Dalva (43 page)

She was backlit by a window in the lounge so that when I came in from the sunlight I couldn't see her features clearly. She stood and waved and a waiter took me to her. Her hand was thin to boniness when I took it, and so was her voice, which was also lightly slurred.

“My goodness, but I would have recognized you anywhere. You must not come to Omaha often. I thought I saw you at the hospital last week when I was visiting a friend. Were you there? I said it must be you, though it all was thirty years ago.”

I nodded yes, unable to find my voice. She was extremely thin, beautifully dressed, and I guessed in her early sixties. It was apparent she had done some drinking in her life but her eyes were kind.

“I'm having a Manhattan, because this is a bit nerve-racking. May I order one for you? I'm puzzled, confused. I don't hear from him often, perhaps once or twice a year, but he said he'd seen you in Santa Monica, also in Nebraska last summer. He said during his Christmas call he would be seeing you again this summer. So when that man called for you I didn't know what to think. He was always a bit of a fibber, but he described what you looked like.”

My breath was shallow and I could barely speak. “He never introduced himself if he saw me. Do you have a photo?” This immediately seemed the wrong thing to say.

“Oh my God, no. I went to a therapist this morning who helped me when my husband died. The therapist said it's the young man's decision. Of course, now that you know his last name you could obviously find him with your resources, but it wouldn't be right. Or so they say.”

“I wouldn't do that. I understand that. It's natural for me to wonder what he looks like.”

“Of course. Let me think it over. There's no way to prepare for this, is there? Your grandfather was a very intimidating man. We were fearful of him even though the adoption was legal. My husband was only a junior member of the firm. Your grandfather asked that the boy be named John. We agreed and that's his legal name, though we resented it and never used the name. We saw your grandfather once more and that was during the August before he died. It was at a dinner given by a senior partner to which we had been summoned and instructed to bring the baby. My husband nearly resigned over the issue, but that evening he got along famously with your grandfather. My husband was from a poor family up in Moorhead, Minnesota, and very probably worked himself to death. Your grandfather came into a bedroom to see the baby and kissed its forehead. He said something to the baby in a foreign language; I suspect it was Indian, because I was told your grandfather was part Indian. Within a few weeks my husband was made the youngest full partner. I don't know why I'm saying this, because what you want to hear is about the boy. We were in our early thirties and thought we were infertile, but after the adoption we had two daughters of our own. One lives here in Omaha and one lives in Maryland. I guess this sometimes happens. So it was all quite wonderful for us. To be frank, the boy was always quite contrary and only infrequently a good student. He was a better student in college. But he was kind to his sisters and was a superb athlete, which meant a lot to his dad and means a lot around here, perhaps too much. During his last two years of high school we let him work on a dude ranch in Wyoming, and we never had any real control of him after that. We had told him he was adopted, because you're supposed to, but I'm not sure that's right. Your grandfather didn't help by leaving him a modest income for when he turned eighteen. The daughters were so easy, and he tended to be out of our control. But I guess so many sons are like that.” She stopped and waved away an acquaintance who was approaching, pointing to her watch. She appeared to be waiting for me to ask questions.

“I know I don't have any rights in this matter. The most I dared expect is to find out what happened to him.” Now I felt
as if someone had driven a spike in my skull. A fresh drink had arrived but I knew it wouldn't help.

“Well, when that man called, at first I refused to talk about it, but then he said it was the only child you ever had. That brought back the hospital to me and how when I looked in your room you looked so lovely, and I thought, How can we take this girl's baby from her? Later I understood no one owns a child, you just raise it. Everyone owns themselves. I keep wondering why he said he knew you. Many of our friends always thought he was arrogant and brash but he was quite shy in matters he really cared about. Maybe after he looked for you and found you he was just too shy to say anything. That must be it.”

“When he calls again will you tell him I want desperately to meet him?” I had begun to cry now out of utter frustration.

“Of course I will. Oh my God, but he could be such a bastard. But not about this sort of thing. He probably thought you might not want to know him.” Now she began to cry and gulped her drink. “How awful for you.”

“Please tell me a little bit more about him. I'm very grateful.” I dried my eyes and felt a specific relief, thinking, My God, he
was
looking for me, and he found me, though he didn't say anything. He said to himself, That is my mother.

“He went to several colleges. . . .” She tried to lighten her voice. “First he was going to be a veterinarian, then a biologist, then a rancher. After the dude ranch he began to care for horses, but not the equitation sort. He started at Macalester, his dad's school, then over in Lincoln, then to Michigan State to study cattle. It was hard to keep track. He got in trouble in Mexico for resisting arrest but his father got him out of that, though it was expensive. His father died five years ago, but just before that he used his political influence to get him into the Peace Corps in Guatemala. But he got kicked out of the Peace Corps, and I received a postcard from Alaska. The last time he called he was in Seattle. His father was very strict and orthodox with the girls, but he was never hard on John, though we never called him that. I was going to say, You'll have to meet him because I can't really describe him. It sounds funny but I know it isn't.”

I began to phrase another question, but it became apparent there was nothing more I could ask that wouldn't make it harder for both of us. It was the kind of silence that hurts your ears. She reached across the table and put her hand on mine. Two of her knuckles were swollen with arthritis and she caught my glance.

“I used to be ladies' champion and now I can't hold a club but I'm teaching my granddaughter. Life is goddamned awful, isn't it? Everything that consoles us can be taken away, and how can I say this to you? He'll call me again some day and I'll beg him, I'll force him to come see you. I'll say, Go see her or I'll shoot myself. I promise that. But now you must tell me who the father was. I've always wondered that.”

“He was a half-breed Sioux boy named Duane Stone Horse. I loved him but he died a long time ago.”

We both drew in as much breath as we could and said goodbye.

I was a full hundred miles out of Omaha on my five-hour drive home before I remembered that I hadn't stopped to see Michael. I had driven quite near the University of Nebraska Medical Center and he simply hadn't occurred to me. I absolved myself of neglect by remembering he said he wanted no visitors and, anyway, Frieda was going to retrieve him in two days.

The last hour of the trip home was in the dark. I was drowsy and hungry with all of the anguish of the day dissipated and replaced by the not very well-founded faith that I would see him some day. I even drove more slowly than usual as if I were being more cautious in my wait for the day to come. The adoptive mother was not the sort of person I would have liked on any immediate, social basis—I might have judged her as brittle and snotty—but by the end of our meeting she seemed rather grand. She had said nothing of herself other than that she was a lawyer's wife and the mother of three, but then I hadn't talked about myself either. It made me curious about her background. My thoughts drifted off to my gynecologist friend who told me his first wife had been a call girl. She
had helped him through medical school and his internship and the unfortunate marriage had been his idea.

Back home I cleaned up after and played with the pup, made a drink, and called Sam at the cabin in Buffalo Gap. It was reassuring at this late hour to find his voice light and playful. He said that Naomi and her young scientist friend, Nelse, had stopped by and they had had dinner together. Naomi was going to come home for a few days but Nelse, who had “cowboyed” a little, was going to stay and help him build a set of corrals, also recaulk and varnish the cabin. I found myself almost begging him to stay there for a while and promising I'd be up within a few days after getting Michael settled. He said not to worry, that he liked the place so well he'd stay for a few weeks or as long as he could earn his “keep.”

I lay down on the couch in the den too tired to eat and looked at the mail. There was a letter from Michael and I hoped it wouldn't further addle me, though the chances were remote that I could be reached in any meaningful sense after the day I had spent. I had been thinking of the words of a song that had been on the radio when I turned into the drive. It was a Neil Young and was something about being a “miner for a Heart of Gold.” I had heard the song a dozen times over the years and it had always made me uncomfortable. It didn't occur to me until I drove into the yard that it was the song that they kept playing on my first night in Key West. The music was so imponderably plaintive that it was understandable that I forced it from my mind.

Dearest D.,

They tell me I am repairing well, though more in body than in mind. Brain repairs are inappropriate at this time. The senescence of quasi-mental health might deter my total immersion in the insanity of history. Thus I have a purpose, unlike when I lost my beloved wife because I was simply too stupid to seek help, afraid to lose the personal drama of a craziness that was, all in all, rather literary compared with that of history.

It is barely daylight and I've been remembering an evening when we sat on your balcony in Santa Monica. You had been telling me how your grandfather had been
born in a tipi near Harney Peak in South Dakota in 1886 and that his own father had gone basically insane at about that time and until the winter of 18g1, when he moved his family to where you live now. You said it was the Dawes Act that pushed him over the edge. I've been reading
The Dawes Act and the Allotment of Indian Lands
by D. S. Otis, which was reedited by Prucha. I won't bore you with details but wanted you to know some of my thinking on the matter.

Northridge was a witness to the twilight of the gods, beside which the Wagnerian constructs are pissant silliness. He was right there when it became dark, absolutely dark. He lived among people who talked to God and who thought “God” talked back to them through the mouthpiece of earth herself. There is no need, of course, to romanticize the Sioux or any other tribe. In the prism of history it is apparent that they all were destroyed because they were “bad for business.” Naturally we were and are Americans to ourselves, but to them we were perfect “Germans” and they obviously felt much the same way that the Poles and French later felt before the Teutonic conquering horde. The Indians were rather decorative at war. Maybe it was the somewhat Newtonian principle that a nation at war tends to remain at war, and after our “Civil” pursuit the Indians fell victim to a mopping-up operation, the sort of thing we tried later in Korea and Vietnam, and are presently aiming at in Central America. All the machinery was there, left over from the Civil War, so why not use it? This is truly the fatalism of a primitive species.

I didn't intend the dourness of this note. To be honest, I have been unfaithful to you with a nurse called, inelegantly, Debbie. She's from Iowa and brought me (from my recipe) a quart of homemade beef broth with plenty of garlic in it, certainly the best thing that ever passed through a hospital straw. My belly has so subsided that for the first time in memory I can see my wienie while standing up! It remains unattractive though useful. Did anyone ever tell you that you were rather scary? I'm not saying you can't be nice or pleasant, but you've always frightened
me a bit, and I suspect all your other men friends have felt it. I'm saying this because without alcohol I'm dreaming a great deal and you always appear as somewhat feral and predatory in my dreams. The culture doesn't prepare us for lionesses! See you soon, my love.

Michael

P.S. Greet the geese for me.

The last paragraph amused me. Way back in college Charlene and I concocted something that started as a game. One Saturday afternoon we began refusing to act as litmus paper for the moods of the men we encountered, and kept a journal for several months of their reactions. We were thought of as “twin bitches” for a while, and the pickings were slim indeed, mostly the shy, bookish, and somewhat masochistic errand-boy types. Then, though we were only sophmores, we begun hanging out with painters and writers who were graduate students and who didn't find our behavior offensive. I suspect that neither of us ever totally abandoned this parlor game and that was what Michael was referring to. Charlene enjoyed playing the queen bee while I was more interested in the notion that the protective coloring girls are taught to adopt seemed to work to their disadvantage. We both felt like pioneers, and though we had no artistic talent we thought we were in the avant-garde of new emotions.