Dalva (6 page)

I've stayed in Santa Monica this long partly because of the trees. When we were young Ruth had the notion from books of photographs that the cities of the coasts, now thought of as our dream coasts, looked fragile and delicate. It was an interesting idea to us that in our lifetimes these huge buildings would very probably fall over. The idea is peculiar to the northern Midwest—anything too tall tips over. Stick your head out and you might get it cut off. Only the grain elevators are allowed to emerge, offering a stolid and comforting grandeur to the untraveled.

I didn't tell Mother until November that I was pregnant. I told her I only had missed one period when it was actually two. That was so she wouldn't think it was Duane, who had disappeared. I told her it was a pheasant-hunter. Her first reaction was a rage that I had never seen before, not against me—I was her “poor baby”—but against the perverted man. I had to add one lie to another because Naomi immediately called Charlene who swore innocence in the matter. I invented a tale of being out riding and meeting a handsome man who was looking for a lost English setter. I helped him find the dog and he seduced me, which wasn't difficult because I was tired of being a virgin. Naomi took me in her arms and consoled me, saying it wasn't the end of the world I had lived in so innocently. She withdrew me from school in November during Thanksgiving break, telling the superintendent that she intended to send me to school in the East. The only people who knew were a doctor in Lincoln, Ruth, Charlene—whose contempt for the world was so great she could share in any secret—and Grandpa.

It was hardest on Grandpa, perhaps harder on him than
on me because I had the resilience of my age and he had none. A poet, I can't remember who, said there is a point beyond which the exposed heart cannot recover. I was fifteen, nearly sixteen, and he was seventy-three. I was the “apple of his eye,” perhaps the feminine counterpart of my father.

From the time that Duane disappeared in late September until I was taken away the day after Thanksgiving, I rode over to Grandpa's every day to see if there was any news from Duane. I never asked directly for news and he never mentioned directly that Naomi had told him I was pregnant. He was considered extremely eccentric well beyond the confines of our county, though never to me. In many ways he had been my substitute father for the nearly ten years since Dad died in Korea, the point in time in which he had ceased active life and retreated behind his successive walls of trees. He had had “too much life” he said, and wanted to think it over before he died. Not that there was grimness on my nearly daily visits—I had at least ten routes to ride over and back, and each of them were well-worn paths. He was grave if I was unhappy, and either went to the heart of the problem with subtlety, or sought to divert me with talk of books, travel, or horses. Naomi felt that he spent far too much on horses for me, but then he had been a horseman all of his life. Even in those days he thought nothing of spending ten thousand dollars on a horse, while a car was nothing more than a vulgar convenience.

His quarrel with Naomi was much deeper than I suspected at the time, because the bits and snatches of it I had heard were not totally comprehensible. As an instance, a few years after Dad died, I was reading in her upstairs bedroom to five-year-old Ruth who had the flu. I stopped because through a floor heating-register I heard Grandpa's angry voice talking to Naomi. I knelt down and Ruth jumped out of bed and we both put our ears to the register. Grandpa used words and phrases that were tinny and muffled in the vent:
You are being a martyr you shouldn't raise the girls here he's dead and you shouldn't stay here as a goddamn monument to his memory the dead are the last people who want us to be unhappy find a gentleman friend a father please for his sake you are barely thirty you are a lovely woman. .
. . I can still see Ruth's face, smiling but flushed with fever.

I knew from Sunday school that a martyr was someone who died for others. Naomi said years later that growing up in a poor family in the Depression and marrying a man so prosperous and dashing as Father was a shock to the system, so that when he died in Korea she wanted to hold on to what they had had together. Strangely enough, it was my pregnancy that forced her into what she thought of as the outside world.

It is nearly thirty years ago and I still feel the pain of that October and November so that my heart aches, my skin tightens, and I can barely swallow. There was a stretch of Indian summer when I would sit with Grandpa on the porch swing watching autumn, then squeeze my eyes as if Duane were walking up the driveway back to me. There was nothing left of him, not a trace, in the bunkhouse except the two Airedales who dozed on his cot as if waiting. I groomed his buckskin but hadn't the heart to ride the horse.

One afternoon, the day before Thanksgiving when I cleaned out my locker and said a tearful goodbye to Charlene, I rode over to Grandpa's against Naomi's wishes in a gathering snowstorm. I asked him to light the soft oil lamps because they cast a yellow light around the room, but the light made him look old and quite sad. Behind his head on the den wall was a folio print from Edward Curtis of the warrior chief Two Whistles with a crow perched on his head. Outside the sky was gray and full of snow with the wind buffeting the windowpanes. He put his favorite Paganini violin solo on the Victrola. He rejected more modern record players, having grown fond of and used to the bad sound reproduction. He repeated one of my favorite stories of seeing War Admiral win the 1937 Kentucky Derby, then drifted off into the splendor of the Dublin Horse Show. When he finished I was looking out the window, thinking I would have to stay the night, and happy at the prospect. I said something idle to the effect of “I could just shoot myself if Duane doesn't come back.”

“Dalva, goddamnit!” he roared. Then for the first time I'd ever seen it, he began to cry. I rushed to him, begging him to
forgive me for saying something stupid. You must never say that, he said. He repeated himself. He poured us each some whiskey, a full glass for himself and a little bit for me.

In the next hour I was to become old before my time. He told me that my grandmother had been somewhat insane and had committed suicide with whiskey and sleeping pills. She had been a lovely and kind soul but had left him to raise the boys. Now that my father was dead, and my uncle estranged, wasting his life wandering the world, I had to live, and he had deeded me this strange corner of the farm. They all could have their goddamn wheat and corn. Then his face darkened and he held my hand. Just before the war my uncle Paul had come home from Brazil, and he and my father, Wesley, had gotten along well, so Grandpa had taken them to a hunting cabin he kept out in the Black Hills. They had a fine drive out though they drank too much and Lundquist had followed in a truck with the horses and bird dogs. Grandpa and Wesley had had a good time hunting but Paul had disappeared for two days, returning with a lovely Sioux girl “to clean the cabin” he said. The girl didn't care for Paul at all, but fell in love with your father and he with her. Naomi knows nothing of this. Paul and Wesley fought over the girl and I gave her some money and I sent her away while your father had taken a horse to town to be shod. I liked her a great deal and told her to get in touch with me if there ever was a problem. Actually I sent her away because I was taken with her also. It was all a god damn mess and I was relieved when we got back home. She wrote me a note with the help of a missionary saying she was pregnant. I sent a man out there to check and it was true. So I sent her money on a monthly basis for ten years or so, until I thought she disappeared or died of drink as many Sioux do; then I supported the child through a mission school. When Duane showed up here he didn't know who you were. Then he came back the day you were baptized and said he wanted to marry you and I told him he couldn't legally because you were his half-sister. He ran away. I know there is no pheasant-hunter. Naomi couldn't bear to hear this. We're the only ones who must ever know this. You have done nothing wrong except to love someone. I would have told him earlier who you were except I thought you were helping to keep him here.

Grandpa embraced me. I told him I loved him and I meant to stay alive.

I've seen Franco's uncle twice in the past week, once from the balcony through my binoculars, and once face to face under a theatre marquee when I was with my ex–gentleman friend the gynecologist. I have no solid reason to believe he is seeking me. Outside the theatre he merely glanced at me, his face swollen from the recently healed scars. He is an unlikely new resident of Santa Monica, though I'm wondering why, if he is looking for me, he doesn't simply knock on my door. He obviously had no difficulty finding out my address from the clinic.

So I called Ted and arranged a meeting. I wanted to avoid the police and knew that Ted with his peripheral business connections would have a way of checking on the boy's uncle. Ted lives in the Malibu Colony in one of those houses you see featured in
Architectural Digest:
normal mortals think How beautiful but I wouldn't care to live there. In addition to the gatekeeper and a private police force in the Colony, Ted has a houseman who also serves as a bodyguard. This houseman doesn't seem to belong to California—he is happily married with two small children, an ex–homicide detective from Albany, New York. He is hyperenergetic, a first-rate cook, wine connoisseur, and gardener, household accountant. He very quickly took the place of three other employees, excepting a Salvadoran maid. I mention this man, Andrew, because such a level of competence and wit is so rare. Ted told me that Andrew retired from police work because he shot a girl during an attempted robbery and found the experience unendurable. The girl was black and Andrew is mulatto. He is married to a schoolteacher who is also an accomplished cellist. Ruth introduced them before she left Los Angeles for Tucson some years ago.

I was a little startled when I reached Ted's to find my professor of the baggy undies there. It had been a week or so since I had seen him, and he had apparently contacted Ted through Ruth, in hopes that more pressure could be applied from another direction. What the professor, Michael, wanted
was access to the family papers and journals, particularly those of my great-grandfather dealing with his “astounding” ideas on what was termed the “Indian problem” in the nineteenth century. Ruth, Mother, and I (and earlier, Grandfather) had decided to keep all the material sequestered after the release of one essay in 1965 to the Nebraska Historical Society, which had caused some not very dramatic publicity and problems. Before he had begun what turned out to be an enormous tree-nursery business to provide root stock to mostly North and South Dakota and Nebraska farmers, Great-grandfather had served as an agricultural missionary to the Oglala Sioux. In the 1880s he had published two articles in
Harper's Monthly,
and several in
McClure's.
He retired to the farm, from the political controversy of what to do with the Sioux, after 1890, when Wounded Knee occurred, though he continued to know Joe White Coyote, Henry Horse, Daniel Blue Horse, Kills a Hundred, and the Minneconjous, Jackson He-Crow, Philip Black Moon, Edward Owl King. He was the closest to He Dog, the friend of Crazy Horse, but tended to be intensely secretive about He Dog. Grandfather had discussed his own father with Edward Curtis, George Bird Grinnell, Mari Sandoz, David Humphreys Miller, and a few others, but then decided in the late forties to put an end to such discussions. We still feel we made an error of honor in allowing part of the journal to be published in 1965. When I returned that spring without my baby I was told by Grandfather a number of specifics that I promised to keep secret, though they have no value except to the very few who care about such matters.