Nine Women

by Shirley Ann Grau

  Farther down the canal there was a dark-haired woman who sat in her backyard under a medlar tree. She waved to them, silently.

  Even farther along there was an old man, a very old man, who always wore a grayish bathrobe and held a glass of red liquid in his hand. He called to them, using the same words every time: “You pass on my canal, and you never stop to talk to me. Come talk to me and I will give you some cream soda.” And he held up the red-filled glass and rattled the ice against its sides.

  Though he was much too old and frail to chase them, they were afraid, and never looked directly at him as they passed. He might have the evil eye.

  Now, listening carefully, they heard the sucking, gurgling sound of fast-moving water. They were nearing the point where their canal emptied into a still larger one, where the water was very swift and the pumps less than a mile away through a great brick-lined underground culvert.

  Already ripples surged across the tin surface of their raft. They dug in their paddles, turned the raft into the side. They landed with a thump and a splash. Quickly, they scrambled up the slope and stood on the concrete parapet to watch.

  The empty raft, freed of their weight, floated off. It slipped into the main canal, its prow bobbing, nodding to itself, as trickles of water splashed across its tin deck. The raft shifted from side to side, anxiously, nervously, then began spinning in circles, traveling faster and faster. Until it vanished into the darkness of the brick tunnel.

  Willie May and the other child watched it disappear, their adventure half over, only the trip home left. Stretching and whistling, arms out, they pranced like acrobats along the narrow concrete edge. Tiring of that, they wandered through strange yards, teasing dogs, stealing medlars or pomegranates or figs, according to the season. At Calhoun Street, at the traffic light, they hitched rides on the backs of trucks, hunched down carefully out of the drivers’ sight. If they were very lucky, they might catch an iceman’s truck and find a handful of ice flakes under the dark canvas.

  Among those children had been John Denham, her husband. He remembered, even if she didn’t. But then she always had trouble remembering John. When he walked into her living room that November day in 1945, still in uniform, duffel bag on his shoulder, she blinked with surprise. He’d never seemed quite real to her.

  He went back to work in the post office. She was pregnant three months later with a boy, their only child, named Michael.

  While she waited for his birth, while her body grew thick and full and her work-stiffened hands became soft and pliable again, she began setting up her own business: children’s dresses. She got out the designs that she had drawn so awkwardly during the war years, and she selected the best, carefully, lovingly. Her designs were always ornate, the colors always unusual—her clothes would be easy to recognize. A year later she sold the first of her special christening dresses, one with a cape of seed pearls to be used later in a wedding veil. For that, because she did it herself alone, there was a waiting period of five months.

  “Those women are crazy enough to order that far in advance?” John said. “My God, Willie May, they’ve got to call you as soon as they find out they’re pregnant.”

  “Yes,” she said smugly, “they do.”

  “But our kid didn’t have a fancy dress when he got baptized.”

  “I didn’t have the time,” she said with a smile.

  She hired three women, then five, and that was all.

  John said, “If you advertised, you could sell a hell of a lot more. You could have a real factory, not just five people, you could be growing.”

  She shook her head. “I don’t want to advertise, I want the mothers and the grandmothers to hear about me. I want them to see my dresses and then want to buy them. Sure, I could hire more people right now, but I want the customers to wait. They will. The Mary Lynne Shop gave me an order yesterday, even when I told them it would be four months before delivery.”

  “Crazy,” John said.

  “No,” she said, “they know my clothes are hard to get and expensive.”

  “And they like that?”

  “Yes,” she said, “that’s exactly what they want.”

  Their son, Michael, was healthy and strong, polite in his catechism class and good in school. The three of them lived quietly, well-organized and orderly. Every Sunday after ten o’clock mass they went to John’s family for midday dinner. Sunday afternoons they went for drives in their new Plymouth, stopping in the park to watch the child play. They went to a downtown movie on Saturday night and Bingo on Thursday. John went out with the boys on Friday night. Sometimes he did not come back to the house at all, but went directly to work on Saturday morning. He kept his post office uniform neatly folded in the trunk of his car.

  Eventually those Friday evenings became whole weekends. Willie May scarcely noticed. She still took their son downtown on Saturday evenings to the big movie house with its curving stairs and crystal chandelier and velvet curtains. And she went to John’s family for Sunday dinner, saying only, “John won’t be here.” His parents never asked about him.

  She decided on a name for her company. Until then her dress labels carried only three gold fleurs-de-lis (she’d seen them on the banner of St. Louis King of France). Now she added Beatrix Designs, named for the author of Michael’s favorite book, Peter Rabbit.

  Somewhere in those years, once, John asked, “You want to take a vacation? I got all this annual leave coming to me. I got to use it or lose it.”

  “I don’t know of any place I want to go,” she said slowly.

  “A couple of the boys are talking about driving over to Morrisport for some fishing. We can rent a camp there. And I might just go.”

  “Fine,” she said.

  Quicker than she thought possible, Michael was finishing high school, and John took fishing vacations several times a year. It took her a couple of days to notice that he had not returned from one of them. Only then did she discover that his clothes were gone.

  Feeling oddly embarrassed, as if she were peeping into an uncurtained window, she asked his family about him. He had retired, they said; he had twenty years’ service.

  She supposed he still lived in town, but it did not occur to her to look for him. The boy she had played with, sailing the drainage ditches after a heavy rain, the young man who had appeared at the counter in Woolworth’s, the soldier who had walked into her house—they were all different, detached, set apart by time. They were none of them connected to the balding, middle-aged husband and father.

  These things, they were all of them beyond her reach. Forces changing her life, and beyond her control. Impersonal, like wind and rain. Unquestioned.

  Why should she be thinking of John now? … She had not taken a Seconal last night and so she’d been up very early, long before day showed the other side of the drawn hospital blinds.

  “Good morning, Mrs. Denham. Your son’s already called to tell us that he’s on his way.”

  “I will be glad to leave.”

  She let her eyes wander lazily around the room, across the pictures—soft landscapes and seascapes—the two large chairs, the flowers.

  A better room to die in, she thought, than ever I was born in. But I don’t die here today. Today I go home.

  Whispering rubber voices of wheelchairs across polished corridor floors. Into cars. Into other corridors and other cars. Endless whispering.

  Long before she boarded the plane, she was so tired she could scarcely hold her head upright.

  It will be too much for me, she thought, I should not have tried. It will be too much for me. I shall die on the way. But no, I didn’t drown on the raft all those years ago. I balanced and paddled and reached the end and got home safely.

  Propped against the vibrating plane wall she dozed, woke to pain. Michael was there. “Here, Mother.” White pills and a fuzziness that did not change the pain, only pushed it farther away. As if it were happening to somebody else. In another place, another time.

  Michael
said, “Mother, this is Dallas. We’ll be here for a little while. Would you like a change of scene? Would you like to see the new airport?”

  Look at something I will never see again? No. I have seen enough. I carry enough images inside my head to need no more.

  My world grows smaller, the edges peel back, an orange shedding its skin.

  But who would think an hour could be so long … Time doesn’t rush toward its end. It groans and creaks and creeps along. Like the beat and the wheeze of the heart, its clock. Each tick like a slow hammer stroke, a gong sounding to mark something or other. Whatever.

  She opened her eyes and saw people in the plane as skeletons, she saw right through their flesh, saw their bones, saw their blood running through its appointed channels.

  She thought: Were I ever so small, a microbe, a molecule, I would ride my raft along those red courses, I would follow those warm canals, exploring.

  She floated on the warm canals, she saw the flaws in the bone, inspected them carefully: the chips and the old breaks and the dusty grit of arthritis. She noted them all, and also the swirls and the eddies and the cumbersome debris all along the warm red courses.

  Long before the plane left Dallas, she herself left the ground, flying. The air was soft, silvery birds flew so close to her that their feathers tickled her cheeks. She brushed them away.

  Michael said, “Mother?”

  But he was not with her, he was far away, held in the plane, and his voice was faint.

  She was flying, alone, complete. She saw rushing toward her, rushing past her, everything. Leaves uncurled, people rose from their beds. Cats crouched, claws tearing fur across backs. Copulation: a jumble of arms and legs. She saw hospitals and bodies lying open and bloody until they were sewed back together missing some part or other. She saw rain falling and snow falling and flowers opening their buds like ticking clocks. She saw people brushing their teeth and people weeping in corners. She saw police dozing in squad cars. She saw bitches strain in birth and puppies born like chains of pearls. She saw suns rise and stars dance in their paths across the seasons. She saw ants and oceans and curving endless space. She saw her house, the one she had lived in all her life. She saw a leaf fallen in the gutter. And swamp water bubbling with its own gases, shivering with the swarms of life beneath.

  Secure in her power and boastful of her strength, she raced the plane home. And won.

  She was waiting at the airport when Michael pushed her wheelchair through the gates. She sniffed at the thin figure sagging sideways, dribble of saliva draining from the mouth, eyes half open but unseeing.

  Filled with distaste, she joined them for one more, the last, passage in this trip. Another trailing hiss of rubber wheels across shiny machine-polished floors, another car, another ride.

  She grew impatient with their progress and tried to lift herself from the car to float on the layers and levels of the wind. This time she could not. Her power drained, she was trapped inside the tin shell, inside her shattered body.

  Michael was there and Michael would let her out. Michael would open the door as soon as they reached home. Until then the endless pale concrete highways, looping rises and the turnoffs, dark night and day all one and the same. Sun and shade. Highways like ribbons, streams of concrete.

  They stopped finally and Michael opened the doors and lifted her out.

  She was too tired now to rise and soar and find the wind. She would need help. In the sky there seemed to be something … a kite. She could ride a kite.

  “Is that a kite, Michael? Over there in the sky?”

  “No, Mother,” he said, “there isn’t anything there.”

  There were other people, but she did not bother noticing them. She stayed hidden behind her eyelids, thinking about all the roads she had traveled that day, the twists and turns that had brought her home. And this was her house, she knew it by its smell. She was home. She smiled to herself, ignoring the distant voices. Was that Michael calling? Well, she would not answer.

  She discovered that she was floating, lightly, delicately, on water flickering and iridescent with oil film. Was somebody with her? John? But John was dead years ago. She was alone. Her body was small and light and when she dabbled her fingers in the water, her hand was a sunburned child’s hand. The day was sunny and there was a very slight breeze. In the sky there were fluffy white clouds that people called bishops, they were so fat and smug and self-important looking. The water flowed swiftly, carrying her past familiar trees: fig and medlar branches drooping with out-of-season fruit. The bridge now, the High Street Bridge. There was no one on it today, no hand stretched down to bring children home safe from danger. The water made little cooing, coaxing sounds … Past the spot where the old man sat, the old man who offered them cream soda to stop and talk to him. No one tempted her today. The raft was moving very fast now, streams of water like banners on each side.

  Here was the end of the familiar journey, here was where they always paddled to the side and scrambled away home. But now she had no paddle. And the current was swifter than she ever remembered. No stopping. The raft moved lightly, steadily, floating like a leaf, turning gently, seeming to know its way.

  She had never been here, where the water was wide and the sun sparkled on tiny surface waves. She had never dared come this far before and she was astonished at how easy it was, how smooth and how silent.

  The raft began to spin in circles, the sun and the clouds flickered across the sky. On both sides was the cream color of hospital walls, and there was nothing to see on them, only rising emptiness.

  Then, as she knew she must, she saw the tunnel ahead. Just as she had seen it from the banks of childhood. She looked at it wonderingly, unsurprised. It waited. The raft sailed directly into it, into the dark.

  A Biography of Shirley Ann Grau

  Shirley Ann Grau is a Pulitzer Prize–winning author whose novels are celebrated for their beautifully drawn portraits of the American South and its turbulent recent past.

  Grau was born on July 8, 1929, in New Orleans. A few years later, her family moved to Montgomery, Alabama, where her father was stationed with the army. Grau returned to New Orleans for her senior year of high school, then attended nearby Tulane University, earning a BA in English in 1950. She initially planned to continue into graduate school, but soon found she was far more interested in writing than in scholarship.

  Her first published story appeared in 1953, in the university quarterly The New Mexico Review. Soon another was printed in The New Yorker. Encouraged by these acceptances, Grau began a series of short stories set in her familiar world of the Deep South. That collection, The Black Prince, was published in 1955 and earned great critical attention.

  That same year, Grau married James Fiebleman, a philosophy professor at Tulane. For many years, they split time between New Orleans in winter and Martha’s Vineyard in summer. While starting a family (Grau and Fiebleman had four children), the author completed her first novel, The Hard Blue Sky (1958), a story of feuding families on an island in the Gulf of Mexico. The House on Coliseum Street (1961) followed, with an unflinching depiction of a young woman’s life in New Orleans. Her next novel, Keepers of the House (1964), directly confronted one of the most urgent social issues of the time. Considered Grau’s masterpiece, it chronicles a family of Alabama landowners over the course of more than a century. Its sophisticated, unsparing look at race relations in the Deep South garnered Grau a Pulitzer Prize.

  Though she taught occasionally—including creative writing courses at the University of New Orleans—Grau focused on her writing career. Her novels and stories often track a rapidly changing South against the complex backdrop of regional history. The Condor Passes (1971) celebrates New Orleans even as it reveals some of the city’s worst sides, as experienced by one of its wealthiest families. Roadwalkers (1994), Grau’s last published novel, follows a group of orphaned African-American children as they scrape by during the Great Depression.

  In addition to writing,
Grau enthusiastically pursues her loves of travel, sailing, dogs, books, and music. She continues to split her time between New Orleans and Massachusetts, and maintains an active presence in the New Orleans literary community.

  Grau’s lilac-covered cottage in Martha’s Vineyard, where she has worked on all of her books “while the field mice played in the walls and scuttled across the floors, while occasional deer scratched themselves on the outside corners,” as she describes it.

  A 1955 announcement for The Black Prince featuring glowing reviews of Grau’s short story collection. “No book is ever as exciting as the first. I found this in my flood-wrecked house in New Orleans, dried it out with a hair dryer,” says Grau.

  Grau and her daughter in Alaska, while on a cruise in 1992.

  Grau at work in a fishing camp on the northern coast of Lake Pontchartrain, Louisiana, in 1997. She finds the marshes and swamps on the Gulf Coast “endlessly interesting, with their own terrible beauty.”

  Grau’s German Shepherd, Yoshi, the last of a line that have been in Grau’s family since her childhood. He acts as her writing companion, sitting beside her while she works—“a kind of silent supervisor,” notes Grau.

  Grau’s view of the beach on Martha’s Vineyard. She describes the experience of sitting on the sand while watching the sunrise as “a comforting feeling of belonging, of cosmic happiness if you will.”

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