Loving Women

by Pete Hamill

  And the odor of my shame would cling to me all my days.

  On Monday, I drifted into routine and the shame began to ease. Harrelson wasn’t talking to me. Not since the night I’d slammed him into the wall. I always said hello when we passed each other, but he kept walking, his eyes not even seeing me. It was as if I were black. Sometimes he and Boswell would look across at me and Miles Rayfield and something would be said and they’d giggle. I asked Boswell about this once, and he said, “Aw, you know Harrelson. He’s just a redneck. Don’t take his boolshit too serious.”

  “I don’t,” I said. “But he does. He thinks Miles and I are queer or something.”

  “Shit, he thinks Eisenhower’s queer. Don’t let it bother you none.”

  At lunch time that day, I walked over to the hangars to see Sal and Max, and there was Mercado just inside the hangar, looking dashing in a flight suit. He held a cup of coffee and was staring at a large blackboard that listed pilots and flight times.

  “How are you?” I said.

  “Ah, Mister Devlin. ¿Como estas?”

  “How was your trip to Mexico?” I said.

  “Ah, hell, I didn’t go,” he said. “The last minute, I hear there was a flight to New York. From Mainsi’. So I take that instead. But you know what? I end up in Philadelphia. I think I am the first Mexican in history to ever go to Philadelphia. I wait three hours for a plane, then at last I give up and got a bus to New York …”

  “What did you think?”

  “I was there before with my father, when I was twelve,” he said. “So I have seen it before, New York. My father was then working for the Mexican government. It’s a great city, no? Life! Energy! But now, it looks a little more bad. More dirty. More crowded. And expensive ¡Ay, caray!” He smiled. “I should have gone to Mexico.”

  My stomach was turning over. He took her to New York! That’s all Eden ever wanted to see and he took her! Anger shoved my shame away. Anger at her, anger at myself for being such a goddamned jerk. Go ahead (I said). Ask him. Ask him did he take her there!

  “You go alone?” I said (trying to be casual, gazing off at the list of flights and landing strips and aircraft numbers) …

  “Yes, what a sin! You ever try to get a girl on a Navy plane? Easier to get a Russian to come with you. But there were plenty of girls there, oh, boy. They got some beauties in New York, no kidding.” He laughed. “All giants, too. What the hell they feed those women in New York? All big, like lampposts, those girls. And one disgusting habit: they all chew gum.”

  “ ‘Meet me in New York some time,” I said. “I’ll introduce you to some short girls that don’t chew gum.”

  “They got any medium size?” he said, and we both laughed.

  I was near giddy as I walked to the mess hall. Captain Pritchett’s flowers were rioting happily against the walls of all the buildings on the base, red, yellow, violet. Sprinklers played brightly on the lawns and the grass looked green and plump with spring.

  “Hey, lover man.”

  Bobby Bolden came up beside me, the two of us moving toward the mess hall.

  “I don’t know what you did Saturday night, man, but that Winnie done gone crazy.”

  I was scared for a moment, then saw Bobby Bolden’s dirty grin, and smiled in what I thought was a cool way. That was one of the moments in my life when I truly felt abruptly older, as if some ability of mine had been ratified and granted approval. And I felt somehow bigger. I said (trying to underplay it), “She’s some woman.”

  He looked at me and shook his head. It might have been in pity.

  In late afternoon, I wrote a letter to my father, telling him the usual bland lies about life in the Navy. I didn’t tell him about Eden Santana; Red Cannon; Miles Rayfield and Freddie Harada; Kuniyoshi or Ben Shahn; Winnie; the Blackhawk Club; the Dirt Bar; Dixie Shafer; the Kingdom of Darkness; Captain Pritchett’s lost wife; Mercado; Sal’s grandfather; or the way to use vine charcoal. I told him the weather was nice and the food okay and the beaches beautiful. I sent him a picture of me under a palm tree with the snow coming down, taken by Becket. I asked my brothers to write me. I was sealing the letter when the telephone jangled on my desk. I picked it up and said hello.

  “It’s me,” Eden Santana said. “I’m back.”

  Chapter

  48

  What Eden Santana Told Me (I)

  You’ve never had a child, so you don’t know. But I have two girls, real pretty, one fifteen, the other ten. But just saying it that way doesn’t explain anything. I could be describing someone else’s kids, I could be talking about dogs or canaries. You see, having children’s different from anything else on this poor earth, and maybe you can’t ever explain it to people that never have had them. But those girls come from me, from my body, I held them in me, I gave them life in blood and pain, and then nursed them and watched them learn to walk and say words and ask for more than food, hear me? You ain’t ever had that, child, so you don’t know why I up and went when I got the word. Maybe you’ll never know. Maybe no man ever could.

  Those girls been part of me for half my life, since when I was younger than you are now, the oldest one anyways. I never had a time after I was sixteen that I didn’t have a little girl pulling on me, followin me from room to room, callin for me scared in the night. Never. Maybe that’s part of why I’m here and not in New Orleans. To be free of that love, that need, for just a little while. That and James Robinson. Maybe you don’t want to hear about James Robinson but I better tell you, child, because if you’re talkin to me you’re talkin to someone who is part of James Robinson. As James Robinson sure is part of me. There’s no getting round it. He is there. In my life. Important as those little girl children.

  I was fifteen when I met him, the summer of thirty-eight. He came walking down Burgundy Street in a white suit and white shoes and the sun was on him and he was more than six foot tall and I thought I was seein some kinda god that come rising up outta the swamps and the morning and landed in New Orleans and came walkin right at me, so close I could reach out and touch him. He walked in a rollin way, on the balls of his feet, like he knew all kinds of things and had been everywhere and he looked at me and paused and then kept on walkin, headin for Esplanade and the Faubourg Marigny. At the corner, he stopped and looked back and he had me.

  I didn’t know him and neither did anyone else. He just came from nowhere and then I was pregnant and then he married me, dressed in that damned white suit, and we set up housekeepin. My daddy didn’t talk to me for three months after the wedding, cuz he didn’t like James Robinson from the startup. I was a girl and Robinson was a man and my daddy saw things I didn’t see, I guess. Robinson wouldn’t tell me what he did, he said it wasn’t women’s business, but he brought home money, lots of it, and my family helped me with the furnishing and the cooking, cause he had no family and this was the Depression still and everybody was tight, even them that had. James Robinson would bring me flowers, and fancy hats, and pretty clothes, and once even a pink silk parasol to hold off the sun. But most days he went to work in the evening and slept late in the morning and when I said to him at last that I wanted a body beside me at night, when I said I wanted him to do with me what he wanted to do, when I said I wanted to do with him some things too, that I had urgings, that I had wife need in me, James Robinson just smiled and said, Yes, my dear. That was all: Yes, my dear.

  So I followed him one evening, me all swollen up with the first girl, feelin fat and watery and ugly, afraid that he had some other woman, some life that I didn’t have a part of. And he went into a club on Rampart Street, with men and women at the door, all of them nodding at him when he went in, some dark place where they all knew him and I felt a chill then in August, a cold breeze upon my heart, knowing that James Robinson must be a man who was living off women. Just like that, just watching him, I wondered too did he have something, a disease or something, that made him scared to come to me in the night. And I was terrible afraid, not of that, not catchin something
, but afraid that when the baby was born, he would take me to that place on Rampart Street and make me work for him.

  But knowing that, knowing where he went, I couldn’t come to askin him about it. It was his secret and it was mine, but I never told him of my knowing of it. I didn’t sleep with him for the rest of the time of the waiting. I felt the baby’s life in me, the stretching and pushing, that other heartbeat, that new need for room that the baby wanted: and that was what I had instead of James Robinson. We called the first baby Nola after New Orleans Louisiana. Nola Robinson. He thought she was the cutest thing and he held her in his arms and was sweet to her and brought her all silk and satin clothes, but he never did come to me in the night, not for months, saying to me I had to heal long after I was healed, saying it wunt a good thing to have too much of that too soon and then I got mad and asked him did he get what he needed in the house on Rampart Street and that was the first time he beat me.

  He put the baby down and tore off my clothes and took a strap to me, puttin welts all over me. And when I was bent over on the floor, weeping and hurt and the baby cryin, he just dressed and went out the door and walked away. He come home that night and run his hands over the welts and heard me cryin and then he finally came to me. And finished quick, with me all achin and unfilled and everything in me all coiled up and ready to burst, but not bursting, ready to be lost but not losing, ready to die but not dying, and he said, Yes, my dear. Like that. Yes, my dear.

  So I knew that was what it would always be like with him and I kept it secret. He would come to me only when he caused pain. He would beat me and hurt me and then come to me. So that I hated it, the bed part. I didn’t want it, the loving part. I erased it, the wife part. I watched movies and when people kissed I thought Yes, my dear. And waited for the beating to begin. I’d read a novel, and when it got to the point where they would sleep together, I began to tremble, afraid for the person in the book, afraid for me, thinking, Yes, my dear and Yes, my dear and Yes, my dear. I put everything into Nola, I touched her, squeezed her, kept her too long at my breast. And James Robinson, with his long body like a god, with his fine wild eyes and white suits, he just kept leaving for Rampart Street.

  My mother must have picked up the grieving, knew there was an emptiness, a thing not happening. She knew just about everything about me anyway, cause I’d come from her the way Nola came from me, I’d been her extra heartbeat. And she started visiting in the afternoons, after James Robinson rose from his bed, and she would look at me and then hold the baby, then look at me and change the sheets, then look at me and go to the garden, then look at me and touch my face and say, finally, the last time, tired of looking, tired of not saying what she wanted to say, held my hand and said, You a woman now. You got to get you a man.

  And I knew she was right. I was a woman now. I’d had a child within me and a child at my breast. I had a right to have a man. But there was one big problem: I had made a holy vow. That promise meant something to me. The keeping of it. And there was another thing: I was afraid. Afraid that a new man would be just another James Robinson. Sometimes I would look at men, all lathered with sweat in the hot sun fixing the streets, or delivering ice, or sawing off limbs in trees full of Spanish moss and I would imagine how they’d feel beside me, on me, in me, and then stop: seeing in my mind James Robinson in white walking up the street like a god. And not trusting myself, I closed up, sealed myself. I didn’t even cry anymore, didn’t fall into grieving. My mother saw that too.

  And then the war started and the army took James Robinson and I was happy. We closed the little house and I moved back home with Nola and my mother cooked and cleaned and I started to read. I read every kind of book from the library down on Burgundy Street. I read Gone With the Wind, but that didn’t sucker me in; I knew what Rhett Butler was, I seen my Rhett Butler go into a house on Rampart Street. I read Anna Karenina by this Russian Tolstoy, and that was better. He knew something about people. I read poetry. And I read books on nature. I learned the names of all the trees and plants, the birds and the insects and the animals. Readin those books, I was suppose to be teachin Nola, but I was really teachin me. My father was workin at the Higgins Shipyard then, making torpedo boats, and the money was comin in for the first time in his life and he bought a car and taught me how to drive and then when we had paid the car he bought a house out by the Atchafalaya River, an old house and small, but with plenty of room for us because my brothers and my sister were all grown up and gone by then. So my mother and I made that sweet little house into something. We planed the wood clean, we changed the windows, we painted everything white, inside and out, and hung pictures that she bought in the old markets in the Quarter, we scraped down the wide plank floors and stained them dark and shellacked them and kept polishin them until they were nearly black. And I was glad bein there, sweatin at the work and seein Nola walk. I was happy. James Robinson was gone. I hoped he’d never come back.

  Nola learned to talk in that little house beside the river, and we had a Victrola and she began to sing too, learnin all the words of some songs before she could even make full sentences. My father loved her. Probably more than he loved me. On weekends he would take her fishing in the bayou, givin her a line, and they’d come home with buckets of catfish and sometimes my sister would come out with her children and we’d eat all night and sing the old songs and Nola would sing what she learned from the phonograph, and I was happy. Sealed up, closed, manless and happy.

  I expected to hear some news from James Robinson, but I sure wasn’t eatin my heart out over him. The truth be told, I dreaded hearin from him, or seein him show up. There wasn’t a letter from him, not a call, and then I started hoping that one day someone from the army would come to the door, looking sad and proper, like all the scenes in the movies, and he would tell me that James Robinson had been killed in action. The truth be told, I came to want that. The truth be told, I wanted him dead. Every day, I read The Item and The Times-Picayune, lookin at the list of casualties, hoping in a shameful way that he’d be there among them and then I’d be free. I’d be through with the holy vow. I could start another life. The real one.

  But the war ground on and there was no word about James Robinson, and Nola started school, and I didn’t even think anymore about a man beside me in the night. And then the war ended. There was a big celebration in New Orleans and we drove in, and my father said, “Well, now we see if the Depression’s really over,” and my mother looked at him in a funny way and there were soldiers and sailors all drunk on Bourbon Street and brass bands and girls dancin and people makin love in public and noise like the greatest Mardi Gras in history and we cheered and shouted and then went home. I lay in bed thinkin of all those young men I’d seen in the Quarter and how I could have had all of them that night, in cars or hotels or backyards, and didn’t want even one. And I couldn’t sleep, thinkin of their young hard bodies and sad drunk eyes, and got up and went outside, where it was hot and buggy, August it was, and my father was alone out there on a white chair, just looking off toward the swamp. He couldn’t sleep either. He said, I’ll have to look for another job tomorrow. He said, They ain’t gonna need no more torpedo boats. And, of course, he was right. The war was over and both of us were sadder than we’d ever been.

  I was in the garden a few weeks later, with the first cool breeze of the autumn blowin and no sun under a haze, when I heard the car and looked through the loblolly pines and saw him. James Robinson. Walkin with a limp, dressed in an army uniform. I stood up. He saw me. I waited. I wasn’t gonna run to him. I waited and waited and he came to me limping and reached out his hands and I could see that he was much older now and he was cryin. So I hugged him and he hugged me and my mother came out and saw us and then took my father’s car to school to get Nola.

  James Robinson cried and cried and said he was sorry for everything, for the way he used to treat me, for not writin, for being the way he used to be before the war. But he was different now, he said. The war had changed him.
He’d almost died and knew when he didn’t die that there were things in his life that meant something and now he was home, had been home for three days, had walked the streets lookin for me, askin where we’d gone, and now he’d found me and now everything was going to be okay, now everything was going to be real truly fine, now everything was goin to be the way it should have been in the first place.

  My mother arrived with Nola, and the father and the daughter regarded each other like strangers. Until the girl just started bawlin and James Robinson did too, and they hugged each other and took a walk down by the water and talked for a long time and I thought, Maybe it’s true, maybe it’s gonna be real truly fine. He came back holdin Nola’s hand, and then my mother said to Nola, well, we better go spread the word, girl, so your momma and your poppa can be alone.

  Alone with me, he was desperate, comin at me like a crazy man, sobbin, apologizin, tellin me not to look at his leg, not to touch it, not to let that leg bother me. I laid with him, and he started saying the names of places, all in the Pacific, the names of strange islands and old battles, all the while askin for forgiveness. Until at last I gave him what he wanted. And renewed the vow, in the back bedroom where everything had for so long been sealed.

  We moved out two weeks later, to another house in the country that he bought with cash. He said he won the money gamblin while he was in the Pacific and I believed him and maybe he told the truth. But he said he didn’t want to go back to the city, that he had no more to do with that life, that he would never even look at the house on Rampart Street again. He had money from the government too, he said and that helped when we needed paint and shellac and furnishings, and he kept busy all winter cleanin and fixin the house and choppin trees to make a path to a bayou, saying here we’d be happy, here we’d be safe. He didn’t much like goin to my momma’s house. He said he didn’t like people watchin him. Not even relatives. And maybe I should’ve known then. But I wanted to believe what he was, that he’d changed, that he was this new man, that he’d been made different by the war. Made good.