Nightmares and Dreamscapes, Page 23

  "Amen, honey," Martha said, and although her mouth smiled, her eyes did not. On each of the first two toasts she had taken a discreet sip of champagne. This time she drained the glass.

  *

  Darcy had gotten the bottle of champagne so that she and her best friend could celebrate Peter Rosewall's breakthrough in the style it seemed to deserve, but that was not the only reason. She was curious about what Martha had said--It's more than sweet, it's true. And she was curious about that expression of triumph.

  She waited until Martha had gotten through her third glass of champagne and then she said, "What did you mean about the dedication, Martha?"

  "What?"

  "You said it wasn't just sweet, it was true."

  Martha looked at her so long without speaking that Darcy thought she was not going to answer at all. Then she uttered a laugh so bitter it was shocking--at least to Darcy it was. She'd had no idea that cheerful little Martha Rosewall could be so bitter, in spite of the hard life she had led. But that note of triumph was still there, too, an unsettling counterpoint.

  "His book is going to be a best-seller and the critics are going to eat it up like ice cream," Martha said. "I believe that, but not because Pete says so . . . although he does, of course. I believe it because that's what happened with him."

  "Who?"

  "Pete's father," Martha said. She folded her hands on the table and looked at Darcy calmly.

  "But--" Darcy began, then stopped. Johnny Rosewall had never written a book in his life, of course. IOUs and the occasional I fucked yo momma in spray-paint on brick walls were more Johnny's style. It seemed as if Martha was saying . . .

  Never mind the fancy stuff, Darcy thought. You know perfectly well what she's saying: She might have been married to Johnny when she got pregnant with Pete, but someone a little more intellectual was responsible for the kid.

  Except it didn't fit. Darcy had never met Johnny, but she had seen half a dozen photos of him in Martha's albums, and she'd gotten to know Pete well--so well, in fact, that during his last two years of high school and first two years of college she'd come to think of him as partly her own. And the physical resemblance between the boy who'd spent so much time in her kitchen and the man in the photo albums . . .

  "Well, Johnny was Pete's biological father," Martha said, as if reading her mind. "Only have to look at his nose and eyes to see that. Just wasn't his natural one . . . any more of that bubbly? It goes down so smooth." Now that she was tiddly, the South had begun to resurface in Martha's voice like a child creeping out of its hiding place.

  Darcy poured most of the remaining champagne into Martha's glass. Martha held it up by the stem, looking through the liquid, enjoying the way it turned the subdued afternoon light in Le Cinq to gold. Then she drank a little, set the glass down, and laughed that bitter, jagged laugh again.

  "You don't have the slightes' idea what I'm talking about, do you?"

  "No, honey, I don't."

  "Well, I'm going to tell you," Martha said. "After all these years I have to tell someone--now more'n ever, now that he's published his book and broken through after all those years of gettin ready for it to happen. God knows I can't tell him--him least of all. But then, lucky sons never know how much their mothers love them, or the sacrifices they make, do they?"

  "I guess not," Darcy said. "Martha, hon, maybe you ought to think about if you really want to tell me whatever it is you--"

  "No, they don't have a clue," Martha said, and Darcy realized her friend hadn't heard a single word she'd said. Martha Rosewall was off in some world of her own. When her eyes came back to Darcy, a peculiar little smile--one Darcy didn't like much--touched the corners of her mouth. "Not a clue," she repeated. "If you want to know what that word dedication really means, I think you have to ask a mother. What do you think, Darcy?"

  But Darcy could only shake her head, unsure what to say. Martha nodded, however, as if Darcy had agreed completely, and then she began to speak.

  *

  There was no need for her to go over the basic facts. The two women had worked together at Le Palais for eleven years and had been close friends for most of that time.

  The most basic of those basic facts, Darcy would have said (at least until that day in Le Cinq she would have said it), was that Marty had married a man who wasn't much good, one who was a lot more interested in his booze and his dope--not to mention just about any woman who happened to flip a hip in his direction--than he was in the woman he had married.

  Martha had been in New York only a few months when she met him, just a babe in the woods, and she had been two months pregnant when she said I do. Pregnant or not, she had told Darcy more than once, she had thought carefully before agreeing to marry Johnny. She was grateful he wanted to stick by her (she was wise enough, even then, to know that many men would have been down the road and gone five minutes after the words "I'm pregnant" were out of the little lady's mouth), but she was not entirely blind to his shortcomings. She had a good idea what her mother and father--especially her father--would make of Johnny Rosewall with his black T-Bird and his tu-tone airtip shoes, bought because Johnny had seen Memphis Slim wearing a pair exactly like them when Slim played the Apollo.

  That first child Martha had lost in the third month. After another five months or so, she had decided to chalk the marriage up to profit and loss--mostly loss. There had been too many late nights, too many weak excuses, too many black eyes. Johnny, she said, fell in love with his fists when he was drunk.

  "He always looked good," she told Darcy once, "but a good-lookin shitheel is still a shitheel."

  Before she could pack her bags, Martha discovered she was pregnant again. Johnny's reaction this time was immediate and hostile: he socked her in the belly with the handle of a broom in an effort to make her miscarry. Two nights later he and a couple of his friends--men who shared Johnny's affection for bright clothes and tu-tone shoes--tried to stick up a liquor store on East 116th Street. The proprietor had a shotgun under the counter. He brought it out. Johnny Rosewall was packing a nickel-plated .32 he'd gotten God knew where. He pointed it at the proprietor, pulled the trigger, and the pistol blew up. One of the fragments of the barrel entered his brain by way of his right eye, killing him instantly.

  Martha had worked on at Le Palais until her seventh month (this was long before Darcy Sagamore's time, of course), and then Mrs. Proulx told her to go home before she dropped the kid in the tenth-floor corridor or maybe the laundry elevator. You're a good little worker and you can have your job back later on if you want it, Roberta Proulx told her, but for right now you get yourself gone, girl.

  Martha did, and two months later she had borne a seven-pound boy whom she had named Peter, and Peter had, in the fullness of time, written a novel called Blaze of Glory, which everyone--including the Book-of-the-Month Club and Universal Pictures--thought destined for fame and fortune.

  All this Darcy had heard before. The rest of it--the unbelievable rest of it--she heard about that afternoon and evening, beginning in Le Cinq, with champagne glasses before them and the advance copy of Pete's novel in the canvas tote by Martha Rosewall's feet.

  *

  "We were living uptown, of course," Martha said, looking down at her champagne glass and twirling it between her fingers. "On Stanton Street, up by Station Park. I've been back since. It's worse than it was--a lot worse--but it was no beauty spot even back then.

  "There was a spooky old woman who lived at the Station Park end of Stanton Street back then--folks called her Mama Delorme and lots of them swore she was a bruja woman. I didn't believe in anything like that myself, and once I asked Octavia Kinsolving, who lived in the same building as me and Johnny, how people could go on believing such trash in a day when space satellites went whizzing around the earth and there was a cure for just about every disease under the sun. 'Tavia was an educated woman--had been to Juilliard--and was only living on the fatback side of 110th because she had her mother and three younger brothers to
support. I thought she would agree with me but she only laughed and shook her head.

  " 'Are you telling me you believe in bruja?' " I asked her.

  " 'No,' she said, 'but I believe in her. She is different. Maybe for every thousand--or ten thousand--or million--women who claim to be witchy, there's one who really is. If so, Mama Delorme's the one.'

  "I just laughed. People who don't need bruja can afford to laugh at it, the same way that people who don't need prayer can afford to laugh at that. I'm talkin 'bout when I was first married, you know, and in those days I still thought I could straighten Johnny out. Can you dig it?"

  Darcy nodded.

  "Then I had the miscarriage. Johnny was the main reason I had it, I guess, although I didn't like to admit that even to myself back then. He was beating on me most the time, and drinking all the time. He'd take the money I gave him and then he'd take more out of my purse. When I told him I wanted him to quit hooking from my bag he'd get all woundyfaced and claim he hadn't done any such thing. That was if he was sober. If he was drunk he'd just laugh.

  "I wrote my momma down home--it hurt me to write that letter, and it shamed me, and I cried while I was writing it, but I had to know what she thought. She wrote back and told me to get out of it, to go right away before he put me in the hospital or even worse. My older sister, Cassandra (we always called her Kissy), went that one better. She sent me a Greyhound bus ticket with two words written on the envelope in pink lipstick--GO NOW, it said."

  Martha took another small sip of her champagne.

  "Well, I didn't. I liked to think I had too much dignity. I suppose it was nothing but stupid pride. Either way, it turned out the same. I stayed. Then, after I lost the baby, I went and got pregnant again--only I didn't know at first. I didn't have any morning sickness, you see . . . but then, I never did with the first one, either."

  "You didn't go to this Mama Delorme because you were pregnant?" Darcy asked. Her immediate assumption had been that Martha had thought maybe the witch-woman would give her something that would make her miscarry . . . or that she'd decided on an out-and-out abortion.

  "No," Martha said. "I went because 'Tavia said Mama Delorme could tell me for sure what the stuff was I found in Johnny's coat pocket. White powder in a little glass bottle."

  "Oh-oh," Darcy said.

  Martha smiled without humor. "You want to know how bad things can get?" she asked. "Probably you don't but I'll tell you anyway. Bad is when your man drinks and don't have no steady job. Really bad is when he drinks, don't have no job, and beats on you. Even worse is when you reach into his coat pocket, hoping to find a dollar to buy toilet paper with down at the Sunland Market, and find a little glass bottle with a spoon on it instead. And do you know what's worst of all? Looking at that little bottle and just hoping the stuff inside it is cocaine and not horse."

  "You took it to Mama Delorme?"

  Martha laughed pityingly.

  "The whole bottle? No ma'am. I wasn't getting much fun out of life, but I didn't want to die. If he'd come home from wherever he was at and found that two-gram bottle gone, he would have plowed me like a pea-field. What I did was take a little and put it in the cellophane from off a cigarette pack. Then I went to 'Tavia and 'Tavia told me to go to Mama Delorme and I went."

  "What was she like?"

  Martha shook her head, unable to tell her friend exactly what Mama Delorme had been like, or how strange that half-hour in the woman's third-floor apartment had been, or how she'd nearly run down the crazily leaning stairs to the street, afraid that the woman was following her. The apartment had been dark and smelly, full of the smell of candles and old wallpaper and cinnamon and soured sachet. There had been a picture of Jesus on one wall, Nostradamus on another.

  "She was a weird sister if there ever was one," Martha said finally. "I don't have any idea even today how old she was; she might have been seventy, ninety, or a hundred and ten. There was a pink-white scar that went up one side of her nose and her forehead and into her hair. Looked like a burn. It had pulled her right eye down in a kind of droop that looked like a wink. She was sitting in a rocker and she had knitting in her lap. I came in and she said, 'I have three things to tell you, little lady. The first is that you don't believe in me. The second is the bottle you found in your husband's coat is full of White Angel heroin. The third is you're three weeks gone with a boy-child you'll name after his natural father.' "

  *

  Martha looked around to make sure no one had taken a seat at one of the nearby tables, satisfied herself that they were still alone, and then leaned toward Darcy, who was looking at her with silent fascination.

  "Later, when I could think straight again, I told myself that as far as those first two things went, she hadn't done anything that a good stage magician couldn't do--or one of those mentalist fellows in the white turbans. If 'Tavia Kinsolving had called the old lady to say I was coming, she might have told her why I was coming, too. You see how simple it could have been? And to a woman like Mama Delorme, those little touches would be important, because if you want to be known as a bruja woman, you have to act like a bruja woman."

  "I suppose that's right," Darcy said.

  "As for her telling me that I was pregnant, that might have been just a lucky guess. Or. . . well. . . some ladies just know."

  Darcy nodded. "I had an aunt who was damned good at knowing when a woman had caught pregnant. She'd know sometimes before the woman knew, and sometimes before the woman had any business being pregnant, if you see what I mean."

  Martha laughed and nodded.

  "She said their smell changed," Darcy went on, "and sometimes you could pick up that new smell as soon as a day after the woman in question had caught, if your nose was keen."

  "Uh-huh," Martha said. "I've heard the same thing, but in my case none of that applied. She just knew, and down deep, underneath the part of me that was trying to make believe it was all just a lot of hokum, I knew she knew. To be with her was to believe in bruja--her bruja, anyway. And it didn't go away, that feeling, the way a dream does when you wake up, or the way your belief in a good faker goes away when you're out of his spell."

  "What did you do?"

  "Well, there was a chair with a saggy old cane seat near the door and I guess that was lucky for me, because when she said what she did, the world kind of grayed over and my knees came unbolted. I was going to sit down no matter what, but if the chair hadn't been there I would have sat on the floor.

  "She just waited for me to get myself back together and went on knitting. It was like she had seen it all a hundred times before. I suppose she had.

  "When my heart finally began to slow down I opened my mouth and what came out was 'I'm going to leave my husband.'

  " 'No,' she came back right away, 'he gonna leave you. You gonna see him out, is all. Stick around, woman. There be a little money. You gonna think he hoit the baby but he dint be doin it.'

  " 'How,' I said, but that was all I could say, it seemed like, and so I kept saying it over and over. 'How-how-how,' just like John Lee Hooker on some old blues record. Even now, twenty-six years later, I can smell those old burned candles and kerosene from the kitchen and the sour smell of dried wallpaper, like old cheese. I can see her, small and frail in this old blue dress with little polka-dots that used to be white but had gone the yellowy color of old newspapers by the time I met her. She was so little, but there was such a feeling of power that came from her, like a bright, bright light--"

  Martha got up, went to the bar, spoke with Ray, and came back with a large glass of water. She drained most of it at a draught.

  "Better?" Darcy asked.

  "A little, yeah." Martha shrugged, then smiled. "It doesn't do to go on about it, I guess. If you'd been there, you'd've felt it. You'd've felt her.

  " 'How I do anythin or why you married that country piece of shit in the first place ain't neither of them important now,' Mama Delorme said to me. 'What's important now is you got to find the child's natural
father.'

  "Anyone listening would have thought she was as much as saying I'd been screwing around on my man, but it never even occurred to me to be mad at her; I was too confused to be mad. 'What do you mean?' I asked. 'Johnny's the child's natural father.'

  "She kind of snorted and flapped her hand at me, like she was saying Pshaw. 'Ain't nothin natural about that man.'

  "Then she leaned in closer to me and I started to feel a little scared. There was so much knowing in her, and it felt like not very much of it was nice.

  " 'Any child a woman get, the man shoot it out'n his pecker, girl,' she said. 'You know that, don't you?'

  "I didn't think that was the way they put it in the medical books, but I felt my head going up n down just the same, as if she'd reached across the room with hands I couldn't see and nodded it for me.

  " 'That's right,' she said, nodding her ownself. 'That's the way God planned it to be. . . like a seesaw. A man shoots cheerun out'n his pecker, so them cheerun mostly his. But it's a woman who carries em and bears em and has the raisin of em, so them cheerun mostly hers. That's the way of the world, but there's a 'ception to every rule, one that proves the rule, and this is one of em. The man who put you with child ain't gonna be no natural father to that child--he wouldn't be no natural father to it even if he was gonna be around. He'd hate it, beat it to death before its foist birthday, mos' likely, because he'd know it wasn't his. A man can't always smell that out, or see it, but he will if the child is different enough . . . and this child goan be as different from piss-ignorant Johnny Rosewall as day is from night. So tell me, girl: who is the child's natural father?' And she kind of leaned toward me.

  "All I could do was shake my head and tell her I didn't know what she was talking about. But I think that something in me--something way back in that part of your mind that only gets a real chance to think in your dreams--did know. Maybe I'm only making that up because of all I know now, but I don't think so. I think that for just a moment or two his name fluttered there in my head.

  "I said, 'I don't know what it is you want me to say--I don't know anything about natural fathers or unnatural ones. I don't even know for sure if I'm pregnant, but if I am it has to be Johnny's, because he's the only man I've ever slept with!'