Sobbing and sobbing, David held her close. He felt of a different world to Alabama; his tempo was different from the sterile, attenuated rhythms of the hospital. He felt lush and callous, somehow, like a hot laborer. She felt she hardly knew him.
He kept his eyes glued persistently to her face. He hardly dared look at the bottom of the bed.
“Dear, it’s nothing,” he said with affected blandness. “You will be well in no time.” Somehow she was not reassured. He seemed to be avoiding some issue. Her mother’s letters did not mention her foot and Bonnie was not brought to the hospital.
“I must be very thin,” she thought. The bedpan cut her spine, and her hands looked like bird claws. They clung to the air like claws to a perch, hooking the firmament as her right to a footrest. Her hands were long and frail and blue over the knuckles like an unfeathered bird.
Sometimes her foot hurt her so terribly that she closed her eyes and floated off on the waves of the afternoon. Invariably she went to the same delirious place. There was a lake there so clear that she could not tell the bottom from the top; a pointed island lay heavy on the waters like an abandoned thunderbolt. Phallic poplars and bursts of pink geranium and a forest of white-trunked trees whose foliage flowed out of the sky covered the land. Nebulous weeds swung on the current: purple stems with fat animal leaves, long tentacular stems with no leaves at all, swishing balls of iodine and the curious chemical growths of stagnant waters. Crows cawed from one deep mist to another. The word “sick” effaced itself against the poisonous air and jittered lamely about between the tips of the island and halted on the white road that ran straight through the middle. “Sick” turned and twisted about the narrow ribbon of the highway like a roasting pig on a spit, and woke Alabama gouging at her eyeballs with the prongs of its letters.
Sometimes she shut her eyes and her mother brought her a cool lemonade, but this happened only when she was not in pain.
David came when anything new occurred, like a parent supervising a child who is learning to walk.
“And so—you must know sometime, Alabama,” he said at last. The bottom fell out of her stomach. She could feel the things dropping through.
“I’ve known for ages,” she said in sickly calm.
“Poor darling—you’ve still got your foot. It’s not that,” he said compassionately. “But you will never be able to dance again. Are you going to mind terribly?”
“Will I have crutches?” she asked.
“No—nothing at all. The tendons are cut and they had to scrape through an artery, but you will be able to walk with a slight limp. Try not to mind.”
“Oh, my body,” she said. “And all that work for nothing!
“Poor, my dear one—but it has brought us together again. We have each other, dear.”
“Yes—what’s left,” she sobbed.
She lay there, thinking that she had always meant to take what she wanted from life. Well—she hadn’t wanted this. This was a stone that would need a good deal of salt and pepper.
Her mother hadn’t wanted her boy to die, either, she supposed, and there must have been times when her father hadn’t wanted any of them dragging about his thighs and drawing his soul off in lager.
Her father! She hoped they would get home while he was still alive. Without her father the world would be without its last resource.
“But,” she remembered with a sudden sobering shock, “it will be me who is the last resource when my father is dead.”
III
The David Knights stepped out of the old brick station. The Southern town slept soundless on the wide palette of the cotton fields. Alabama’s ears were muffled by the intense stillness as if she had entered a vacuum. Negroes, lethargic and immobile, draped themselves on the depot steps like effigies to some exhausted god of creation. The wide square, masked in velvet shadows, drowned in the lull of the South, spread like soft blotting paper under man and his heritage.
“So we will find us a beautiful house and live here?” asked Bonnie.
“Que c’est drôle!” ejaculated Mademoiselle. “So many Negroes! Do they have missionaries to teach them?”
“Teach them what?” asked Alabama.
“Why—religion.”
“Their religion is very satisfactory, they sing a lot.”
“It is well. They are very sympathetic.”
“Will they bother me?” asked Bonnie.
“Of course not. You’re safer here than you’ve ever been in your life. This is where your mother was little.”
“I went to a Negro baptism in that river at five o’clock on a Fourth of July morning. They were dressed in white robes and the red sun slanted down over the muddy water’s edge, and I felt very rapturous and wanted to join their church.”
“I would like to see that.”
“Maybe.”
Joan was waiting in the little brown Ford.
Alabama felt like a little girl again to see her sister after so many years. The old town where her father had worked away so much of his life spread before her protectively. It was good to be a stranger in a land when you felt aggressive and acquisitive, but when you began to weave your horizons into some kind of shelter it was good to know that hands you loved had helped in their spinning—made you feel as if the threads would hold together better.
“I’m awfully glad you got here,” Joan said sadly.
“Is grandpa very sick?” said Bonnie.
“Yes, dear. I’ve always thought Bonnie was such a sweet child.”
“How are your children, Joan?” Joan wasn’t much changed. She was conventional, more like their mother.
“Just fine. I couldn’t bring them. All this is very depressing for children.”
“Yes. We’d better leave Bonnie at the hotel. She can come out in the morning.”
“Let her just come to say ‘Hello.’ Mamma adores her so.” She turned to David. “She’s always liked Alabama better than the rest of us.”
“Junk! Because I’m the youngest.”
The car sped up the familiar streets. The soft inconsequential night, the smell of the gently perspiring land, the crickets in the grass, the heavy trees conspiring together over the hot pavements, lulled the blank fear in Alabama’s heart to a sense of impotence.
“Can’t we do anything?” she said.
“We’ve done everything. There’s no cure for old age.”
“How is Mamma?”
“As brave as she always is—but I am glad you could come.”
The car stopped before the quiet house. How many nights had she coasted up to that walk just that way to keep from waking her father with the grind of the brakes after dances? The sweet smell of sleeping gardens lay in the air. A breeze from the gulf tolled the pecan trees mournfully back and forth. Nothing had changed. The friendly windows shone in the just benediction of her father’s spirit, the door spread open to the just decency of his will. Thirty years he had lived in his house, and watched the scattered jonquils bloom and seen the morning glories wrinkle in the morning sun and snipped the blight from his roses and admired Miss Millie’s ferns.
“Ain’t they pretty?” he’d say. Measured, marked only by the absence of an accent, his balanced diction swayed to the aristocracy of his spirit.
He had caught a crimson moth once in the moonvines and pinned it over his mantel on a calendar. “It’s a very good place for it,” he had said, stretching the fragile wings over a railroad map of the South. The Judge had a sense of humor.
Infallible man! How his children had gloated when something went wrong—the unsuccessful operation on a chicken’s craw with the Judge’s pocketknife and a needle from Millie’s sewing basket, an overturned glass of iced tea on the Sunday dinner table, a spot of turkey dressing on the clean Thanksgiving cloth—these things had rendered the cerebral machinery of the honest man more tangible.
The quick fear of unclassified emotion seized Alabama, an overwhelming sense of loss. She and David climbed the steps. How high those cement sl
abs that held the ferns had seemed when she was a child jumping from one to the other—and there was the place where she had sat while somebody told her about Santa Claus, and hated the informer and hated her own parents that the myth should be untrue and yet exist, crying out, “I will believe—”; and there the dry Bermuda grass between the hot bricks had tickled her bare thighs, and there was the limb of the tree her father had forbade her to swing on. It seemed incredible that the thin branch could ever have supported her body. “You must not abuse things,” her father had corrected.
“It won’t hurt the tree.”
“In my judgment it will. If you want to have things, you have got to take care of them.”
He who had had so few things! An engraving of his father and a miniature of Millie, three buckeyes from a Tennessee vacation, a pair of gold cuff buttons, an insurance policy, and some summer socks was what Alabama remembered of his top bureau drawer.
“Hello, darling,” her mother kissed her tremulously, “and my darling! Let me kiss you on the top of your head.” Bonnie clung to her grandmother.
“Can we see Grandpa, Grandma?”
“It will make you sad, dear.”
The old lady’s face was white and reticent. She moved slowly back and forth in the old swing, rocking with gentle condolence their spiritual losses.
“Oh—o—o—o—, Millie,” the Judge’s voice called feebly.
The tired doctor came to the porch.
“Cousin Millie, I thought if the children want to see their father, he is conscious now.” He turned kindly to Alabama. “I’m glad you got here,” he said.
Trembling, she followed his lean, protective back into the room. Her father! Her father! How weak and pale he was. She could have cried out at her inability to frustrate this useless, inevitable waste.
She sat quietly on the bed. Her beautiful father!
“Hello, baby.” His gaze wandered over her face. “Are you going to stay here awhile?”
“Yes, it’s a good place.”
“I’ve always thought so.”
The tired eyes traveled to the door. Bonnie waited, frightened, in the hall.
“I want to see the baby.” A sweet tolerant smile lit the Judge’s face. Bonnie approached the bed timidly.
“Hello, there, baby. You’re a little bird,” the man smiled. “And you’re as pretty as two little birds.”
“When will you be well again, Grandpa?”
“Pretty soon. I’m very tired. I’ll see you tomorrow.” He waved her aside.
Alone with her father, Alabama’s heart sank. He was so thin and little now that he was sick, to have got through so much of life. He had had a hard time providing for them all. The noble completeness of the life withering on the bed before her moved her to promise herself many promises.
“Oh, my father, there are so many things I want to ask you.”
“Baby,” the old man patted her hand. His wrists were no bigger than a bird’s. How had he fed them all?
“I never thought you’d known till now.”
She smoothed the gray hair, even Confederate gray.
“I’ve got to go to sleep, baby.”
“Sleep,” she said, “sleep.”
She sat there a long time. She hated the way the nurse moved about the room as if her father were a child. Her father knew everything. Her heart was sobbing, and sobbing.
The old man opened his eyes proudly, as was his wont.
“Did you say you wanted to ask me something?”
“I thought you could tell me if our bodies are given to us as counterirritants to the soul. I thought you’d know why when our bodies ought to bring surcease from our tortured minds, they fail and collapse; and why, when we are tormented in our bodies, does our soul desert us as a refuge?”
The old man lay silent.
“Why do we spend years using up our bodies to nurture our minds with experience and find our minds turning then to our exhausted bodies for solace? Why, Daddy?”
“Ask me something easy,” the old man answered, very weak and far away.
“The Judge must sleep,” said the nurse.
“I’ll go.”
Alabama stood in the hall. There was the light her father turned out when he went up to bed; there was the peg with his hat hanging there.
When man is no longer custodian of his vanities and convictions, he’s nothing at all, she thought. Nothing! There’s nothing lying on that bed—but it is my father and I loved him. Without his desire, I should never have lived, she thought. Perhaps we are all just agents in a very experimental stage of organic free will. It cannot be that myself is the purpose of my father’s life—but it can be that what I can appreciate of his fine spirit is the purpose of my own.
She went to her mother.
“Judge Beggs said yesterday,” said Millie to the shadows, “that he would like to go for a ride in the little car to see the people on their front porches. He tried all summer to learn to drive, but he was too old. ‘Millie,’ he said, ‘tell that hoary-headed angel to dress me. I want to go out.’ He called the nurse his hoary-headed angel. He always had a dry sense of humor. He loved his little car.”
Like the good mother she was, she went on and on—as if she could teach Austin to live again by rehearsing all those things. Like a mother speaking of a very young child, she told Alabama about the sick Judge, her father.
“He said he wanted to order some new shirts from Philadelphia. He said he would like some breakfast bacon.”
“He gave Mamma a check for the undertaker for a thousand dollars,” added Joan.
“Yes,” Miss Millie laughed as if at a child’s capricious prank. “Then he said, ‘But I want it back if I don’t die.’ ”
“Oh, my poor mother,” thought Alabama, “and all the time he’s going to die. Mamma knows, but she can’t say to herself, ‘He’s going to die.’ Neither can I.”
Millie had nursed him so long, sick and well. When he was a young man in the law office and the other clerks no older than himself addressed him already as “Mr. Beggs,” when he was middle-aged and consumed with poverty and care, when he was old and had more time to be kindly.
“My poor mother,” said Alabama. “You have given your life for my father.”
“My father said we could be married,” answered her mother, “when he found that your father’s uncle was thirty-two years in the United States Senate and his father’s brother was a Confederate general. He came to my father’s law office to ask him for my hand. My father was eighteen years in the Senate and the Confederate Congress.”
She saw her mother as she was, part of a masculine tradition. Millie did not seem to notice about her own life, that there would be nothing left when her husband died. He was the father of her children, who were girls, and who had left her for the families of other men.
“My father was a proud man,” Millie said, proudly. “When I was a little girl I loved him dearly. There were twenty of us and only two girls.”
“Where are your brothers?” said David curiously.
“Dead and gone long ago.”
“They were half-brothers,” said Joan.
“It was my own brother who came here in the spring. He went away and said he’d write, but he never did.”
“Mamma’s brother was a darling,” Joan said. “He owned a drugstore in Chicago.”
“Your father was very kind to him and took him driving in the car.”
“Why didn’t you write to him, Mamma?”
“I did not think to get his address. When I came to live with your father’s family I had so much to do I couldn’t keep track of my own.”
Bonnie was asleep on the hard porch bench. When Alabama had slept that way as a little girl, her father had carried her upstairs to bed in his arms. David lifted the sleeping child.
“We ought to go,” he said.
“Daddy,” Bonnie whispered, snuggling under his coat lapels. “My Daddy.”
“You will come again tomorrow?”
>
“Early in the morning,” Alabama answered. Her mother’s white hair was done in a crown around her head like a Florentine saint. She held her mother in her arms. Oh, she remembered how it felt to be close to her mother!
Every day Alabama went to the old house, so clean inside and bright. She brought her father little special things to eat, and flowers. He loved yellow flowers.
“We used to gather yellow violets in the woods when we were young,” her mother said.
The doctors came and shook their heads, and so many friends came that nobody ever had more friends to bring them cakes and flowers, and old servants came to ask about the Judge, and the milkman left an extra pint of milk out of his own pocket to show that he was sorry, and the Judge’s fellow judges came with sad and noble faces like the heads on postage stamps and cameos. The Judge lay in his bed, fretting about money.
“We can’t afford this sickness,” he said over and over. “I’ve got to get up. It’s costing money.”
His children talked it over. They would share the expenses. The Judge would not have allowed them to accept his salary from the State if he had known he was not going to get well. All of them were able to help.
Alabama and David rented a house to be near her parents. It was bigger than her father’s house, in a garden with roses and a privet hedge, and iris planted to devour the spring, and many bushes and shrubs under the windows.
Alabama tried to persuade her mother to take a ride. It was months since she had left the house.
“I can’t go,” Millie said. “Your father might want me while I’m away.” She waited constantly for some last illuminating words from the Judge, feeling that he must have something to tell her before he left her alone at the last.
“We’ll just stay half an hour,” Millie finally agreed.
Alabama drove her mother past the Capitol, where her father had spent so many years of his life. The clerks sent them roses from the rosebed under his office window. Alabama wondered if his books were covered with dust. Perhaps he would have prepared some last communication there, in one of his drawers.
“How did you happen to marry Daddy?”
Save Me the Waltz: A Novel Page 23
