was closed. So she had left the Mountain Brook Country Club at ten minutes past eleven and it was almost one before she came to a part of town so rundown she felt safe enough to stand in a lighted place and call a taxi.

  The girl’s name was Julia Erskine.

  The girl was not whining as Warren said but crying because her head hurt. Charlotte believed that Julia Erskine’s head hurt.

  The girl said that her head hurt because she had fallen from a horse that morning while riding with Warren. Charlotte did not believe that Julia Erskine had fallen from a horse that morning while riding with Warren.

  When the taxi came Charlotte went to the Birmingham airport. The first plane out was for New Orleans and Charlotte got on it. She was the only passenger. “You and I can watch the sunrise,” the stewardess said. Charlotte did not feel safe until the plane was airborne and then she ordered a drink and sat with her head against the cold window and did not watch the sunrise but drank the bourbon very fast before the ice could dilute it. She had not eaten since lunch the day before at Minor and Suzanne Clark’s, the lunch at Minor and Suzanne Clark’s to which Julia Erskine and Warren had never come, and as the bourbon hit her stomach she was pleasantly astonished with herself.

  She was pleasantly astonished that she could still do all these things.

  Walk out.

  Call a taxi.

  Use her American Express card, get on a plane, order a drink.

  While she was st
ill being pleasantly astonished her water broke, and soaked the seat with amniotic fluid.

  “You hurt that girl,” Charlotte said to Warren when he brought the peonies to the Ochsner Clinic. Leonard was in the room. Charlotte did not know how Leonard happened to be in the room and she knew that she should not say anything about the girl in front of Leonard but it did not seem to matter any more what she said in front of anyone. “You hit her in the head. Didn’t you.”

  “She’s doped up,” Leonard said. “Stay neutral.”

  “Don’t talk about things you don’t know about,” Warren said to Charlotte. “What are you going to do about the baby?”

  “Just the note I had in mind,” Leonard said.

  “How did you find me,” Charlotte said.

  “Never mind how I found you. I always find you. What about the baby.”

  “The baby is—you hit that girl in the head.”

  “You’re on pills,” Warren said. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Don’t let that stop you,” Leonard said. “Pitch her another life decision.”

  “He doesn’t want you to see the baby,” Warren said. “Does he.”

  “No,” Leonard said. “I don’t. The topic is now closed. Now we’re going to limit our remarks to areas in which Charlotte has no immediate interest. Sex. Politics. Religion. All right?”