Dominic spends a lot of time with Mary. Everyone in the house has been wonderful about it. But he and I are now carrying the burden of parents—the weight of it, I guess. Nothing is as carefree as it was between us when we were school friends, and since we’re not involved in the way of a married couple, there’s a very odd kind of negotiated feeling about it all, nothing like the old times when he used to make me laugh, and I could tell him things. Now when we’re together in company and we have Mary between us, there’s the natural sense of our being a couple, and of course we aren’t. We’re—some kind of friends; or, we’re in some complicated zone of friendship, and the fact is that a strain has been put on it all. We have fallen to bickering once or twice—but it’s been so uncomfortably blistering here, and I have to say that might have contributed to it. Dominic took time off from work to look for a good day care center, and then we decided not to go that route. We’ve been interviewing baby-sitters, and in the meantime Amy helps out. She’s a nice person, Amy—though a little fast for my comfort. A different boy picks her up every day it seems, and she’s always talking about how much this or that one means to her—always talking about what beloved friends they are—yet she dresses for them, looks half the time like a hooker. Though she wears a cross on a small gold necklace, and talks about church, and once I came home to find her trying to teach Mary how to say Jesus. Another time I found her asleep with Mary curled up on her chest, and Mary clearly loves her, is always very excited and happy to see her.
Dominic helps feed Mary, and walks the floor with her when she’s restless, and rocks her to sleep every night. He’s even changed her diaper a couple of times. She’s still a little leery of him, sometimes, staring that way she has when she’s trying to decide whether or not she’s happy. But she’s getting more at ease all the time. When he picks her up, she no longer tries to pull away from him toward me or Amy.
In the evenings, we sit in the living room, all of us—even Amy sometimes—and watch her play. It’s like watching a TV comedy special. There have been moments when I’ve had the sense that we’re a family, odd as we are. Yesterday, Saturday, we went to the river to a café to eat dinner and listen to some jazz, and people looked at us with frank curiosity, trying, I’m sure, to figure out the dynamics. Even in a place like New Orleans—there’s Manny and Dom, obviously together, and Aunt Violet, and then the baby and me.
I don’t know how much longer I’ll stay here, and we don’t talk about it. It’s almost as if we’re all avoiding it as a subject. I’m writing every day, and feel as if I’m making headway. But there are still so many areas where I’m at sea about it all. I would like to finish what I’ve started, and get it out of my hands. But there have been good days when I really do feel I’m getting there. I was pleasantly surprised when I first sat down to it after all the confusion of the move here and getting into some sort of routine again.
The baby is learning to say things, and starting to pull herself up. In the mornings, she stands in the crib and holds her hands out to me and says Ma-ma. I love waking up to it.
I haven’t heard much from Sheri or Millicent or Nick since I left Oxford. Nick sent some money out of what Tyler paid him, and put a little note in saying he hoped things were all right. I still have not received divorce papers, and don’t know if I should worry right now about putting them through myself. Dominic says I should wait. Tyler might decide to come back. Dominic says he lives in the expectation that he’ll turn up here. He doesn’t believe Tyler is the type simply to let go, like that.
Sheri called twice, both times wanting me to turn around and come back. Sheri, when we talked, said Millicent is still inconsolable, and that Rosa went back to the coast. Sheri’s unhappy, in a sad, half-offended way, about all of it. They’ve heard nothing from Tyler, and she said even Nick has stopped hearing from him. With this stupid situation in the Middle East, Millicent is convinced that we’ll go to war with Iraq and Tyler will be sent over there to be killed. Sheri said the whole thing’s ridiculous, but I think she’s worrying about it, too. There’s some point of pride with her where Tyler’s concerned. It was always there, even before all the trouble. As I said, I don’t know how much longer I’ll be here, and just maybe I’ll be heading back to Virginia before very long. I don’t know and I don’t believe Dominic knows how we’ll settle things at last concerning the baby. But there’s a definite feeling of the temporary about us—a feeling I have become so used to that I sometimes fail to notice it. Aunt Violet talks about all of us being in transit, the whole household on our way to some other place. Yet Dom seems so good with Mary, and dotes on her. And she responds to him. He keeps telling me he’s afraid he’s not up to it.
Anyway.
I’ll call you soon. I’d like to hear your voice. Please give Daddy my love, and Peggy, too. And take some for yourself. You know.
Love,
Lily
Night. Alone.
I’ve been working on the play about you, and arguing with Aunt Violet, who says perhaps it is on some level possible to explain you as an exaggerated case of sexual hysteria. I think you would laugh at this. I have pointed out your early childhood interest in explorers and exploring and in the study of human spiritual beliefs. I’ve reminded her of your private study of Spinoza and Goethe, of your pantheism, your lifelong curiosity about the manifestations of human faith and the definitive questions of the meaning of things. I have spoken to her of your lineage, and of the example of your father. She nods, and gives me a tolerant smile, and then mentions the fact that at the turn of the century it was considered neurotic for a woman to experience, or wish to experience, orgasm. And that in such a climate an extraordinary, healthy, passionate intelligence, if it felt the pressure to break out, would either self-destruct, or run. She says you ran. She’s perfectly admiring of you in saying it, and talks about your toughness and valor. Though she insists that valor doesn’t depend on events or extraordinary people for its presence in the world; extraordinary people only serve as the dazzling illustrations of it over time: for most women, it was brave enough to raise their families and bear their crushed passions in secret.
She confesses that at some level she’s describing her own experience. But she can’t be moved in her distinctions concerning yours….
I have to go to work. I’m a teacher now.
The heat of September and October gave way to a softer kind of warmth, the breath of the cerulean Gulf. Hurricane season had come and gone. Storms washed in from the sea, but nothing worse than a squall, a few somber days of rain. She taught classes and came back to the house to care for Mary. In the late afternoons, she sat out on the veranda in the barbed shade of the palm plants and wrote. Sometimes she simply watched the traffic on the street, and what she could see of the lime-colored river between the houses on the other side. There were many nights when, sleepless, she sat out there, as if presiding over the restless and always agitating city, with its cries and hubbub and songs, its continual uproar of human voices.
Dominic brought her books from the store, and in the mornings, Manny always had coffee for her. Aunt Violet found things to do away from the house, though it was growing more complicated for her to get around. She had friends in various homes, private and institutional. When she walked, her pace was quick, or looked in some way hurried, even if she took it more slowly. And it was true that on the infrequent occasions Lily accompanied her, Lily had some trouble keeping up. Violet was fond of walking to the river, to sit on a bench and watch the traffic gliding along there. She would talk about the history of it all—the big steamboats that had plied the “Old Man” north, and the terrible floods of the Mississippi delta back in the twenties and thirties. She liked to think about how the muddy-looking water came all the way from Minnesota, down the curve of the planet, stretching that far, dividing the continent. “Think of it, cher, you’re looking at water that washed out of Lake Itasca in northern Minnesota. It’s like looking at me and realizing you’re looking at the nineteenth cent
ury. Well—the last year of it, anyway.” She smiled wryly. “I’m old as the river and I’ll never die. Don’t I sound like a fictional character? The wise old lady from the novel about the wise old lady.”
Lily watched her stare out at the smoothly coursing water. The deeply lined face was far more interesting than the muddy flow along the banks. Lily only wanted her to go on talking. But then Violet would nod, and close her eyes, breathing so shallowly that it was difficult to tell if she was breathing at all. If the younger woman touched her shoulder, she’d stir, and give a chiding glance. “Not yet, cher. I’m still here.”
“I wish you’d stop talking like that,” Lily said.
After a time, Violet would rise, and hike back up the bank, and on through the busy confusion of the Quarter to Burgundy Street. Now and again she would stop at one of the small shops, or cafés, or she would buy food and sandwiches at Central Grocery (mufalettas, a delicacy of the region) that Lily would carry back. When Violet went alone, if it was raining or the weather was too humid, she took cabs, and there were particular adjustments necessary to get her into the backseat.
In some daily instances, she appeared a little confused—especially about having a child in her house, but this was momentary, never lasting longer than a few seconds. When she was home, she drifted into her naps more frequently, it seemed, though Dominic said it ebbed and flowed—she had good weeks and bad weeks.
She was not the kind of simple, positive soul with a youthful vitality and serene wisdom that people took her for: in the evenings she sat on the veranda outside Lily’s room, and Lily’s company was required in these hours. Indeed, the presence of everyone in the house was required. She would ramble on about the old days, the old city as she had known it when she was a girl, talking easily, with the slight pauses that told them she had dropped off for an interval. She would wake with a little shudder, and rock back and forth, as if animated by her own surprise at having drifted away. She would watch the night come, napping off and on in this fashion. She had a large fund of stories about people she had known and places she had been, and she liked to talk about them. Stories of violence and mayhem interested her enormously; it had been a subject of long study when she was younger. She had a sophisticated understanding about most of the important battles of the last two centuries. In her room, she kept a police scanner and a radio so she could monitor the crimes of the city. The subject fascinated her. Outlaws had her grudging allegiance.
“Mary Kingsley was an outlaw,” she said. “We have to widen the definition of the word, don’t we, with her. An outlaw in bombazine and lace.”
“I’m trying to understand her more as an exemplary person,” said Lily.
“That’s precious.”
“No.”
“Of course it is. Who cares about that?”
“You do. We all do. If we pretend to civilized life.”
“You’re young.”
“Well.”
“Civilization is overrated, cher. There are instances where it wrecked everything.”
“I know, I know,” Lily said, unable to keep back the note of weariness at the thought. “Every civilization is built on a crime. I’ve heard and read all that. I’m interested in the particulars.”
“Laudable,” Aunt Violet said.
“Mary was obsessed with the nature of consciousness—searching for explanations of ultimate matters.”
“Again, laudable.”
“I’m boring you,” Lily said.
“No.”
There was an aspect of Violet’s makeup that urged her to challenge whoever she was with. It took a few weeks for Lily to realize that the other woman had a horror of being thought of in the stereotypical ways most of the people with whom she came in contact did think of her. She was so old; and everyone assumed that this meant that she was religious, and too rickety as a personality to withstand conflict, or change, or the changes in the culture of the times. Her hatred of being thought prudish made her decidedly blunt on matters of sex, and to friends of hers and Dominic’s, she was careful to explain that the baby was an accident, and what the real situation was between Dominic and Lily.
“Dom’s gay as a wren,” she would say, grinning out of one side of her mouth. “And this girl is not. But they had this baby together. We don’t know what the baby will turn out to be.” Dominic feigned mild amusement about it, but Lily could see that he was silently irritated. She couldn’t bring herself to ask him directly what he felt. The fact was, the two of them were skirting their feelings with steady, vigilant determination when it came to the baby.
In the first week of November, Mary caught a bad cold that subsequently turned into a fever. After the second day, the fever spiked alarmingly, and Lily and Dominic were told to bathe her in cool water in the bathtub. It was the flu. There were many cases in the city. Lily and Dominic took turns with the baby, but no one slept very well, and then Violet came down with it, too. Violet grew starkly pale, and was delirious. They put her on the sofa in the living room, and Manny tended to her as best he could. Dominic and Lily sat up with Mary, who pitched and tossed on the blanket they had laid out on Lily’s bed. Mary’s fever had gone down some, but she still had a terrible croupy cough and no appetite.
“The flu usually doesn’t do well down here,” Dominic said. “It doesn’t like humidity. It shouldn’t be so severe.”
Lily was exhausted, and everything grated on her nerves. She had been seized by a desolate fear that she had brought her child here to grow ill and die. It was impossible to muster any belief in health, or in a future: they would stay this way, witnessing the suffering of her child, who had no understanding of it, and no ability to express where and how it hurt. Dominic’s remark about the flu only exacerbated Lily’s sense of aloneness in this predicament. There was an element of complaint in it, as if the fever were the baby’s fault. She said, “Go get some sleep, why don’t you.”
“I’m okay.”
They were quiet. They could hear the low rambling Aunt Violet was doing in her delirium, downstairs, a steady stream of half-enunciated words and phrases.
“It’s too much,” Dominic said abruptly.
Lily turned to him. “Go on to bed.”
“No—I mean this—this responsibility. I’ve never been so scared. I hate it.”
She was silent. The baby coughed, deep and awful-sounding, then cried some. Lily reached across the bed and patted her back, the crying slowed and stopped, and she was asleep again.
“Jesus,” Dominic said.
“Dom, please leave us alone.”
He seemed affronted at the suggestion. “How can you say that?”
“I just mean go get some sleep.”
“I can’t sleep.”
“Well, take a walk, then. Go get some fresh air.”
“It’s the middle of the night, Lily. I’m not going out.”
She was conscious of his hands knotting in and out of themselves in his lap. He coughed and sniffled; perhaps he was coming down with it now. “Lily,” he said. “I love you.”
She stretched out her arm and patted the back of his hands.
“Let’s get married.”
“Oh, Dom,” she said.
“I can’t help it,” he told her. “I’ve been thinking about it. This country—this place—what kind of life can she have?”
“I don’t want to talk about this now. Please.”
He sat there fretting.
The baby coughed again, a bad spell this time that necessitated Lily’s lifting her and holding up the little arms. Mary coughed so deeply that the crying she tried to do would not come, and when at last the coughing ceased, the crying brought on another fit. Lily held her, feeling the heat in her skin, the small convulsions of her chest. Every breath seemed labored and wheezing, noisy with rheum.
“I can’t stand it,” Dominic said.
“Well, then leave,” Lily told him. “Get out. Christ.”
He appeared stricken. He stood and moved to th
e door, where he hesitated and seemed about to say something. But the baby was in a coughing fit, and Lily was attending to that, so he left them there and banged down the stairs. She paced, holding the baby until she fell back to feverish half-sleep. Then she put her down again on the blanket. The fever was still there, but the cough was loose, now, phlegmy, a good sign. It was breaking up; the tightness in the little chest was giving way, the breathing seemed slightly easier. Lily sat down again and rocked, waiting, watching.
Dominic came back up and stood in the frame of the doorway. She found it hard not to think of him as being like Tyler in this respect: no tolerance at all for the kinds of trouble parental love brought, the kinds of nurturing it required. The messiness of living upset him. And maybe it was something that upset any man. She was too tired to examine the thought; it seemed true enough.
Hello to the Cannibals Page 67
