“Morrissey knew about it from the first and that I wasn’t any killer, not a thief, and certainly that if I went too far that time, it was out of my own principles … how they got out of bounds. He had some good inside stuff about them, but when they put on the pressure, he was even able to swing a position elsewhere, it’s how he got the big appointment … oh, Pam’s money … you saw that house … where’d he be without it, nobody can say, only it’s not so much money … just that he saw a way of getting me out, out of the country till it blew over … that was when Pam came looking. It was her idea … I’d swear to it anytime….”
“Out of the country, where?” she mumbled, her mouth sticky inside from being sleepy.
“Think of anywhere. Mexico. Think of Canada.”
She thought of Canada, but only saw polar bears. They had got back. He turned at the Hibiscus sign, and drifting in, stopped the car. Hundred-pound weights sat on her eyelids. “Look.” He held his hands forward and turned up the dash light, then showed her his fingers, palm up. She could discern by the dim light what she’d seen before, the healed skin over finger ends which had been cut or burnt. She was still hearing the soft crush of shells beneath the tires, and then she felt the broken finger ends like pieces of screen printing her cheek and neck, then her mouth pressed and opened with his own. She remembered earlier how he’d pushed her down, knew her body had taken a note of it, like a secretary might write down a call to be made at a later moment which had now arrived. She was dead for sleep, opened the door herself to stumble out and find her cabin but instead was being carried, floating, skimming silently down along a smooth and swollen stream, face rising up above the surface, eyes closed, branches of oleander, vines of bougainvillea, hibiscus like trumpets, crisp and red.
She woke with sun coming in through the slant blinds, the long borrowed skirt crumpled on a chair, herself a trampled field with a game over, the score standing.
She lay there till she got hungry. No one came in the door and no message was to be found. She dressed, folded up the skirt and put it in a grocery sack. Outside, it was clear and hot, without a cloud. The breathless enormity of the Florida day entered her breathing self and made it light and pure. She could find him. The skirt was her excuse.
He wasn’t at play practice, nor was anyone. A tolling bell reminded her: This was Sunday. She turned strange corners until she saw—far down a street in the ever-heating sunlight—a couple of shore patrols in white uniforms struggling with a man they were dragging out of a front walk between red flowers. The man’s face was bruised with streaks of blood on it, the same as her own blood, red like the flowers. All down the street she could hear their heaving breath but no words … nothing to say.
She grew faint and around eleven-thirty went in a drugstore, sat down at the lunch counter and ate a sandwich. A fan was turning overhead. In a jar of pickling brine, some large eggs were floating. The man at the counter was darkly thinking of things not before him. The whiteness of the eggs in the huge jar frightened Dottie vaguely. From the mirror a smooth little face, her own, watched and noted that she looked about the same.
Move closer, or go far, she thought and folded her paper napkin. She knew which already. She paid her check and gathered up her bundle as responsibly as if it bore a child inside. She had wandered in: now, committed and compelled, she went a chosen way. She was lame, yes, and motherless, yes, and she’d been left with a legacy greater than she needed, but the one thing she knew she bore was a right to be seen, to be answered.
Everything, she guessed, was in the precise look of that big luxurious white stucco house when she finally found it by the blaze of the afternoon sun. She trudged in through the gate, her footsteps making unequal crushes into the gravel, her height not reaching halfway up the square sentinel posts of the entrance drive. The house looked blank, green-shuttered, sheltered and curtained and cool within. She remembered the patio, the pool, the trailing vines, thick as hair, a house with a woman inside whom she didn’t like, an intricate mystery. In one sense she drove herself forward; in another, it was all she could possibly do. Her vital thread, whose touch was her life, was leading her.
From the upper floor windows, she supposed, you could see the water. The entrance was recessed into the shadow of an arch, and a grillwork gate of iron stood ajar before a closed front door of darkstained wood. A fan-like spread of steps led down to the gravel drive, and above them and below, a paving of square yellow tiles gave off a flat gloss to the sun. At either end of the tiled area below, large cement urns of verbena stood on square pedestals.
Clambering upward, step by halting step, she gained the entrance, but before approaching the door, she turned and looked around her. Out at the side where the pool was situated, she could see the coconut head of the Cuban, motionless, out of hearing. She walked three steps backward, and looked up to where on a balcony above stood the dark woman. She shielded her face from the sun.
“I thought you’d be at play practice,” Dottie said.
“Not on Sunday. Wait there. I’m coming down.”
Sandals on the long white walkways, the white-railed stairs, the marble floors, approaching expensively.
Then Dottie heard the sound of a car turning into the drive. She dropped the sack and ran.
Hidden behind a large stone urn full of verbena, Dottie watched as her enemy greeted Johnny at the door. Where did she go? Pam was probably asking him. Where did who go? You know, that girl you brought. The lame one. The singer, dopey.
Dottie looked up to where gazing down from an upper window the drunk blond grandmother was regarding her silently. When Pam and Johnny went inside, Dottie remained behind the verbena pot, alone and miserable, for even the old lady had closed the window, and the Cuban was out there asleep. He had to be asleep. Nobody could sit that still.
I want! I want! thought Dottie Almond; and alone, not just in that place but in the world, in the grand presence of her wishes, she turned and put her arms around the verbena urn and wet the harsh cement surface with streaming tears. Not only for Johnny but for herself, outside like that, and for her grand aplomb in seeing herself the possessor of the cool lovely house alone with him there in it, sometimes hidden from each other, wandering shadowy passages, sometimes discovering by chance or by search the other that each sought constantly, bedding for whole afternoons, and at night gathering moonlight in through windows, joining like twin divers in the pool, tangling like vines from sunny breakfasts onward, lords to the last fence corner and rock of gravel at the drive’s head of all All All.
A drapery slid across a distant window, and Dottie limped out and away. Home. Nothing was merited; that, she knew. Nothing was ever deserved.
When, two days later, she saw him on the beach, he asked her where she’d been. “I thought about you,” he said. “About the other night.”
“What were you thinking?”
“How sweet you were.” He touched her cheek, then caught her hand, and sat, holding it. “Why don’t you come up to the university?” he said. “School’s not far off. Morrissey can get you in.”
“Pam’s husband.”
“Sure, Pam’s husband. You met him. Morrissey.”
“Pam—” she started, then gave out.
“What about Pam?” he asked. “You’re something—to her.”
“I know I did a lot of talking the other night. Maybe I said things—things you didn’t understand.”
“Or maybe I did.” Some force she didn’t know the name of was pushing her on to the next thing to say. “Ron Morrissey—”
“What about him?”
“He got you out of something bad.”
The boy did not answer.
“Is Johnny even your real name?”
He dropped his arm away and whereas before they had been blending warm with each other while one breath did for both, he was now sitting separate from her, stoney silent. Dottie felt exhausted, like a sea creature who had struggled up on the beach, then to a rock, attaining, while th
e damp dried from its panting sides, a visible, singular identity. There wasn’t any need to go farther.
“Come to practice,” he said, and bent to kiss her.
“Be glad you’re just crippled,” they used to say, “you might be dead.” “But why be either one?” she had asked.
From the beach she watched jet streams like scars fade into the sky. There was nothing left to do but pack her clothes, say goodbye to the room, get ready to take the bus all the way up Florida, across Alabama, all the way to North Mississippi in unbroken silence. And once on the road, she would drift in and out of sleep, thinking, Aunt Maggie Lee Asquith, it’s you I’m riding with, Mr. Avery Donelson, I am travelling with you.
A FUGITIVE’S WIFE
The old lady now is getting me to read letters aloud to her; furthermore, I have to answer them. She is in charge of my soul at this point. Everything depends on her. Of course, she is going to take some advantages. That is to be expected.
… Dear Agnes paragraph indent if I do not write you more often please do not think that I am not always interested in you and your boys you are often in my thoughts do you know how to punctuate?
Yes, but now I have to start over (I am giggling at my own inattention) I wrote that in the letter.
To her it isn’t funny. She isn’t feeling at all well. She regards me as a bad child. I should be grateful, continually grateful. Instead, in a sense, I mock at her, whenever I behave carelessly, whenever I laugh.
Your new ballet shoes arrived. They’re over there in the white box. From New Orleans.
Oh!
My true chord is struck. My self goes streaming toward the box, all on its toes. Restrained, I walk across to open the box, standing in repose in the classic third position I often take, heel in instep.
Pink!
Wasn’t that what you ordered?
Perfect! I thought they’d send white instead.
Is your skirt pink?
I can dye it. I have before. You’ve got to get well for the program….
Before we got the dance thing going at the Bozart, I was just a young mother with a beat-up Volkswagen and a little girl, driving to park in some bay up the beach alone, wandering afternoons among the clumps of seaweed, dodging the occasional person who wanted to talk, picking up driftwood. You can see it in advance, sanded, varnished, trimmed a little, angled to best advantage, ornamenting the chic coffee table at the cocktail hour. One day I made a good find, really remarkable, something that looked like two children with hands joined, tense and joyous with their playing. I must show it, was my impulse. Where? I sneaked it into the new development for the arts near the coast city whose name I was supposed never to mention. I’ve sneaked in here too, you realize, much like driftwood myself: mother, and daughter hardly walking yet, hardly talking yet (Where’s Dod-dee? When Dod-dee tummin?)
It was there I saw the new dance stage. Chills went up and down me. I had studiously kept my leotards packed away, along with the satin slippers and the tulle skirt, the black practice shoes, the two costumes for productions at the Eastern college—“Graduation Ball” and Prokofieff’s “Cinderella,” my one starring part. My head began to whirl, silently orchestrating.
I stood before the window where the stage was, watching and waiting for someone to come who, I could see without speaking to them, would be in touch with what I knew. But no one came. The work on the stage was not going on and no class was then in session.
The boy in the design school, which had a shop opening onto the street, had been kind and responsive. Where are you from? Staying around here? Yes, it’s good … I see what you see in it. Let me show you one we got last week. Maybe I’ll put yours in the window.
Now I went back to him. Kathy is tired and fretting. I carry her. The ballet school. Oh, they’re going to do all sorts of modern and folk dancing too, but they haven’t got started. That’s coming later. We had this huge grant, see? Instead of coming in a whoosh the money comes a little at a time, so we opened some shops to keep going, now it’s fun, so we’ll keep them. There’s been a world of interest.
Cute advertising, I say.
Bozart? You like that?
Sure?
Y’all staying around here?
Yes and no. I smile in a don’t-push-me way and he notices it. Not much difference between us, age-wise. We could for a moment be tableau stuff—mother, father, child. Except he’s gay.
Next step, to rig up a practice bar, realize my happiness. Mrs. Levine, God help her, hasn’t known how good she’s had it. I’m going to worry that woman until I can dance again. She will fuss fuss fuss, but help me. She’ll want it for me. She is kind and doomed. Those dark circles tell too much on her. Also the way she’s come to say “Mary,” in a personal tender way, a motherly or family way—that tells, too. It tells me I’ll soon be tugging tights on, lacing shoes in place, lifting my arms in the old curving ways brought over here to us by those who cared about it.
Driftwood cannot be art … art is a discipline, not an accident. I am driftwood, but I can once again do what I was taught once … take my stance, lift my arms in curving grace, mount to my trembling toes.
At night, Kathy asleep, Mary sat with her leg tucked under her, writing to Bob.
Dear Johnny, Should I call you Johnny? All the girls do there, I’m sure, if it’s the name you want. I’ve found a place to dance, an art center attached to a college. They’ve got some government money. I think I can work with the teacher if she’s crazy enough to believe I’m hiding from a homicidal husband and don’t want my name known. (Let’s think of something better, can’t we?) I’m counting days till you come. Kathy is fine. I’ve put up a practice bar out of an old length of iron pipe we got from a junk man. It isn’t too bad now I’ve used rust remover and enameled it. I’m going to put up a little one for Kathy as soon as she can understand enough. She wants to imitate me already. How can you stand two geniuses? Mrs. L. has trepidations about the dancing, but I know she knows how lonely I’ve been, besotted in routine as bad as people who drink all the time or play bridge every day. There are some women up the beach who sit day in and day out on the front porch playing bridge. Pity I can’t quit this and come crawl in bed with you. It will be next week and you won’t let me down. Some day I want to meet your new friends there, too. It will do me good. They ought to think the world of this sacrifice I’ve made. Still, I’ve got to get word to Mom and Dad before too long. They’ve acted like they don’t give a damn, but if anybody took Kathy away I would die. We’ll talk about it. Mary.
She took the letter with her in the blue Volkswagen to mail to the secret box number at Marathon, above Key West. It seemed not a letter, but more like a little smoke signal sent up from behind her concealing hillside.
MR. McMILLAN
There are few sights more pleasant than a girl and a man dining happily together, and those two over in the corner were laughing as well that night, not too loudly but not softly either, because something was really funny, you had to suppose. In the courtyard restaurant out in the soft New Orleans September air, people spaced out among banana plants, lanterns, candlelight, palm trees, and a fish pool, turned from various distances and smiled.
Aline could soon be seen wiping her eyes on the big white napkin. It was an old habit, a tendency to cry when she laughed too much, and one which her whole family, she supposed, shared, for she could remember them all sitting through one perpetual summer after another in shorts and sandals on their screen porch, talking and telling things, and every once in a while bursting into such laughter that for a time no world would have been big enough to laugh in. So they would cry, great rolling salt tears as big as moth balls.
The man Aline was dining with apparently had no such family characteristic. He just quieted and refilled her wineglass.
“Good God,” he said. “Incest, suicide, insanity, cancer, murder, divorce. Is that the best, really the best, you can do? I thought every Mississippi family had at least one idiot, two rapists, and a
good criminal lawyer.”
“I’ve only described my immediate family,” she said. Whereupon they were both almost plunged back into merriment again, but the main course was set before them, a sizzling mass of flounder and shrimp.
“Of course,” she said, lifting her fork, “I love them all.”
“Well,” he said soberly, “they sound very lovable.”
She noticed he was doing very well with her, if that’s what he wanted, and evidently he did. From now on they would have a note, a tone, to return to; they could share a knowledge that life was funny and serious both at once, the way, to her, it really was. He had wired her up home, up in Mississippi, from Chicago. In the old days, the wire would have been called up or run up from the station and everybody in town would have known what was in it before it reached her. But now that the new exchanges had been put in, the message had been telephoned out to her impersonally from a point some thirty miles away. She had told her family it had been about her research at the university, that one of the department assistants was sick and a report was due right after Labor Day. She didn’t want to talk about him, the young man she’d met three months ago at a convention in Indiana. If she laid it to her work, which was taking her eight years to train for, having to do with disease-carrying parasites in South American countries, they merely nodded. They never asked her anything about it, even when she had seen the light of what she could really do in the world and what she loved, and had determined to make for it, like a swimmer choosing a distant goal. Full of enthusiasm, with a fellowship promised her after graduation, she had come home and tried to explain. One by one she saw those faces, so like her own, turn glum, and dollar signs, as if in comic strips, appeared to grow on their eyeballs. As stuffed with money as piggy banks, they appeared for the first time to show how they’d earned it, by letting it be a prime motive in everything. Why hadn’t she married as any pretty girl should? She would be further from it, now, with every year that passed. And she wouldn’t even be earning. It did not matter how her face was glowing. She might as well have announced to them that she was going into anything, from Aristotelian philosophy to codifying puberty rites among African tribes. It was all the same to them. “We just don’t know anything about it,” was what they had said when she (a girl: imagine!) had determined on a science major. It was what they said now when she wanted to go further—a good answer, she supposed, for next to everything. On the second day they had started complaining; she could expect nothing, they had decided, beyond that fellowship, since it was so grand and pleased her so. On the third, they having got together again, she was the butt of ridicule, needled at table, ignored in hallways. She’d no old uncle or cousin or aunt out in the country to go and talk to, for heart’s ease and understanding: they had died. But the uncle had left her a small wooded acreage near town. She had wanted to turn it into a town park someday, but needing money, she went secretly and mortgaged it, and, check in hand, heartsick, young, dashed, determining on the train not to think about it, to get that stricken look off her face, she had returned to New Orleans. No need to go home at all, she thought, unless they needed her.
On the Gulf Page 5