Likenesses and differences set to the side, it could never be said that one had fallen harder in love than the other. Before long they had formed into a circle, and neither of them could imagine being a straight line again, caught in the loneliness of blunt, severed ends.
When he said he wanted to introduce her to his mother and would like to be introduced to hers, she told him she wasn’t ready for all that and didn’t care to discuss the matter further. And so they continued to live in a world that fit inside a few hours. That is until he drove her to the small house he was renting on Washington Avenue in New Orleans, where they spent an entire afternoon kissing and caressing and moving against each other. There were several such occasions after that one; occasions in which they managed to find fulfillment within the confines of risk-free touch.
And then came that Sunday in May.
William had picked Dancy up precisely at noon; they planned to spend the entire day in New Orleans. She was wearing a green-and-blue-striped sun blouse and a light green skirt, and she’d let her hair fall loose, the way he liked it best. When she hopped into the car and leaned over toward him, he knew just how to touch her chin and tip it slightly, and how to move his own head to catch the lightness of her kiss. Their first kiss of the day was always sweet like that, soft and a little bit breathy.
While William and Dancy were driving to New Orleans, Dancy’s mother was still attending services over at the International Church of the Elevated Forthright Gospel, to which she’d converted—the one she’d left the Southern Baptists for. The Forthright Gospelers didn’t have an actual house of worship made of bricks or stones or Louisiana lumber but met down by the river under what they called the Resurrection Tent, a structure that was really nothing more than some canvas tarpaulins from a surplus store over in Gretna. Dancy had gone to the tent service just once and refused to ever go again. The preacher was a fearmonger in her eyes, a man who could only threaten. His face became grotesque and spittle gathered in the corners of his mouth as he beseeched God Almighty in a doom-laden voice.
But the ranting didn’t work on Dancy. She wasn’t afraid of her mother’s odious preacher, or of that preacher’s gruesome God. When she came right out and said as much, her mother told her she was taking the shortest road to damnation there was. Dancy said she didn’t care. After that, she proceeded to excuse herself from organized religion altogether, which is how she came to have Sundays free to do whatever she liked.
William parked near his house, and they took the St. Charles streetcar to Canal Street, getting off at the French Quarter. The day was beautiful, pure-aired and velvet. William took Dancy for brunch at Antoine’s, and then they strolled the Vieux Carré, ducking into shops, trying on hats, and sizing up antiques for imaginary purchase, though the only thing they really bought was a box of pralines. They listened to a street band play some good jazz. They went for a ride in a surrey. They savored the stirrings that would lead to William’s bed.
When they returned to the house on Washington Avenue, some essence of pent-up passion that always haunts the Quarter returned along with them. They’d felt arousal before, but this time was different. They wound around each other with a languid tension and a wild thirst for more. They went to the edge and back, and then they took the jump. They had never felt anything like it.
Afterwards, as they lay together on William’s soft sheets, coolness crept over their skin like dry dew. He tightened his arms around her and pulled her close as he could. She nestled her head beneath his chin and tangled her legs up with his. Neither one spoke for a while, and when they did, it was in whispers.
“I love you, Dancy.”
“I love you, too.”
And so William and Dancy became a destiny fulfilled, two halves of the same whole, a sun and a moon in their own private galaxy. They lay entwined and thought themselves alone. But that is one thing they most definitely were not, for Bonaventure had begun. The cells of his body were doubling again and again, dividing in two, then four, then eight, becoming many thousands.
A few days after their incautious passion, tiny embryonic Bonaventure floated down a fallopian tube and settled in to grow. About five weeks later, his arms and legs began to bud, his heart had started to beat its own drum, and blood swirled through him at four miles an hour. Bonaventure would keep on growing and changing and changing again and soon would weigh as much as a three-page letter.
Trinidad Prefontaine detected a change in the night sky. She ascribed it to a new presence, one that needed some time to reach her, for starlight does not hurry.
One missed period and two sore breasts later Dancy said she had something to tell William as he walked her home through the loblolly pines. She didn’t say anything for a pained eternity, and then she stopped walking and looked him straight in the eye. Her tears welled up and spilled over before she even said a word, and William was certain she was about to break his heart.
This Turn of Events
WILLIAM Everest Arrow and Danita Celine Roman stood before the justice of the peace upstairs in the courthouse on Lafayette Street in Bayou Cymbaline, on a Wednesday in July of 1949, promising to have and to hold from that day forward. He was twenty-two and she was just nineteen. Both of them were excited-nervous. The bride wore a powder blue, short-sleeved dress with eleven buttons down the front and a cinched waist that would be too tight in a week. She’d fashioned her long blond hair into a chignon that she felt was in keeping with the feather and rhinestones on the netted felt hat she had borrowed from a friend. The groom was dashing in dark gray serge and a white bespoke shirt, with twenty-four-karat gold cuff links at his wrists. The scents of Evening in Paris and Old Spice puffed into the air from the pulse points on the sides of their necks, near the veins that carried blood from their heads to their hearts.
The county clerk acted as witness, and the certificate of marriage was signed and recorded.
The young man’s background was full of pedigreed ancestors, a businessman and bankers among the paternal Arrows, and landed gentry among his mother’s people on the old-moneyed Molyneaux side.
Not so the young lady’s. Her father’s family, the Romans, owed their living to the various crustaceans of the Louisiana delta; anything that crawled, swam, or burrowed in the muck around Shoats Creek. Her mother’s stock, the Cormiers by name, were good-natured, hard-scrabble bayou folk who dwelled amidst the palmetto jungles of Beauregard Parish along with lizards and spiders and dark-loving bats. They were steeped in all things Cajun and Creole and wore the pungent, musky taint of the swamp like a badge. Dancy’s mother had never fit in with her folk.
Though the lovers paid no mind to their dissimilar social standing, it was evidenced by more than the quality of their clothes and ancestral pedigrees or lack thereof. He had recently graduated from the law school at Tulane, and she from a third-rate beauty school above Slocum Brothers Furniture in Bayou Cymbaline, an education she’d paid for with waitressing wages.
But such trivial things mattered not.
There’d been no talk of conversion on either side. Their mothers, Letice Arrow and Adelaide Roman, being a couple of churchgoing women, were greatly affected by this turn of events. Each had a grievance with the very sudden wedding, one regarding it as socially improper, and the other as inconsiderate (Just imagine what people will say!). In the aftermath of the bare-bones nuptials, unease and embarrassment tried to choke those mothers to death. The shock of a courthouse wedding attended by a premarital baby would certainly not wear off quickly. Letice Arrow hadn’t liked the idea of a civil ceremony, but it was the fact of the baby that distressed her more, though not for the obvious reason but for one that would be revealed much later.
Familial relations were strained at best—a situation helped along by private demons, not the least of which was envy: Letice Arrow would spend more on a hat than Adelaide Roman could spend on a sofa.
The Wanderer, As Yet Unknown
THERE was another who knew private demons, a solitary wander
ing man. He’d spent more than half his life moving from place to place, laboring as only an angry man can, pounding harder and cutting deeper and wielding an axe with an arm full of rage in attempts at substitute vengeance.
There’d been stints as a farmhand and a ranch hand in the twenties, when he was very young. The Wanderer had experience with animals. But then the Great Depression came and those jobs disappeared. In the thirties he found his meals and a place to lay his head in work camps run by the WPA. He helped build roads and bridges—sturdy, useful things. He was left alone. There was the occasional woman, the type who was thrilled by his looks and never cared that he didn’t want her to talk, the type who didn’t wonder why he wanted her to wear a pearl necklace, the type who didn’t mind being a stand-in.
The Wanderer had been too young to fight in the First World War but had volunteered to fight in the Second, though by then he was older than the average soldier. He was sick of the loneliness of his angry life, and so used the war to court death. In the thick of the action, he swallowed his fear and vomited it back up. By the time the war was over, he knew a two-part suffering: one part injury and one part survivor’s guilt, and that two-part misery curdled his bitterness.
He came back home in general good health, that is, except for his face. He’d lost a part of his jaw near Mézières in the Champagne-Ardenne. The medics did the best they could on his once handsome, shot-up jaw. The doctors worked on the leftovers, wiring and grafting and stitching together. What remained of his chin no longer sagged open and he could chew his food enough, but his eyelid drooped and he’d lost half his hearing. The Wanderer no longer resembled himself.
The doctors told him he was lucky. They were quite proud of their work. But no one had done a thing about the piece of his mind that had stayed in the Champagne-Ardenne with scraps of his bone and teeth and sinew. The Wanderer became permanently troubled.
The only women who would have sex with him now were the ones who did it for pay, and even some of those refused. He took to drink because he could count on Jack Daniel’s to offer him cold comfort.
“She’s just another damned old whore,” his whiskey friend would say.
The Newlyweds
WILLIAM and Dancy honeymooned at the Hotel Monteleone on Royal Street in New Orleans. Dancy had never seen so much marble, had never even imagined that a ceiling could look like a painting, had never checked the time on a tall and hand-carved grandfather clock until she walked into the Monteleone. This was William’s world.
“Have you bags, sir?”
“My wife has one,” William replied, and turned to wink at Dancy.
The porter took her overnight bag and with a gracious nod escorted them to their room.
“It’s nice and cool in here,” Dancy said when the porter had gone, “even without the ceiling fan on.”
“Air-conditioning,” William said.
“Oh.”
“Are you thirsty?” William asked. “There’s ice water.”
Dancy didn’t reply. She’d picked up a card on the writing desk and saw that they could get a cup of coffee until one o’clock in the morning if they wanted to, and that the Monteleone would do their laundry.
“Dancy?”
She turned to him and with a serious look asked, “Are you sure about this, William?”
“What? The cost? Of course I’m sure,” he said. “It’s our honeymoon.”
But that wasn’t what she’d meant.
Dancy looked at him without saying a word. She was afraid she’d start to cry.
“Are you feeling okay? Do you want to lie down?” William asked.
Dancy nodded.
She didn’t want to wrinkle her wedding dress—it was the only really good thing she’d brought—so she took it off and lay down in her slip.
William took off his jacket and necktie, lay down beside her, and took her in his arms.
That’s when the tears came.
William thought it was a sudden bout of pregnancy emotion, and so he cradled her and smoothed her hair and told her everything would be okay. After a while, he got a cool cloth for her face.
“Feel better?” he asked.
Dancy nodded.
“Are you hungry?”
She nodded again.
“Well, then, let’s get dressed again and go downstairs for some dinner.”
As they were looking at the Hunt Room’s menu, it struck William that Dancy seemed anxious. He thought she was worried about the money again but then noticed how her brow knit and her lips moved as she read, pressed pompano moutardine.
“I have to chuckle a little bit at these places,” he said. “They say pressed pompano when all they really mean is jack fish.”
Her face lit up when he said it—they served jack fish for dinner in William’s world! Maybe everything really would be okay.
They went to the Carousel Bar after dinner, where Dancy had some sparkling water, what with the baby and all. Dancy loved the Carousel—fancy as it was, they served gumbo and crackers.
They made love that night as a married couple and, oddly enough, were kind of shy.
Mr. and Mrs. William Arrow remained at the Monteleone for two nights. They couldn’t stay any longer because William had recently secured a position at the law firm of Robillard & Broome and he had a family to think of now. They checked out and went straight to the Café Du Monde because Dancy was craving beignets. Then they returned to the rented house, where over the next few weeks, Dancy put up curtains and gave the place some color with rag rugs and plants and a picture of Paris.
Almost immediately they fell into ritual: She put on his robe like a child playing dress-up and sat on the tub’s edge to watch him shave, getting so absorbed in the act that she stretched her own lip over her teeth as he scraped the razor under his nose. They learned the things that couples come to know: how he put his socks on, or how she put away the dishes, or that she slept on her side and he slept on his back, or exactly how they brushed their teeth and swished to rinse their mouths. Upon waking in the morning she had the habit of bunching her hands up and rubbing her eyes, which always made him smile. William loved everything about Dancy in the morning, but most of all he loved the way she walked when she was barefoot—soft and quiet like a puffy little cat.
Dancy cooked and cleaned and read library books, and Monday through Friday at 5:25 in the afternoon she dabbed perfume behind her ears and waited for William to come home. He always nuzzled her neck when she met him at the door, and each settled into the warmth of the other and into a love that was stronger than it had been just hours before.
During the early weeks of her pregnancy Dancy slept a lot, which was just as well considering the nausea that could come over her like motion sickness even when she was sitting stock still and nowhere near an automobile or a spinning carnival ride. Mostly it was smells that bothered her, smells she used to love: bacon or coffee or Borax detergent. The nurse at her doctor’s office said it was a good sign because being sick meant the baby was healthy, which brought some much-needed consolation but absolutely no relief.
Bonaventure could move his eyes and wrinkle his nose and pull his mouth into smiles or frowns. Nine weeks after he’d been conceived, his arms had hands, his hands had fingers, and his fingers had fingerprints unique just to him. In no time at all his eyes were brown, and sometimes he got the hiccups.
After four months of intermittent sickness, Dancy began to have more good days than bad. Eventually, she was sleeping less and spending hours and hours reading cookbooks and practicing recipes. She enjoyed the cooking, but she enjoyed eating more: pancakes or liverwurst or sausage and grits, most of it smothered in blackstrap molasses. She gained enough weight to look more pregnant than she was. Her skin glowed, her hair shone, and her eyes had taken on a sparkle. Both William and Dancy marveled at the rounding of her belly, at the perfect dark line that ran from her navel to her pelvis, and at the amazing thing that had happened to her breasts.
Both of them had
an overwhelming feeling that their baby was a boy, and they tried to imagine what he would be like. Dancy envisioned an active child with a face full of freckles and hair that was brown and very, very straight. William saw a slender fellow with an interest in bridges and a fondness for fishing. It would turn out that they both were a little bit right.
“Do you think he can hear us from inside my belly?” Dancy wondered aloud over orange juice and toast when she was about four-and-a-half months along. William assured her that he absolutely did. Having come to an agreement on their baby’s ability to hear them, they sang a pretty good rendition of “Shoo-fly Pie and Apple Pan Dowdy” and laughed when they had finished.
Unborn Bonaventure listened to the song and the laughter. It thrilled him so much he did a little dance and reveled in the constancy of his mother’s beating heart.
“William!” said Dancy. “I felt him! He moved!” And Dancy put William’s hand right there. He felt nothing at first, and then came a flutter, and William Arrow’s breath got caught in his throat when Bonaventure brushed his fingers beneath the place where his father’s hand rested.
Once the pregnancy sickness stopped altogether, William and Dancy made love with the abandon of those who haven’t a care in the world. He would hold her against his chest in the afterglow and brush his fingertips up and down her arm, and she would curl into him, feeling safer than she’d ever felt in her life. But there was even more to their happiness. They sang with the radio and danced in the daytime. They made lemonade and iced tea and drank it on the porch, while crickets sang in the grass. They furnished the nursery, painting it yellow and hanging a mobile over the crib. They breathed in unison through the sleeping hours, never once sensing the nearing hand of fate.
The Silence of Bonaventure Arrow Page 2