Ancient of Days

by Michael Bishop

  “Hey,” Livia George said, “that’s the fella Miss RuthClaire brung in here las’ January. You know, the one done upchuck all ovah the table.”

  “Adam!” I exclaimed.

  “Now he’s got so uptown ’n’ pretty he drivin’ a silver bullet. An’ jes’ look who’s with him, too!”

  “RuthClaire!” I cried. Even in the mist-cloaked street, the syllables of her name reverberated like bell notes.

  We embraced all around. I even hugged Adam, who, in returning my hug, gave my back such a wrench that for a moment I thought a vertebra had snapped. He was gentler with Livia George, probably out of inbred habiline chivalry. When RuthClaire and I came together, though, we bumped bellies. She laughed self-consciously, and I knew that her baby wasn’t long for the womb. In defiance of the real possibility of her going into labor along the way, she and Adam had made the two-hour trip from Atlanta. That struck me as crazy. Angrily, I told them so.

  “Relax, Paul. Even if I had, it wouldn’t have been a catastrophe.”

  “On the expressway shoulder? Like a savage? You’ve got to be kidding!”

  I turned to Adam. Although still far from a giant, he was taller than I remembered, maybe because he was wearing hand-tooled leather boots with elevator heels. I was going to rebuke him for making the drive with his wife so close to delivery, but RuthClaire had launched a spirited mini lecture: “Only a tiny fraction of all the babies born to our species have been born in hospitals, Paul. And that fact has not led to our extinction.”

  I whirled on her. “What if you’d had trouble?”

  She patted the opaque ball turret of her pregnancy. “Gunner here’s not going to cause any trouble. I’ll have him—or her—the way a birddog bitch drops her puppies. Thwup! Like that.”

  “When is it due?” I asked, shaking my head.

  “They don’t quite know. I’ve been pregnant since June at least. That puts me early in my seventh month.”

  “She safe enough, then,” Livia George assured me.

  Fresh-faced in the December mist, RuthClaire said, “That’s not altogether certain, Livia George. No one has any real idea what the habiline gestation period is. Or was. Adam says that as a kid on Montaraz he witnessed a couple of births, but he doesn’t have any memory of his people trying to reckon the length of a woman’s term.”

  “Surely, one of those hotshots up at Emory has an opinion on the matter.”

  “I’m sure they do, Paul, but we haven’t asked them. We think I’m close. Habilines may carry their offspring no more than five or six months, maybe even less. They’re small, you know.”

  “Yeah. Even when they’re wearing platform heels.”

  “That’s to help him reach the brake and accelerator pedals, not to pamper his vanity. Even so, we had those pedals lifted about four inches from the floorboard.”

  “Jesus.” I gazed into the glowering pewter sky. “A thirty-six-year-old madonna on the brink of water-burst and an East African Richard Petty who can barely touch his brakes!”

  “You gonna keep ’em out here all afternoon, Mistah Paul, or can they go inside to field your cuss-’em-outs.”

  I waved everyone inside and sent Livia George to the kitchen for coffee and hot chocolate. It was still a couple of hours before my dinner crowd would descend.

  “Why didn’t you telephone? I might not’ve even been here.”

  “You’re always here, Paul. The West Bank’s what you do.”

  “Yeah, but why didn’t you phone?”

  “I always see Edna Twiggs sitting at the switchboard when I dial a Beulah Fork number, AT&T reorganization and all. I don’t trust the phones—not after last summer.”

  “So you’d risk turning Adam into your obstetrician?”

  “Absolutely. Adam and I have decided: I’m not having this baby in a hospital.”

  Unable to help myself, I rolled my eyes.

  “Stop it. You belittle everything you don’t understand.”

  “You planning a hot-tub delivery? That’s one of the latest crazes. Mama pretends she’s a porpoise in Marineland.”

  “Paul—”

  “Birthing stools. That’s big, too. You have the kid squatting, like a football center pulling the pigskin out from under his jersey.”

  Adam looked at his crooked hands on my new mint-green tablecloth. RuthClaire spoke through clenched teeth: “I’ll never understand how we got married. Never.”

  Knowing I had gone too far, I apologized.

  “Neither of those methods is as absurd as you make them out to be. Underwater delivery is nonstressful for mother and child, and a birthing stool gives a woman a degree of control over a process that’s rightfully her own, anyway. If your consciousness is ever raised, Paul Loyd, it’s going to have to be with a block and tackle.”

  Livia George came back from the kitchen with our hot drinks. “Had six babies ’thout a doctor ’round,” she told us. “In a feather bed in my own house. Oldest done hit six-foot-four. Youngest ain’ been sick a day.”

  Adam made a series of gestures with his hands, which RuthClaire translated: “Adam says to tell you that we want our baby born at Paradise Farm. We’ll even pay for the privilege. It’s important to us.”

  “But why?” I asked, almost—but not quite—dumbstruck.

  “As soon as I check into a hospital, the media will descend. It’s understandable, I guess, but I can’t let them turn the birth of our baby into an international circus. Paradise Farm’s already got a good security system, and it’s far enough from Atlanta to thwart a few of the inevitable busybodies.”

  “RuthClaire, why not fly to some remote Caribbean island? You can afford it. It’s going to be butt-bruising cold here in Beulah Fork—not like in Zarakal or Haiti, kid.”

  “Don’t you see? I’ll be comfortable out there. And what more fitting place to have Adam’s child than the place where we first met?” She turned an admiring—a loving—gaze on the habiline, and he responded with one of intelligent steadfastness.

  Discomfited, I said, “You can stay out there, Ruthie Cee, on two conditions.”

  “Two!”

  I stood. “Just listen. They’re easy. First, you don’t pay me a dime.” Adam and RuthClaire exchanged a look, the meaning of which was obviously both gratitude and acceptance. “Second, let me find a discreet, reputable doctor to help with the delivery.”

  “No! An outsider would needlessly complicate things, and I’m going to be fine.”

  I told her there was still a possibility she might need help. How could I live with myself if anything went wrong? She replied that for the past six months Adam had been reading—yes, reading—every tome on childbirth he could find. It was also his opinion that the unborn infant’s gracile body—gracile, for God’s sake!—would ease its journey through the birth canal. Ruthie Cee, a birddog bitch dropping puppies.

  My forefinger made a stabbing motion at Adam. “It’s hard for me to credit his coming so far in six months. Forgive me if I’m skeptical of his medical expertise.”

  “He’s brighter than most, Paul, and he had a head start on Montaraz that nobody chooses to acknowledge.”

  “But he’s not a doctor. And that’s my second condition.” RuthClaire stood. Adam stood. For a moment, I feared they’d leave, and I cursed my show of intractability. I was about to rescind my second condition when Livia George gave me a face-saving out:

  “S’pose I midwife Miss RuthClaire’s little ’un? How that be?” She fluttered her hands before her. “I got lots of s’perience birthin’ babies.”

  Hallelujah. RuthClaire, Adam, and I all did double takes. We all liked Livia George’s proposal. There was something about her turn of phrase, her cunning self-mockery. Our conflict thus resolved, we four took turns embracing as we had earlier done on the sidewalk.

  I sent the Montarazes out to Paradise Farm with a set of keys. Livia George and I finished decorating and greeted the dinner crowd. Hazel Upchurch and Nancy Teavers came in at 4:30. By recent standards, bu
siness was slow and the evening dragged. At 11:30 I roared up the highway to see how my new lodgers were doing.

  They had not yet gone to bed. I found them in RuthClaire’s old studio.

  Often over the past few months, I had entered the untenanted loft to stand in its memory-haunted emptiness imagining just such a reunion. Now she was really back, my lost RuthClaire.

  Adam, of course, was with her, sitting cross-legged on the drafting table opposite RuthClaire’s Naugahyde sofa, a book between his legs and gold-framed granny glasses clamped on the end of his broad, flat nose. The sleeves of his baby-blue velour shirt were rolled up, and he’d unzipped it to the midpoint of his sternum, revealing a flannel-y nest of reddish-black chest hair. He saw me before RuthClaire did.

  “Still reading up on childbirth?” I asked him.

  He bared his teeth—a smile, not a threat or an expression of fear—and lifted the book so I could see it. RuthClaire pulled herself to a sitting position with my nappy beige rearing-bear blanket around her shoulders. By the door, I leaned down and kissed her on the forehead. Then I crossed to the drafting table to find out what Adam was reading. A small, slick paperback: The Problem of Pain by C. S. Lewis.

  “C. S. Lewis?” I said incredulously, turning to RuthClaire. “A habiline holdover from the Pleistocene’s reading C. S. Lewis?”

  “What’s wrong with that?”

  I took the book from Adam. “Your husband—the living descendant of a bunch of East African mole people—is busily ingesting a work of theology?”

  “Do you believe he can read?”

  I glanced sidelong at Adam. I knew he’d mastered sign language, I had seen him driving a car, and his eyes were appraising me with a pause-prompting keenness.

  “Sure,” I grudgingly admitted. “Why not?”

  “Then why find it hard to believe he’s reading C. S. Lewis? The man wrote for children, you know. He even wrote science fiction.”

  I changed tacks. “He ought to be reading, uh, Midwifery Made Easy, or Benjamin Spock, or something like that.”

  “He’s done that already. Don’t you understand? His consciousness is emerging from a kind of mental Upper Paleolithic. Adam’s trying to find out who he is.”

  “More birthing-stool psychobabble?”

  “Only if you choose to belittle it as such.”

  Adam made signs with both hands. I could not interpret them. The irony of his knowing a system of communication of which I was ignorant underscored the foolishness of my doubting his interest in theology. (If he could sign, he could just as easily genuflect.)

  “He wants to know if he has a soul,” RuthClaire translated.

  “So do I. Want to know if I have a soul, that is.”

  “Your lack of a heart may imply something equally discouraging about your spiritual equipment, Paul.”

  “It’s after midnight, kid. I can’t believe we’re discussing this.”

  “What about it? Do you think Adam has a soul?”

  “What kind of soul, for God’s sake? An animal soul? A rational soul? An immortal soul? All this sort of adolescent head game will get you is a migraine and a reputation as a philosophical nitpicker.”

  RuthClaire flapped her nappy blanket. “Skip it. You’ve got all the sensitivity of a tire iron.” Dog-tired, I shuffled to the sofa and plopped down opposite her. She took pity and flapped an end of her blanket at me. I pulled it over my knees. “Almost like old times, hey, Paul?”

  “I can’t recall having a chaperone before.”

  “Livia George.”

  “Livia George’s a chaperone the way Colonel Sanders is a spokesman for the Save-the-Chickens Fund.”

  RuthClaire laughed, and we began to talk. Somehow, owing in part to Adam’s absorption in his book, it was almost as if we were alone in the wide, chilly room. RuthClaire told me that downstairs she had seen my growing collection of plates in her Footsteps on the Path to Man series. I had arranged the eight titles issued to date on hinged brass stands in a glass-fronted maple hutch. The plates included Ramapithecus, Australopithecus afarensis, A. africanus, A. boisei, Homo habilis, Homo erectus, Homo sapiens, and Homo neanderthalensis. The habiline, first issued back in August, bore an undeniable resemblance to the gargoyle perched on my drafting table.

  “Look,” I said, “you’ve still got ten unissued plates in this series. The eight main hominids on the road to Homo sapiens sapiens are already out. What’s next?”

  “Contemporary racial variations.”

  “Negroes, Caucasians, Orientals?”

  “I’ve already done paintings for those and some others—Oceanics, aboriginals, American Indians. The final four are up in the air because there’s unavoidable overlap. I’ll probably do Eskimos, Arabs, pygmies, and Nordics, but I could substitute Bushmen or Montagnards or Ainu somewhere in there. It’s arbitrary, of course, a way to get the number of plates up to eighteen. AmeriCred’s hollering for the last four so they can put the plates into production. Me, I’m sick of the whole rotten thing.”

  “Really? You don’t enjoy doing them?”

  “It’s donkeywork. I liked doing the prehistoric numbers, Adam’s portrait and all that. But these last ten are sheer commercial excess. AmeriCred wants their subscribers to pay through the nose for gewgaws. I’m a hack writing otherwise worthless potboilers.”

  “Enjoy your popularity. No one’s twisting their arms.”

  “It’s not that I’m doing a lousy job, but these latest plates aren’t contributing anything to the development of my art. It’s safe representational stuff. My audience consists of well-to-do old ladies and fat-cat corporate executives looking for a ‘classy’ cultural investment.” She stuck out her tongue, as if to see if there was a piece of lint or tobacco on its tip. “That’s why I’ve been so slow to finish this assignment, Paul.”

  “Blame it on your pregnancy.”

  “I’ve done that. It’s a lie.”

  “People who regret making money are nincompoops.”

  “The regret—the guilt—comes from what you do to make it. Even you know that. Right now I’m whoring.”

  Adam looked up from The Problem of Pain. He made some signs translatable as “Don’t talk rubbish,” then went back to Lewis’s little piece of theodicy.

  “Whoring? You didn’t feel that way about The Celestial Hierarchy, did you?”

  “No. Those are breakthrough paintings. I avoided all the clichés—archangels with flaming swords, naked cherubs with wings on their heels, Jesus dragging his old rugged hanging tree. I did something new. It was a small miracle the series was successful. A bigger miracle it ever got commissioned.”

  “It made you popular. You hadn’t bargained for that.”

  “‘How public,’ ” RuthClaire quoted, “‘like a frog.’ ”

  “That’s smug elitism,” I said. “It’s probably insincere, too. You pretend to despise success because there’s an old art-school attitude that figures nothing popular can be worth a damn.”

  “There’s a backlash against me in the Atlanta art community because of my success. The people who count up there see my work on these stupid plates as a sellout. I do, too. Now, especially.”

  “If that opinion takes in the plates you’re proud of, to hell with them.”

  “It’s more complicated than that. They don’t respect what I’m doing, and I can’t truly respect it, either—not my last ten examples of porcelain calendar art, anyway.”

  “They’re jealous.”

  “That enters into it. But I’ve always thought myself something of a visionary. My work for AmeriCred has undermined all that. The worst thing about the backlash is that I know I’ve brought it on myself.”

  The studio’s fluorescents flickered palely as the wind gusted and moaned. The yew outside the twin-paned plate glass creaked its tall shadow across our imaginations. Even Adam looked up.

  “Is that another reason you came down here? To escape the disapproval of the art-scene cognoscenti?”

  RuthClaire fro
wned. “I don’t know.” Her spirits mysteriously revived. “They like what Adam does. In February, Paul, the folks at Abraxas will give an entire third-floor gallery room over to an exhibition of Adam’s paintings. It’ll be in place for two weeks. Promise me you’ll come see it.”

  “The West Bank,” I reminded her. “It’s hard to get away.”

  “You got away in February when you visited Brian Nollinger at that primate field station north of Atlanta. Well, Abraxas is twenty miles closer to Beulah Fork than that concentration camp for our furry cousins.” A grimace of unfeigned revulsion twisted her mouth, but then her eyes were facetiously pleading. “Listen, Mr. Loyd, I’ve just made you an offer you can’t refuse. Understand?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” I said. “Yes, ma’am.”

  And so Adam and RuthClaire stayed with me, and Livia George drove home with me from the West Bank every evening in case my ex-wife went into labor. At the restaurant itself, we had a prearranged telephone signal. Adam, out at Paradise Farm, would dial and let the phone ring once. Then he’d hang up, wait thirty seconds, and repeat the procedure. After the second ring, no matter how busy we were, Livia George and I would sprint up the Tocqueville Road in my Mercedes to answer his call.

  Atlanta’s news media finally realized that the Montarazes had left the city. They phoned the West Bank looking for a lead. Sometimes they tried to induce Edna Twiggs to give them my unlisted number at Paradise Farm. She resisted. One day at lunch, in fact, she told me how she’d turned down a bribe of money for that information. Edna Twiggs, an ally! Even so, I took the added precaution of connecting all the telephones in my house to an answering machine so that, in my absence, RuthClaire and Adam could monitor incoming calls. Fortunately, no one but me ever tried to ring them up.

  I was still concerned that someone in a TV van or a newspaper company car might try to gatecrash. The Atlanta papers had recently featured headlines about Adam and RuthClaire. In the morning Constitution, this: