Three Short Novels

by Gina Berriault

  She was given a bed in the labor room, in a row of four beds. Down the row, a young woman with pink curlers in her hair was chatting with her husband, who was sitting in a chair by her bed. But Cort’s wife, who hadn’t slept for almost twenty-four hours, was given a sedative by a tired young doctor. She spoke just a few words to Cort and began to drowse.

  Cort went out, under a stucco portico, past a trickling fountain, and around plots of flowers. He walked past the emergency entrance, under its red light, past the wing of the building and its rows of lighted windows. It was the last few hours of their being two, he and his wife, the last hours of a closeness he suspected would never return when the child entered the picture, and he resented the stranger child who was to intrude on the intimacy of the parents and claim some of the love, or even all, from the tall, long-legged woman with her sullen, bony face that could focus on a kiss and draw out of him the brooding left by his brother. He loved her for her healing of him, he loved the woman asleep in that high bed on which other women in labor had lain, and he needed her more than would the stranger of a child. A desperate desire came over him to return with her to the beginning, to take her home with her belly flat and no child anywhere, a desire for her unhindered, undivided, fresh and startling, healing of him as she had been at the beginning, because, contending with her now and with the child, was his brother, following him step for step in the night.

  Under an elm tree lit by a lamp hanging high above the street, he waited for his brother to take the last step to him, and, when the presence of the dead man was full upon him, he struck the trunk of the tree to punish himself with pain because he, Cort, was a criminal and nobody knew it. It was a crime to bring a child into the world and not love life yourself. It was a crime to hold out to the child a hand that had no meaning to offer, and to lead the child into life. He stood on the curb, crying noiselessly with fatigue and anxiety and the desire to return his wife alone and without child to the past.

  Leaf shadows, enlarged to enormous size by the high globe, lay all around him, intensifying his feeling of unreality, and he sat down on the curb in their midst and lit a cigarette to smoke out the tears from his throat. How often in the past year he had called up his brother! Even in the midst of pleasure, he had brought him into the company and introduced him around to remind them all of the meaninglessness of their existence. Six weeks ago on a Sunday afternoon, Pauline and he were guests at a neighbor’s outdoor party; the odor of barbecued meat floated over the yard, smoke swirled out from the brick barbecue, and the fragrance of liquor rose up from the cold glass in his hand. He was sitting by a lattice that cast a striped shadow over him—he liked that puzzling shadow—and his wife was reclining close by on a canvas chair. By him were three men, all with glasses in their hands. He knew none of them, they were friends of the host, but given a lead by a word, by a pause, he had told them about his brother, he had lauded his brother to the smoky sky. No one so sensitive, no one so intelligent, no one with the courage to say what he’d said in his act of suicide, oh, the greatest guy in the world! They had nodded or gazed at him, but one man had wandered away, and later, when the party was breaking up, Cort had caught sight of him. Their eyes met, and the antagonism in the man’s eyes had shocked him. On the curb now, in the midst of the giant leaf shadows, he remembered the times when he and his wife had gone to movies with other couples and as they all sat crowded together in a booth in a bar, he had recalled his brother. He told about his brother every chance he got, like a derelict who claims high-class relatives. He had to tell everybody that he, Cort, was different, he was smarter than his listeners, who accepted life without questioning. With knuckles that were still crumpled with pain, he struck the elm tree again, then spread his stinging, jerking fingers over his knee, waiting until they calmed.

  He got up, crossed to the other corner, and walked along by the old two-story frame houses that made up this neighborhood where wealthy, elderly women lived, where lawns were hedged in and lace curtains hung in windows that looked out onto high porches and wicker chairs. An exotic tree of waxy white blooms confronted him at the edge of a yard, overbearing in its still, heavy beauty. From somewhere came the fragrance of orange blossoms and from somewhere the fragrance of wisteria, and it seemed to him that fragrances in this neighborhood of the elderly were like children who had wandered over from another part of the city where children slept two and three and four in a bedroom and no bedroom was unused, as bedrooms were unused in these tall houses. Maybe, he thought, the child, the wandering fragrance, would assist the mother in the task of eradicating the image of the dead brother from the heart of the father. Maybe the child would be an ally. But what a job he was assigning the child at the moment of its birth. The child was to give the father a reason for living! It would never be equal to the task. The task was the father’s, the task of the father was to give himself and the child a reason. Not love yet, but the possibility of love caused him now to protect the child from the harm the father might do it. He heard in his throat his plea to his brother to go, to stop hounding him, to disappear on this spot, and leave him, younger brother, alone.

  Unwilling to go back to the maternity ward and wait there, he walked on, wanting to go instead to his sister, Naomi, wanting to knock on the kitchen door and ask for a cup of coffee. He wanted to know, for the first time, if she felt the same way about Hal that he felt. He had never even wondered before if that which had been done to him had also been done to her. Only Naomi—he wanted to see his sister alone, he wanted his mother to be asleep, so he and his sister could talk very quietly in the kitchen. But what could she do for him? Naomi, simple, awkward, skittish woman? What could he say to her when he was convinced beforehand that she would not comprehend? She had idolized their brother, their brother could do no wrong, not even in that final act.

  Crying in his throat for a love of life to exorcise the dead man, he wandered out into the street. A dog up on a porch growled at him, growled a late-night threat, safe under a hammock or a chair.

  7

  They sat down, tugged off their gloves, took off their hats.

  “You girls are getting to be regulars.” The bartender clucked his tongue. “Every damn week.”

  Naomi sat with her back to the entrance. At the table behind Athena a man sat alone, his glass down on an open newspaper. He had lifted his head, slowly alerted, amused by their entrance.

  “What do your husbands say when you come home late, no supper, nothing?” the bartender asked.

  “That’s why we got no husbands. They gripe too much.” With elbows resting on the table, Athena ran her fingers through the curls above her ears, bowing her head quickly to do it. “Isn’t that right, Naomi?” winking at her.

  “Naomi what?” the man at the table asked, gazing at her past Athena, who turned around to see him.

  “Costigan,” said Athena.

  “You from Butte, Montana?” the man asked Naomi. “I had a sister by that name. She left home at sixteen and we never heard a word from her.”

  “I’m from right here,” Naomi said.

  “Native daughter,” Athena said.

  “It ain’t often you hear the name Naomi,” he said.

  “It isn’t often you hear my name, either,” said Athena. “I think my old man named me after some Greek goddess.”

  “I got a name everybody else’s got,” he said. “Or it sounds like that. I’ll tell you if you don’t laugh.”

  “We won’t laugh.” Athena was acting strange, her voice had a crackling sound, and her body seemed rich with pleasure.

  “Dan O’Leary,” he said. “Do I look like one?”

  “Like what?” Athena asked.

  “Like a Dan O’Leary.”

  “If you gave me any other name I’d think you were kidding me,” she said.

  “You know what his real name is?” the bartender said. “Adolf Hitler. He never really died.”

  “Yeah, I’m looking for work over here,” said Dan O’Leary, and he lau
ghed half a dozen staccato sounds. “Dirty work.”

  “What kind of work do you do?” Athena asked.

  “Well,” he said, “I’ve been a pants presser, ship’s steward, I’ve been a funny man in a burlesque show, and I also barked. You know, stand out in front and bark,” and he barked like a dog.

  Athena’s laugh was loud and crackly.

  “That was the most low-down job of all, barking like that,” he said. “But a princess rescued me. Princess Nadja. She was the stripper and she fell in love with me. She set me up in business for myself, opened a little bar for me.”

  “You go broke?” asked Athena.

  “Me go broke?” He seemed offended. “It wasn’t me that went broke. The bar went broke.”

  “What happened to Princess Nadja? She get mad at you?” Athena turned her chair so that she could talk to both Naomi and the man, and crossed her legs.

  “Nobody gets mad at me,” he said. “It ain’t in my nature for people to get mad at me. No, she didn’t get mad. I just left her. She was loony about white and it gave me the creeps.”

  “What’s white?” asked Athena, puzzled.

  “Every goddamn thing white. She got some crazy fixation on white. Is that what you call it?” he asked Naomi, implying that since she spoke less she knew more. “It begun to bug me. Every damn rug in the house was white, every damn lamp, every damn everything, and her hair is also pearly white. It’s real nice for a while, feel like you’re living on the moon. But after a while it begun to bug me. I said to her, you ain’t fooling me, baby, you sit on the toilet like everybody else—excuse me, girls. I said, you trying to look pure or something, and I spilled a gallon of dago wine in the middle of the living room rug. I don’t do things like that habitually, you understand.” He leaned forward on his elbows, speaking to Naomi. “You follow me or you think I’m bats?”

  Athena turned back to their own table, laughing. “You’re bats!”

  He smiled at Naomi, a pale, lopsided smile, his eyes aware of his mouth’s pleading. “That don’t hurt me,” he said. “As long as I’m bats and funny. If I was bats and sad, you’d have every right to turn me in.”

  Naomi disliked his singling her out to talk to, a homely woman who had to be treated with respect, who had to be talked to for a few moments to relieve his tension from talking to Athena, the woman he wanted to talk to. But she wondered—was he saying to her, past Athena, that between himself and herself was an unspoken understanding requiring no jokes? You’re a crazy woman, she said to herself. He got to sleep with a woman other men pay to see undress herself. You’re not a woman to him and Athena’s not a woman, and he gets a kick out of making us believe he thinks we’re real attractive women. He gets a kick out of hearing a couple of gullible women laugh their cackling, girlish laughs. She pulled on her gloves.

  “Hey, you’re not going?” he said.

  Usually she had a smart remark to make to the men who came into the recorder’s office and teased her with their insinuations that she was somebody and that if they had the courage, the recklessness, they’d leave their wives for her. She didn’t want to answer that way to this man, but she did. “I’m afraid of the dark,” she said.

  “Of the dark?” He wagged his head. “God Almighty, she says she’s afraid of the dark.” His face lapsed into petulant resentment, and she realized that even the dumbest woman, leaving him in the midst of his act, could hurt his feelings. “God Almighty,” he said, “something’s wrong. Here this woman comes into a bar and she got to leave before it gets dark. Everybody think they’re two years old?”

  When they left, she saw that he was still wagging his head. It was the first time ever she had hurt a man. She had hurt him inadvertently, but all evening, at home, she was troubled by contending feelings, by a sense of her own power and by a sense of guilt, and, lying in bed, a crazy fear that she had ruined her chances with him took hold of her.

  She saw him again the next day. He was at the other side of the horseshoe-shaped lunch counter in the drugstore, and when she looked up from the menu and saw him across the space where the waitress flitted around, he began to shake his head again, unbelievingly, chidingly. He was again the man whom nobody could get mad at because he got mad at nobody. He carried his coffee and sandwich carefully around the counter and sat down by her, and he learned, that noon, who she was because she sat there with her hands trembling on her cup.

  A few minutes before it was time to put on her coat, he came into the recorder’s office. With his hands in his pockets, he glanced along the shelves of red and gray record books, his manner that of one who finds no place too exclusive for him to enter. She slipped her coat on, buttoning it up to her chin, and he opened the door for her and walked along beside her down the hall, limping.

  “You never knew I had a bullet in my knee, did you?” he asked. He had not limped when they walked out of the drugstore together, and she knew he was pretending to limp now.

  “I got this hotel room almost in the center of town, so I don’t need to ride any buses to get to where the action is. So I figured it’d be interesting just to ride a bus, but I didn’t want any old line, like the B or the G. It’s got to be your bus with you on it. Then you can point out what you think I ought to see, like the high school, you know? What’s the population of this town, would you say?” They stood on the edge of the crowd waiting for the buses across from the courthouse.

  “Maybe a hundred thousand,” she said.

  “They all catch the bus at this hour?”

  She laughed, and he bent over to grip his knee. “Don’t make me laugh,” he said. “My knee buckles.”

  He limped behind her aboard the bus and half fell into the seat beside her, his leg stiffened out into the aisle. Some passengers, who had ridden the bus every evening for as many years as she had, nodded at her and glanced at him, examining him, she knew, for any resemblance to her, for only a relative would ride home with her after all her years of riding alone. Never out of the clear sky, out of the sky from where mates fell, would a sort of handsome man fall into the seat beside her, Naomi, the woman with a face flat and familiar as the advertisement placards above the bus seats.

  “This knee is a good thing,” he said. “I don’t have to get up to let a lady sit down. You see?” His breath smelled of clove gum or mouthwash. His hand, gripping the horizontal steel rod on the back of the seat ahead, was a pale hand with high blue veins, almost the hand of a convalescent, but so strong in its power over her that she had to glance away. She felt sick with the suspicion that he was playing a trick on her. Only a drunk, only a man without a conscience could play a trick like this on a homely woman.

  “You think I’m mean, Naomi, because I don’t let a woman sit down?”

  It was her chance to say yes. Yes, get up and get off and let somebody else sit down, somebody I’m used to. The only other answer she could give was No, and, by saying No, imply that she liked him sitting there, but if she said No, he’d go back to the bar and tell the bartender about what the scared, silly woman had said, that she liked him sitting by her.

  “But I ain’t a mean person, Naomi.” He spoke so low the passengers in the seat ahead, their ears protruding to catch the conversation, could not hear. “Only I don’t like to prove I ain’t mean by doing something nice. When I have to do something nice, I feel mean.” He gave a small, hiccuping laugh to tell her he was only joking. “Naomi sounds like an Indian name,” he said. “There used to be a burlesque queen who was a full-blooded Cherokee. Some of them Indian girls are real beauties.”

  “Was that Princess Nadja?”

  “Was who Princess Nadja?”

  “The Cherokee girl.”

  “Hell, Nadja ain’t an Indian name. It’s Roosian, ain’t it?”

  “I thought you were married to the Cherokee queen.”

  “Me? I wasn’t married to no Cherokee.” He glanced up quickly as a few passengers, wanting out, pressed past the others standing in the aisle, and, when the commotion was o
ver, he continued to gaze up into the faces above him. After a few moments, he suddenly sat up straight. “Three times,” he said. “I been married three times, all of them fine women to begin with. I must of been fine to begin with myself or they wouldn’t of begun with me.” He laughed soundlessly. “There’s a beginning and there’s an end. Nobody likes endings and that’s why they get bogged down in the middle.”

  “Which one was Princess Nadja?” she asked. That voluptuous woman with moon-white hair had become a terrible adversary, a woman whose seductiveness was as beyond her as the moon was beyond her. “I bet you made her up,” she said, wanting to wound him, wanting to let him know she was not a dupe. “Am I right?”

  “Right as rain,” he said.

  So she destroyed his imaginary princess, and the real ones remained beyond him, this pale, thin barker, pants presser, barman, clown. If she lived alone, she thought, she’d ask him in for supper. She would have no fear that he had come to sponge on her for a meal and then make fun of her afterwards to the bartender. She’d have no fear because she would say right off, tough like Athena, You want to come in for supper? You look like you need some meat on your bones.

  He was smiling, maybe over the loss of Princess Nadja, running his hand over his head, scratching at the gray hair that had a mealy look though all his clothes were clean as a whistle, scratching with a monkey’s musing curiosity.

  “I get off here,” she said rising.