A Book of Common Prayer

1

SHE HAD BEEN GOING TO ONE AIRPORT OR ANOTHER FOR four months, one could see it, looking at the visas on her passport. All those airports where Charlotte Douglas’s passport had been stamped would have looked alike. Sometimes the sign on the tower would say “Bienvenidos” and sometimes the sign on the tower would say “Bienvenue,” some places were wet and hot and others dry and hot, but at each of those airports the pastel concrete walls would rust and stain and the swamp off the runway would be littered with the fuselages of cannibalized Fairchild F–227’s and the water would need boiling.

I knew why Charlotte went to the airport even if Victor did not.

I knew about airports.

People who go to the airport first invent some business to conduct there, a ticket to be adjusted, a query about cargo rates, a newspaper unavailable elsewhere. Then they convince themselves that the airport is cooler than the hotel, or has superior chicken salad. Then one day they see a plane, “their” plane, one plane of many but somehow marked, a mirage on the tarmac.

They pay the lunch check.

They buy the ticket, they glance at the clock above the counter.

Quite as if they were ordinary travelers.

Quite as if they traveled on ordinary timetables.

I supposed that one day Charlotte Douglas would be sitting in the Boca Grande airport and would see her plane and get on it, just as she had clearly gotten on her plane from New Orleans to Mérida and Mérida to Antigua and Antigua to Guadeloupe and Guadeloupe to Boca Grande, supposed that she would maintain that blind course south, but she never did.

2

LOOK AT THE VISAS. TRACE BACK THE COURSE.

Before Boca Grande she had been on Guadeloupe.

A few tourists had been killed by terrorists on Guadeloupe that year and until the Air France crash Charlotte was the only guest at the hotel, which had been built just before the trouble and was very large with open terraces where the rain splashed. Her clothes mildewed. The untouched butter in the little crocks went rancid by noon and by dinner was dusted with the fine volcanic ash still falling from an eruption two years before. One of the killings had taken place on the dining terrace of the hotel, and there was a stubborn bloodstain on the concrete at which a busboy scrubbed desultorily every afternoon.

After the Paris — Lima flight hit the volcano there was another woman at the hotel, the wife of the Air France investigator, but she and Charlotte did not speak. The woman was very small and tanned and she played backgammon all day with the beach boys, cheating and winning. Charlotte rented a Peugeot to drive up the volcano but at the first turn she came upon a large black plastic tarpaulin on which lay fragments of metal and one teddy bear. As she drove back to the hotel it occurred to Charlotte that Marin could have been on that plane under a different name.

Marin could also have been on the Delta flight that crashed at Dulles.

Marin could have been on the Alitalia that exploded over the North Atlantic.

Marin was loose in the world and could leave it any time and Charlotte would have no way of knowing.

Before Guadeloupe Charlotte had been on Antigua.

Winds blew on Antigua and she rarely left the hotel. She was uncertain where the hotel even was, except that it was a long way from the airport: she recalled taxi rides through the cane and a small one-story hotel on the water. Her skin burned in the wind and in the odd glare off the opaque clouded sea and after the first week she did not go outside. In the evenings Charlotte and the other off-season guests, two Lesbians from Toronto and for a while a man and a woman, Seventh-Day Adventists from Newport Beach, California, were served conch stew at a single table by the swimming pool. Perhaps because the man and the woman from Newport Beach were not married to each other or perhaps because as Seventh-Day Adventists they did not approve of drinking they would appear each night only when the plates were set on the table and vanish directly after the Key Lime pie. For the rest of the evening Charlotte would sit by the pool and look at the illustrated books the manager pressed on her, cheaply bound books with mildewed pages and titles like The Funeral of King George VI and The Marriage of Princess Margaret, and the Lesbians would get drunk on rum punches and dance to the Mabel Mercer records they had brought from Toronto. They had made a new life in Toronto and they were thinking about making another new life on Antigua but they were both Americans and they had both gone to Miss Porter’s School in Farmington, Connecticut.

“Not together,” the younger one said. “Not at the same time we didn’t.”

“We were both at Farmington,” the older one said.

“At different times.” The younger one took Charlotte’s hand and studied it. “You have a beautiful life-line.”

The older one wept.

Mabel Mercer sang “My Shining Hour.”

Charlotte put down The Marriage of Princess Margaret and stared at the sea. She had the sense that she could swim from where she was to somewhere else, but she had no idea what lay out there, or in which direction she was staring. In any case she could not swim at night because she could not see the bottom. She remembered swimming at night with Marin on the reef off Waikiki and screaming when Marin’s leg brushed hers.

Before Antigua Charlotte had been in Mérida.

Mérida was where she had taken the baby to die of complications, her baby, Leonard’s baby, the baby she was carrying when she left California with Warren, the baby born prematurely, hydrocephalic, and devoid of viable liver function in the Ochsner Clinic in New Orleans. The doctors had said the baby would die in the hospital but it did not. It took a long time to die even in Mérida. She had taken the baby to Mérida because she thought it would die faster there but it did not. Toward the beginning of the two weeks she waited for the baby to die she moistened its lips with tap water and told it about the places they would see together.

They would of course see the Great Banyan at Calcutta.

They would see the stone slabs in the conservatory at Bangalore.

They would see the monkeys in the primeval garden at Singapore, they would see the Royal Palm Avenue at Peradeniya, due to reach its best appearance in the year 2050.

They would not see the cacti at San Marino. Marin had not minded the cacti at San Marino but Charlotte had. San Marino had given Charlotte bad dreams. Cacti. Fungi. Fat dry spikes. San Marino would give the baby bad dreams too.

“No San Marino,” Charlotte promised the baby. “Quite frankly you wouldn’t like it.”

After a few days Charlotte exhausted her memory of botanical gardens around the world and began planning one for Mérida. She “named” everything around her. She asked the botanical names of all the plants outside the hotel in Mérida and listed them by genera and subgenera, made notations about color variation in seasonal blossoms, and engaged the manager of the hotel in an astonishing discussion of why he did not dedicate the parking lot to the cultivation of native flora; by the middle of the second week she had progressed from flora to fauna and was cataloguing the birds, the lizards, the insects that bred in the hotel plumbing and crawled from every drain in spite of daily flushings with Ortho-Muerte.

Typhoid was epidemic in the Yucatán that year but still the baby did not die.

By the end of the second week Charlotte was cataloguing the bacteria, the parasites, the sources of fever and intestinal infection: poinciana and poinsettia gave way to salmonella, another tropical flowering. The night in Mérida when the diarrhea finally came Charlotte held the small warm dehydrating creature in her arms all night. Toward midnight she weakened, tried to charter a plane to take her baby back to New Orleans or even to Miami, but no one answered the telephone at the airport, and when Charlotte went out there by taxi with the baby in her arms she found only the controller playing cards with a couple of Yucatair mechanics and they said there were no charters in Mérida that night.

3

LEONARD HAD NOT WANTED HER TO SEE THE BABY BUT she had.

Leonard had wanted her to leave the baby to die in the Ochsner Clinic but she would not.

There had been words about it.

There had been words between Leonard and Warren about it in the room at the Ochsner Clinic but she could barely remember the words.

There had been words in the room at the Ochsner Clinic and there had also been peonies. She could remember the peonies very clearly and she could remember the words only barely and mainly she remembered that she had not wanted the baby to die without her.

The baby did not die at the Mérida airport but an hour later, in the parking lot of the Coca-Cola bottling plant on the road back into town. The baby had gone into convulsions and projectile vomiting in the taxi and Charlotte had made the driver stop in the parking lot. She walked with the baby on the dark asphalt. She sang to the baby out on the edge of the asphalt where the rushes grew and a few trailers were parked. By the time the baby died the taxi had left but it was only a mile or two to the Centro Médico de Yucatán and Charlotte walked there with the baby in her arms, trusting at last, its vomit spent. The doctor did not speak English but marked the death certificate in English: death by complications.

“Complications of what,” Charlotte said.

“Complications of dying,” the doctor said. “Her name in Christ?”

The Louisiana birth certificate said Douglas, Baby Girl. The Mexican tourist card said Douglas, Infanta. Leonard said it. Charlotte said baby.

“Charlotte,” Charlotte said. “Her name is Charlotte.”

“Carlota,” the doctor said, and made the sign of the Cross before he signed the certificate.

Carlota Douglas was buried in a short coffin which the doctor’s brother-in-law would not close until Charlotte had inspected his work. He was very proud of the work he had done on the baby. He was very grateful to have the job and he wanted Charlotte to be pleased. He had wrapped the baby in a lavender nylon shawl and put a bow in her hair and tiny red shoes on her feet. Charlotte had looked once and then away. She had paid the doctor and his brother-in-law in American ten-dollar bills. Before she left Mérida she called Leonard in San Francisco and told him that the baby was dead.

“I’ll come get you if you want,” Leonard had said.

“Whatever you want,” Charlotte had said.

“You have to say.”

“They put shoes on her feet. Red shoes.”

“It’s over. Forget it. You never should have seen it. You never should have.”

“Warren’s not responsible. For my coming down here. If that’s what you think.”

“No,” Leonard had said. “That’s not what I think.”

“I think I better call you back later,” Charlotte had said, but she had not called Leonard back later.

She had not called Leonard back later and she had not called Warren at all.

In the evening before the plane left for Antigua she had gone back to the cemetery and tried to find the baby’s grave but she could not. It was not a large cemetery but there seemed a large number of small fresh unmarked graves. She left the bougainvillea she had torn from the wall of the hotel on one of them.