Claire watched them.
Mamie’s mind began to wander as she protected herself, shielding herself from her own sight. The words to an old chant, a body-slapping dance, came to her and she repeated the words over and over as other words formed and clotted behind her burning eyes. Claire has lost her shoes, who will pay the bill downstairs? “A‘e pahu i ka moku, ua ho‘ohiolo ka ‘aha: push out to the ship, whose sails have been let down; behind stand the Sacred Images that fill me with terror, I yearn to flee to the ship, the tall-masted ship of the white man …” This is my fault, she thought, this is my penance for the time I rode my bike too slowly past the boys in the workers’ camp, and walked too slowly past the construction workers on Fifty-fifth Street, and because I wasn’t smart enough to understand about the hotel room in Chicago. I thought I’d be allowed to sleep alone, peacefully, in the yellow silk room. It is because I was not able to stop Sherry Alden from presenting me with her first menstrual blood, and it is because I kissed Cecil Furtado in the vegetable garden, rubbing against the rough, fragrant tomato leaves, driving him to such desire that he would shove my chafed and surprised face (yes, surprised, I promise) into his jeans, Cecil smelling like cheese and motor oil, “e ku i ka hoe ‘uli: I stop the boat with the steering paddle, and press it against the side of the boat, I make fast the rope to the coral, and circle my rope around and round. Yes, you’re someone now. Yes, you’re someone now.” Because of dear, beloved Hiroshi, whose cracked, sweetly soiled fingers rested on my pale, plump vagina for a few bewildering moments. It is for my McCully, most of all, my McCully, and because, really, as Hiroshi understood, I am a woman and I deserve no better. I forgive you, Hiroshi, and I forgive you, McCully. Yes, you’re someone now.
It was an hour before the drugs began to work on the man, but eventually, like Brooke and Claire, he, too, began to show signs of stupefaction. He slumped on top of Mamie, his chest on her crushed face, his legs still grasping her in their boney embrace.
She opened her eyes. It was difficult for her to breathe. The smell of the damp shag carpet, the smell of dirt and piss, and the acrid, oily smell of the man on top of her made her gag.
She waited a long time to make sure that he was not just asleep. Her vagina burned sharply and she shook with fear and rage. She could see through the one small window that the sun had risen. To her surprise, she heard a bird outside.
She slowly slid herself out from under him, realizing as she did so that she need not fear his awakening. His head fell heavily onto the floor as she pulled away from him. She sat up. She could see the thick legs of the yellow tiki emerging from her vagina. She pulled it out slowly. She was bleeding.
Claire stirred uncomfortably, eyes finally, mercifully, closed. Mamie shook her awake. Claire wanted to speak, but Mamie quickly put her hand over her mouth. Claire tried to push aside Mamie’s trembling hand, but then she saw the blood on Mamie’s dress and the man sprawled on the floor, his mustard yellow trousers around his thin, white ankles and for once, for once, she succumbed to Mamie. Mamie held her finger to her own swollen lips, signifying silence.
Brooke, in deep, drugged sleep, could not be fully wakened, so Mamie took her by one flapping arm and Claire took the other, and they carried her suspended between them to the door and into the hallway and down the stairway.
They had to stop halfway down the stairs for Claire to vomit, noisily, but there was no one in the back corridor or the bar downstairs and no one to stop them from pulling open the heavy brass-studded door and falling out into the clear early light of Tenth Avenue.
The moment they were outside, Mamie let go of Brooke, and Claire had to struggle to keep Brooke from falling to the ground. Mamie sat on the curb and put her head on her knees. She was shaking.
“What happened to Toni?” Brooke asked, squinting and rubbing her eyes like a sleepy child. Mamie lifted her head to look at her. She lay her head back on her knees.
“What are you doing, Mamie? Are you all right?” Claire was barefoot. She felt in her pockets. “I forgot to give you your present and now I can’t find it.”
Mamie, at the curb, looked up at them again. Her jaw ached and the membrane inside her mouth was ripped where she had bitten herself. She could taste her own blood and worst of all, most sickening of all, she imagined that she could taste the semen.
“I’m hungry,” said Brooke, looking around. She did not know where she was.
Mamie stood up slowly and deliberately and calmly smoothed down her ruined dress and pushed back her damp, matted hair. Then she began to walk uptown, not looking back, not wanting to see them, dangerous, dangerous babes in the woods. She would not take care of Claire any longer.
“Mamie! Mamie, wait!” she heard Claire call, but she did not turn back, and she did not wait.
Mamie walked to Mrs. Lee’s house. There was no answer at the front door, but she was patient, knowing now that the house was not as deserted as it appeared to be. Mr. de Beaupré opened the door. He showed no surprise at seeing her, even in her torn dress, and he led her without question into the back garden. He was having breakfast under the magnolia tree. The table was set with a lace cloth. There was a German silver coffee pot and thin toast, its crusts trimmed, in a silver rack wrapped in an ivory damask cloth, and a bowl of peaches lying in their dark green leaves. Mamie noticed different jams and marmalades in small turquoise blue Sèvres pots. The little spoons and knives were of mother-of-pearl and vermeil.
He asked her if she would like something. She said no, thank you. He was not disappointed. He ate slowly and meticulously. There was a boiled brown egg in a gold cup. He whacked it deftly, lightly, and removed its little cracked skull.
He did not notice when she went back inside the house. She crept to the bedroom on the third floor. She had imagined as she walked across the city that the only thing she wanted was to clean herself. Now that she was in the room with its clean beds in their crisp piqué covers, she only wanted to lie down. She did not feel that she could go so far as to get under the covers, her despoiled, filthy body soiling Mrs. Lee’s linen sheets. The body that used to be her body was thankful to rest. She had been foolish to think that she had ever earned it back. She had assumed too much.
Mr. de Beaupré came in with a tray of coffee and milk. He set the tray down on the other bed and poured the coffee and held it out to her. His quivering hand made the cup jump noisily in its saucer, and coffee spilled into the dish.
“She never cared much for her own people. Take young Miss Laura, she had no interest in her whatsoever. I saw the girl try with her mother, the way children do, but it didn’t matter. You know, sometimes it is the fault of the man and the woman. They are so taken up with each other, they don’t have no time for the children, you see what I mean? But this does not apply here. She says it was because she was so crazy for me, but the fact is, she just didn’t like her children.” He laughed and rubbed his knees. He was wearing a navy blue jumpsuit and a captain’s hat with a black patent brim.
Mamie thought of her own mother.
“Why didn’t she like them?” she asked. She was shivering and he took the blanket from the chaise and put it over her. Mamie was grateful for his odd lack of interest in her. He had not asked why she was there, or why she was trembling.
“She was too smart and restless. They couldn’t hold her attention and, to tell you the truth, she didn’t know how to talk to them. Miss Laura would bring a picture home from school for her mother, and Leonora would say, “Thank you, lamby, but shouldn’t the house be bigger than the pigs?’ You know, she just didn’t know how to talk to them nice.”
She handed him the cup and saucer and he poured more coffee and gave it back to her.
“What about her husband?”
“What about him?” Mr. de Beaupré linked his fingers and cracked his knuckles.
“Where is he?”
“He is dead and buried. Two years ago, three years ago this October. He died in this very room. I picked out the clothes he wore in his coffin. His g
ood gray suit, that he used for meetings with his banker; a dark blue, navy blue, not your royal blue, tie. He looked sharp.”
It did not bother Mamie that Mr. Lee had died in the room that she now thought of as her room, perhaps even in the same bed. What she had not imagined was that Mr. Lee had lived in the house with the two of them all those years.
Mamie had only lately begun to congratulate herself on being able to locate that tenuous line of balance between protecting herself and accommodating society. She had begun to form a theory, not about older women in the French novel, that seemed a little academic to her now, but a theory to explain the sexual aggression that seemed to track her all through her life. It was an aggression that manifested itself in many ways, harmless as well as violent. The Chinese driver who politely asked if she was good for sucking; the boys in the camp, innocents still themselves, who turned a shortcut through the camp into a ritualistic hazing; Mr. Felix, who believed in a good diet and moderation in all things, even ejaculation; the men who whispered to her in the street. It is necessary for a woman, Mamie thought, to be very, very careful. Always ready to run.
She had blamed herself for being naïve about Felix Villanueve, but she did not blame herself for Vinnie. She knew that there was nothing more she could have done. I was only looking for Claire, only looking for Claire, she thought over and over. Only looking for Claire.
It is conceivable that a woman might never be able to relax her vigilance, and, neither, she realized, could some men. Who could trust Alysse? Alysse could not break a man’s neck with a flick of her hand, but Alysse had found, both in her defense and in her ambition, other ways in which to use her strength. That her goals were materialistic and greedy, rather than sexual and licentious, did not make her any the less capable of injury. The difference, and it was of great importance, Mamie knew, was that Alysse did not subject her victims to physical harm, and death. It was not an equal struggle.
“He was my best friend,” de Beaupré said.
There does not seem to have been sexual aggression in this house, Mamie thought in confusion, but how am I to really know? She was tired. It is impossible to know, she thought as she felt her eyes closing in exhaustion.
The last thing she heard him say was, “And I think I may say I was his.”
She was there for four days. Mr. de Beaupré took care of her, bringing her sweet sherry, crackers and butter and Stilton cheese, and books. She began to read Jane Eyre on the second day, even though she had read it before. It was a bound library book, full of pale insects’ wings, from a girls’ private school. It was due back the twenty-sixth of April, 1957.
She telephoned Claire on the third day. Alysse answered the telephone. She was helping Claire to pack. Alysse, who went to India every year for a month and returned looking astonishingly refreshed and years younger, had asked Claire to stay in her house in Portugal—that way the tweenies won’t steal me blind, she said. Bones Washburn always believed that Alysse never went to India at all, but boarded a direct flight to Zurich where she went straight to the clinic on the mountain, and Bones was right.
“Claire will be such a help,” Alysse said. “Isn’t it wonderful? And we’ll do some shopping.”
“Shopping?” asked Mamie. “Is there anything left? I thought you and your friends had already bought everything on the planet.”
“Teddy Pugh-Page is doing the apartment while I’m away. Completely country English, with a little room off the front hall for muddy Wellingtons and fishing rods and those straw basket things they put the dead fish in after they’ve caught them, and tweed caps. Maybe the walls in my personal tartan. You won’t even know you’re in New York. I’m sick of New York. And Claire says she’s sick of New York, too. I tell you, no one has manners anymore. The way people behave at table chills the soul. I’ve had black cleaning ladies who had better manners. And, frankly, I’m shattered by the number of people who don’t send flowers, or notes at least, after a party. Shattered. Here, Claire wants to speak to you.”
“Mamie?”
Mamie took a breath.
“Mamie, where are you?”
“I’m at Alder’s grandmother’s house.”
“I was so worried about you. You seemed so weird the other morning.”
“Are you really going away? You’ve decided so quickly.”
“Yes, well, I hope you don’t mind. Alysse just asked me yesterday and it seemed like such a fun thing to do. There’s some duke she wants me to meet. Actually, she wants me to marry him. I’ll water the garden and open the mail while she’s in India.”
“We talked about this one day by the river, do you remember? Heroines with private incomes.”
“I don’t remember. It must have been someone else.”
“No,” Mamie said. “It was you.”
“You sound funny. Are you sick?”
“How’s Brooke?”
“Don’t mention her name! This whole time, she was going out with Sean, too. Just by themselves.”
“She didn’t look it.” Mamie couldn’t help herself.
“Exactly!” Claire was furious. “That’s just the point. I get tied up and slapped and she gets earrings and chocolate.”
“Well, I’m sorry,” Mamie said.
There was a long pause as neither of them spoke.
“There’s something I have to tell you,” Mamie said at last.
“We leave in the morning,” Claire said. “I’ll be back at the end of summer. Alysse has to be here in September for the Antiques Show.”
“You’re going to become another Alysse, if you’re not careful.”
“Oh, Mamie, I wish you were coming with us.”
“Maybe you won’t become Alysse. You believe that everything is permissible. She’s only interested in what advances her. I think I finally figured out what’s wrong with your idea that it doesn’t matter what you do so long as no one is hurt against their will—I even take into account your argument that it’s a matter of choice. It’s just not that personal, Claire.”
“What isn’t?” Mamie could hear Claire yawn.
“All of it. It can’t be. The soul needs more. The soul asks for more. A certain amount of transcendence is necessary. And responsibility. Remember when Mrs. Nagata would scold us for disturbing her silkworms and tell us that the Buddha was in us and the worms, so how could we be so thoughtless? I’m not sure she was right about the godhead, it’s nice to think she was, but you could start there, start small, and work up. Reverence for your own body. And his body. Your regard might grow until you encompassed whole countries, whole nationalities.”
“You think so?” Claire said something to Alysse that sounded to Mamie like “pinch the cat.”
“That’s not what I wanted to tell you, though,” said Mamie. “It’s about the other night. At the birthday.”
“Do you know what happened to my shoes? I can’t find them anywhere and I want to take them.”
“Vinnie has them.”
“Who’s Vinnie?”
Mamie had anticipated some resistance from Claire, but it had never occurred to her that Claire would not remember anything. She did not know what to say for a moment. “Your friend. The man who held me down and came in my mouth.”
“Oh, Mamie. Such a sensitivo.” Claire laughed. “The last thing I remember is taking a toke of something unbelievable through a rubber tube. I don’t even know what it was. You weren’t even there, Mamie!”
“I’m afraid I was. You’re going to get yourself killed, Claire.”
“Brooke had diarrhea for days. I’ll never do that again.”
“Good.” Mamie took a big breath, and then she gave up. “Neither will I.” I’ll tell her another time, she thought, and maybe she really would.
“Well, hundreds of kisses, Mamie.”
Mamie hesitated. “Six or seven kisses, Claire.”
“Oh, I am going to miss you!”
Alder came on the fifth day. He had been calling the Crawfords’ apartment and h
e was very worried, even though he had spoken twice to Alysse and had asked her to give Mamie the message that he had called and the number where Mamie could find him. He had been in Palm Beach, Baby having summoned him to discuss, at last, the terms of their separation. He had been asking to see her for weeks and she had always refused, only to call suddenly, drunkenly, to say that if he could be there in six hours she would listen, alone and without her brothers, to what he had to offer her. He had tried to reach Mamie, but she had already left for the birthday party. He had even sent a telegram to the Crawfords.
“I thought you were dead,” she said. She was in bed in the gray room, wearing a faded blue satin nightgown made for Mrs. Lee’s trousseau by Poiret. Mr. de Beaupré had brought it down to her, with a pair of swansdown slippers, yellow with age.
Alder sat on the edge of the bed. He held her hand. “I wouldn’t die without telling you,” he said.
“Hiroshi did. McCully did.”
“Who?”
She told him about the birthday and what had happened in the room above the Aloha Kai, what the man had done to her, with Claire watching. She told it to him very simply, without trying to explain what she had felt, because she was afraid that he would be repulsed by her violation and unable to love her, and because she was afraid that he would be so infuriated, in the way that men have of appropriating the woman’s outrage and making it about their own assaulted honor, that he would call the police or go after the man himself. She explained, without unnecessarily betraying her sister, that there had been drugs in the room, perhaps heroin, and that Claire and Brooke had been there for quite a while before she’d found them.
When he was so stricken and sad for her, when he did not jump up and threaten to kill the man, when he held her to him and stroked her hair and face, she began to cry.
“I thought I’d feel revulsion for my body and have to undergo some ritualistic cleansing, wash it with Mrs. Kaona’s bitter herbs, before I let you touch me. I thought I’d lost my body again, but it’s come back to me these last few days. Mr. de Beaupré somehow made me understand. It’s still my body. He didn’t take it away from me. No one has ever taken it from me, although I thought they had for such a long time.”
The Whiteness of Bones Page 23