Nine Women (18 page)

Another time her mother called her. That once in September during the hurricane season. “Willie May,” her mother cried, voice shaking with fear and pain, “Willie May, help me.” The child she was carrying was born too soon, a small hairy boy who gasped a couple of times and was perfectly still.

Willie May ran off into the rain, hiding in the heavy tangle of titi bushes and myrtle trees on the other side of the street. She shivered all over—not with cold, because it was September and very warm, and not with fear of the weather, because though the winds were high they were not nearly hurricane strength. She huddled against the trunk of a big wax myrtle, and rain and leaves and bark pelted down on her. Her arms and hands twitched, like a puppet, her body shook so hard that she could scarcely breathe. Perhaps she’d even stopped breathing for a while, because she found herself lying full length on the ground, one ear and eye pasted shut by soft oozing mud.

It was still raining hard and the sky was darker, not with the greenish dark of a hurricane, but the gray dark of night. Looking out carefully from her shelter, across the empty ground, she could see that all the lights in her house were on.

She went home then, because she had no other place to go. The deep gutters on each side of the dirt street were filled to the top (crawfish would like that, she thought), the water was ankle deep on the three loose boards that served as a bridge to her house. She inched her way across, carefully. The boards shivered and quaked, about to wash away. In the morning she would have to go hunting for them and put them back in their place. She’d most probably find them near the Duquesnay house where the ground rose just a bit. An Indian mound, people said, and children frightened each other with stories of walking ghosts.

Out of the darkness her father said, “Willie May.”

She hadn’t known he was there. His voice came from the dark corner of the porch by the living room window. She stared, dazzled by the bright square of light, saw nothing. Mosquitoes, attracted to the moisture of her eyes, swarmed on her, and she blinked rapidly.

“You ran off,” her father said, “when your mama called you. You left her and the baby died.”

She wanted to say: I didn’t kill him.

But no sound came out.

“Your mama knew you were afraid when you saw the baby, but she thought you’d know enough to run to Rosie’s house.”

No, she hadn’t thought of that. Never once thought of running the three blocks to her Aunt Rosie’s house and telling her. She’d thought of nothing but digging under the weeds and the bushes, hiding. Like a mouse gone back to earth.

I’m sorry, she wanted to say.

But again no words.

The water-washed boards suddenly shifted sideways and she fell into the muddy night-black rushing water, coming up coughing and choking, crying with fear, scrambling up the bank of the ditch to the firm hard-swept mud of the front yard.

Her father did not move. She would not have known he was there, except in the quiet night she could hear his breathing.

“Mother, please stay. You’re comfortable here and the doctors are so good.”

“I do not need doctors now.”

“Mother, listen. We only want to take care of you. Don’t you understand. We love you.”

Oh, I understand. The trap. The trap that caught my father and my mother and even me. But that was years ago, not now. No more love.

She would run away again. Only, when she went to earth this time, it would be for good. And she would choose her own spot.

“The baby didn’t die because of you,” her mother said.

But Willie May knew better. She knew.

“He died because he was born too soon. If I hadn’t strained and fought with that window because the rain was pouring in, and if the window hadn’t been stuck … He wasn’t your fault. But you shouldn’t have run away.”

She hung her head and the old guilt and disgust settled in her stomach while her chest ached so much that she thought she too would die.

“Your duty,” her mother said, “you don’t ever run away from your duty to your family. Not ever. Not until you die.”

Willie May thought wearily, and with horror: You aren’t ever free. Something always holds you, stops you, brings you back.

“Good evening, Mrs. Denham. Will you have your sleeping pill now?” The night nurse: round black face under a round white cap.

“You still wear your cap, Nurse. None of the others do.”

“The hospital doesn’t require it any more, Mrs. Denham.” She had a habit of repeating the patient’s name over and over again. Perhaps she had been taught to do that. “But I worked hard for this bit of organdy and I intend to keep on wearing it.”

“I know what it is to work hard for something.”

“Yes,” the nurse said.

Then there were the usual little night sounds: rubber-shod feet thudding ever so softly, and the soft silky whispering of nylon-clad thighs moving up and down the halls.

I did not come for this, she thought dully, I came to see my son, my only son who lives a continent away in a house with green lawns and dogwood blooming outside the windows, who has two sons, his images. I came to visit and I broke down on the road like an old car.

She could smell the sickly sweet stench of her own skin. Her whole body had an aura of decay.

The smell reminds me of something. Something years ago. I was young, but my skin still carried this smell.

I have only to live until the morning. It is time.

Time had so many different patterns. After her father died, when they were very poor with only his small pension to support them, Willie May went off to work at the Convent of the Holy Angels. Thirteen, tall and strong, and afraid. For three years she lived in a maze of echoing halls that smelled of floor wax and furniture polish and a laundry that smelled of steam and bleach and starch for the stiff white coifs and wimples the nuns wore. Three years of small hard beds in tiny rooms. Of weariness and sick exhaustion. Of prayers and echoing Gregorian chant. And a great emptiness. Occasionally in the garden as she swept the covered walkways, she could hear children shouting as they walked to school. She envied them and their living fathers whose hard-earned money sent them laughing along the sidewalks.

Eventually her mother remarried, a police sergeant named Joseph Reilly, a widower nearly sixty. “Hello, Willie May,” he said, when she came back from the convent. “I married your mother.” “Okay,” she said. He smiled then, and it was settled.

He liked to cook, and despite his name he cooked Italian style. Her mother was beginning to grow fat on spaghetti and sausage and peppers, all glistening with olive oil.

He was a quiet man who spent every evening at home listening to the radio, sitting in his special chair (one he had brought with him to her mother’s house) with his feet propped on a stool. He was a kind man and treated her like his own child. Each birthday he bought her a pair of white gloves to wear to church, and every Christmas he gave her a box of Evening in Paris cosmetics, blue bottles held in shining white satin.

There was no talk of her returning to school, the time for that had passed. On her sixteenth birthday she went to work at Woolworth’s, at the big store on Decatur Street. She sold potted plants and stood all day behind the counter near the front window, and when she wasn’t busy she watched the street outside. The cars and the big delivery vans and the green streetcars rocking unsteadily past on their small clacking iron wheels. Women in print dresses and hats, breathless and harried from the excitement of shopping. Office messengers with brown envelopes and packages and long cardboard tubes. Girls in navy blue school uniforms, arm in arm, and boys gathered at the corner by the traffic light. Bookies and numbers runners whose territory this was; she grew to recognize them and smile, and they lifted their hats to her in passing.

As she watched she felt her quietness and her loneliness slipping away. She felt herself become a part of things, no longer a child looking in, but an adult and part of the busyness and bustle that was life. Her hands, broadened and thickened by the convent work, their nails clipped very short and square across, grew soft and slender, and she filed her nails into careful ovals. She buffed them too, until they had a high shine; she might have worn nail polish of a color to match her lipstick (they sold those sets at the cosmetic counter at the back of the store), but the management did not allow that.

She had money of her own now, and the delicious expectation of each week’s pay. (Dutifully she gave half to her mother, the rest was hers.) Sometimes she would stand for long minutes, half-smiling, half-dozing, smoothing the bills between her manicured fingers, pressing the coins against her palms until they left their imprint on her skin.

Every evening on the streetcar home, she stared through the dirty finger-smeared window, lulled by the steady rocking, and dreamed half-visions of the future. She had never done that before. She had met only one day at a time, fearful. Now she saw the future, a series of busy days. Beyond grimy windows the littered crowded streets were mysteriously inviting. She lived now in a state of great excitement, with a fluttering in her stomach, a feeling of endless energy, a sense that flowers were beautiful and rain was lovely, that colors were brighter than they had ever been before, that something wonderful was about to happen. She had no experience of it, but she thought this must mean that she was happy.

One day John Denham walked past Woolworth’s big front window. They stared and blinked and then laughed at the sight of each other grown up. They had been children together; he’d lived two blocks away. In those half-remembered days before her father’s death, they had played and adventured together. “When you get off work,” he said, “I’ll be waiting for you.” He rode home with her on the streetcar, but he wouldn’t come near her house. “Your mama wouldn’t like me.”

“Why not?”

“She won’t like any boy hanging around you. I’ll see you after work tomorrow.”

He did, every evening. They talked the whole way home, nervously, rapidly summarizing the years. He told her that years ago his family had moved across town to share a house with his aunt. “Way out,” he said. “Nothing but swamps behind us. We used to go crawfishing a lot.” Once, he told her, he’d gone back to their old neighborhood and people said she’d gone off to the convent.

“I thought you were going to be a nun,” he said.

“Not me.” She held up her soft manicured hands, admiring them against the scratched varnish of the car seats. “Mama went to work but she couldn’t make enough to keep me and the house both, and then Father Lauderman heard that the convent needed somebody, and that somebody turned out to be me.”

“They teach you anything?”

“Sure. Cooking—would you believe they’ve got thirty-seven nuns there. And embroidery and crochet. And a lot of prayers.”

“Okay,” he said, “say me a prayer.”

“I get plenty enough prayers in church on Sunday,” she said. “Anyway, the next stop is mine.”

He got off with her and they stood talking until a car came going the other way. He swung on, she walked home.

And so she saw him six days a week. She learned that he still lived at home with his parents and his orphaned cousins and his grandmother. That he’d finished Jesuit High School and right away was lucky enough to get a job with the post office, delivering mail. “I like it,” he said. “I couldn’t ever stand being inside at a desk all day long.”

“I like my job too,” she said.

“What do you do on Sundays?”

“Go to mass. Do my laundry and my ironing and be sure my clothes are ready for the week. And I help my mother with her garden, and in the evenings there’s always the radio programs.”

“You don’t work much in the garden, not with hands like that.”

“I didn’t know you noticed my hands.”

“Sure I notice. I notice everything about you.”

She felt pleased and shy.

“But your Sundays don’t sound like any fun to me.”

“I like it just the way it is,” she said. But in truth she didn’t like it as much as she had.

“Where do you go to church? St. Rita’s?”

“Mama and I go to the eleven o’clock every Sunday, rain or shine. She wouldn’t miss it.”

“What would you say if I told you I’d be there? That’d surprise you, wouldn’t it? Well, I used to go to that church when I was a kid living just down the street from you, and I might just take myself back there again. Oh, I wouldn’t talk to you, just spy on you. I know they get a big crowd for mass, so you see if you find me. And I bet you can’t.”

On Monday he said triumphantly, “You had a blue skirt and a white blouse and a tie like a man’s, and you had to sit in the middle of a pew because you got there late, and you dropped your purse because you were so busy looking for me.”

“I don’t think that is a funny game,” she said.

“I’m tired of it too.” He popped a match against his thumbnail and lit a cigarette. “Let’s not go to church next Sunday. Let’s go out to the lake and walk along the seawall and have a look at all the big boats. I’ll meet you at the streetcar stop at the end of Prentiss Street.”

She did not meet him. She felt tired and out of sorts that Sunday, but she worked very hard in the garden, spraying the tomato plants with tobacco water to control aphids, staking and tying the beans.

“You are such a big help,” her mother said. “You’ve got such a lot of energy.”

The following day John Denham said, “You sure did miss a good time yesterday.”

“I told you I was busy.”

“Sure you were,” he said. “I’ll believe anything.”

Day after day he waited for her. “Who’s your boyfriend?” the other girls at Woolworth’s asked. “He’s not a boyfriend, he’s just somebody used to live in my neighborhood.”

The September rains began and he carried a big gray post office umbrella. The interior of the streetcars smelled of wet mud and musty sawdust, but the windows were washed clean by the pounding rain.

“You can’t work in that precious garden now,” he said.

“Not much any more,” she said.

“So let’s go out this Sunday.”

“I am busy on Sundays,” she said. “I have very important things to do.”