Forever

by Pete Hamill

  She reaches for his face.

  “Why are you crying?” she says.

  The band leaves first, bound for another gig, all smiles and carrying away pieces of cake wrapped in napkins, refusing money. Cormac tries to help with the dishes, but Elba and Rosa and Marisol and Doris and María Elena and Ramona push him aside. “It’s your birthday, man,” says Elba (bony and a bit worn around the eyes). “You just be nice to Delfina, you hear me?”

  Delfina comes in from the other rooms with glasses and plates and one of the women (Marisol? Doris?) takes them and washes them and stacks them on a drainer (for there is no dishwasher), while someone else (María Elena?) scours pots and pans and another wraps unfinished dishes with Saran Wrap. “You can eat here for a month,” says the woman named Rosa. “Maybe more!”

  In the bathroom off the kitchen, the door closed and the guests all gone, Cormac sees lotions and vials and soap, towels and facecloths, all arranged on shelves as neatly as her books. Over the toilet, there’s a portrait of Trujillo, the old dictator, with his white pancake makeup and killer’s eyes. When Cormac comes out, the women are gone, as if on command, and Delfina is leaning against the opening to the rest of the flat. She has changed into a long high-collared yellow gown. Cotton. A kimono. Her feet in red thong slippers. Nails painted yellow too.

  “Thank you,” he says in a soft voice.

  “You danced.”

  “I did. Thanks for that too. Maybe most of all.”

  She says nothing, then flicks off the kitchen lights. The flat is now dark. She takes his hand, and her palm is damp. She leads him through the dark book-lined rooms to the place where she has pitched her bed. In the darkness, he hears her kick off slippers, and he sits on the edge of the bed and unlaces his shoes.

  “I want to pray first,” she says. “Do you mind?’

  “Of course not.”

  She opens the door to the small room. Slowly. As if revealing something about herself that she fears might frighten him. But he has been here before, at the bottom of an Atlantic slaver, in the vanished streets around the Battery, in the small house of Quaco, in sealed rooms in the Five Points. He has been here with Kongo. He has been here with men and women now dead. For he knows he is in a chapel of the old religion of Africa. Which is like the Old Religion of Ireland, with different names and similar verbs. Here in Tir-na-Nog.

  Before them stands a long table made of a door set upon wooden sawhorses. A dark green cloth covers its top, and set upon the cloth are sixteen burning votive candles. In their flickering, ancient light, Cormac sees other things: glasses of water, unlit cigars in ashtrays, a plate of broken chocolate, crackers, a slice of coconut. He counts nine brass bells of different sizes. On the table there are two fetishes. To the left stands a double-edged ax adorned with silvery beads, for Chango, god of fire and thunder, iron and male power. It is set at an angle facing the goddess Oshun. Cormac knows her too: the goddess of water, of rivers and streams and wells. A cool, liquid deity. Tender, healing, yielding, cleansing, free of jealousy and avarice. She is cradled in a yellow wooden boat and adorned with fans, amber beads, cowrie shells like tiny vulvas. She is flanked by a mound of parrot feathers and a wooden mortar and pestle containing smooth black stones, shaped by the lightning. Above Oshun on the wall hangs a machete with a red handle. Oshun wears spiral earrings.

  “Moyuba,” Delfina says in a supplicant’s voice, a Yoruba word that Cormac knows means “I salute you.” She lifts one of the bells.

  Then she kneels on a straw mat spread before the altar, stretches in her yellow gown, facedown, and rings the bell. Oshun, Cormac thinks. Like Oisin. Or Usheen. Kongo gave me his gods, those words, with his blood; as I gave him mine from the Sacred Grove of Ireland. Delfina rings the bell sixteen times. Then chants:

  Olokun, Olokun

  Baba Baba, Olokun

  Moyuba—Baba Olokun…

  A submission to the God of Gods, the Owner of the Ocean, the Owner of all Destinies, the god above Chango and Oshun. Above Yahweh and Jesus and Allah, and all the other gods. She must be thanking her god for food and drink and music and dance, and perhaps even the gift of love. When she rises, she turns to Cormac and reaches for him with her hand.

  “Don’t step on the mat,” she says.

  “I know.”

  Then she leads him out of the small chapel and lights a votive candle on a small table beside the bed. He sees a bowl, beads, a jar. She tells him to undress and then she touches a switch. From the far end of the flat, he hears music from the CD player. All drums. A sharp bata drum, and then counterpoint from smaller drums, the toques, like altos playing into and against the baritone of the bata. The rhythm is insistent, caressing, suddenly explosive, then returning to a steady texture, and he surrenders to it.

  Delfina opens the buttons of the yellow kimono. There’s a slight, ironical smile on her face. She wears a high collar de mazo on her neck, like the many-layered necklaces of sculpture from Benin. Cormac knows that there’s a bead for each ancestor, and nine strings sewn into a single piece. On each wrist and ankle she wears an ide made of amber beads, the color of Oshun. Her orisha. Her Santeria guardian angel. The drums are joined by the sounds of shaking gourds filled with gravel or nuts. She climbs on the bed and leans toward Cormac and kisses him.

  “I don’t want you to cry,” she says.

  They lie together for a long time, the flesh of her body cooling against his in the dark. They hear a siren somewhere in the night. And from the street, a muted shout, a bottle breaking. Candles still flicker from the chapel of Oshun. She reaches behind her neck and unclips the collar de mazo. He kisses her naked neck.

  “I have a couple of things to tell you,” she says.

  “Tell me.”

  “First? I’m not twenty-eight. I’m thirty-two.” Her voice is remote. “I left out four years when I told you the story of my life. The four years I lived in Puerto Rico, in a town called Loiza Aldea. A black town up in the mountains, with jungle all around it, and Oshun living in the rivers. In the old days, cimarrónes hid there, escaped slaves, the wild men. I went there with a priest. One of our priests. He gave me the tattoos, not some man in the Bronx. I didn’t know one day from another, one month from the next.” A pause. “But I saw the gods there.”

  “Why did you come back?”

  “He told me to come back. He said he had read my shells, and they said I should go back. He didn’t say why. Maybe he didn’t know. But when I saw you that first time, I knew why. I could smell the blood of a babalawo from you.”

  The smell of Kongo.

  “Mi Chango,” she whispers with affection, and a hint of irony, and then chuckles.

  Their breathing merges in the darkness.

  “You said there were two things you had to tell me. What’s the other one?”

  She’s silent for a long moment, then exhales softly.

  “I’m pregnant,” she says.

  117.

  In the morning, leaving her to dress for her downtown job, he goes to the street, his head swirling. He lights a cigarette, trying to steady himself, to focus. He sees kids playing, and traffic thickening, as cars peel off the FDR drive into the streets, coming in from the Bronx and Long Island, pushing for passage. A boy of ten or eleven pitches a pink rubber spaldeen hard against a box painted on a factory wall. He uses a complete windup, mixing Roger Clemens with El Duque Hernandez. He throws one strike after another. A thickset woman in a yellow dress turns a corner pushing a child in a stroller, her eyes puffy with morning or the loss of sleep. She has a blue sweater over her shoulders and pulls it tighter with a free hand. Autumn is coming now.

  Cormac feels a heaviness rising in him. It’s as if too many events are pushing for his attention and combining to block all focus: the party, the musicians, the women, the food, the dancing, and his yearning to live in a crowded, intimate world. The heaviest presence of all is Delfina. And the creature she says she is carrying. Could this be true? They talked and talked, and she is certain t
hat the boy���she knows it is a boy—could not be from Reynoso, she made certain, and there has been nobody else except Cormac. He did not ask her any of these questions. She raised the subject, blurting it out to him, her voice trembling with emotion, swearing on Oshun. The words coming in a rush: I lied about my age, yes, but every woman lies about her age. This I can’t lie about. She saw a doctor in the Dominican, just to be sure, but never thought for ten seconds of staying for an abortion. I want this child because I’ve already lost one, do you understand me? Yes, he said to her, I understand, I do understand. I do. And she said, fiercely: I want this boy.

  He walks now toward the Lexington Avenue subway and tries to remember Delfina’s words and what he said to her in reply and what he thought and didn’t say. A lifetime of caution still caged him; he promised her nothing, neither marriage nor money nor the best doctors. He could speak none of the oily clichés, none of the plastic language of paternal joy. Five thousand movies and a hundred thousand television commercials have robbed those words of meaning. He knew he would take care of her, would make her richer than she could imagine, but he couldn’t say that, couldn’t bring those words to her like a gift, and she wasn’t demanding them. She asked him for nothing. Not even love.

  Which made him love her more. He loved her toughness. He loved the way she faced the world.

  And as he reaches the subway, he asks himself again: How can this be? He feels in his bones that it is true. Everything is now altered by the arrival of a life. All plans. All old vows. The end of the Warren line. The journey to the cave and the passing into the Otherworld. The sense of time too. All changed. His blood will live on, no matter what happens in the next forty-eight hours. How can this be?

  Kongo will know. Of course. When Kongo returned to the city, Cormac thinks, something must have changed. He must have seen something in me. Or in Delfina. Or in this big scary heartbreaking piece of the world. He must be here as a messenger.

  Yes: Kongo will know.

  He hears a woman’s voice, sibilant and tough, speaking under the roll of music: You better be nice to this girl, man.

  118.

  At 7:30 on Monday evening Cormac left Duane Street for the home of William Hancock Warren. There was no passion in his movements, no tingling anticipation, no feeling that he was rising out of a trench to confront the enemy. He was going uptown to fulfill an ancient contract, its terms set many years before and remembered now in the voices of Mary Morrigan and his father. He had an appointment to keep, the day and hour set by Elizabeth, but an appointment that could fulfill an old vow. In the morning Warren had called to confirm. We’ll have to rough it, he said on the phone, his voice waxy with the effort at good cheer. Everybody will be gone, he explained. Even Elizabeth, who’s off somewhere for a few days.

  “We can send out for pizza,” Warren said, and laughed. “And by the way, bring me back my bloody sword.”

  * * *

  The rest of Monday morning had been spent on final things. The news from Delfina moved in and out of him, swinging back and forth. A child. Absurd. Too strange. He cleaned the loft while listening to Prokofiev’s Fifth Symphony and the CD of Charlie Parker with strings, and an album of Spanish monks singing Gregorian chant. The music of farewell. I won’t even see this child. He dusted the bookshelves. He tied up all the newspapers, his eyes weary of the shrapnel of the world beyond New York. Killings on the West Bank. Assaults in Belfast. The endless violence of believers. Won’t hear him squalling. He carried two roped bundles down to the bin at the back of the ground floor. Where is Kongo? What will he tell me about the child? For lunch, he ate a bowl of yogurt filled with grapes, sliced papaya, and mango, and then emptied the refrigerator.

  Safe in Delfina’s womb, right down there, seven blocks south, at a desk on the eighty-fourth floor. Listen, son. Pay close attention. I made a vow to my father, and I must keep it, or live in damnation. Everything truly serious is absurd. He called Delfina. Just to hear her voice. And got her recorded voice, with its curl of a Spanish accent, explaining she was away from her desk, please leave a message. “It’s me,” Cormac said. “I love you.”

  Around four, he walked down to Chambers Street under an iron-colored sky. Can I look at this world from the Otherworld? Can I see the boy learn to walk? Three Africans were emptying a truck outside a Big Sale shop named Great Expectations (how Dickens would have embraced them), talking in the percussive rhythms of Ashanti. Cormac couldn’t make out all the words and wished they were speaking in Yoruba, but the subject seemed to be soccer. I won’t see him run.

  He bought some things he needed from an Indian shopkeeper, and then went into a Korean deli on the corner of Church Street. He bought a black coffee and then stepped outside and stood beside a pay phone, using its back wall to shield him from the river wind. He lit a cigarette. The view down Church Street was as always: the post office, the towers in gray fog, all lights burning. He wanted to be in Mary’s with Healey, hearing his booming voice, but Mary’s was closed now forever, and he hadn’t been able to find Healey since his expedition to the Hamptons. He might still be there. He might be lashed to a bed in a hospital, lost on Long Island, cursing fate and Hollywood. Cormac thought: Where are the morning sirens who called us sweetheart? Healey’s my last friend. The only friend in the great dense city. I couldn’t bear to bury another.

  Time was racing in him now, the way it did when he would meet deadlines on the newspapers. Decade after decade. One deadline tonight, at Warren’s house. Another deadline tomorrow night, in a cave in Inwood. He might never see Healey again. He would never see the waitresses again. Nor would he see faces like these, passing him on the street: the high cheekbones and flared nose of this elegant high-hipped black woman hurrying downtown toward the post office or the World Trade Center; the gullied skin of the Puerto Rican man with the worried face and gray mustache, angling through traffic to the coffee shop across the street; the slack jaw of the teenage hip-hopper shambling along in his suit of polyester armor. Never see the boy become a man. He tried sketching the faces in his mind, drawing on old habit, using his eyelids like the shutter of a camera, freezing a moment: the Asian woman wrapped in solitary thought as she came out of a watch shop; the panicky glance of a heavy black woman whose three-year-old had jerked free of her grip. Never hear him talk about the Count of Monte Cristo.

  And here’s a white rummy in filthy clothes spewing a personal jumble of words as if looking for directions to a mission that no longer exists. Take a left, Cormac instructs him from the side of the phone booth. Go up past Broadway and make another left. You’ll be in the Five Points then, old man. You’ll be in the Bloody Ould Sixth. They’ll know you there. Someone will give you succor.

  There is harm in the world, son. There’s evil. There’s whiskey. There’s smack and crack and too much heartbreak. There’s violence. Listen to me, son.

  And then he thought: If I do what I need to do tonight, I’ll see her on Tuesday evening. Then I’ll try to explain why I’ve killed a man named Warren. I’ll tell her that he’s the man in all the morning newspapers, on television, on radio. That man.

  William Hancock Warren. Then I’ll take her to the north, to my farewell in the cave that gave me too much life, and tell her all of the truth. The least I can do: the truth. About who I am. All of it. While swearing to her that Usheen and Oshun will bring us once more together, forever.

  He imagined her at this very moment, coming back from lunch, smiling, radiant, possessing her secret, walking between desks in her new suit from Century 21, women pleased with her, or envious, and men watching her with hungry eyes. But you can deal with it, son. You can deal with anything the world throws at you.

  He stepped into the booth and called Healey.

  “This is Healey,” the recorded voice said. “I am out of TOWN. With any luck, I will rob a BANK before I come home. If you leave a MESSAGE, I will call you BACK from the penitentiary!”

  Cormac laughed and left a message: “Make sure it’s a
big bank.”

  He dropped the empty coffee cup in a trash bin and started walking home. Rain was predicted on New York 1, and they were never wrong. In a corner store, he bought a small bag of jellybeans, tiny, glistening, and delicious, one of the marvels of a long life. His sweet tooth had cost him many hours in a dentist’s chair, but he’d never gotten fat. Too much walking with Wordsworth in his head. Or (he thought) one more eerie mutation of my metabolism. A pregnant woman walked into the candy store as he was walking out. She was ochre-colored, with tired eyes above high cheekbones. He thought: Will her daughter ever know my son? You’re free to wander the whole wide world, son. Do it. See Paris and Rome and Florence. See Tokyo and Samarkand. Roam deserts and jungles. Sleep in an Irish meadow. Climb the Matterhorn. Go. Do what I could never do. Your mother will keep you safe.

  He turned on Duane Street. Kongo was waiting in front of his building.

  He wore a dark green corduroy jacket, a black turtleneck, and jeans. His brown boots were polished to a high sheen. His hands were jammed into his pockets. When he smiled, Cormac realized how much he looked like Michael Jordan. The true messenger of Chango.

  “Good afternoon,” he said, as they embraced. “I just wanted to make certain all was ready.”

  “All is ready.”

  They talked about the coming night and where they would meet after Cormac’s appointment with Warren.

  “It will be a cold night,” Kongo said.

  “With rain, says the weather report.”

  “Yes, with rain.”

  They stood for a long moment without speaking, while cars and taxis honked for passage, the street blocked by a wide truck holding a construction crane. Kongo smiled.