The Butterfly Plague (34 page)

Oh, dear.

Oh, my…

But how to drive a car?

Dolly got out of the rumble seat into the front.

He turned the key.

That much he knew.

Miraculously, the Franklin at once slid into action.

Backward.

Backward—
backward
down the drive.

“Help!” Dolly screamed. “God help me! I’m moving!”

At once, the car jiggered to a stop.

Dolly blushed.

Although God had apparently heard him, he sincerely hoped the neighbors had not.

So there he was, immobile in the center of the road, broadside to oncoming traffic.

Luckily, however, there was no traffic coming on.

Looking both ways to ensure at least temporary safety, Dolly pulled a few knobs, and after one or two backfires that nearly cost him his life in heart attacks, he heard a faint rumble, felt a promising jolt, tingled with delight at the first jiggling and juicings of the engine, and realized that indeed he had somehow mastered the mysteries of internal combustion.

Now, all he needed was a destination.

There was no orange sky, unfortunately. It was the wrong time of day for that.

Still, it hardly mattered. There was Dolly, sitting in the front seat—all by himself—driving.

It was lovely. Not a single other car was in sight. Only people walking their dogs on distant sidewalks.

Dolly wanted to wave at them, but he didn’t dare. That would mean taking his hands from the wheel. And if you took your hands from the wheel, the car stopped. Everyone knew that.

Didn’t they?

10:15 a.m.

The journey extended as far as Topanga Canyon Beach.

When he arrived with a crash, Ruth and Miss Bonkers could not believe their eyes, and kept going back outside to make sure Dolly did not have someone else in the car with him. They did not notice that he had been forced to bring it to a stop by crashing into a convenient sand dune.

“You’ve got a woman hidden out there,” Ruth teased. “You must have.”

“No. No. Not at all. Quite honestly. I really did, Ruth. I drove it all the way myself.”

“Well, I think that’s marvelous,” said Ruth. “I think that is simply marvelous. Don’t you, Miss Bonkers?”

“Oh, yes. Yes. Marvelous,” said Miss Bonkers, and left the room. She had beds to make.

Adolphus beamed from ear to ear. He did a sort of knock-kneed march from one end of the living room to the other. He gave his goatee several patronizing pats with the flat of his hand. His clothes (pink trousers, blue blazer) seemed to shout “Success!” and even “Bravo! Bravo!”

“It was nothing,” said Dolly. “Nothing.”

“Well, I think it calls for a good stiff drink,” said Ruth.

“I feel,” said Adolphus, leaning elegantly and delicately against the stones of the fireplace, “like the whole of emancipated slavery! I shall drive everywhere from here on in—slowly, I admit. I still have no wish or penchant for speed, but I shall do all the driving myself!” He smiled. “I simply adored it.”

“Oh, Dolly! I’m so proud of you,” said Ruth. “Driving your own car! Why, it’s marvelous!”

She had made some highballs in the interim and now she passed him his. He snuck a look at her figure.

“How do you feel?” he asked with as little commitment to interest as he could muster.

“Fine,” said Ruth. “Fine.”

“Ha—hum! “Dolly said.

“What’s the matter?”

“Well, I mean to say—I mean, well. Do you know yet?”

“Oh, yes,” Ruth laughed. “I’m certain.”

“Certain, eh? Well. Well.”

“I hope you approve.”

“How can I approve when I don’t know who the father is?”

“Don’t fish, Dolly. All in good time. I’ll tell you, all in good time.”

“Can you tell me if it’s somebody I know? I should, at least, think you could tell me that.”

“No. You don’t know him.”

“Do you think…? I mean, one day…? What I mean to say is, whoever this is, do you think…? Well?”

“Marriage?”

“Yes.”

“No.”

Dolly found his way to a chair and sat down.

“What am I expected to say when this child appears? That you’ve had some sort of unhappy affair?”

“We can decide that when the child comes. For now, it’s sufficient that the child is coming.”

“Sufficient for what?” said Dolly, miserable with ignorance.

“Sufficient for my peace of mind.”

Ruth, too, sat down.

“How can you do this, Ruth?” Dolly pondered. “Inflict life on this child. Don’t you know how awful it is for me to be alive…”

“But you stay alive,” said Ruth.

“Only because death is too repugnant to contemplate.”

“Come on, now. You don’t believe that for one minute.”

“I do. I do.”

“But just now, just now, driving the car it was triumphant for you and wonderful to be alive…”

“In that moment, Ruth. Only in that minute.”

“But that’s all life is,” said Ruth. “Moments and minutes—one by one.”

Adolphus stared at her. She was his sister, but he did not know her. Certainly, she did not know him. As children, yes. As adults, no.

“You’re very positive,” he said, “all of a sudden.”

“I have another life inside me,” said Ruth. “It’s easy to be positive when you carry the future around with you.” She smiled. But this only angered Adolphus.

“You never did grasp philosophy,” he said. “Never. You have the mind of a child. Up and down. Up and down. Here today and gone tomorrow. Pessimist. Optimist. Stoic and pleasurist. The shy gregarian. That’s what I ought to call you, the shy gregarian. You won’t talk to anyone, and then, when you will talk, finally, who do you choose? A bunch of gypsies on the beach. You marry a perfectly extraordinary man who, from all appearances, certainly loved you, but you won’t have children by him. Oh, no! So what do you do? You come back here and meet some total stranger…” Dolly paused and then said, “Some slavering sex maniac, for all I know, and you give yourself to him without a thought. One minute you’re devastated by depression and everyone’s sick with worry that you’ve gone mad, and the next minute you’re bouncing around like a schoolgirl who’s discovered boys, telling us you’re going to have a baby. I think you are crazy, that’s what I think. Crazy as the March Hare—or just plain simple-minded. And for my money, there’s very little difference.”

There was a silence and then Ruth said, very quietly, “When Myra died, didn’t your life change?”

Dolly couldn’t follow that. He said, “No,” and stared at his sister, who was sitting near a window, her face invisible in light.

“We are the living dead,” said Ruth. “Walking around dead, until…”

“Until what?”

“Until we are forced by circumstances to live.”

“No ‘circumstance’ could possibly make me live.”

“Yes, it could,” said Ruth. “Yes, it could. The threat of extermination could.”

“I have lived my whole life with the threat of extermination! Really, Ruth!”

“It hasn’t been sufficient, then,” said Ruth. “It can’t have been, or else, when Myra died, your whole life would have changed.”

“Why, why, why, do you keep saying that?”

“Because she died wanting to live. That should mean something to you.”

They stared at each other.

“And Mother?” Dolly asked. “Don’t tell me she didn’t want to live.”

“She didn’t,” said Ruth, very simply.

“She hated dying. She hated it as much as I do. Or will.”

Ruth shook her head. “No,” she said. “She was prepared and ready. She was eager.”

“And what are you saying about Myra? What are you saying? It’s just a stupid paradox. Myra wanted to live and killed herself? Mother wanted to die but let a mere disease kill her when all she had to do was take poison? What are you saying?”

“I am saying…”

“Well?”

“Wait a minute.”

“Haven’t got it thought out, eh? Hah! I thought so.”

“No, I have it thought out,” said Ruth. “I have it all thought out. Only.

“Only what?”

“Is it wise to tell you?”

She jiggled the ice in her glass.

“Myra was murdered,” she said at last.

“Murdered! Nonsense. She did it herself with sleeping pills.”

“She was murdered,” said Ruth, “and that’s the difference between the effect death has on me and the effect it has on you. The difference, now too, between the effect life has. No one loved Myra enough to make her…force her to live for their sake.”

“And Mother? Are you saying no one loved Mama enough for that?”

“No. I’m not saying that, at all. It’s just that Mama wasn’t a victim. And Myra was. And so are you. And so could I be. In fact, for a long while, I was.”

“Fiddlesticks.”

“Victims are victims, by choice. Other people’s choice at first, and then their own.”

“Drivel.”

“But they still die—the victims of killers.”

“Name one.”

“I have already. Myra.”

“Myra was loved. I loved her.”

Ruth slowly shook her head. “No,” she said. “No. You don’t understand me. There is only one love that can save life. And that love is the love that has killed, buried and replaced the love of self.” Now she looked directly at Adolphus and he could see the expression of her face, at last.

Ruth appeared to have been possessed. It was not a pleasant expression. It contained no element of contemplation and too little confusion to be a recognizable human expression. She was not, he suspected, speaking to him at all, but to herself, and, from the way she looked at him, he also guessed that she was not for a moment even aware that he was there. She was speaking, not at all about Myra, or their mother, or himself, but about some other thing—some other time—some vision she had had or some experience that had returned to haunt her. She was speaking not of persons, one by one, but of people, hundreds by thousands.

“I don’t,” he said, but quietly, as though afraid to interrupt her or even to allude, by his voice, to his presence, “I don’t—and I am sorry—understand.”

Ruth stared at the floor and then back out of the window.

“Victims,” she muttered. And then, Dolly swore, she added, “Butterflies,” but so gently and with such private wonder that he rose and left her there, knowing, inside himself, that the private wonder was at some private message and that, indeed, his sister had not changed. She did not vary, but only rose up, like a fish to dragonflies, from the depths of a dark and desperate lake, to the challenging surface of its element wherein there was safety, but beyond which for more than mere seconds, the fish could not hope to trespass and live.

“Imagine,” Dolly thought, rising to leave her there, “that we must strangle on the very air we breathe.”

The air of hope.

Hope, Naomi had said, is death in the mind.

But Dolly did not know that. He only knew that there was hope inside of him. The hope of eluding death—the subject of all conversation.

He wavered on the brink of the doorway to his mother’s room. He looked inside. The empty bed seemed deprived of more than Naomi’s presence. It was sadder than a mere deathbed. The echo of something alive had rumpled the edges of its coverlet. Just a breeze, probably, for the windows were open. But someone undoubtedly was there.

Adolphus had the very strange and almost sinister experience of thinking, with what he thought was rationality, that he must go in and check between the mattress and the spring, to see if his mother had left her integrity there, or some message about death that could assuage his fears of it—or the name of some place where one could go for safety.

What had Ruth meant about no one loving Myra enough to force her to live for their sake? And “victims” and “butterflies”?

Butterflies?

Ruth cut his thought in half by speaking suddenly, aloud, from the living room.

“I’m going to go and have a swim,” she said.

Dolly stared at her.

“Is that wise?” he asked.

Ruth smiled.

“Of course it’s wise,” she said. “Exercise is always wise.”

“Well, you know best,” said Dolly.

“Oh, by the way,” said Ruth, lowering her voice. “I think you should know I haven’t told Miss Bonkers. In fact, I haven’t told anyone but you. And, judging by the way you’re reacting, I think it’s a damn good thing I haven’t. So, I’d appreciate your silence.”

“I’m not going to say a word,” said Dolly, appalled by the mere idea. “Not a word.”

“Thank you.”

“Ruth?”

“What?”

“Did you, by any chance, tell Mother?” Ruth thought this over for a moment.

“Yes,” she said. “I did.”

Of course she hadn’t.

But she thought it might help Dolly to think she had.

He needed lies to keep him going.

11:30 a.m.

Ruth changed into her bathing costume, an old one-piece Olympic suit that needed mending at one blue shoulder, and passed, carrying her towel and sandals, through the living room.

She paused to look into her mother’s room.

What she saw silenced her.

Adolphus had gone to the bedside table where he’d picked up the last book read by Naomi. It was at this very moment that Ruth stopped to watch him.

He looked askance at the bed.

So did she.

It was easy to imagine it occupied. Easy and sad, for both of them, for different reasons.

With the pages of the book still dripping down, suspended in their own hoarse whisper of movement, Adolphus stood staring at the pillows, staring at something there that moved. He tiptoed quietly over.

Closer, sidling up, he extended the backs of the fingers of his free hand, five little whisks of bone and vein, and he passed them gently across the pillow faces so that a fly, having settled there, rose up in a slow but definite retreat.

Then Dolly turned away and sat down in the watching chair, still holding the book in his hand, and he began to read.

The Bridge of San Luis Rey
.

Ruth quietly closed the door between them. He did not even notice.

Dolly in the watching chair.

Ruth, already swimming in her mind, went down to join her body to the legendary waters of peace.

Something was about to happen. She knew it and was trying to escape. But action would not stop it from happening. Whatever it was. Neither action, nor stillness.