Though the lovers paid no mind to their dissimilar social standing, it was evidenced by more than the quality of their clothes and ancestral pedigrees or lack thereof. He had recently graduated from the law school at Tulane, and she from a third-rate beauty school above Slocum Brothers Furniture in Bayou Cymbaline, an education she’d paid for with waitressing wages.
But such trivial things mattered not.
There’d been no talk of conversion on either side. Their mothers, Letice Arrow and Adelaide Roman, being a couple of churchgoing women, were greatly affected by this turn of events. Each had a grievance with the very sudden wedding, one regarding it as socially improper, and the other as inconsiderate (Just imagine what people will say!). In the aftermath of the bare-bones nuptials, unease and embarrassment tried to choke those mothers to death. The shock of a courthouse wedding attended by a premarital baby would certainly not wear off quickly. Letice Arrow hadn’t liked the idea of a civil ceremony, but it was the fact of the baby that distressed her more, though not for the obvious reason but for one that would be revealed much later.
Familial relations were strained at best—a situation helped along by private demons, not the least of which was envy: Letice Arrow would spend more on a hat than Adelaide Roman could spend on a sofa.
T
HERE
was another who knew private demons, a solitary wandering man. He’d spent more than half his life moving from place to place, laboring as only an angry man can, pounding harder and cutting deeper and wielding an axe with an arm full of rage in attempts at substitute vengeance.
There’d been stints as a farmhand and a ranch hand in the twenties, when he was very young. The Wanderer had experience with animals. But then the Great Depression came and those jobs disappeared. In the thirties he found his meals and a place to lay his head in work camps run by the WPA. He helped build roads and bridges—sturdy, useful things. He was left alone. There was the occasional woman, the type who was thrilled by his looks and never cared that he didn’t want her to talk, the type who didn’t wonder why he wanted her to wear a pearl necklace, the type who didn’t mind being a stand-in.
The Wanderer had been too young to fight in the First World War but had volunteered to fight in the Second, though by then he was older than the average soldier. He was sick of the loneliness of his angry life, and so used the war to court death. In the thick of the action, he swallowed his fear and vomited it back up. By the time the war was over, he knew a two-part suffering: one part injury and one part survivor’s guilt, and that two-part misery curdled his bitterness.
He came back home in general good health, that is, except for his face. He’d lost a part of his jaw near Mézières in the Champagne-Ardenne. The medics did the best they could on his once handsome, shot-up jaw. The doctors worked on the leftovers, wiring and grafting and stitching together. What remained of his chin no longer sagged open and he could chew his food enough, but his eyelid drooped and he’d lost half his hearing. The Wanderer no longer resembled himself.
The doctors told him he was lucky. They were quite proud of their work. But no one had done a thing about the piece of his mind that had stayed in the Champagne-Ardenne with scraps of his bone and teeth and sinew. The Wanderer became permanently troubled.
The only women who would have sex with him now were the ones who did it for pay, and even some of those refused. He took to drink because he could count on Jack Daniel’s to offer him cold comfort.
“She’s just another damned old whore,” his whiskey friend would say.
W
ILLIAM
and Dancy honeymooned at the Hotel Monteleone on Royal Street in New Orleans. Dancy had never seen so much marble, had never even imagined that a ceiling could look like a painting, had never checked the time on a tall and hand-carved grandfather clock until she walked into the Monteleone. This was William’s world.
“Have you bags, sir?”
“My wife has one,” William replied, and turned to wink at Dancy.
The porter took her overnight bag and with a gracious nod escorted them to their room.
“It’s nice and cool in here,” Dancy said when the porter had gone, “even without the ceiling fan on.”
“Air-conditioning,” William said.
“Oh.”
“Are you thirsty?” William asked. “There’s ice water.”
Dancy didn’t reply. She’d picked up a card on the writing desk and saw that they could get a cup of coffee until one o’clock in the morning if they wanted to, and that the Monteleone would do their laundry.
“Dancy?”
She turned to him and with a serious look asked, “Are you sure about this, William?”
“What? The cost? Of course I’m sure,” he said. “It’s our honeymoon.”
But that wasn’t what she’d meant.
Dancy looked at him without saying a word. She was afraid she’d start to cry.
“Are you feeling okay? Do you want to lie down?” William asked.
Dancy nodded.
She didn’t want to wrinkle her wedding dress—it was the only really good thing she’d brought—so she took it off and lay down in her slip.
William took off his jacket and necktie, lay down beside her, and took her in his arms.
That’s when the tears came.
William thought it was a sudden bout of pregnancy emotion, and so he cradled her and smoothed her hair and told her everything would be okay. After a while, he got a cool cloth for her face.
“Feel better?” he asked.
Dancy nodded.
“Are you hungry?”
She nodded again.
“Well, then, let’s get dressed again and go downstairs for some dinner.”
As they were looking at the Hunt Room’s menu, it struck William that Dancy seemed anxious. He thought she was worried about the money again but then noticed how her brow knit and her lips moved as she read,
pressed pompano moutardine
.
“I have to chuckle a little bit at these places,” he said. “They say pressed pompano when all they really mean is jack fish.”
Her face lit up when he said it—they served jack fish for dinner in William’s world! Maybe everything really would be okay.
They went to the Carousel Bar after dinner, where Dancy had some sparkling water, what with the baby and all. Dancy loved the Carousel—fancy as it was, they served gumbo and crackers.
They made love that night as a married couple and, oddly enough, were kind of shy.
Mr. and Mrs. William Arrow remained at the Monteleone for two nights. They couldn’t stay any longer because William had recently secured a position at the law firm of Robillard & Broome and he had a family to think of now. They checked out and went straight to the Café Du Monde because Dancy was craving beignets. Then they returned to the rented house, where over the next few weeks, Dancy put up curtains and gave the place some color with rag rugs and plants and a picture of Paris.
Almost immediately they fell into ritual: She put on his robe like a child playing dress-up and sat on the tub’s edge to watch him shave, getting so absorbed in the act that she stretched her own lip over her teeth as he scraped the razor under his nose. They learned the things that couples come to know: how he put his socks on, or how she put away the dishes, or that she slept on her side and he slept on his back, or exactly how they brushed their teeth and swished to rinse their mouths. Upon waking in the morning she had the habit of bunching her hands up and rubbing her eyes, which always made him smile. William loved everything about Dancy in the morning, but most of all he loved the way she walked when she was barefoot—soft and quiet like a puffy little cat.
Dancy cooked and cleaned and read library books, and Monday through Friday at 5:25 in the afternoon she dabbed perfume behind her ears and waited for William to come home. He always nuzzled her neck when she met him at the door, and each settled into the warmth of the other and into a love that was stronger than it had been just hours before.
During the early weeks of her pregnancy Dancy slept a lot, which was just as well considering the nausea that could come over her like motion sickness even when she was sitting stock still and nowhere near an automobile or a spinning carnival ride. Mostly it was smells that bothered her, smells she used to love: bacon or coffee or Borax detergent. The nurse at her doctor’s office said it was a good sign because being sick meant the baby was healthy, which brought some much-needed consolation but absolutely no relief.
Bonaventure could move his eyes and wrinkle his nose and pull his mouth into smiles or frowns. Nine weeks after he’d been conceived, his arms had hands, his hands had fingers, and his fingers had fingerprints unique just to him. In no time at all his eyes were brown, and sometimes he got the hiccups.
After four months of intermittent sickness, Dancy began to have more good days than bad. Eventually, she was sleeping less and spending hours and hours reading cookbooks and practicing recipes. She enjoyed the cooking, but she enjoyed eating more: pancakes or liverwurst or sausage and grits, most of it smothered in blackstrap molasses. She gained enough weight to look more pregnant than she was. Her skin glowed, her hair shone, and her eyes had taken on a sparkle. Both William and Dancy marveled at the rounding of her belly, at the perfect dark line that ran from her navel to her pelvis, and at the amazing thing that had happened to her breasts.
Both of them had an overwhelming feeling that their baby was a boy, and they tried to imagine what he would be like. Dancy envisioned an active child with a face full of freckles and hair that was brown and very, very straight. William saw a slender fellow with an interest in bridges and a fondness for fishing. It would turn out that they both were a little bit right.
“Do you think he can hear us from inside my belly?” Dancy wondered aloud over orange juice and toast when she was about four-and-a-half months along. William assured her that he absolutely did. Having come to an agreement on their baby’s ability to hear them, they sang a pretty good rendition of “Shoo-fly Pie and Apple Pan Dowdy” and laughed when they had finished.
Unborn Bonaventure listened to the song and the laughter. It thrilled him so much he did a little dance and reveled in the constancy of his mother’s beating heart.
“William!” said Dancy. “I felt him! He moved!” And Dancy put William’s hand right there. He felt nothing at first, and then came a flutter, and William Arrow’s breath got caught in his throat when Bonaventure brushed his fingers beneath the place where his father’s hand rested.
Once the pregnancy sickness stopped altogether, William and Dancy made love with the abandon of those who haven’t a care in the world. He would hold her against his chest in the afterglow and brush his fingertips up and down her arm, and she would curl into him, feeling safer than she’d ever felt in her life. But there was even more to their happiness. They sang with the radio and danced in the daytime. They made lemonade and iced tea and drank it on the porch, while crickets sang in the grass. They furnished the nursery, painting it yellow and hanging a mobile over the crib. They breathed in unison through the sleeping hours, never once sensing the nearing hand of fate.
When Bonaventure heard their harmonized breathing, he would close his fingers and make a little fist, and it wasn’t but a minute until he was sucking his thumb, which always brought him comfort. The memory of their singing flowed from his ears to his knees and down to his feet, where it caused him to wiggle his toes in his sleep.
The Voices Were Very Encouraging
A
FTER
the war, The Wanderer got a job at the Rouge, Henry Ford’s most famous factory, located upstream from the convergence of the Detroit River at Zug Island. He had to clench what was left of his jaw against the rat-tat-tat of mass production that sounded so much like machine guns. His rented room in the basement of a Melvindale house felt just like a foxhole with the booming that came from the underground blasting in the salt mines located nearby. His days were filled with steel and sweat, his nights with edgy bitterness; he could not escape the smells and the dust. Sometimes his head ached as if it were caught between an anvil and a white-hot hammer. The headaches became more frequent. They grew talons that stabbed into his memory, causing wounds that oozed resentment.
And those headaches brought voices with them, and then the voices came on their own, constant and buzzing, speaking to him of all that he’d lost: his family, his roots, his young man’s hopes. He’d been lonely for over twenty-five years. He felt empty, cold, and gray all the time. He mended his own clothes and took his meals in isolation; he knew no friendship or comfort. He’d never married or beheld his own child or slept with a woman all through the night.
Now the voices spoke to him of home. They reminded him of the hurt on his father’s face; they echoed his mother’s pleading—his parents had not known his real reason for leaving. Mostly those voices whispered to him about the one who had taken from him and broken his spirit; of late they’d been speaking of settling the score.
Reading was the only thing that could quiet those constant voices, and so the library became The Wanderer’s haven. He’d always been an avid reader; his personal tastes favored the classics, and it was in that section that he rediscovered
The Count of Monte Cristo
, a book he’d read when he was young. He remembered being inspired by the better nature of the character Edmond Dantès: loving, kind, and good. This time he was inspired by the man’s need for vengeance.
The voices began to steal from the book. In the predawn hours of The Wanderer’s insomnia they whispered Dantès’s words:
I wish to be Providence myself, for I feel that the most beautiful, noblest, most sublime thing in the world, is to recompense and punish.