The Age of Miracles (9 page)

“God is here,” I put in.

“Maybe he is and maybe he's not. If he is, he's doing a terrible job.”

In the end only Crystal Anne and I went to Disney World. Miss Crystal stayed at the hotel taking dancing lessons. Crystal Anne and I had a pretty good time. We had our photographs made and a five-minute video of us talking to Donald Duck. We rode about two dozen rides and ate lunch in Rapunzel's Tower and bought sweatshirts and sunglasses and got home about five in the afternoon completely exhausted. At least I was.

We went up to our rooms and Crystal Anne threw herself down on Miss Crystal's bed and started pouting. I was in the next room with the door open between the rooms.

“Did you have fun at Disney World?” Miss Crystal asked.

“No.”

“Why not?”

“I wanted you to be there. People look at me funny when I'm with Traceleen.”

“Why is that?”

“They think a maid is taking care of me.”

“Do you think that?” I couldn't get up and close the door. I didn't know what to do. I coughed, but they did not seem to hear. I coughed again. “Come in here, Traceleen,” Miss Crystal said. “This concerns you too.”

“Black people should be at home taking care of their own families,” Crystal Anne said. “That's what everybody thinks.”

“I don't have any children but you,” I answered. “This is my job, Crystal Anne. Also, my heart's desire. I love being in Florida with you. You know it's true.”

“You're mad about Mr. Hotchkiss, aren't you?” Miss Crystal had decided to bite the bullet.

“I think it's going to be like it was in Maine with Allen. You and Daddy will get a divorce and I'll have to live in two houses like Augusta Redmon.”

“I am only getting to know Mr. Hotchkiss so that when Lydia comes down here she will have someone to go out with. I'm trying to get Lydia to come and join us. I haven t told you yet because I wasn't sure she could come. Well, there it is, now you know and don't be disappointed if she doesn't come.” Miss Crystal looked at me across Crystal Anne's head. It was the biggest lie I had ever heard her tell her child. The worst lie she had told since she quit drinking. It was a lie that was destined to draw me in. I took the bait. “See there, honey. It's not what you thought it was.” Crystal Anne looked at me out of the bottom of her eyes. It is impossible to lie to her. Many children are that way. It is a gift they have.

“I'm going swimming,” she said. “I want to get in some laps before dinner.”

As soon as Crystal Anne left the room Crystal got on the phone and called Miss Lydia in California and began to plead with her to come and join us. “I'll buy the airplane ticket,” she said. “I'll pay for everything. You better come and meet this man. He's a ten. You know you don't like any other kind.”

So the upshot of it was Miss Lydia agreed to come the following day. It turned out she was in a lull between painting jobs anyway and thought she might drum up some portrait business among the snowbirds.

That night Miss Crystal went to work telling Mr. Hotchkiss all about how happily married she was and how careful everyone has to be around Crystal Anne because she is so sensitive and can read minds. Also, how fortunate everyone in Saint Petersburg was going to be when the best painter in the United States showed up for a visit and let ordinary people talk to her. I think Miss Crystal probably overdid it. Mr. Hotchkiss was so lonely and guilt-ridden over his liver not being strong enough to save his child that he was ripe for any kind of attention. We could have run in somebody with only half the personality of Miss Lydia and he would have been thrilled to meet her.

So Miss Lydia joined the party. She is a catalyst I guess you could call it. The ingredient that makes the pot boil over. She got off the airplane wearing this little black California outfit and carrying a rolled-up canvas under her arm. It was her latest painting, a portrait of a famous writer sitting beside a bowl of huge white roses.
Homage to Van Gogh
, it is called and we all agreed it was the best thing she had ever painted. Why she would roll it up and carry it across the United States on an airplane is beyond me but she says it is because of anxiety. She is continually worried that an earthquake will destroy one of her paintings before she has time to finish it or put it in a contest.

“I have just found out that much of what I have always thought of as anxiety is just plain fear,” she started telling Mr. Hotchkiss as soon as they were introduced. (It is not the old-fashioned way to get a man interested in you but I try to keep an open mind about such things. In the old days we would look up at a man and say, Where did you get those big brown eyes? or something more along that line.) “All these years I assumed I was suffering the ordinary anxiety and depression common to artists when all along it was just plain old Midwestern fear.”

“Imagine that,” Mr. Hotchkiss said.

“I could have told you that,” Miss Crystal puts in. “You've never been depressed, Lydia. Being afraid of earthquakes when you live on the San Andreas Fault is not neurotic. Why don't you move to New Orleans and live near me?”

“I might,” she answered, and got this dark and serious look on her face and sat up straighter. “I'm rereading the
Chronicles of Dune
. I want to be a Bene Gesserit nun and have power over every aspect of my life. I am training myself to be constantly aware. And read body language.” She looked directly at Mr. Hotchkiss, who was sitting like a perfect gentleman. He didn't move a muscle when she said that and I began to think maybe I had underrated him.

“Well,” Miss Crystal said. “I think I'll join Crystal Anne in the pool. I want to get in a swim before dinner.” Miss Crystal got up and went to join her daughter and Mr. Hotchkiss suggested that Lydia change her shoes and accompany him on a walk.

Lydia agreed and went off to her room, leaving Mr. Hotchkiss and me alone. He looked off toward the sea, very gentle and companionable, and I reached in my bag for my knitting. I am knitting a pair of golf club covers for my niece Andria. It is tricky work and I forgot myself in it for a while. “I took up knitting once,” Mr. Hotchkiss said. “When I was in the navy. I knitted seven scarves, each one longer than the last. The last one was seven feet long. It was my masterpiece.”

“What sort of vessel were you on?” I asked.

“A nuclear sub. Imagine being young and unimaginative enough to do that.” He laughed a gentle laugh and I thought for a moment he might cry. It is a strange thing about very handsome men as they grow older. Either they become great to match their beauty or a sort of fading begins. Their smiles lose all excitement. It's as if great beauty makes promises it cannot keep.

Miss Lydia reappeared, wearing shorts and a shirt and white socks and tennis shoes. She swept him up and took him off down the beach.

About that time who should come walking out of the hotel but Mr. Manny. He had finished up his work and decided to come down and surprise us. He came walking out of the hotel still wearing his suit and tie. Crystal Anne spotted him from the pool. She came tearing across the concrete and threw herself into his arms, getting him soaking wet.

Miss Crystal was slower in her welcome but I could see it was sincere. The things that have gone on between this pair that I have witnessed! Still, the love they have is always greater than their problems. They are smart enough for each other and can make each other laugh. “I look terrible” is the first thing Miss Crystal said. “My hair's wet. Why didn't you tell me you were coming? Come on, go up to my room while I get dressed.”

“Crystal Anne and I will get a snack in the coffeeshop,” I volunteered. Nothing makes me happier than the thought that Miss Crystal and Mr. Manny might spend an hour in bed. It looked like this might be the afternoon, so I grabbed up Crystal Anne and took her inside to eat bacon, lettuce, and tomato sandwiches and drink iced tea.

“Where did Lydia go with Mr. Hotchkiss?” she asked me. We were taking dainty little bites of our sandwiches, our backs straight, our napkins in our laps. Crystal Anne and I are not part of the messiness of life in the nineties.

“Lydia can take care of herself,” I answered. “She has lived through two earthquakes all alone in a little house in a redwood forest. I wouldn't worry about her taking a walk with a man from Atlanta, Georgia.”

“What does Mr. Hotchkiss do for a living?” She sat up even straighter and knit her eyebrows together in a perfect imitation of Miss Crystal's father.

“We haven't asked,” I answered. “You know it is impolite to question people about their livelihoods. People will volunteer this information when they are ready.”

“I don't like it when men don't go to work.” She picked a piece of tomato out of her sandwich and laid it on her plate. “They should go to work in the daytime.”

“Judge not that ye be not judged” is all I would say to that. We finished up our sandwiches and iced tea. Crystal Anne had added so much sugar to her tea that the bottom of the glass looked like a beach. She removed the ice, then took her red-and-white-striped straw and fashioned the sugar into a tiny sand castle. “Are you going to eat that sugar?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said. She took her iced tea spoon and very carefully filled it with the castle and put it into her beautiful little pink mouth. I would rather have a meal with Crystal Anne than any king or queen on the earth. I have never had a meal with her that did not turn out to be memorable.

We wrapped up our bread crusts for the gulls and signed our bill and walked down to the beach to give the crusts away. There was no sign of Lydia and Mr. Hotchkiss. We walked along beside the water for a while, then we went up to our rooms to dress for dinner.

At seven that night Lydia and Mr. Hotchkiss had not been heard from. At seven-thirty we went to dinner without them. At nine Miss Crystal began to want to call the police.

At ten-fifteen the phone finally rang. It was Lydia calling from a bar in Tampa, begging them to come and save her. “He's drunk,” she told Miss Crystal. “He said he'll kill himself if I leave him. He said he has no reason to live.”

“I knew he was a kidnapper,” Crystal Anne said, when Manny and Crystal had gone off to save Lydia. “You all go crazy if I speak to a stranger and Mother just takes up with a man she meets in a hotel and lets him take Lydia off like that.”

“Your mother does the best she can,” I answered. “You are too smart a little girl to start disliking your beloved mother just because she has flights of imagination.”

An hour and a half later Manny and Crystal reappeared with Lydia. “I have spent my life trying to escape that bar,” Lydia said. “Then I end up in it with this dull goddamn man from Atlanta. Will I ever learn?”

“Why did you go?” Crystal Anne had moved in closer. I couldn't believe we were letting her take part in this conversation.

“Because I felt sorry for him. And because he said he wanted me to paint his dead child. From a photograph, of course. He didn't bat an eyelash when I said twenty thousand dollars.”

“Why don't you paint Crystal Anne instead?” Manny asked. “For, say, half that amount.”

 

Which is how a spring that began with pollen, mold, and dust mites ended up in a glorious portrait of Crystal Anne wearing a green and white sprigged dimity garden dress and holding a hat in her hand. Beside her are squirrels and robins and bluejays and a turtle and her cat and many other of the creatures that she loves so dearly. Lydia stayed with us while she painted it and while she was doing the drawings Crystal Anne would add an animal every time she saw Lydia in a good mood. The painting is called
The Menagerie
and a copy of it was the cover of
New Orleans
magazine for August of last year. It has completely dominated the living room of our house and looks perfect with the stark floors and armless Mies van der Rohe chairs.

Actually, we would not have had to move all that furniture and paint all those walls if we had waited a few months. It turns out that Miss Crystal's allergies were really caused by all the antibiotics that she took when she had her teeth capped. What few allergies she has now can be controlled by nose spray and are only caused by the budding of the trees in spring and the going-to-seed of plants in the fall. Talking about things like that is work for a poet. If Mr. Alter hadn't killed himself he might be here to turn this experience into literature. In his absence I have tried to do the best I can. Here is my poem.

When the dew point rises

When the buds appear

“When Aprile with its sweete showeres”

Fills the world with moisture

This is the hour when the upper respiratory system

Goes into high gear

And we must accept

We are not in charge here

Paris

A
YOUNG MAN is dead and maybe we could have stopped it. That's what I wake up with every morning. Until a month ago I was a completely happy person. Who knows, maybe I'll be happy again.

Reality expands exponentially. It meets itself coming and going. It is a net, a web; touch one strand and the whole thing quivers. Get caught and you cannot get away. Sticky stuff, reality. Spiders understand this metaphor. It had nothing to do with me. I say this over and over again, like a mantra.

There was no reason why I shouldn't go to Paris. My young friend, Tannin, was writing a book about me. He needed me to inspire him and give him material. I don't think he knew he was writing about me. He thought he was writing a book about three girls in Paris living in an apartment and talking all the time about their lovers. Only all three sounded like me, my hysteria, how I make every utterance an oath or a promise. I can't help it. I was poisoned in the womb. If you don't buy first causes, don't read on.

I'm a journalist and a writer of novels. My name is Rhoda Manning and I'm fifty-eight years old and you'd never believe that either. People who believe in fairies don't age.