State of Grace (29 page)

“I can’t stay away too long,” Corinthian says, “but I thought a slightly roundabout route back would be nice.”

I tell him the long way back doesn’t take much longer.

The baby is coming soon. It will be here soon. It’s not a matter of much time. But if I am not there? Not present? If I have other promises to keep?

I think of Father telling me a story once. It seemed just odd imagination. I am talking to Corinthian but I am thinking of Father. I see him sitting at the open window, watching the late spring sky. The house is empty of its past. There is nothing there, but Father has bought a cradle. It has been delivered and is on the dock. He walks through the streets, holding it. The wood is light and gracefully woven. He carries it in one hand. He enters the house and chooses a room. He puts the cradle in the middle of it, where the light falls. He buys a chair, a blanket, a picture for the wall. He attaches a string of Christmas tree lights around the window frame. They cast a soft and sourceless glow such as a child might find comfort in, waking in the night.

“What’s the matter?” Corinthian is saying.

“Isn’t it about time?” I say. I hear the distant sounds of crowds and music.

“Someone is supposed to come out and tell me.” He gets up and moves over to the leopard. He rubs his knuckles down the animal’s backbone. The leopard is impassive, indifferent. “How is that man of yours doing?” Corinthian asks me.

I feel leaden. Dust motes dance around the leopard’s perilous head. Grady’s boots are in the locker but they had to cut his clothes away. The laces are caught beneath the locker door, knotted and muddy and forceful. I try to think of Grady before he was so still.

I don’t answer.

“I am going to watch the Serenade from the porch,” I say. “I’ll see you in a little while.” I leave the garage. I walk
through an arc of bougainvillaea. The sky is bloody with flowers. The petals on the ground are as delicate as rice paper. I try not to step on them. I make every effort to avoid the sound of breakage.

I pass Cords. She looks at me indulgently but doesn’t speak. She has such curious, brittle ways—distasteful yet effective ways, for I had done what she requested. I had asked Corinthian for the leopard. They are here. I have stopped, I tell myself. I have stopped long before now, but the decisions I cannot make continue, subtle and unslaked.

In the bathroom, one of the girls is shaving off some of her pubic hair. She puts the bottoms of her bikini on, frowns and shaves off a little more.

I sit on the porch swing beside the housemother. She smiles at me gassily. Her lipstick bounces disembodied. The crowd mills about wooden and impatient, waiting for action. On the lawn is a deputy sheriff. It is Ruttkin. I lean forward.

“Ruttkin,” I whisper, “hello.”

He looks at me with a friendly lack of recognition.

“How is Ronald?” I persist shrilly.

This time he does not look at me.

“Do you know that young fellow?” the housemother says.

“I guess they all look alike in the dark,” I say. It seems the punch line to some joke. The jokes themselves are hardly necessary any more. The endings will suffice. I feel so heavy. My legs feel buttoned up in mattresses. Think of quizzes of all sorts, they’ll tell you. Keep your mind off the pain.

The answer is
the time taken for the fall of the dashpot to
clear the piston is four seconds
and what is the question? The answer is
when the end of the pin is approximately
inches below the face of the block
and what is the question?

Grady, Grady.

“These young fellows are the salt of the earth,” the housemother is saying. “My husband was an auxiliary highway patrolman and he knew them well. He always told me they were the salt of the earth. It was his life being in the Auxiliary. He was in the Legion too but that meant nothing to him. He only stayed in the Legion so he could be a member of the Auxiliary. Every Monday night and every Thursday night for fourteen years. They had uniforms just like the deputies but a little lighter, just a bit of a different shade. And that’s how I like to recall him best. Going out of the house in the dignity and responsibility of that uniform every Monday and every Thursday night.”

Her dog is between us, trying to bark at the crowd. The housemother swings forward and raps him on the head. He sits down and then lies down, resembling a rag.

All along the street, the girls from the various sorority houses are dancing and singing. Rented spotlights play across them, slide up the rococo buildings and empty themselves in the stars. In the South, there are men that rent these spotlights, big ones and little ones, surplus from wars and airstrips and stadiums. They carry them on flatbed trailers attached to ’62 white Cadillacs. These men can always be reached. In the South, there are always men available in white Volkswagen buses who will give you a blood pressure reading for twenty-five cents. These men are always present, though not obviously so, soliciting your desires.

The housemother and I sit on opposite ends of the swing. She is a tub and I am a stick, yet I hold my own end of the swing down. It is the baby that is accomplishing that. I imagine the baby inside me feeling long and tight and smooth as an ear of corn although actually I feel no such thing. I am
detached, unanxious. I watch the men on the back of their white Cadillacs pan the spotlights past the sly faces of the crowd and rest inquisitionally on Corinthian Brown.

“They’re showmen those people,” the housemother says irritably. “They’ve always got to get into the act. There’s not a bit of reason for him to get into the act.”

Corinthian stands implacably in his T-shirt and work pants. The light picks up the hectic disorder of the hollows of his face and his face seems to be galloping toward some terrible realization that his body hasn’t reacted to yet, but he is motionless in the light. And the leopard beside him, as always, is motionless, although its tail is flickering in the air, showy as flame, but that movement does not alleviate the stillness as much as it reinforces it.

“Once I went on a tour of Beautiful Homes,” the housemother says. “I can’t imagine now why I ever bothered. I’ll never do it again. The silliness of those people with beautiful homes! Two of them had big china animals just the size of that one there sitting on the lanais. Strictly ornamental. You couldn’t use them for a single blessed thing. Never in my life have I ever had anything strictly ornamental.”

The sisters are singing. They are in a semicircle, facing the street, their backs to the porch, in rows of two, the fatter girls in the rear, a tier of flesh mostly, sparkling like fryers in a skillet. The crowd increases. There are a few whistles, an inflexionless yapping sound of children. The spotlight fades and is put out. I can hear, it seems, its rattle as it cools.

“There’s too much money and waste,” the housemother says. “Do you know what I do? I put a little pan under the air conditioner outside my room and it catches the condensation from the machine and I use that water to water my ivy. It takes a little thought but I think anything like that makes one a better person.”

With the spotlight out, the torches are visible, tall inventions of bamboo, and palm fronds and jars of gasoline. There are
smatterings of fire and light everywhere now and the crowd is silent because they are impressed. They are impressed because this is all free and yet stagey and professional. Better than New Orleans they think. They are in the darkness and they are so silent, it’s as though the street is empty. They arc being courted and they are being entertained. Their opinion is being sought. And it is better than New Orleans and it is better than Miami. They feel their presence here tonight strongly. They are speechless with their worth.

And then Doreen becomes visible in her scant outfit of fake tatters, her long hair swimming to her thighs, and there is still no sound from the crowd. She is bony and beautiful and a little foolish. Her face in the cast from the torches changes from being pretty to not being at all pretty to being clownish. It changes so rapidly. She starts to walk, very pale and absorbed and ephemeral, and the effect is winsome and lustful and lost on us. The crowd, me. The housemother says,

“I don’t believe anyone’s at their best when they’re nine-tenth’s naked.”

Doreen walks, her face, out of the light, aged and predisposed. The leopard beside her has its muzzle almost on the ground. The motion is fluid with a hasty hesitancy. Doreen walks. She looks gorgeous and sulky. Her legs rise up pure white and impossible to her manufactured little loin rag. She turns. She starts back to Corinthian. The sisters bleat,

The cramp begins again and I shift myself on the swing. The housemother gives me a sharp look. The cramp moves up and encircles each breast, like a lover might, like Grady might with his warm hands. Think of mind teasers, they’ll tell you. Think of the ingenuities of language and rhyme.
Cords has made everything rhyme. Her song is a fortune cookie, a penny horoscope. Think of a rhyme, they’ll tell you, for step or mouth or silver or window. Think of things that are diversive or exceptions to the rule.

The cramp is gone and I feel nothing. I see Father. It is summer. He brings a baby down to the sea. He sprinkles water across its sleeping eyes. The sea is opalescent with its fathomless order and law. They watch it, the baby, blind and cautious and still, and Father. Little flowers grow between the higher rocks. The littlest flowers I’ve ever seen.

Doreen has almost reached Corinthian. A small spot comes on again and floods her prematurely. She is handing the rope to Corinthian. We all observe the
deus ex machina
. The error is corrected. The light goes out. Doreen is in shadow and suggestive once more. The crowd’s breathing becomes obvious. They are aroused on all the levels of their loneliness. And now the leopard rises, moves leisurely in a tall and searing spiral and attaches himself to Doreen’s shoulder. It is as though the animal is whispering some absolute secret in her ear and the beautiful girl is receptive to it. It is as though the beautiful girl bends a little to hear it, sagging against that singular coat.

Doreen screams. It seems frivolous. She screams and screams. The leopard leaps away into the darkness. The chaos is fixed and rigid. Ruttkin unholsters his gun but there is nothing to shoot at. Everyone is moving and shouting now. Doreen’s thin scream is the current beneath it all. I sit on the swing and raise my hand to my throat. I don’t feel anything. The night offered nothing to my eyes. It took nothing from me.

They put me in a white room in a white bed with high sides on it so that I cannot climb out. Nonetheless, when the nurse leaves, I climb out. There is a curtain in the room and a toilet behind it and I sit on that. I think that if only I can go to the bathroom that will be the end of the terrible seizure in my bowels and then I can get on with having the baby. I cannot do anything. Nevertheless, I feel much better. I climb back into the bed.

An adult female consumes seven hundred pounds of dry food in one year
. No one ever tells you that there comes a moment when you have to pass it all.

I am in a seersucker nightshirt with little blue flowers on it. A prerogative of the ward. I have another contraction. Another moment gone. Something I could reflect upon now if I cared to. I think about it in a way. I think that they do not put nightshirts with blue flowers on patients who are critically ill. Once she cut her lip while shaving her legs. Once she fell while getting out of her underwear. Now how can a girl like Doreen be all cut up and better off dead?

The nurse comes back into the room. She has white hair and a white uniform and she puts her white face very close to my own as she puts her fingers up my vagina. She steps back, wiping her hand on a tissue. “Cervix has dilated this far,” she says, holding up three fingers.

“How wide does it have to be?” I ask, though having her dawdle there is the last thing I want. I want only for her to leave quickly so that I can sit on the toilet again.

“Seven wide,” she says. “One hour.”

It was said that one of my cousins was born in a chamber
pot. It didn’t seem to matter. It was one of the few stories that Father ever told me and therefore I cannot comment on its meaning. I would say, however, that it was just a story that didn’t matter much.

I am a funambulist, the act, at last, proceeding without interval. They’ve placed an enormous clock on the wall for encouragement of a sort, the only kind there is.
Time passes
. And they have nothing else to offer, no matter what they claim.