Hoop lit her up and she blew a big spiral at the ceiling, watching it as if she had forgotten us for a bit. “My point is, the world doesn’t go around on biographies. Remember that and we’ll get on fine. No bio.”
“I will.” I had to recall the Orphan.
“Act!” Hoop suddenly shouted. “That’s about right. Chief knows more than he looks. She acts, all right.”
Mary looked at Hoop. “Ensign Hooper here believes in quartering on board while in port.” She held her cigarette near her ear, smoke swirling irregularly up around her hair.
She looked at me with low eyelids. “What do you intend to do about Mother Nature?” she said.
Hoop stopped his fussing with bar things.
“I’m not sure yet,” I said.
“Mush!” Hoop said. “We’re out of ice.” He went to the kitchen.
Mary leaned toward me, as if falling, and pressed her forehead to mine, holding me behind the neck with her cold drink hand. She rolled our foreheads together.
“How do these work?” Hoop stood in the door with a blue plastic tray of ice cubes. “There’s no arm.”
“Twist them, Hoop,” Mary said.
“There’s no arm,” Hoop said again.
“They don’t make arms on them anymore,” I offered.
Hoop looked at me. “Yeah, I see.”
I took it for a slur. “You torque them, Hoop,” I said, trying to somehow slur him back.
“Yes, Hoop,” Mary said. “Torque you ice trays.” She made the sense I couldn’t. She was holding some liquor. She laughed.
Hoop turned and retreated. We heard ice cubes popping loose and hitting the floor.
“Friggin torque is right.” Hoop came back and fitted the new cubes into the glass-lined ice bucket. As soon as he settled them in and achieved a tight fit with the lid, Mary held her glass in the air to him, tapping out her cigarette. I started to swivel away from the bar, but she got me by the waistband and tugged me back around.
Hoop hurled the ingredients of another drink toward a fresh glass. He scrubbed the rim with lemon rind. “Always your friggin twist on these,” he said again. Mary looked at the ceiling. Ray Conniff was skipping.
“Goddamn, Connie,” Hoop said suddenly, leaning toward her over the bar. “You don’t respect—”
Mary pushed her stool away and saddlebagged herself over the bar, reaching a set of keys which she retrieved in a violent, upward fling. She marched into the kitchen. Hoop said, “She’s going to tear a page now, kid.”
We heard a roar from the kitchen. In the garage, through a door off the kitchen, we found Mary in a high, boxy, old Mercury, revving its engine with a thoughtful, deliberate expression on her face. We stood next to the car with our drinks, smelling the exhaust. Mary floored carbon out, deafening us. She got out and gallantly held open the door, to me.
“Jesus,” Hoop said.
“Don’t say a damned word, Hoop.” To me: “Get in.
I sat where placed, fingering the large knurled steering wheel of the Mercury. Mary crossed to the rider’s side. Hoop attempted our old conspiratorial leer behind her, but it fell and he suddenly yelled, “Go to Florida!”
“Fine,” Mary said.
“Friggin Jesus.”
Our eyes were stinging.
“I got to get Virginia out of here,” Hoop proclaimed. He trailed a V sign into the house. We heard him yell, “Evacuate!”
Beneath the moldy smell of the Mercury was the smell of a showroom-new car. I eased it out of the garage into heavy rain, which knocked dust off the hood in violent spore bursts, leaving craters of fresh, new color. It looked for a moment as if we were driving on the moon.
The car was so high-centered and heavy it felt full of water, full of water and horsepower. I got it up to a speed which brought in some wind, and looked over at Mary—her hair flying about like the photograph in the newspaper she swore wasn’t her. I was on a tear, full of gin and with a woman named Drown, and I drove us to a club called the Car Wash, where I knew Ebert to hang out. A naked woman hand-painted on the outside of the club spoke from a cartoon balloon, NO DRINKIN ON PREMISE PLEASE. The artist had given her very large breasts, using, apparently, a house brush that lent them a hairy aspect.
Ebert came forward with a gaping kind of frozen grin on his face: This is so absurd I can’t quite laugh and I can’t quite ignore it. And we were in an all-black club. “Man!” he said, when nearly to us.
“Man what?” I said.
“I ain’t never seen you like this before.”
“Like what?”
“On the weekend.”
Mary rolled her eyes. She retook my arm, and Ebert turned back toward the bar as if to shepherd us through the quieted crowd. The noise slowly resumed, and we went to the bar.
Ebert was not sober. “Man,” he kept saying, “you a trip.”
Mary whipped a little flask of gin out and asked the barman if it was all right.
“She a trip, too,” Ebert said. His eyes were brilliant and looking over my head, as if he was checking the horizon. Mary had the barman pouring her a drink from her flask, which he put away for her. They had no tonic, so she took a 7-Up and the first hit made her wince. She winked at Ebert. “My main man, Ebert,” I said to her, indicating him with a thumb. The jive felt very artificial and I decided to cut it out. Ebert and I were better friends when we couldn’t manage to shake hands.
“You a trip,” Ebert said again. “Never seen you like this.”
He was still studying things afar, eyes wet.
Watching him, I lost some time. I suddenly noticed Mary at the pool tables. She selected a cue and stood, hip out, chalking it.
“Ebert,” I said, “do you have loose teeth?”
“Naw, man,” he said.
He didn’t want to know why I would ask him something like that. I could not have told him. Something about his dreaming, teary gaze suggested old men without teeth, and I thought I saw him clenching his jaw as if moving his teeth.
“Your teeth are tight?”
“They tight. They loose, too.”
Mary had gotten into a game.
I motioned with three fingers and pointed to Ebert, myself, and Mary, and the barman gave a quick nod upward and filled the order. He carried Mary’s fresh gin and 7-Up to her and she gave me a theatrical scowl.
Ebert put his head down onto the rim of his glass, and when he raised it he had a dark ring imprinted on his forehead. “Never seen you like this.”
He was drunker than I cared to see him as our escort. I gave Mary a little let’s-get-going sign.
She had made friends by amazing all the dudes anywhere near the table. A guy came up to me. “You carry her back sometime.”
We drove home. The Mercury felt like two or three boulders.
In bed I had the spins. I started deep breathing to burn up some alcohol before throwing some up, and got a saliva run.
“Put your foot on the floor,” Mary said.
“It’s on the floor,” I said. “I know about that.”
“You know a lot,” she said. I couldn’t tell if she was mocking.
“What do you call the bedspins?” I asked.
“The whirlies.” I had thought maybe she had an exotic name from her own generation. She reached over and felt my forehead then, as if to say she had not meant to sound sarcastic if she had. I lay there spinning, thinking: She maybe thinks I know things, and maybe knows I don’t.
SO THAT IS HOW I find myself sitting at this wire-mesh table in the mornings, taking hangover notes, reflex motions of a would-have-been scientist. Since that first day three weeks ago we’ve not had anything so spectacular as the drop-in. Hoop and Virginia’s visit established several data points:
1. Sam, or Stump, is presumably dead, and that is the extent of my privileged knowledge.
2. He may have had something to do with Florida, where it is, as if in obeisance to Hoop’s outbursts, somehow tacitly assumed we may go, so long as it—the going—does not
obtain an urgency. There is a sense in which we are packing our things psychologically, and when the moment is right, but not demanding or in any way special, we will take off and simply be there as unprepared and innocent as we were that night in the Car Wash.
3. The no-bio rule is a constant of this universe. You follow it if you want to operate. What I know of Stump and Mary is largely known, and she is indifferent, as she says, to any bio song and dance out of me.
Mary is moving through rich banks of azalea, her head alone above the creamy reds, nickel arc of cold water lobbing heavily all around her. I have begun reading her old acting scripts. They turn up everywhere—in Stump’s clothes, under table legs—and they all seem to have been handled roughly. I have not found one yet with its cover intact.
I don’t know plays beyond the forced college stuff, and I’ve never seen anything like these things. In every one there is a role made for Mary. I found this in a script under Virginia’s daybed—cover gone, as usual—and was stupid enough to ask Mary the title. “I forgot,” she said.
JASMINE: Mother, John took me up to Black River and we went swimming.
MRS. TAYLOR: Are we getting a bit too familiar, Jasmine Ranelle?
JASMINE: Oh, Mother! It was nice. You know, the water is so dark, and when we jumped in, the splashes were white and foamy, like—like the head on an A&W!
MRS. TAYLOR: Like the head on an A&W!
JASMINE: Yes!
MRS. TAYLOR: Jesus my beads.
Mr. Taylor had been shot in a hunting accident and Mrs. Taylor could not be too careful of her daughter and only child. They went round and round over gentlemen callers, with Mrs. Taylor becoming gradually more mannish and violent in her protection of Jasmine Ranelle. Mrs. Taylor could even swing an ax handle!
Mary, I imagine, played a grand Mrs. Taylor. Late in the second act she cracks a suitor over the head while he’s kissing Jasmine—with the flat side of a butcher knife. The audience sees her creep up on them through a scrim, the knife is shadowed hugely behind them, and Mrs. Taylor shrieks into the parlor and slaps the caller with the knife. Suitor flees stage.
JASMINE: You ruin everything, Mother.
MRS. TAYLOR: I used the back side of it, honey.
JASMINE: That’s what you always say.
I had notions of Mary surprising me with versions of her characters—say, the knife trick sometime, but she never did, of course, and was generally not in favor of my associating her with her roles, as our introduction on the lawn had suggested. She was not in favor of anyone mistaking her for a play character.
I had a role to consider myself. Guy, young guy, stops by, moves in, shoots pool, and drinks gin wearing widow’s husband’s pastel golf outfits.
MRS. TAYLOR: You don’t know a thing about a one of those young men.
JASMINE: That’s the point, Mother. I’m getting to know them.
MRS. TAYLOR: You’re getting nowhere!
JASMINE: And you’re seeing to it!
[Runs, crying, to her room]
Mary has trundled by with a wheelbarrow blocked from sight by a bank of azalea. When she slides into view, I see the straining tendons in her neck. Sweat is on her like rain. She is not far from the gin flash point.
She’ll come in, and all the gentle care of plants outside will translate into a ruthless hammering of ice in the kitchen. She uses a chrome gizmo which serves, screwed into respective configurations, as a jigger, a corkscrew, and a hammer. On her way to shower, she will deliver a drink and a hard kiss, holding my neck with the back of her cold hand, leaving me to contemplate the scene. The drink sits tall, emerald lime refracting through sparkling soda, on a queer blond split-level end table with splayed conical legs and rusting brass feet.
Yesterday I suffered the momentary illusion that I was progressing at pool, but I am finally only mastering a more manly look of indifference to the trouncing. You would think her cruel in this if you did not see how absorbed she is, oblivious to even Ray Conniff and Perry Como when she gets a challenging run. She would be mean, I think, only if she were capable of pulling back in my behalf.
After pool Mary asked if I was any good with figures and I said fair and she handed me a desk-style book of checks, which she explained was “a bit behind.” It hadn’t been balanced in eighteen months, there were checks missing, there was a statement showing automatic deposits from two sources which I was told were regular. I made the bold presumption that they were Stump’s pensions of some sort and determined monthly cash flow, within a tolerance of three hundred dollars, and figured the account to be breaking even or gaining slightly.
Mary came out in a waxy wig that frightened me.
“Want anything from the grocery?” she asked.
“What is that?”
“My disguise.”
“For what?”
“Theatergoers.”
“Come on.”
“You’ve read the play. Give me a check.”
“Give me a list, I’ll go. You look like a wick.”
She shrugged and I went shopping. I had indeed read the play. If she was telling the truth about people recognizing her and mistaking her for the character she played, I could believe that they would harass her. They could hardly not.
The woman named Drown was charged with manslaughter (forty-three counts) because she had failed to relocate her shanty town away from the river. A large flood swept her plantation into the Mississippi and to the Gulf.
drown: Negligence! Was I negligent standing on the second floor of my house in a nightgown fighting water moccasins? Was I negligent when I saw my cash box float out the window?
PROSECUTOR: You were negligent when you did not inform your colored workers of the imminent danger.
DROWN: What was there to tell? They could see it was raining. They knew damned well how high the water was—they were at the river day and night salvaging bateaus and wagons and whatever else came down. They were getting rich in trees over the water with gang hooks, hooting and laughing. You don’t know a damned thing about poor niggers if you think they would have listened to a rich white woman telling them to abandon a rolling mint like that river.
[Jury whispers among itself; judge calls for order]
PROSECUTOR: No further questions at this time.
This speech turned the tide in Drown’s favor. She was let off on the manslaughter business, which, it seems, had been only a thin pretext for exposing the real issue: she had two mulatto children drowned in the flood, who were allegedly hers by a black worker named Carlisle. What implicated her was having taken two other children—fully black ones—into her home the night of the flood. This survival of only two of the four children on her place gave credence to the town talk which for years had rumored her to have had twins, no less, by Carlisle, a big handsome man who sometimes worked as her chauffeur.
PROSECUTOR: Were you not in St. Louis for a period of five months seven years ago—seven years before two seven-year-old children were allowed to drown on your property while two others were saved?
DEFENSE: Objection.
COURT: Sustained.
PROSECUTOR: And was not your place run at that time by—
DEFENSE: This line of questioning is irrelevant.
COURT: Can the prosecution prove this questioning related to the specific charges?
prosecutor: We can.
And so Carlisle, otherwise uneducated and ill equipped, had run the Drown place for five months. (The name Drown is the character’s real name, and the playwright seems to have been either ignorant of or delighted by this heavy-handedness.) Apparently his overseerage was competent, for a large crop of high-quality tobacco was harvested, and Carlisle, in his pride, was seen in town smoking self-rolled cigars so large he was dubbed Havana Carlisle. Retrospectively, it was argued that the cigar-parading was evidence that he knew of his mistress’s birthing business in St. Louis.
Drown beat the rap, but Mary Constance Baker had more trouble with it. She was convinced that a part of th
e audience—the mall ladies who recognized her, for instance—believed she slept with blacks. Thus I have come to do the banking and the marketing, as she calls it.
I got back from shopping and it occurred to me for no reason that we had taken another invisible step toward our undeclared trip to Florida, where I swear we are somehow bound to go, whether vexed by Hoop to do so or not. I’ve had my drunk-driving skills checked, can count money, and now have demonstrated some kind of real-world dexterity in fetching three bags of groceries five blocks—these are the talents of secular dependability required of a companion on the road, it would seem, at least in my imagined itinerary of our imagined traveling together.
We had a steak on the garden patio last night and we got on the oilcloth-covered chaise together, Mary sitting in my arms, and upon a casual remark of mine about the flowers, she said, “It’s too cold for them in winter here.” In my no-bio disadvantage, a remark like that indeed suggests Florida, and I think I suggest Stump, whose clothes fit me to a t, and I think, all together, we’re in small maneuvers for leaving for Florida, but there’ll be no song and dance about that either.
“Thought I’d go see an old friend tomorrow, if you’d like to go,” Mary said.
The idea of being alone in her house seemed radical. “Sure.”
“They’re a gas. Hazel and Bruce.”
“Okay.”
She turned around, and up and kissed me so suddenly she reminded me of a girl nervous about sex and deciding to get the butterflies over with. I felt young, too: Stump’s Ban-Lons give me a strange feeling on the skin, not unlike I’m wearing ladies’ nylon hose. The garden was close and green and dark, and a sprinkler was spicking somewhere, casting a mist on us. Mary’s skin has a half-size-too-large feel, giving it a satin effect, a softer touch than a younger woman. It is hard to imagine we want to leave at all. It is a halcyon, unjudged time: billiards crack, drinks fizzle, colors pour into the house from dazzling flowers every morning watered, making it a cozy, gauzy life, as if we were candied fruits sweetening in a snifter of brandy.
A Woman Named Drown Page 4