The Courts of Love

by Ellen Gilchrist

  I’d better go to Grandmother’s, she decided. If Momma calls and tells her I’m gone she might get worried. I don’t want her worrying about me. I’m all she has. The thought brightened up the day. The thought was full of light and seemed to make a space before Nora Jane as she walked. No matter what happened, her grandmother Lydia loved her with all her heart. I am her heart, Nora Jane said to herself. I am the dearest thing on earth to her. She wouldn’t know what to do without me. She began to walk faster until she was almost running. The heat had settled down upon the park and the joggers were slowing their paces but Nora Jane walked faster and faster. She moved past the golf club and past the curve to the flower clock and crossed Saint Charles Avenue and moved along in front of Tulane and Loyola and found Story Street and she was running now.

  Her grandmother was in the living room writing letters. When she saw Nora Jane come up onto the porch her heart lifted and she forgot the terrible ache she had borne in her back all morning and went to the little girl and held her in her arms. “What happened?” she asked. “Has anything gone wrong?”

  “She got drunk last night and I didn’t get any sleep. I need to eat something, Grandmother. What do you have to eat around here?”

  Twenty minutes later they were seated at the dining room table. Nora Jane had a toasted pimiento cheese sandwich on a gold-banded plate. She had an ironed linen napkin on her lap. She had a plate of carrot and celery sticks and a tall glass of milk with ice. Her face and hands had been washed and her underwear removed and replaced with some her grandmother kept in a drawer.

  “I met a lady this morning who has a dog from California,” Nora Jane said, when she had finished half the sandwich. “I want to get a dog, Grandmother. A dog would walk around with me when I go out to the park. It would bark if anything tried to get me. Do you think I can get one someday?”

  “That’s what you want, a dog?”

  “I’ve been wanting one for a long time. I guess she wouldn’t let me have it, would she?”

  “You can have a dog. I will get you one. If she won’t let you have it, I’ll keep it here. I have a friend who raises short-haired fox terriers. I’ll call and see when he’s going to have some puppies.”

  Lydia Whittington stood up. Nora Jane wanted something that was within her reach to give and she was going to give it. It soothed Lydia to think of getting Nora Jane a dog. It made her forget her dead husband and her dead son and her drunken daughter-in-law and her lost fortune and the plight of this child, who was her reason to live. My one and only reason to live, she thought. She went around the table and caressed the child’s dark curls and kissed her beautiful ivory cheek. “Finish eating that and drink the milk. I’m going to call Judge Bass.” She went into the kitchen and dialed the number of a retired federal judge who had been one of her admirers in her youth. “Joe,” she said. “I am in need of a puppy. When are you going to have a puppy for a little girl?”

  By the time Nora Jane had finished eating it was settled. The judge had a litter that was two months old and he was coming in his car to pick up Nora Jane and her grandmother and take them to his house to see the puppies. “You better call my momma and tell her where I am,” Nora Jane suggested. “Before she calls the police like she did that other time.”

  Lydia dialed the phone. She opened a box of vanilla wafers and put some on a plate while the phone rang ten, then twelve, then fourteen times. On the fifteenth ring Nora Jane’s mother answered it.

  “She’s with me,” Lydia said. “I’ll send her home this afternoon for some clothes. She’s staying here for a while. If you argue with me, I’ll call the court. This time I mean it, Madelaine. She looks like an urchin. Her hair wasn’t even combed. Go back to bed. I’m hanging up.”

  “Have a cookie,” she added, holding out the plate. “We’re going to pick out a dog. You need to have plenty of energy for that.”

  “She combs my hair,” Nora Jane answered. “She always combs it every night.”

  The phone was ringing. It was Madelaine calling back. “You are the worst bitch in New Orleans,” Madelaine said. “I’m the one who’s calling the police, Lydia. You’re turning her against me. I know what you’re up to, you know. You aren’t fooling me.”

  “You’re drunk every night and everyone knows it. That house looks like a pigpen. Judge Bass is on his way over here right now to talk to me about it. Go back to bed, Madelaine. She’s staying here. I’ll have you committed if I have to. You can’t threaten me. Every derelict on Magazine Street will testify for us.”

  “That’s my child, Lydia. Nora Jane belongs to me. You’re going to be sorry for this. You’ll regret this day.” Madelaine hung up the phone and went into the kitchen and opened a can of beer and took it with her to the bed. It was going to be one of those days when life was as black as the coffin in which her husband’s remains were lying in the ground not a half a mile away. She lay in the bed and cried into the pillow. After a while she fell asleep.

  Nora Jane and Lydia were waiting on the porch swing when the judge’s chauffeured Lincoln pulled up to the curb. The driver opened the door and the judge got out and walked up onto the porch and spoke to Nora Jane and offered Lydia his arm. They proceeded across the porch and down the stairs and the driver held open the door and Lydia and the judge got into the backseat and Nora Jane sat up front with the driver. They drove down Saint Charles Avenue to the Garden District and the driver turned into a driveway on Philip Street behind a huge gray house with porches and towers and beautiful flower gardens in full bloom. It was very hot and the judge was sweating in his seersucker suit and Lydia was sweating in her pale blue and white striped dress and Nora Jane couldn’t believe her luck. All the other girls in the fifth grade were at the Home for the Incurables reading to the old people and she was at Judge Bass’s house getting ready to pick out her dog.

  The puppies were in a pen by the shade garden. There were four of them. Brown-and-white fox terrier puppies, their faces looked up at her. They scrambled over each other to lick her hands and arms.

  “Which one do you like?” the judge asked, when she had been with them ten minutes or more, sitting on the ground with the puppies all over her and climbing on her legs.

  “I don’t know if I should take one away,” she said. She lifted her face to his. “Won’t it be lonely if I take it away from its brothers and sisters?”

  “You could take two.” The judge laughed and looked at Lydia to see if she was going to kill him. “Which two do you like the most?”

  “I have to decide. I want a boy and a girl. I want the one with the most black on his face and the one with brown paws.” She turned her face to the judge’s again. She gave him a smile so huge and terrible and beautiful that he would have given her his house, would have signed it over. “This one and this one.” She pulled two puppies into her arms. She moved their faces toward each other.

  “That child will lead a charmed life,” Judge Bass told Lydia later, while the butler was helping Nora Jane settle the puppies in a kennel for transporting them to Lydia’s house. “You were almost that beautiful, Lydia, but not quite. But then, I didn’t know you when you were a child.”

  “She is the dearest thing on earth to me. I may have to try to take her from Madelaine again. Will you help me?”

  “There’s nothing I can do. The courts won’t take her from her mother unless she physically harms her. I’ll call around this afternoon, but it won’t do any good.”

  “Never mind. She won’t desert Madelaine even though she wants to. She is beautiful, isn’t she? It will protect her, I suppose. She met Alston Monroe’s bride in the park this morning. They went for a walk.”

  “She is very special, charismatic. I’ve only seen her once before, when you brought her by the office. How old was she then?”

  “Five.”

  “I’ve never forgotten the face. Will the pups be all right over there? I wouldn’t want them neglected.” He leaned forward. He was sitting on a chair. Lydia was on the set
tee.

  “I’ll keep them at my house. I’ll keep her for a while. After one of her bad episodes, Madelaine lets me have her. I think last night was bad. The child didn’t get any sleep.”

  Nora Jane folded the blanket and laid it on the bottom of the kennel. She arranged the edges flush up against the bars. “I don’t want them feeling any steel around them,” she said to the butler. “It will make them cold. They might think it’s a knife or something.”

  “They won’t mind. Just to ride in the car awhile.”

  “They might. You don’t know what dogs think. You have to read their minds.”

  “If you say so.” He held the kennel door open while Nora Jane picked up the male puppy and laid him on the blanket. Then she picked up the female puppy and laid it beside its brother. Then she shut the kennel door and locked it. “This is only for a little while,” she said. “After that you will never have to be in a cage again. I promise you that.”

  The butler picked up the kennel. The chauffeur appeared. They all walked back out onto Philip Street and loaded up the car. The puppies went in the trunk. Nora Jane was in the front seat. Lydia and the judge got in the back. “Hurry up,” Nora Jane told the chauffeur. “I don’t want them in the trunk for long.” They drove back down Saint Charles Avenue. They passed the Academy of the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus, where the girls were filing out to catch the streetcar and their rides. Nora Jane barely glanced their way. She was worrying about the oxygen in the trunk. “Hurry,” she said to the driver. “They could suffocate back there. They could have nightmares the rest of their lives from riding in the trunk.”

  “They’ll be okay” he said. “There’s plenty of air.”

  “That’s easy for you to say. You aren’t in a cage back there.” She smiled her dazzling smile at him and he drove as fast as he dared all the way to Story Street. As soon as the car stopped, Nora Jane jumped out and ran around to the back of the car. “I’m coming,” she was calling. “Don’t worry, angels. Heart of my heart. I’m coming to get you out of there. You’re home now. You’re home with me.”

  The chauffeur hurried out of his side and opened the trunk with the key and lifted the kennel from the trunk and carried it up onto Lydia’s front porch. Nora Jane sat down beside it. She opened the door. She put her arm into the cage, talking and stroking the puppies’ backs. “You are all right now. You are with me. Nothing can hurt you now. I’m going to take care of you. You are my darling, darlings, heart of my heart.”

  “Is that what we say to each other?” the judge asked. He put his arm around Lydia’s waist and hugged her to his side. When he was twenty years old he had loved her enough to die for her. On the day she married he had gotten into his car and driven five hundred miles without stopping. Now they were as old as the hills and nothing had changed.

  “Come in,” Lydia said. “Send the chauffeur home. I’ll make you a cup of tea.”

  “You are my own little dogs,” Nora Jane was saying. “You will never have to do anything you don’t want to do. You can just run around with me and sleep when I’m in school.”

  The puppies began to walk out of the cage. They shook their legs. They shook off the ride in the trunk. The sun was shining. The voice was sweet and soothing. There were good smells in the air. Mice and squirrels and roots and vines, shoes and tables and the undersides of swings. They began to tumble around the painted porch. There was nothing to be afraid of here.

  Nora Jane’s mother came over about seven o’clock that night. She was dressed up and she was sober and she was contrite. “Come see my dogs,” Nora Jane said to her and took her by the hand and led her to the kitchen where the puppies were playing in a cardboard box. “They don’t have names yet. I just call them boy and girl. Do you like them? Do you think they’re cute?”

  “Lydia, you didn’t do this to me?”

  “She’s staying here until the school year is over. You are welcome here at any time as long as you are sober. That’s it. It’s final, Madelaine. Don’t talk about it anymore.”

  “You want to stay here? You want to leave me alone in that terrible house?” Madelaine turned to Nora Jane. Tears were beginning to run down her face.

  “You could clean it up if you hate it so much,” Nora Jane said.

  “Don’t do this, Madelaine,” Lydia said. “It’s almost her bedtime. Don’t do this now.”

  “I’ll come over there whenever I can,” Nora Jane said. “But I have to stay here and take care of them. They wouldn’t like it with the cat. So I have to stay here for a while.” Madelaine was backing up. She thought about grabbing Nora Jane and dragging her out the door. But the little girl turned her back to her and lay down on the floor beside the cardboard box.

  “Goddamn you, Lydia,” she said. “You don’t care about anything but yourself. You think you can break into my house and steal my child. No wonder your son was such an egotist. He learned it from you, didn’t he?” She kept on yelling various insults, and Lydia followed her to the front porch.

  “You are a mean old witch is what you are,” Madelaine said. “You can’t have her, Lydia. I’ll get a court order to keep you from ever seeing her again.”

  “Calm down, Madelaine. Please don’t yell out here in the front yard.”

  “I’ll yell all I goddamn well please. And I’m going to sue you for everything you own for this day’s work.” Madelaine got into the car and started the motor and drove off down the street. Nora Jane came out onto the porch holding the puppies in both arms. “She’ll just go find her friends and talk to them,” Nora Jane said. “She probably won’t be back tonight.”

  “I hope not, sweetie.” Lydia sat down in the swing and the dogs began to tumble around the porch and Nora Jane tumbled with them. The first stars were showing in the sky beyond the porch. Even though there was still light, the moon and several stars were showing. Nora Jane rolled over on her back and laid her head upon her grandmother’s soft leather shoes. The puppies licked her face. It had been a long long day.

  A long time later Lydia woke her up and took her into the house and bathed her and washed her hair and cut the ends of it and found her a toothbrush and cleaned her teeth and examined all the mosquito bites and bruises on her skin and cleaned behind her ears and put her into a long white cotton gown and tucked her into a beautiful four-poster bed with clean peach-colored sheets and big soft pillows. When Nora Jane was asleep, Lydia drew her own bath and prepared herself for bed. Twenty years, she was thinking. If I can live twenty years or even ten. Give me ten, God, and I will make her safe before I leave. Please give me twenty. Give me twenty or give me ten. I will take whatever you allow me to have. Lydia was crying then, thinking of the child alone in the world. Then she stopped her tears and gave herself a lecture on courage and climbed into her own clean high bed and went to sleep.

  A Man Who Looked Like Me

  The man I should have married drove two hundred miles the other day to come and hear me lecture. Fortunately, he was late. Fortunately, he only saw me later at his sister’s house. Fortunately, I didn’t know he was coming or I wouldn’t have been able to say a word. I suppose I could have read a story out loud and answered the well-intentioned questions from the audience. But I couldn’t have been my self-assured, sparkling self, the person people drive long distances to hear on those rare occasions when I become greedy or generous enough to pack my suitcases and climb aboard germ-infested airplanes and sleep in strange beds and let the public see me. I like the people who come to hear writers read. I just don’t like to travel and I don’t like to be the center of attention.

  Who are you? is the question they want answered, but I never seem to be able to answer to their satisfaction. He probably could have told them, this man who drove two hundred miles and missed the lecture and came running across his sister’s lawn with his wide-open smile to see me. To forgive me. I’m the one who broke our engagements. But it wasn’t really me. It was my father and my mother and my fear. Ugly, mean old fear. Teach your children not
to be afraid. Make safe homes for them and don’t make them move around and go to ten different schools. Don’t built nests like robins build, out on crazy limbs that wouldn’t hold up a tennis ball. I watched just such a nest fall last Saturday. The first rain washed it down. “You fool,” I told that robin. “That wasn’t a branch. That was a place where two limbs fell across one another.” All my life I have found robin’s eggs on the ground in spring. That unforgettable, marvelous blue. Sometimes the eggs are whole. Sometimes they are broken and the yolk is spilled. Once there was a chick. I thought all those years it was because robins are unlucky birds. No, it is because they build stupid nests that are not anchored properly.

  I am not blaming my parents for what happened between Farrell and I. Farrell and me, whatever. I could live somewhere where people speak the English language properly but I cannot leave this nest I’ve made. I have made a home that’s strong and safe. Nothing can harm me here. Here I can dream and create. Here I can sleep. I was fifty years old before I learned to sleep.

  I was engaged to Farrell twice and both times I broke the engagement. I was afraid to marry him because my parents turned their noses up at his parents. His father was a social worker. His mother taught the second grade. These are professions I admire above all others now. These are the sort of people I surround myself with in my safe and lovely sleeping nest. But then I could not make such judgments. If my parents thought he was not good enough for me, I had to think so too. I was in the third high school I had attended. I had lived in three different towns in five years. I could barely hold on to a stable personality. I held on by reading books. Wherever I went, my books went with me. My books were my nest. Even later, when I was quite old, I had to have those books near me, in the bedroom where I slept. Later, when I became allergic to old books, I finally threw them away. I threw them away as a gesture. I had them memorized. I knew what they said and how each page looked and my name written in the corner of the first page. Jane Martin, 1951, or some such date. This was all so long ago and is still imprinted on my brain. The past is not dead, it is not even past, Faulkner wrote. My analyst says, The past is a swamp where we wander at our peril.