“And you were living in the city then, weren’t you? So you should know a good place to go. Come on,” I said, taking a few steps down the path, back toward the hospital door. “We’re going to make that phone call.”
“I just told you—”
“You told me you haven’t danced in well over a decade.” I strode down the path, thinking Lydie was behind me, but I’d gone several yards when I heard her say, “Well, have you?”
I had danced with Karol a year or two before he died. It was in our living room. He’d put a record on and extended a hand to Debbie, formally, and asked her to dance, but she’d been too shy. Let Mommy do it, she’d begged. So he had turned to me and just as gravely asked me to dance over the carpet, over the creaking spots in the floor, with the lamps burning on the end tables and Debbie and Joe both sitting on the sofa, laughing whenever Karol spun me out and then back into his arms. Some sort of magic was in the air and we were all caught up in its spell. I felt the brush of my skirt on my legs, the calloused tips of Karol’s fingers pressing my wrists and the back of my neck. I shivered when he did that, feeling suddenly happy with my body, with each bone and muscle—not in the way I would feel later with George, but in the way that I could only feel there, with my husband and our two children, in our home. And when the next song came on, I went over and pulled up Debbie and Joe and the four of us danced in a circle. Afterward, I danced with my son, and Karol spun Debbie—all she wanted to do was spin—and at the end of that song the needle lifted off the record and we all looked around at one another and the magic was gone.
“No,” I answered Lydie, lying. “I don’t think I’ve probably danced since I was sixteen. So come on,” I said and began walking toward the hospital door again. “There was a pay phone in the lobby. I saw it when we came in.”
“A long-distance call . . .”
“Can it, Lydie. I’ll lend you the dime.”
By the time we went back through the glass doors, I could tell that she was getting into the idea of it. Her eyes were shining as she turned to me. “What in the world do I tell George?”
I thought fast. “Tell him my insurance man needed some paperwork signed and he couldn’t possibly get it before tomorrow.”
Lydie nodded, as if this made any kind of sense. Then she asked what I was going to do about Debbie and Joe.
“I’ll call Rena and tell her I can’t get back tonight. She won’t mind having them stay over and she can get them off to the bus stop in the morning.”
The thing was taking shape, putting on substance. It was no longer a fanciful idea, instead a matter to be planned and figured out. Lydie was looking thoughtful, her eyes disappearing in a squint, but the mention of what I would do with Joe and Debbie must have made her think of the boys because she suddenly shook her head. “What about supper?”
“Haven’t you got anything in the freezer?” I’d taken to freezing pot-pies and hamburgers and stews for those evenings when I was so tired of slopping food onto plates at the cafeteria that the thought of spending any more time in the kitchen at home made me feel sick. And I knew Lydie had a deep freeze, just as I did.
“I do have some meatloaf they could eat. It won’t kill them to have a meatloaf sandwich for supper, will it?”
It was clear that she’d made up her mind. We went in through the doors to the bank of pay phones on the wall and I dug around in my bag until I found the change purse at the bottom. Picking up the phone, I called the operator, and in short order the other end was ringing. I handed the receiver to Lydie. George wouldn’t know that I was there with her, listening, and it seemed unfair and somehow wrong for that to happen, so I made my way over to the glass entry and stepped out onto the sidewalk.
I stood for a minute listening to traffic on the nearby streets, tires shushing the asphalt still wet from the morning’s rain. Somewhere nearby, a truck changed gears. An ambulance wailed and screamed, grew closer, stopped. I turned and saw a young woman making her way up the sidewalk, her hair pushed up under a hat, a newspaper folded under her arm. Something in her gait, grim and determined, made me think she was intent on following through with a task that wouldn’t be easy. It could be she was coming to see her husband, who she knew she didn’t love as she should. Or a parent who had turned her loose on the world without well wishes or grace. But as she got closer and I saw the expression on her face—pinched with worry, but angry at the same time—I thought it more likely that she was coming to visit a man she had no business visiting. As she approached, she gave me a look that seemed to dare me to ask what she was doing. If George were in the hospital, I realized, I would look the same.
She reached the door, which was propped open, and passed into the lobby, and a moment later Lydie came out. “George didn’t answer,” she said, “but I called Sally and asked her to pass on the word for me.” Sally was a neighbor on the other side of George and Lydie’s place. She was the rare woman who truly had no interest in gossip. If she stopped to wonder why Lydie was staying overnight in St. Louis, she wouldn’t have asked.
I went inside and placed a call to Rena, who picked up on the second ring and told me not to worry, she’d take care of everything. She would ask questions later; for now it was long-distance, and her curiosity would have to wait to be satisfied.
I didn’t quite know what two women could find to do in St. Louis. Years earlier, before we had Joe, Karol and I had gone to the city for a wedding and stayed overnight. It was one of my cousins who’d got married, in a church that surprised me by feeling on the inside almost exactly the same as the one we attended back home, despite the fact that it stood in the shadow of a big warehouse. Afterward, instead of a stand-up snacks-and-lemonade reception in the lobby, the couple held a luncheon at a restaurant down the street. They’d rented out the whole place and the wedding guests filled it to the walls. We were all of us dressed in our good clothes, the women in sugary pastels, the men with fresh-looking shirts and jackets that creaked when they moved their arms. I had on a dark red dress I hadn’t worn since before the war. It had seemed all right that morning when Iris and Walt picked us up at the house and we’d all driven out through town, down the highway, and over the wide river until the city raised its black arms around us. Once we got to the restaurant, though, the dress seemed a bit shabby. The woman our cousin was marrying worked in the accessories department at Famous-Barr, and many of her friends at the wedding were single girls who worked with her on the floor. They all had chic haircuts that made their heads look like they were resting on a half-shell, and they wore frothy dresses in every pale shade of pink, green, or blue. They were women of a type I wasn’t used to seeing in the world, women whose hands danced birdlike through the air as they spoke, women with fluty laughs and sharp glinting eyes.
Next to those women, I could practically feel the dust sifting down from the folds of my dress, which was not cut simply enough to pass for new. It had a small crocheted lace collar and loose sleeves that ended just above the elbow at a cuff. The dresses the Famous-Barr ladies wore all had straight sleeves that went to a point halfway between the elbow and wrist, and I could see plainly the beauty of this style, how it made their arms look thin, and the simplicity of the cut made the color seem expensive. They were all beautiful as butterflies, lit on their chairs at the tables spread around the restaurant. I’d looked at them and thought, I am out of my league.
I had this thought again as Lydie and I stood on the sidewalk in front of the hospital, trying to figure out where to go to have a good time. It felt like we were holding something precious and dangerous and wild, like we’d had a monkey shipped over from Africa and had to figure out what to do with it.
“I tell you what,” I said at last. “Why don’t we ask where a good hotel is, and a restaurant. We’ll take ourselves out to dinner, have a real night out on the town.”
Lydie lifted her brows. “You know better than me.”
Not one hour later, we’d settled into our room at the Drake-Anders, a small
place on Hickory Street. It had been two separate row houses until sometime in the 1930s, when the walls were knocked down and a few more bathrooms put in, and now it was a hotel, not too chic, not too squalid, either. We didn’t have our own bathroom, but the one across the hall was reserved for ladies. The room itself had a vanity with a mirror, which was enough for our purposes: between the two of us, we had two combs and a tube of lipstick.
It was barely afternoon. We weren’t in the hospital any longer, but the sense of it was still with us: the long halls with hollow footfalls. It made me think we needed to get out of that room as quickly as possible.
Out on the street in search of a place to go, Lydie started telling me a story about a time years before, when Bobby wasn’t born yet and Gene was just a few months old. He couldn’t crawl, not quite, though felt certain he should, so when you set him on the ground he would lunge his top half forward, again and again, until he lunged to one side and fell over. “Oh, it was funny,” Lydie said. “Sometimes George and I would nearly die laughing when we saw him do it.” Then they’d set him upright again and he’d topple again. And again and again. You remember, Lydie said. I was walking beside her down the sidewalk, ducking the drips of rain from awnings overhead—it had rained again while we were settling in at the hotel—and at the same time I was keeping a lookout for a bar where we could go in and get ourselves a drink. I remember, I said.
Well, George’s uncle died and he had to go down to Louisville for the funeral. He took a bus and left Lydie alone with their son for three days.
It was just him and her in the house, and he’d squawk if she didn’t let him down on the ground, then he’d tip over and he’d squawk at that, too. Now when he fell, though, Lydie wouldn’t laugh. She’d sit him upright and move away, out of sight. He could only twist his neck around so far, and he’d end up falling again, and sometimes she left him that way and he’d cry, but he managed all right. They’d laid down some carpeting in the sitting room and though the floor was cold in the winter, it wasn’t frigid.
She began leaving the room. She’d go into the kitchen and wash dishes: the sound of the running water covered Gene’s cries. She’d go outside and stamp around in the frozen grass. She’d wander out to the road and keep watch for anyone coming or going.
“Then it came to me that I could just leave him like that and he’d be fine—thirty minutes, an hour. The worst he could do was cry and mess himself.”
By this point Lydie and I were sitting at a bar down the street from the hotel, and this story, which was getting more detailed by the minute, no longer sounded true. I’d known Lydie for years, and she’d never said anything about it. I didn’t remember George leaving her alone for three days with their baby, either. But it had the tone of a confession, and I didn’t stop her from giving it.
We were sipping gin fizzes. I don’t think she had ever had gin before because when she took her first drink, her whole head jerked back as if she’d been slapped. I asked her if she wanted to order something else, and she shook her head. She took another drink, this time steeling herself for the taste, her mouth set in a grim line and her eyes fixed on some point on the wall behind the bar. That wall was painted a shade of red that made you think of lipstick and fingernail polish. It must have taken ten coats. It looked like if you pressed on it, you’d leave a dent.
“Anyway,” Lydie said, “one day he was squawking, so I set him down, and then I went outside and got in the car and drove off.”
She had both hands around the glass in her hand and she was talking in a sort of daze, like she’d done the week before, talking about Paris. “You could’ve driven over to our place,” I offered. “I would’ve been glad to see you.”
“Without Gene, you would have? I show up at your house and you say, hello, and where’s your baby? And I tell you I left him sitting on the living room floor? Oh, sure, I can just imagine that.” Lydie was staring at the red wall again, and I looked at it, too, as she went on. “I drove all the way up to Alton that day. I hadn’t planned on it, but once I was driving I needed a place to go, and I kept heading up the highway. After a half hour or so, I looked around and saw where I was, and I decided I wanted to keep going and drive up to see that Indian rock painting they have. You know the one?”
I had heard of it—some painting on the bluffs up north of Alton; there was an Indian myth about the magical bird that it depicted, but I was fuzzy on the details. I took another sip of my drink. It was down to the ice, and I wasn’t certain if Lydie would want another. I thought I’d better take my time and swirl it around a little, make the ice cubes dance. But Lydie paused her story to call the bartender over. She ordered a sherry for herself and another gin fizz for me. “I must have read about it in the paper,” she went on as the bartender began to fix our drinks. “I never had been up there or given it a single thought. But once I realized I was driving north, I figured I might as well make it my destination.”
Just then, I heard the door open and turned to see three men in vests and shirtsleeves looking for a place to sit. Several small tables lined one wall and most of them were free, but we were sitting at the center of the bar, taking up room. Lydie twisted around on her stool to see what had grabbed my attention. When she turned back, her face was tight. We weren’t women who drank at bars, and we weren’t used to sitting close to men who weren’t known to us in some way—known, at least, in the way that every farmer’s wife knows a farmer when she sees one. If those three men had been dressed in blue jeans and muddy boots with bits of hay stuck to their shirts, if they’d had creased skin at the backs of their necks, then we would have known how to read them in an instant. They would have sat at the bar, all in a row, but their talk would have been quiet and slow. Whole minutes might have passed without them saying a thing, and when the bartender asked what they wanted, they’d have told him he might as well go ahead and bring them some beers.
These men were not of that type. They were speaking in the way of a swing band—all at once and fast, but somehow blending together. The shortest of the men was standing a little forward of the others, and I knew he was the one who would make the decisions. I saw his eyes slide over Lydie and me: he didn’t think we were much worth looking at—too old, too weather-beaten. But he walked up to the bar, nodding toward his friends to show that they should follow, and he put both hands on the wooden surface and craned his neck forward to get a good look at the bottles on the shelf.
I leaned in toward Lydie. “You were telling me about the drive you took up to Alton.”
She gave me a startled look. “Oh, why, I guess . . .” She stopped and pressed her mouth into a line. The short man was standing right behind her, asking the bartender about some particular whiskey he wanted and didn’t see on the shelf.
“Don’t you mind them,” I said in a low voice. “Did you ever see it—the painting?”
The bartender, who was doing his best to answer the man’s questions about which liquors they had in stock and to listen as he explained why the one he wanted was superior to all others, had finally finished making our drinks. He slid them in front of us and took away our empty glasses at the same time.
Lydie considered her drink. “I found it, but it’s not exactly a bird they have painted there. Looks more like a dragon, scales and all. The Piasa Bird, that’s what it’s called.”
“What’s it mean?” I asked. “Piasa.”
“‘Bird That Devours Men.’ That’s what I heard,” the short man interjected. “I’ve got a friend went up to see it.” He’d turned, his shoulders steering his body toward us, and he looked like he wanted to wink. Instead he just smiled. “Sorry to jump in. I’m a nosy son of a gun.”
“That’s all right,” I said, and Lydie nodded. This was all part of some script. We’d come to a bar to talk to some men, and here we were talking. “You haven’t seen it yourself?”
“I try to stay this side of the river.” He took a step away to retrieve his drink from the bar, and one of his friends
grabbed the opportunity to step into the space and widen it into a circle.
“What’s that mean?” his friend asked in a grinning way. “You got something against Illinois, Wendell?”
The short man shrugged. “Nothing against it. Just nothing for it much, either.” He stopped to look at Lydie and me, raised one hand like a policeman, and cocked his head. “You aren’t from over there, are you? ’Cause if so, I’ve stepped in it.”
“You’ve stepped in it,” I said.
“Now, me,” the friend said, “I’ve got family over in your parts. In Gravois?”
Lydie explained that it was a little northward, and then glanced at me as if she thought she needed my agreement for the men to believe her. I took a sip of my drink and asked the friend if he’d ever been there.
He told us he hadn’t, but he wouldn’t mind going sometime. Lydie and I didn’t know what to say to that. He was an unremarkable-looking man in every way, except that his ears stuck out from his head so far they looked like they could pick up radio signals from New York. Still, he was fun to talk to. He was a man and a stranger, and there was something reassuring about the fact that he looked like Dopey from Disney’s Snow White.
“So what are you all doing in St. Louis?” This came from the short man—Wendell. He pulled two cigarettes from a pack and handed one to Lydie and one to me. She took the cigarette and rested it between two fingers; I laid mine on the bar. After Wendell had lit everyone else’s cigarettes, he glanced at the one I’d laid down and put his matches back in his pocket.
“We came in to do some shopping,” I said, figuring this would hold no interest for any of them. But Wendell asked where we’d been, and without waiting for an answer, proceeded to explain the best areas to go. “You’ve got the Famous-Barr down on Locust,” he said, “but my wife, she likes Stix better for clothes. You’re going clothes shopping, I guess?”
Lydie nodded, looking relieved. He’d mentioned his wife, which meant we could talk now without worrying about where any of it was heading. “I’d like to get a couple new dresses,” she said suddenly, as if this shopping expedition were an actual thing. She held her cigarette out and stared at its burning end. “You wouldn’t believe how long it’s been since I did something like that.”
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