Three Short Novels
Copyright © 1962, 1966, 1984, 1998, 2014 by Gina Berriault
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the Publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any semblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
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ISBN 978-1-61902-360-4
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The Son
The Lights of Earth
Conference of Victims
The Son
My well loved and tender son, know and understand that your house is not here. This house wherein you are born is but a nest, an inn at which you have arrived, your entry into this world: here do you bud and flower. Your true house is another.
AZTEC FRAGMENT
The Midwife to the Newborn
1
On the night of the day she was graduated from a girls’ school with twenty-three other girls in the same kind of virginal white gown, all floating under the trees with their ribboned diplomas in their hands, she demanded that her parents consent to her marriage to the brother of her father’s mistress. The young man was nineteen, extraordinarily handsome and on his way to Hollywood where, with the help of a cousin who was an actress, he would become an actor. He had no money and no job other than as an occasional waiter in a big, cheap restaurant frequented by Italian families, and he could not act, so he could not, her father explained to her, ever hope for much to happen unless his beauty was so great that nothing more would be required, and this, her father said, was doubtful, for wasn’t his head too large and his legs too thick, and wasn’t he a bit pigeon-toed? Her father was an elegant man with a fine profile, and he made a practice, in times of stress, of deriding and condemning the enemy by referring to physical deficiencies. But swayed by his daughter’s threats to accompany the young man anyway, and to bear a child to make matters worse, he consented to the marriage, and his wife consented also, and the wedding of Vivian Carpentier and Paul Cardoni took place in the Episcopal cathedral.
She had wanted as many guests as possible, for the greater the number the greater was the approval of her obsession with the groom, the more public the marriage the more assured was his future as an actor; that was the superstitious and substantive role the guests played. In Paul’s old Ford they drove down the coast, stayed a few nights with the actress, then found a small apartment of their own; he went to work as a waiter in a famous restaurant patronized by the movie crowd and there awaited discovery. When she became pregnant, a month after the wedding, she looked forward to the child as a unifier of the parents. The child was to make the marriage last forever, though she had no doubt that it would anyway. But the pregnancy lasted longer than the marriage. Toward the end of the pregnancy he was troubled by insomnia, brought on, he revealed one night, by his dread of her bearing a child. The advent of a child unnerved him; he had not realized what a shock a child could be to the parents. He felt that his chance for fame was less now, he felt that he was chained to a rock. Since he revealed his feelings only one time, one night, she believed that he felt the way he described only once, as a person has a case of nausea one night and then no more. Not long after that night, however, he failed to return from his job, and nine days after his disappearance a letter came from Chicago, instructing her to return to her parents and to wait to hear from him. He was on his way to New York to try to get on the stage. He would, he wrote, send her an address when he got there, and he wanted her to let him know when the baby was born.
After riding all night on the train, she arrived just as her parents and her brother were sitting down to Sunday breakfast. She had not eaten supper the night before, having been revolted by the thought of food, and was hungry now; but hunger was not the only reason she ate with a gluttonous concentration. She felt that her parents had construed as wholly selfish her desire to marry the young man who had now deserted her, and, in their care again, she mockingly accepted their view of her by obligingly demonstrating the same kind of selfish desperation over the meal. She had been prepared for the world by her mother’s celestial mauve ceilings and pale yellow satin sofas, yet here she was in her true nature: a girl with cheap, draggy pregnancy clothes given her by some neighbor’s sister; her hair dried by peroxide and bleached two colors, white edged with sulphur yellow; her high heels turning under; her fingernails unclean; and too insensitive to lift her head for even a moment to say a gracious word to her family.
She sat in her mother’s room while her mother spent an hour dressing and making up her face, apparently unaccepting of the reflection, patting her cheeks with rouge, twisting down hennaed curls to cover the cheeks. Vivian took cigarettes from her mother’s porcelain box on the dresser and smoked them the way her husband smoked—after a long draw on the cigarette, throwing back her head to let the smoke trickle out. She crossed her knees, hooked her arm over the back of the chair, and swung her foot, while she told her mother about the actresses and actors into whose homes and pools Paul and she had been welcomed. She said that Paul had got a part in a movie that was being filmed in the Arizona desert, and she had told him before he left that she was going to visit her parents because he had been afraid she would be lonesome without him. At that point she broke into tears, sobbing so loudly she felt that she was wrenching the child out of place.
She lay limp and manageable in her mother’s bed, babbling about cockroaches in the sink, grease-eating ants in the tub; blaming insects as the cause of her husband’s departure because insects had been a constant irritant during a time she could not begin to examine, and because to examine the marriage, even if she could, was to see her life as she suspected her mother saw it, as a great prevalence of mistakes. Her mother covered her with a blanket, her and the large hump of her child, and went off to church.
Four days after her return, her father drove her late one night to the hospital, and the child was born in the early morning. She named the boy David, not in honor of any relative or friend but because the name had always appealed to her for its calling up of the youth who had slain the giant and in his manhood had become king, for the eternal youthfulness of it. The child had dark, downy hair and eyes like narrow luminous beads within plump lids, eyes of a deep yet indeterminable color; his feet were wrinkled and tinged with purple as if they were two hundred years old; and everything possessed that perfectness of miniature objects of art.
She was surprised by how her body responded to the child’s cry when she herself was doubtful in response, unsure of how she felt about him—whether she would grieve if he were to be taken from her or whether she would be relieved, or whether she would both grieve and be relieved at once. When the child cried to be fed, a minute ferment started up in her breasts, an activity like that which might go on inside a fruit when the hot sun concentrates on it. The milk seeped through the cloth of the nightgown, and, when she lay on her side to feed him, the trembling draw of his mouth on her nipple tugged the womb upward in a most inward, upward pulling that made the sucking a pleasure for her and almost a reason for having borne the child. At these times she would caress his small, round head and his limbs of no angles, no joints, that had a curve like a doll’s rubb
er legs, trying with her touch to perceive who he was, what manner of person he was to be, touching with a feeling of dread the hair that lay over the soft fontanel where the soul seemed to be contained. And even when, gazing down at his small face, she was disturbed by the inanity of his hunger, by the animal simplicity of his need to be fed and of his satisfaction while he fed, by this simple demand upon her because it forecast unknowable, more complicated demands, even as she felt in her spirit a shrinking away from his demands upon her and her future, her breasts responded to his mouth, her body enjoyed the secret and yet unsecret, the known to all upward pull within, and she was pleased with his dependency on her body.
Once, toward the end of her stay in the maternity ward, as she sat in the chair next to the bed, nursing him, it seemed to her a ludicrous mistake that a man should ever be in the condition of infancy. She wondered if he might be ashamed of her later—of the time of his infancy, and look at other male infants, even his son, and be ashamed for them. The time of his infancy seemed so absurd because there was already present in his person the time when he would be of significance beyond her—the girl who held him at her breasts, her two hands spanning his length. She was so amused by the absurdity of his infancy that she lifted him high to press her laughing face into the almost weightless combination of small dangling body and soft garments.
After one week she packed her few things, nightgowns and bathrobe and slippers. Her father carried her overnight case for her and she left the hospital, holding her baby wrapped in a blanket. She was careful of her step over the elevator threshold because she was wearing very high heels and taking some satisfaction in the fact that the shoes opposed the baby, that they hinted she was not in any girlish elation over the real baby in her arms, that the time of her delusion was over. In the walk along the corridor of the main floor and down the broad steps and out through the parking lot to her father’s car, she fought an urge she knew she would never give in to and yet feared—to stumble in her heels and drop the baby. When her shoe turned a little, out by the car, she clutched the child closer in terror.
2
Almost every day, for the rest of that summer, she guided the canvas baby carriage down the hill to the park and sat on a bench in the sun and the moving shade of the trees, a girl in a pastel cotton dress, her legs and arms bare, her feet in sandals. There were always small children on the grass; and mothers, each with her disarray of kits and bottles; and there was sometimes a solitary man on a bench, a different man each time, who watched her over his newspaper or watched her without concealment. Joggling the carriage with her toe, she imagined herself with the man across the path, imagined a union so amorous that her husband would be wiped from her memory. Sometimes the proprietor of the grocery store gazed at her from under the awning, a small, green-smocked figure across the street, standing watchful. Was there about a girl with her first child, she wondered, the greater desirability of a woman who is innocently pledged? She speculated on her effect as she pushed the carriage home, pausing along under the awning to examine the fruit on the sidewalk stall, catching in the dimness within the store his gazing eye or the quick lift of his head.
The white, frilly bassinet was set up on its stiff legs and rollers in a corner of her room, and, when the child slept, she listened to the radio by her bed or read the novels that her mother bought, and the magazines, and was restless for the use of her body. The use of her body was enough; the rest of it—the belief that somebody else could know her spirit as well or better than she knew it herself—was a delusion. She lay on the bed, listening to popular songs or reading, with the fantasy of her next embrace always in the back of her mind, her body always waiting for the fantasy to claim it. She saw no ending to this time in her parents’ home with her child other than the beginning of a time with another man, and in her mother’s crooning and clucking at the baby she sensed the wish for another man to come and take the daughter away. The wish was in the sweet, ardent, rather weary sounds as her mother bent over the basket, in the feminine ways of her body, ways exaggerated for the daughter to see and to imitate; since the daughter was now again at home and with a child, one must assume that she had not used and was not using her ultimate powers. As for her father, if Vivian were to run off with a man, he would not miss her, she knew. He lectured at medical schools on his specialty, the heart, saw his private patients, and spent almost every evening at his club or with his mistress; his family had become like a group of patients he had treated when he had been specializing in a branch of medicine that no longer interested him but whom he was obliged to look over once in a while. Her brother, Charles, Jr., six years older than she and interning in a hospital across the bay, although he sometimes came home for a night, did not visit with her or show any interest in the child. When he did come into her room, it was usually in the few spare minutes before he left the house, and the contempt in his manner made her stand away from him and answer him grudgingly. She could not bear his loud, drawling voice, his calves bulging importantly against his trousers, and the long legs nervously shifting in professional style from one crepe sole to the other. When he asked her what she intended to do with her life, she told him, turning away from him, that she intended to take a course for charwomen.
She did, however, venture out, after a time. Her father’s mistress, Paul’s sister, was her good friend—a tall, almost harshly beautiful young woman, an advertising artist, who painted in oils and who had black walls in her apartment. Vivian often walked the two miles to Adele’s to drink with her friends—newspaper reporters and commercial artists and actors. She sang for them one night, imitating a torch singer, perching herself on the arm of a chair, crossing her knees, languidly plucking at the drooping petals of a beige rose that Adele put into her hands. She sang again, a few nights later, for one of Adele’s brothers-in-law, who owned a bar where the customers were entertained by singers and raconteurs at the piano. He had come over to Adele’s apartment to hear her. She wore a dark brown silk dress that fit tightly and a long string of amber and jade beads, and her voice was insinuatingly low and warmed by the brandy.
The first night she sang in the bar, her parents came in together, hoping, she knew, that in spite of what they had learned about the lives of aspiring actors and entertainers, their daughter would be famous someday, bypassing the pitfalls. Her hair was cut short like a boy’s, the shining paleness in startling contrast with her large, dark eyes; and her slender, young body affected the sensual indolence of the woman of experience, enticing yet seeming to remain aloof, waiting for the right one. The first few nights she was afraid that the patrons would suspect that she was fooling them. The gestures were not her own—she had learned them from singers in nightclubs and movies; the voice imitated that of an already famous singer, husky and plaintive with a controlled break in it; and the color of her hair was the color that was popular with movie starlets and salesgirls and carhops. As she repeated her act, it came to seem natural because the fixed, absorbed gaze of the audience and their applause led her to believe what they believed, that everything was natural with her, that everything was not a matter of trickery but of her own nature, as if she, herself, had originated all that was imitative and the others were imitating her. And when certain men in the audience became infatuated with her, this was further proof.
She became infatuated, in turn, with a big and amiable radio announcer, a widower in his fifties. He had a small gray mustache and gray curls brushed slickly back with silver brushes. She chose this man to make her body known to her again because he, among the others, seemed most affected by her. When he sat with her at a restaurant table, his fingers trembled touching her wrist and fingers, and his bass voice shook. He was not, she knew, the one who would mean more than her husband had meant, the one to rid her of the desire for others, but he was the one to break the link, her body’s link, with her child. On the unmade bed in his half-empty apartment, he uncovered her breasts that had given up the mouth of the child only a month before and s
till felt the communion with the child; now the mouth of the man destroyed the link and, though it had to be destroyed, under the excitement she was disturbed by its breaking. Where the child had emerged, the doctor had sewn her into a virgin again, and the pain that resulted in the man’s embrace seemed like an attempt of her body to repulse the stranger who was destroying the link with the child. She went up to his apartment often, and they lay in each other’s arms for hours, approaching a tender respect for each other that took faults and failings into consideration; but always, when he rose from the bed and she lay watching him dress, his shirt tentlike around his hips, he became troubling to her and futureless.
No word had come from her husband since the letter written along the route of his escape, and at her parents’ promptings she sued for divorce. The erotic atmosphere of the lounge was not, they implied, to be denied its possibilities. The child, at this time, receded from the center of her life. The Swedish cook and housekeeper, who lived in the servants’ quarters off the kitchen, took the child to her room on the evenings that Vivian sang in the lounge, and her wages were increased for this extra service to the family. Sometimes, when Vivian had stayed out all night and slept all morning, she would go down in her robe, a sense of guilt upon her, and find the baby asleep in the bassinet in the sun filtering through the lace curtains in the woman’s room, or gazing up at the canary in its cage. Although to sing and to be applauded was gratifying, and the nights with her lover exciting, she felt this was not enough to warrant her separation from the child. The separation seemed furtive, no matter how many accomplices she had. And she would make a show of love for the child, taking him up in her arms and carrying him through the house, laying him down on her bed or on a couch and nuzzling his belly and the soles of his feet; and the semblance of love passed over into the real.
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