A Book of Common Prayer

1

FEVERS RELAPSE HERE.

Bacteria proliferate.

Termites eat the presidential palace, rust eats my Oldsmobile.

Twice a year the sun is exactly vertical, and nothing casts a shadow.

The bite of one fly deposits an egg which in its pupal stage causes human flesh to suppurate.

The bite of another deposits a larval worm which three years later surfaces on and roams the human eyeball.

Everything here changes and nothing appears to. There is no perceptible wheeling of the stars in their courses, no seasonal wane in the length of the days or the temperature of air or earth or water, only the amniotic stillness in which transformations are constant. As elsewhere, certain phases in these transformations are called by certain names (“Olds-mobile,” say, and “rust”), but the emotional field of such names tends to weaken as one leaves the temperate zones. At the equator the names are noticeably arbitrary. A banana palm is no more or less “alive” than its rot.

Is it.

I tried to tell Charlotte this but once again Charlotte did not quite see my point.

Charlotte did not take the equatorial view.

Of anything that had happened.

Charlotte did not even remember much of what had happened during the six months between leaving California with Warren and taking the baby to Mérida. She remembered certain days and nights very clearly but she did not remember their sequence. Someone had shuffled her memory. Certain cards were lost. She and Warren had been in the South. She knew that much. They had been in New Orleans a while in January and February, and then again when it was hot and raining and the baby was showing, she remembered that. She remembered arriving at the New Orleans airport. The airport must have been in January because the second time they arrived in New Orleans, the time it was hot and raining and the baby was showing and the girl was with them, they had not flown in but driven in, from Greenville. They had eaten some crab bisque once in Greenville. They had made that crab bisque in Greenville. She had bought the crabs and Warren had shown her how to make the bisque.

“You’re ruining it,” she had said. “You’re putting in too much salt.”

“You don’t know anything about it.”

“Taste it, it’s brine.”

“Taste it yourself,” Warren had said, and pushed the wooden spoon in her face. The soup had gone up her nose and she had choked and he had hit her between the shoulder blades until she stopped. “I never cared for anybody like I cared for you but you never knew your ass about food.”

Everyone else had liked that crab bisque but they had stayed too long in Greenville, they had stayed too long everywhere. After-three-days-guests-like-fish-begin-to-stink. She had heard that all over the South with Warren. After three weeks of hearing it from Howard Hollerith in Greenville she and Warren had moved from Howard Hollerith’s place to a motel in town near the levee but Warren had kept on seeing Howard Hollerith’s wife. And Howard Hollerith’s girl too. The wife and the girl. “I want them to do it together,” Warren said to Charlotte. The girl went to New Orleans with them.

But Greenville was May, June. She knew that Greenville was May or June because Birmingham was July.

The Mountain Brook Country Club in Birmingham was definitely July.

The New Orleans airport had been January.

Warren had been drunk and had twisted her arm behind her back at the Hertz counter.

“I don’t have to be here,” she had said. “I’m going home.”

“Go home,” Warren had said. “I’ll send you home. I’ll ask Porter for the fare, go into debt and send you home. How do you think you’re going home without sending me into debt.”

“The way I came,” Charlotte said, and Warren had hit her.

“It’s all right,” Charlotte kept saying to the Hertz girl, and “No. Don’t call. Please don’t.” The Hertz girl was calling the airport police and Warren was buying a postcard and mailing it to Leonard. The postcard showed a Confederate flag and a mule and the legend PUT YOUR HEART IN DIXIE OR GET YOUR ASS OUT. “It’s all right,” Charlotte said to the airport police. “It’s nothing, it’s personal, it’s all right.”

Delta had lost her bags but it did not seem to matter.

“You forgot your map,” the Hertz girl said.

“Lower that white-trash voice,” Warren said.

In the Hertz car they had driven from the airport to Porter’s new house in Metairie and it began to appear that Leonard had been right again. Porter did not appear to be dying but Warren did. Porter told her that. Porter told her that while Warren was upstairs calling a girl he knew in Savannah and telling her to come down. Porter hoped that Charlotte would understand why she and Warren could not stay with him. Porter hoped that she would not think it inhospitable for him to have made a reservation for her and Warren at the Pontchartrain. By the way the reservation would be in her name because the last time Warren had stayed at the Pontchartrain there had been a little unpleasantness, Porter would not say what.

“Warren doesn’t show his best side as a houseguest, Charlotte, you recognize that. If Warren has to leave us, I want to recall his many virtues only.”

“What do you mean, leave us.”

“About time he came home, stopped catting around New York. ‘Dying Is But Going Home,’ am I right? Ever hear that?”

“What are you talking about, dying.”

“Used to see it on gravestones. ‘Dying Is But Going Home.’ ‘The Angels Called Him,’ that was popular too. At least around here it was popular. I don’t know about out there.”

“You said if Warren ‘has to leave us,’ Porter, what did you mean?”

“Don’t bother yourself, Charlotte. I’m going to persuade Warren to let Ping Walker have a look, you remember Ping, Lady Duvall’s boy? Lived up east a while? Came back down home around the time Lady married her fancy man?”

“I don’t know any Ping Walker and I don’t know any Lady Duvall and I don’t see what they’ve got to do with Warren.”

“Don’t raise your voice, Charlotte, your husband out there allow you to converse like a fishwife? Ping is a specialist. I should say, a specialist. Very fine training. Tulane, Hopkins, Harvard. His father didn’t pay for it, old Judge Duvall did.”

“A specialist in what?”

“Bad blood,” Warren said from the stairway, and both he and Porter laughed.

“Bad blood between Warren here and Lady’s fancy man, if memory serves.”

“Watch your mouth,” Warren said.

“Porter said you were sick.”

She was standing at the window in the room at the Pontchartrain watching the first light on the windows of the houses across the avenue. She did not have a bag, she did not have an aspirin, she did not have a toothbrush. The skirt she had put on the morning before in Hollister was wrinkled from the long drive to the San Francisco airport and the long flight to New Orleans and the long night watching Warren and Porter drink in Metairie. In a few hours she could go out and buy what she needed. She tried to concentrate on what she needed and did not think about what she was doing in a room at the Pontchartrain Hotel on St. Charles Avenue in New Orleans. In the empty house on California Street in San Francisco it would be three o’clock in the morning. The night light in Marin’s bathroom would be burning just as she had left it. The crossed spots on the Pollock in the dining room would be burning just as she had left them. Leonard would have gone on by now from Miami to Havana via Mexico City. Leonard was in Havana and Marin was gone. Warren was either dying or not dying and Marin was gone.

“Porter said you were sick and he wasn’t. At all.”

“Porter’s an ass, don’t you be one.” Warren lay on the bed and unbuttoned his shirt. “You got it wrong. As usual. Shut those curtains and come here.”

We could have been doing this all our lives, Warren said.

We should be doing this all our lives, Warren said.

We should have done this all our lives, we should do this all our lives.

The verb form made a difference and she could not get it straight what Warren had said. She could not remember. She could remember the New Orleans airport and she could remember the Mountain Brook Country Club in Birmingham but she could not remember too much in between. There must have been about five months in between, about twenty weeks, about 140 days, simple arithmetic told her how many days there must have been between the New Orleans airport and the Mountain Brook Country Club in Birmingham, but someone had shuffled them. Everywhere she had been with him he wanted the curtains shut in the daylight, she did remember that. She remembered darkened rooms with the light cracking through where the curtains were skimpy and all she could not remember was where those rooms were, or why she and Warren had been in them.

“You wanted to bring me home with you,” she remembered saying in one of them. “Didn’t you. You wanted to come home again.”

“No,” Warren had said. “I just wanted to fuck you again.”

Sometimes those months in the South seemed so shattered that she suspected the Ochsner Clinic of having administered electroshock while she was under the anaesthesia for delivery. This suspicion was unfounded.

2

I SAID BEFORE HE HAD THE LOOK OF A MAN WHO COULD drive a woman like Charlotte right off her head.

His face had been coarsened by contempt.

His mind had been coarsened by self-pity.

As it happened he was quite often “right” to hold other people in contempt, and he was also “right” to regard himself with pity, but allow a dying woman a maxim or two.

I have noticed that it is never enough to be right.

I have noticed that it is necessary to be better.

His favorite hand was outrageousness; in a fluid world like Leonard Douglas’s where no one could be outraged Warren Bogart was dimmed, confused, unable to operate. He could operate marginally in academe, and he maintained vague academic connections: a week at Yale, three days at Harvard, guest privileges at a number of Faculty Clubs where he never paid his bar bill. He could operate marginally on the Upper East Side of New York. He could operate very well in the South. Like many Southerners and like some Catholics and unlike Charlotte he was raised to believe not in “hard work” or “self-reliance” but in the infinite power of the personal appeal, the request for a favor, the intervention of one or another merciful Virgin. He had an inchoate but definite conviction that access to the mysteries of good fortune was arranged in the same way as access to the Boston Club, a New Orleans institution to which he did not belong but always had a guest card.

He belonged to nothing.

He was an outsider who lived by his ability to manipulate the inside.

His final hold on Charlotte was that he recognized in himself everything I have just told you about him, and said mea culpa.

As another outsider I recognized that hand too.

Outsider. De afuera.

We were both de afuera, Warren Bogart and I. At the time I met him we were also both dying of cancer, Warren Bogart and I, which perhaps made us even more de afuera than usual, but that was a detail Charlotte had never made entirely clear.

Charlotte had trouble with the word.

Not the word “cancer.”

The word “dying.”

I met him only once, one evening in New Orleans four or five months after Charlotte first came to Boca Grande, one evening in the Garden District at the house of one of the fat brothers in white suits who factor our copra. I had flown to New Orleans that morning to receive cobalt and to renegotiate the copra contracts with Morgan Fayard; I was due to have dinner with Morgan and his wife and sister and to fly back to Boca Grande the next morning. I had not been invited to dinner to meet Warren Bogart, nor had Warren Bogart been invited at all. He was just there in Morgan and Lucy Fayard’s living room when I arrived. He was a visible thorn in Lucy Fayard’s plan for the evening. He seemed bent on embarrassing both Lucy and her sister-in-law Adele, as well as on humiliating the girl he had with him, but the central thrust of his visit seemed to be to see me. This girl he had with him was referred to as “Chrissie,” or “Miss Bailey,” or “our unexpected guest’s little friend from Tupelo,” depending on who referred to her, and she was thin and pale and spoke, when prodded, in sporadic and obscurely startling monologues. In fact she was not unlike Charlotte Douglas, give or take twenty years and the distinctions in cultural conditioning between Tupelo, Mississippi, and Hollister, California. Still I watched the two of them in the Fayards’ living room for several minutes before I understood that this “Warren” who had arrived uninvited for drinks and would stay unasked through dinner and who studied my every reaction was the Warren who figured in what I had come to regard as Charlotte Douglas’s hallucinations.

“Just so thoughtful of you to drop by, Warren.” Lucy Fayard’s voice carried clear and thin as glass. “Morgan and I long to have you for a whole evening one time soon. You and your friend. You’re most definitely included, Miss Bailey.”

The girl from Tupelo smiled wanly and tied on a scarf as if instructed to make her goodbyes.

“Here’s-your-hat-what’s-your-hurry.” Warren Bogart held out his glass to be filled. “Take that bandana off, Chrissie, don’t mind your hostess. Mrs. Fayard’s been learning West Texas manners.”

“Just shush about that,” Lucy Fayard said.

“Just don’t start about that,” Adele Fayard said.

“Lucy doesn’t associate with West Texas trash,” Morgan Fayard said. “I don’t allow Adele to filthy this house with him. Grace doesn’t know what we’re talking about and it’s rude to continue, in fact I forbid it.”

As a matter of fact I knew precisely what they were talking about, because the last evening I had spent with the Fayards had been devoted exclusively to a heated discussion of this same “West Texas trash.” It had appeared then that Adele Fayard was seeing a man from Midland of whom her brother did not approve. It appeared now that Lucy Fayard was seeing him as well, and that Morgan did not yet know it. Very soon now either Lucy or Adele would allude to one of Morgan’s own indiscretions. All evenings with the Fayards were essentially Caribbean, volatile with conflicting pieties and intimations of sexual perfidy, and in that context were neither very difficult to understand nor, in the end, very engaging.

“That West Texas trash doesn’t enter this house,” Morgan Fayard said, ignoring his own injunction.

“My mistake then,” Warren Bogart said. “I thought I met him here.”

“I should say, your mistake,” Lucy Fayard said.

“You are certainly set on making it difficult, Warren.” Adele Fayard smiled. “Just as difficult as can be?”

“Set on making what difficult, Adele.”

“You know perfectly well what’s difficult, Warren.”

“Difficult for you and your discourteous sister-in-law to continue to extend me your famous hospitality during my dying days? That about it, Adele? Or is it my mistake again.”

“What dying days you talking about,” Morgan Fayard said. “Nobody dying here.”

“You’re all dying. You’re dying, your wife and sister are dying, your little children are dying, Chrissie here is dying, even Miss Tabor there is dying.”

Warren Bogart watched me as he lit a cigar. I had not been introduced to him as Grace Tabor.

“But not one of you is dying as fast as I’m dying.” Warren Bogart smiled. “Which I believe allows me certain privileges.”

“Frankly he didn’t behave any better when he wasn’t dying,” Adele Fayard said.

“Frankly it’s not ennobling him one bit,” Lucy Fayard said.

The girl from Tupelo laughed nervously.

“ ‘Sunset and evening star and one clear call for me!’ ” Morgan Fayard cried suddenly. “ ‘And let there be no mourning at the bar when I put out to sea.’ Learned that at Charlottesville.”

“Not any too well,” Warren Bogart said.

“No mourning at the bar, Warren. Lesson there for all of us.”

“It’s ‘moaning of’ the bar, Morgan. Not ‘mourning at’ the bar. It’s not a wake in one of those gin mills you frequent.”

“I don’t guess George Gordon Lord Byron is going to object.”

“Wrong again, Morgan. You don’t guess Alfred Lord Tennyson is going to object. You recite it, Chrissie. Stand up and recite. Recite that and ‘Thanatopsis’ both.”

The girl looked at him pleadingly.

“Stand up,” Warren Bogart said.

“I must say,” Lucy Fayard said.

“Shut up, Lucy. I said stand up, Chrissie.”

The girl from Tupelo stood up and gazed miserably at the floor.

“Speak up now, or I’ll make you do ‘Evangeline’ too.”

“ ‘Sunset and evening star — And one clear call for me — And may there be no—’ ”

The girl’s voice was low and wretched.

Warren Bogart picked up his drink and walked over to me.

“It is Miss Tabor, isn’t it?”

“ ‘Twilight and evening bell — And after that the dark—’ ”

The girl was speaking with her eyes shut. All three Fayards sat as if frozen.

“It was,” I said finally.

“I believe you did research of some sort with my old friend Mr. McKay. In Peru.”

“In Brazil.” At the end of each line the girl would open her eyes and look at Warren Bogart’s back as if he alone could save her. “If you’re talking about Claude McKay it was Brazil.”

“Somewhere down there, you may be right.”

“I am right. I was there. What exactly are you doing to that child.”

“Chrissie? Chrissie’s brilliant, you should talk to her, she’s very interested in anthropology, took some courses in it at Newcomb. Does some homework before she speaks. Mr. McKay would have been devoted to her. He had a place in Maryland, you probably know it, I used to drink with him there before he died.” He glanced across the room at the girl, who had fallen silent. “Straighten those shoulders, Chrissie, don’t slouch. ‘Thanatopsis’ now.”

“ ‘To him who in the love of nature holds — Communion with her visible forms—’ ”

The girl’s voice was so low as to be inaudible.

“Would have been devoted to her,” Warren Bogart repeated. “May he rest in peace. An American aristocrat, Claude McKay. One of the last. Gentleman. Well-born, well-bred.”

The evening was hot. I was tired. When I am tired I remember what I was taught in Colorado. When I remember what I was taught in Colorado certain words set my teeth on edge. “Aristocrat” is one of those words. “Gentleman” is another. They remind me of that strain I dislike in Gerardo. As a child Gerardo once described the father of a classmate as “in trade” and I slapped his face.

“Last of a breed,” Warren Bogart said, watching my face. “Used to speak about you. You should meet my good friend Miss Tabor, he’d say.”

The last time I could recall seeing Claude McKay I had accused him of publishing my work under his name. I wondered when Warren Bogart would get around to Charlotte.

“I never thought I’d run into you here at Lucy’s,” he said.

I have never had patience with games.

“I expect you did,” I said.

The girl from Tupelo had finished reciting. The room was silent. Warren Bogart was fingering his cigar and watching me warily.

“Warren,” the girl said. “I finished. I’m through.”

“Do ‘Snowbound,’ ” Warren Bogart said. “There’s nobody here wouldn’t be improved by hearing ‘Snowbound.’ ”

“I just won’t allow this,” Lucy Fayard said.

“I’d advise you to save that tone of voice for West Texas,” Warren Bogart said.

“What’s this he’s saying about West Texas,” Morgan Fayard said.

“Just nonsense, Bro.” Adele Fayard stood up. “He’s talking nonsense.”

“I’m asking certain people in this room a question, Adele.” Morgan Fayard pushed his sister back into her chair with the heel of his hand. “And I believe I’m owed the courtesy of a reply.”

“What’s the question, Bro?”

“Goddamn West Texas trash.”

The girl from Tupelo began to cry.

Dinner was announced.

No one moved.

“This is a fucking circus. A freak show.” Warren Bogart turned to me. “Doesn’t this put you in mind of some third-rate traveling circus? Some Sells-Floto circus passing through that country you people run so well? Doesn’t it?”

“No,” I said. “It puts me in mind of the Mountain Brook Country Club in Birmingham, Alabama.”

Warren Bogart looked at me and then away. “You’re in over your head,” he said finally, and that was all he said.

Trout was served in the dining room. Lemon mousse was served in the dining room. Coffee and praline cookies and pear brandy were served in the dining room. The dining room was hot and we could not seem to leave it. Lucy and Adele Fayard described their most recent Junior League project in compulsive detail. Lucy and Adele Fayard described dinner as we ate it. Lucy and Adele Fayard described a pet cobra they had seen drink Wild Turkey-and-water at a party the night before.

“I told Morgan,” Lucy Fayard said, “ ‘Look there, Morgan, I believe that cobra is taking some drinks.’ ”

“I said to Morgan,” Adele Fayard said, “ ‘Mark my words, Morgan, that cobra’s going to have itself a season in New Orleans.’ ”

Morgan Fayard sulked. Warren Bogart remained in the living room with the girl from Tupelo. We could hear them at the piano. Warren Bogart seemed to be making the girl play, over and over again, the song that was always played in New Orleans at Mardi Gras. She played it badly.

“ ‘May the fish get legs and the cows lay—’ That’s an A-flat, Chrissie, you missed the flat. Start over.”

“Dare he sing that song,” Morgan Fayard said.

Lucy Fayard raised her voice. “You’re forgetting your duties, Morgan. Grace’s glass is empty? You ever get ground artichokes down there, Grace? To put around game?”

“Not forgetting my duties,” Morgan Fayard muttered. “Fine one to talk.”

“ ‘May the fish get legs and the cows lay eggs — If ever I cease to love — May all dogs wag their—’ No. No, Chrissie. No.”

“The irony,” Morgan Fayard said. “You talking about duties.”

“We should ship some down to you,” Lucy Fayard said. “Ground artichokes. To put around game. Morgan. Grace’s glass.”

“Actually,” I said, “I have to leave.”

“See now what you’ve done, Morgan. Making us all suffer at this stuffy table instead of taking our coffee in the living room like civilized beings, no wonder Grace wants to leave.”

“Not going out there to be insulted,” Morgan Fayard said.

“ ‘May the fish get legs and the cows lay eggs — If ever I cease to love — May all dogs wag their tails in front—’ ”

“Got no right to sing that song,” Morgan Fayard said.

“He has too a right,” Lucy Fayard said. “He’s from here.”

“Not from here at all. He’s from—” Morgan Fayard spit the words out. “Plaquemines Parish. That’s where he’s from. Where he left a—”

“I don’t guess Mardi Gras is your own personal property,” Lucy Fayard said. “Just because your mother was Queen of Comus. Which Adele, incidentally, was not.”

“—Where he no doubt left a promising future as assistant manager of a gasoline station, that’s the kind of trash you—”

I stood up.

Something about the presence of Warren Bogart was causing the Fayards to outdo even themselves.

“You back on West Texas?” Lucy Fayard said. “Or you still on Warren.”

“It’s a tacky song anyway,” Adele Fayard said. “Mardi Gras comes, I go out of town with the Jews. Do sit down, Grace.”

“I won’t tolerate this.” Morgan Fayard slammed his fist on the table. “I will not tolerate having my little children exposed to this trash.”

“Unless I’m very much mistaken your little children are at school in Virginia,” Adele Fayard said. “Which makes your tolerance the slightest bit academic?”

“I been hearing certain things about you in the Quarter,” I could hear Morgan Fayard saying as I left the dining room. “Sister.”

“I understand you’ve been leaving your own visiting cards at a certain address in the Quarter,” I could hear Adele Fayard saying as I walked through the living room. “Bro.”

“ ‘May the fish get legs and the cows lay eggs — If ever I cease to love — May the moon be turned to green cream cheese — If ever I cease to love — May the—’ ”

Warren Bogart looked up from the piano.

“Pretty little song, isn’t it.”

I said nothing.

“Tell Charlotte she was wrong,” he said.

3

HERE AMONG THE THREE OR FOUR SOLVENT FAMILIES in Boca Grande we have specific traditional treatments for specific traditional complaints. Nausea is controlled locally by a few drops of 1:1000 solution of adrenalin in a little water, taken by mouth with sips of iced champagne. Neurasthenia is controlled locally by a half-grain of phenobarbitone three times a day and temporary removal to a hill station. In the absence of a hill Miami or Caracas will suffice. I have never known a treatment specific to the condition in which Charlotte Douglas arrived in Boca Grande, but after that one meeting with her first husband I began to see a certain interior logic in her inability to remember much about those last months she spent with him.

One thing she did remember was when and where she left him.

“I don’t want to leave you ever,” she remembered saying to him in Biloxi.

“How could I leave you,” she remembered saying to him in Meridian.

She left him at ten minutes past eleven P.M. on the eighteenth of July in the bar of the Mountain Brook Country Club in Birmingham.

I’m dizzy and my head hurts, the girl had said.

I think she should see a doctor, Charlotte had said.

She doesn’t need a doctor, Warren had said. She’s drunk and she needs a sandwich.

Sometime in the next several minutes, at the very moment when Warren hit both the waiter and Minor Clark, Charlotte got up from the table and walked in the direction of the ladies’ room and kept walking. She did not risk waiting to call a taxi. She just walked. She had been wearing a sweater in the bar but the night outside was hot and she dropped the sweater in a sand trap and kept walking. Once she was off the golf course she paused at each intersection to assess the size of the houses and the probable cost of their upkeep and then she walked in whichever direction the houses seemed smaller, the lawns less clipped. She had a fixed idea that she would not be safe until she had reached a part of town where people sat on their porches and on the fenders of parked cars and would be bored enough to take her side if Warren came after her. When it began to rain her feet slipped in her sandals and she took off her sandals and walked barefoot. She knew exactly what time it had been when she left the Mountain Brook Country Club because Minor Clark had said the girl did not need a sandwich, she needed a doctor, and Warren had ordered a sandwich and the waiter had said it was ten minutes past eleven and the kitchen was closed. So she had left the Mountain Brook Country Club at ten minutes past eleven and it was almost one before she came to a part of town so rundown she felt safe enough to stand in a lighted place and call a taxi.

The girl’s name was Julia Erskine.

The girl was not whining as Warren said but crying because her head hurt. Charlotte believed that Julia Erskine’s head hurt.

The girl said that her head hurt because she had fallen from a horse that morning while riding with Warren. Charlotte did not believe that Julia Erskine had fallen from a horse that morning while riding with Warren.

When the taxi came Charlotte went to the Birmingham airport. The first plane out was for New Orleans and Charlotte got on it. She was the only passenger. “You and I can watch the sunrise,” the stewardess said. Charlotte did not feel safe until the plane was airborne and then she ordered a drink and sat with her head against the cold window and did not watch the sunrise but drank the bourbon very fast before the ice could dilute it. She had not eaten since lunch the day before at Minor and Suzanne Clark’s, the lunch at Minor and Suzanne Clark’s to which Julia Erskine and Warren had never come, and as the bourbon hit her stomach she was pleasantly astonished with herself.

She was pleasantly astonished that she could still do all these things.

Walk out.

Call a taxi.

Use her American Express card, get on a plane, order a drink.

While she was still being pleasantly astonished her water broke, and soaked the seat with amniotic fluid.

“You hurt that girl,” Charlotte said to Warren when he brought the peonies to the Ochsner Clinic. Leonard was in the room. Charlotte did not know how Leonard happened to be in the room and she knew that she should not say anything about the girl in front of Leonard but it did not seem to matter any more what she said in front of anyone. “You hit her in the head. Didn’t you.”

“She’s doped up,” Leonard said. “Stay neutral.”

“Don’t talk about things you don’t know about,” Warren said to Charlotte. “What are you going to do about the baby?”

“Just the note I had in mind,” Leonard said.

“How did you find me,” Charlotte said.

“Never mind how I found you. I always find you. What about the baby.”

“The baby is — you hit that girl in the head.”

“You’re on pills,” Warren said. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Don’t let that stop you,” Leonard said. “Pitch her another life decision.”

“He doesn’t want you to see the baby,” Warren said. “Does he.”

“No,” Leonard said. “I don’t. The topic is now closed. Now we’re going to limit our remarks to areas in which Charlotte has no immediate interest. Sex. Politics. Religion. All right?”

“You don’t know anything about Charlotte,” Warren said. Charlotte could smell bay rum. Bay rum and cigar smoke. Warren. “You never did.”

Charlotte tried to focus on the tight pink balls of peony blossom.

“He wants you to walk away,” Warren said.

The tight pink balls seemed to swell as she watched them. The baby’s head would swell if the baby lived but the baby could not live. They had told her so. The doctors. Leonard too. If Leonard had told her about the baby then Leonard had been in the room before, she had just forgotten.

“He wants you to walk away from here the same way you walked away from everything else in your life.”

“You hit that girl in the head. You don’t take care of anybody.”

“I’m taking care of you right now. I’m telling you not to walk away.”

“I never did,” Charlotte said.

“ ‘How could I leave you,’ ” Warren said. “The same way you left everybody. How-could-I-leave-you-let-me-count-the ways.”

She closed her eyes against the obscene peonies.

“Never mind whether I take care of you,” Warren said. “You can take care of me.”

“Cut her loose,” Leonard said.

“She doesn’t want to be loose,” Warren said.

The peonies were swelling behind her eyelids.

“It doesn’t matter whether you take care of somebody or somebody takes care of you,” Warren said. “It’s the same thing in the end. It’s all the same.”

“You had your shot,” Leonard said.

She kept her eyes closed and she heard their voices ugly and raised and by the time the voices were normal again the peonies had burst behind her eyelids and the warm drugs were pulling her back under and she knew what she was going to do. She was not going to do what they wanted her to do. She was not even sure what they wanted her to do but she was not going to do it.

“Tell her I said it’s all the same,” she heard Warren say to Leonard.

She was going to leave here alone with her baby.

“You want her to watch you die,” she heard Leonard say to Warren.

She was going to let her baby die with her.

“Never mind what I want,” she heard Warren say to Leonard. “Just tell her I said it’s all the same. Tell her that for me.”

4

WHEN I CONSIDER THE PATTERN OF THEIR DAYS AND nights during those five months I see again that nothing outside that pattern happened at the Mountain Brook Country Club.

I wonder again why Charlotte left that night and not some other.

Charlotte could never tell me.

“But I had to leave,” Charlotte would repeat, as if until ten minutes past eleven P.M. on the eighteenth of July there had been some imperative to her staying. “He’d been with this girl and he’d hurt her and he was acting crazy. After I left the Clarks took her to the hospital, she had a concussion. Mild.”

Had not other such evenings occurred during those five months?

Charlotte said that she could not remember.

Bear in mind that I am talking here about a woman I believe to have been in shock.

Everywhere they went during those five months they ended up staying in a motel. Charlotte did remember the motels. They had stayed a while with Howard Hollerith in Greenville and they had stayed a while with Billy Daikin in Clarksdale and they had stayed a while with other people in other places but after a certain kind of evening they would always move to a motel. Usually Warren would not be present during the early part of this certain kind of evening. Usually Warren would be upriver or downriver or across the county with their host’s wife or sister or recently divorced niece. Never daughter. Warren never went upriver or downriver or across the county with the daughter of a host.

Charlotte learned early to recognize the advent of such an evening.

For the day or two before such an evening Warren would announce his inability to sleep.

“I’m restless, I’m wired, I got the mean reds,” he would say.

“Don’t cross me,” he would say.

“Don’t mess with me,” he would say.

For the day or two before such an evening their host would announce his inability to provide minor but key aspects of his normal hospitality.

“Wouldn’t be surprised Warren’s used up all those Peychaud bitters he can’t take a drink without, what a shame, can’t buy them up here.”

“Damn that plumber, can’t get here before Tuesday, daresay you’ll be glad to get somewhere they’ve got the pipes in working order.”

A familiar drift would emerge. Not only toilets but guest-room telephones would go out of order. Men would arrive to drain the swimming pool. Suggestions would be made for traveling before the rain set in, or the heat, or the projected work on the Interstate. Reminders would be made about promises to visit Charlie Ferris in Oxford, or Miss Anne Clary on the Gulf.

Doors would be closed.

Voices would be raised.

The evening itself would begin uneasily and end badly.

“Hope Warren has the courtesy to leave a little something for old Jennie, all the extra picking up she’s done, you might remind him, Charlotte. Or isn’t that the custom where you come from.”

And: “Most interesting the way men where you come from allow their wives to traipse around as they please, must be very advanced thinkers in California.”

And then: “The idea, your friend Warren going off and leaving you here alone, might not matter to you but it matters to me, a man insults a lady in my house he insults me. You wouldn’t understand that, Mrs. Douglas, I’m certain it’s all free and easy where your people come from.”

And finally: “You say you’re going to bed ‘and fuck it,’ Mrs. Douglas, I believe that is your name, just what am I meant to conclude? Am I meant to conclude there’s a woman in my house who’s certifiable? Or did my ears deceive me.”

After Charlotte went to bed there would be silence for a few hours and then more raised voices, Warren’s among them, and Charlotte would bury her head in one pillow and put another over her belly so the baby could not hear and the next day she and Warren would move to a motel.

“I don’t like these people,” she said to Warren after one such evening. “I don’t like them and I don’t want to be beholden to them.”

“You’re not beholden to anybody. You’re too used to Arabs and Jews, you don’t know how normal people behave.”

“I can’t help noticing Arabs and Jews are rather less insulting to their houseguests.”

“Not to this houseguest they wouldn’t be, babe.” In the wreckage of these visits Warren seemed unfailingly cheerful. “You show me an Arab who’ll put up with me, I’ll show you an Arab doesn’t get the picture.”

In all those motels he wanted the curtains shut in the daytime.

In all those motels she would sit in the dark room a while and watch him sleep.

It seemed to her that toward the end of the five months they had spent more time in motels than toward the beginning of the five months but she could not be sure. Warren always paid for the rooms with crumpled bills fished from various of his pockets and she paid for meals, when they ate meals. She ate regularly, usually alone. She forced herself to eat, just as she forced herself to take her calcium and see an obstetrician in any town where they spent more than a day or two. There was no need for her to see an obstetrician that often but she wanted to have a number she could call in the middle of the night. An obstetrician would not question her reason for seeing him. An obstetrician was the logical doctor to see.

“You’re sick,” she had said the first time she saw Warren gray and sweating. He had swerved abruptly off the highway and stopped the car on the shoulder. “You’re sick and you need a doctor.”

“Not going running to any doctor.” His breathing was harsh and shallow and he did not seem to have strength to turn off the ignition. “Not sick. Ran over a moccasin is all.”

They sat in the idling car until his breathing evened out. He did not speak again but took her hand. When he finally put the car into gear and drove on she glanced back at the highway but of course there was no moccasin. It was after that day when she began to find an obstetrician in every town, began to get the questions done with early and the telephone number in hand. Some night in some town she was going to need to call a doctor and ask him for something and she wanted that doctor to take her call. She did not let her mind form the word “cancer” and she did not let her mind form the word “dying” but the word Demerol was always in her mind. She had not been there when her father died but Pete Wright had told her about the Demerol, the night they had dinner at the Palm.

5

SOMETIMES SHE WOULD LEAVE THE MOTEL DURING THE day. She would leave Warren sleeping and take the car and drive down the main street of whatever town it was and look for somewhere to spend an hour. She remembered sitting in the library in Demopolis, Alabama, every afternoon for most of a week. She had read back newspapers in the Demopolis library. She had followed the progress in the newspapers of a Greene County murder trial which had taken place some months before. They left Demopolis before she got to the verdict and when she asked the woman at the motel desk if she recalled how the trial came out the woman said curiosity killed the cat. She remembered having her nails manicured in a pine town above Mobile by a child who looked like Marin but was fifteen and married to a logger and running her mother’s beauty shop in a trailer. She remembered drinking chocolate Cokes at the counter of the Trailways station in Pass Christian and reading an Associated Press story about the continuing search for Marin Bogart and she remembered leaving the paper on the counter and staring out at the dark glare off the Gulf. She remembered drinking chocolate Cokes at the counter of the Trailways station in a lot of towns. She remembered staring at the Gulf in a lot of towns. She remembered the Associated Press quoting Leonard as saying that she was “traveling with friends.”

On those days when she did leave the motel she would usually come back toward sundown and find Warren gone, the bed unmade, the towels wet on the floor of the room, the curtains still closed and the air sweet and heavy with the smell of bay rum. Warren never put the top back on the bottle of bay rum. She remembered that. She would put the top back on the bottle of bay rum and call the maid and stand outside on the walkway while the room was made up. The air would be chilly and wet and then later in the spring it would be warm and wet. Toward eight or nine on those evenings Warren would telephone the motel and tell her where to meet him.

“Warren appears to have his mood upon him,” someone would be saying wherever she met him.

“Warren is certainly himself tonight.”

“Warren is incorrigible.”

“Warren is without doubt the most incorrigible of anybody I know.”

So self-absorbed was the texture of life in these rooms where Charlotte went to meet Warren that the facts that she had been married to him for some years and that they were the parents of a child whose photograph appeared somewhere in every post office and gas station in the county appeared not to have penetrated.

She was Warren’s “friend from California.”

She was “visiting with Warren.”

Warren was “showing Mrs. Douglas the South.”

“Why do you lie?” Charlotte said after one such evening. “Why do you pretend I’m just this pregnant acquaintance you happen to be showing around Biloxi?”

“I’m not lying. You’re just here on a visit. You’ll leave.”

“That’s not what you make me say in bed.”

“Don’t talk about what I make you say in bed. Don’t talk about it, talk about it and you lose it, don’t you know anything.”

We could have been doing this all our lives, Warren had said.

We should be doing this all our lives, Warren had said.

We should have done this all our lives, we should do this all our lives.

“I don’t want to leave you ever,” Charlotte said.

“No,” Warren said. “But you will.”

After a while there were no more frosts at night and the wild carrot came out along all the roads and every night ended badly.

After a while there were no more tule fogs at dawn and all Charlotte wanted was one night that did not end badly.

After a while there was Howard Hollerith’s girl.

“What do you suppose Marin did today,” Charlotte said one night in the car when she thought Howard Hollerith’s girl was asleep in the back seat.

“Played tennis,” Warren said. “Marin played tennis today.”

“Marin who?” Howard Hollerith’s girl said.

“See what you’re going to leave me to,” Warren said to Charlotte.

In the coffee shop of a Holiday Inn outside New Orleans one morning in May or June Charlotte read another Associated Press story in which Leonard was again quoted as saying that Charlotte was “traveling with friends.” This time Charlotte read the story several times and memorized the phrase. It occurred to her that possibly she had misunderstood the situation. Possibly Leonard and Warren and the Associated Press were right. She was simply traveling with friends, and Warren and Howard Hollerith’s girl,asleep in the bed behind the second door past the ice machine, were simply the friends with whom she was traveling. Soothed by this construction Charlotte had another cup of coffee and worked the crossword in the Picayune.

6

THE LAST THING CHARLOTTE REMEMBERED BEFORE THE Mountain Brook Country Club in Birmingham was sitting and reading inside the cyclone fence around the swimming pool at a Howard Johnson’s in Meridian. The Howard Johnson’s was just off a curve on the Interstate between New York and New Orleans and all afternoon the big northern rigs would appear to hurtle toward the cyclone fence and then veer on south. The vibration made her teeth hurt. The shallow end of the pool was filled with prematurely thickened young girls celebrating a forthcoming marriage. They talked as if they were just a year or two out of high school but they were already matrons, careful not to splash one another’s blown and lacquered hair. After a while the bridegroom-to-be arrived with a friend from his office. The bridegroom and his friend were both fleshy young men in short-sleeved white shirts and they placed two six-packs of beer on a damp metal table and they opened all the cans and started drinking the beer. It seemed to be a town in which everyone thickened early. Out of some deference or indifference to their own women the men ignored the shrieks from the pool and instead watched Charlotte as they drank the beer. “Somebody’s gone and put a bun in that skinny little oven and I wouldn’t mind it had been me,” one of them said. “I never knew this Howard Johnson’s was X-rated,” the other one said. He held up one of the cans as if to offer it to Charlotte and the other one laughed. Charlotte felt old and awkward and dimly humiliated, a woman almost forty with a body that masqueraded as that of a young girl, a caricature of what they believed her to be. When she went back to the room Warren had the air-conditioning off and the windows closed and all the blankets and spreads from both beds piled over him. By Meridian he was having sweats and chills every day as he slept. By Meridian he did not sleep at night. By Meridian Howard Hollerith’s girl was no longer with them. Charlotte supposed there had been a fight somewhere but she did not particularly remember it.

“I can’t get it up,” Warren said when she tried to wake him. “Baby, baby, I can’t get it up.”

“I don’t want it,” she said. “That’s not what I want.”

“Don’t leave me. Don’t leave me again.”

“How could I leave you. Don’t wake up.”

How could I leave you.

The same way you left everybody.

“You like it too much,” Warren said. “You like it more than anybody I ever knew. I know a girl in Birmingham likes it almost as much as you. We’ll go do it with her. I want to see you with Julia.”

“I didn’t like that before.”

“Did we do that before?”

“With Howard’s girl. I didn’t like it.”

“You liked it all right.”

We could have been doing this all our lives.

We should be doing this all our lives.

We should have done this all our lives, we should do this all our lives.

Talk about it and you lose it.

She was a woman almost forty whose fillings hurt when the highway vibrated. She was a woman almost forty waiting for the night she would call to get the Demerol. When Warren woke at sundown he took her to see a bike movie in a drive-in and drank a fifth of bourbon in the car and drove under the big pink arc lights with the rented car flat-out all the way to Birmingham. When the peonies swelled and broke behind her eyelids in the Ochsner Clinic they blazed like the big pink arc lights all the way to Birmingham. She could take care of somebody or somebody could take care of her and it was the same thing in the end.

Mérida.

Antigua.

Guadeloupe.

How could I leave you.

The same way you left everybody.

He wants you to walk away from here the same way you walked away from everything else in your life.

Tell her I said it’s all the same.

El Aeropuerto del Presidente General Luis Strasser-Mendana, deceased.

Tell her that for me.