Due Preparations for the Plague (35 page)

Lou leans her cheek against Sam’s back and puts her arms around Sam’s waist. “It wasn’t so terrible, Sam, it really wasn’t. If he was a coward, he was a very ordinary sort of one, the kind most people are—though you and I, in fact, aren’t, and never would be.” Lou ponders this as though just struck by the revelation. Surprised by it. “Probably because we’re both too stubborn,” she says, puzzled. “Too mulish. We won’t say things to please or placate.

“There was a party,” Lou says. “An engagement party for your parents at someone’s house on the Isle of Palms, only Rosalie got sick and had to go home early. I wouldn’t go home with her, I was having too good a time. It was a hot summer night and couples were wandering off along the beach and lying in the dunes and things got a bit wild …

“I was young and giddy and going off to college in the fall. I thought, you know, that I had the world in my pocket, and I drank too much, way too much, I’d never had alcohol before. I remember kissing someone, I remember sand in my hair …”

Two months later, Lou says, she knew she was pregnant and she ran away to New York. She wrote to her parents from there.
I cannot tell you who the father is
, she wrote,
because I was very drunk, and I never even knew his name. He was from somewhere up north, and it wasn’t his fault. I was very willing. I was intoxicated, but I did know what I was doing. I am so sorry for causing you all such pain and embarrassment, especially just before Rosalie’s wedding.

Apart from that, Lou told her family, she was fine. She was living in a home for unwed mothers, and then, afterward, she would stay in New York and get a job.

“My mother,” Lou says, “was so distraught, she had to be hospitalized. A daughter in disgrace, a wedding in jeopardy. What would people say if I didn’t show up at my sister’s wedding? And what would they say if I
did
? I’d be showing by then.”

As for the man who had taken advantage of Lou, what else could you expect of a Yankee?

“Poor Lou,” Sam murmurs. “Poor Lou. Did you …?”

“I had my baby and I gave her up for adoption.”

“When you said you went to Paris to get over someone …?”

“I meant my baby. I was bleeding grief and I thought I’d die. I wanted to die. The only person I ever told was Françoise. On New Year’s Eve, we were drunk and depressed and we made a pact. You have to leave your violent boyfriend, I told her, before he kills you. You have to find your baby, she said.
Ton bébé
. She wrote it on my mirror with lipstick:
Il faut trouver ton BB
.”

“And then you got stuck with a brat like me. What a lousy consolation prize I was.”

Lou moves away, studying gravestones. Sam follows.

“So somewhere in the world I’ve got a cousin,” she says, awed by the thought. She thinks about it. “We must have been born about the same time, because I’ve calculated that I was conceived—”

“About the same time, yes. The difference was, Rosalie could keep you, and I couldn’t keep mine. I was insanely jealous of Rosalie.” Lou pulls at long blades of grass and shreds them with a thumbnail.

“But you can find her, Lou. You can find your baby again. People do it all the time.”

“Yes,” Lou says. “Well, I did, in fact. But I don’t want to intrude on her life. I’m waiting for her to want to find me.”

“Oh, she will, she will,” Sam says. “And she’ll be so lucky, Lou, to have you as a—”

And then it arrives, the heavy thing Sam has been afraid to know, though she seems—quite suddenly—to have known it all her life. It rises inside her head like a plane turning into a sun. There is a crashing noise in her ears.

“Lou, are you …? Am I …?”

Lou nods. Sam thinks Lou nods. They are not touching, and she thinks Lou is weeping, but all she can see is fog. For a very long time, Sam traces Mary Elizabeth Sharrod’s name with one finger. Tributaries of angel hair are tangled in the letters and they flow around the years of her death and of her birth.

“It was Rosalie’s idea,” Lou says softly. “She was such a generous person. She was a genuinely good person, Ros. She was with me when you were born.”

MARY ELIZABETH SHARROD
, Sam’s finger spells.
BORN 1762, DIED
1770.

“They adopted you formally. They had to give up the wedding so no one would know. That’s the sort of thing you had to do in Charleston in those days. In our kind of circle in Charleston. The circle the Raleighs and the Hamiltons lived in.”

“So what’s different?” Sam asks. “In the circles of the Hamiltons and Raleighs.”

“Broke our mother’s heart, everyone whispering about how Rosalie and Jonathan
had to get married
and how Lou
got herself into trouble
and how the Hamiltons
had to take care of things
… But we kept you in the family, and nobody outside the family knew, and I was grateful. I thought I’d be grateful.”

Lou buries her face in her hands then, but when Sam touches her, she lurches off toward the chapel.
Lou!
Sam wants to call out, but her tongue sticks in her mouth, because what name should she use? She runs clumsily, catching hold of Lou’s sleeve, but Lou pulls away. “Leave me, Sam. I’ll be all right. I just need to be alone for a bit.”

What Sam feels is panic. She is standing at the top of a chute that drops into nothing. “No,” she pleads. “Don’t leave me alone, please don’t.”

And then Lou turns and they hold each other.

It seems to Sam that they each have one foot on the tip of a steeple, and if they let go of each other, they both will fall.

When dark comes, they are still sitting on Mary Sharrod’s grave.

“We should get a cab,” Lou says.

“Yes,” Sam agrees, but they do not move.

The city lights blink and shimmer. The sycamore sighs.

“So my father is from somewhere up north?” Sam says. “My father’s a Yankee like Lowell.”

“No, Sam. Your father is your father,” Lou says.

A fist of air shoves Sam like a punch and the chute tilts to vertical and she hangs onto the stone angel’s hair. Knowledge rains down on her like a building collapsing. She cannot support the weight. Don’t tell me anything more, she begs mutely.

“I think Ros knew,” Lou says. “I think she always knew. Your father doted on you so extravagantly. I think she guessed. And I think she forgave both of us, your father and me. That’s the kind of person Ros was.”

A fog settles in on the churchyard, thick with presence. Sam can smell Matthew’s baby powder, her father’s pipe, her mother Rosalie’s perfume. She smells the boathouse and the salt marsh. She smells Jacob’s violin and Cassie’s fear. She can feel a wave rising up within her, not happiness, she could not say that, but something rich and mellow that she could call a state of being at peace. She knows what Lou means then. She knows what her mother means. The dead are always with us; they are close; but we must cling to the living. She wants to hold Lowell and Amy and Jason and Lou, her mother Lou, in the sacristy of her mind. But this is the mystery, she thinks: how do we ready ourselves for what might happen tomorrow?

What possible preparations can be made?

Twenty-seven-year-old Scotsman David Mackenzie Angus stepped ashore in Australia in 1882, hoping that the climate would improve his health. While working for a Sydney bookseller, he managed to save the grand sum of £50 – enough to open his very own secondhand bookshop. He hired fellow-Scot George Robertson and in 1886 Angus & Robertson was born.

They ventured into publishing in 1888 with a collection of poetry by H. Peden Steele, and by 1895 had a bestseller on their hands with A.B. ‘Banjo’ Paterson’s
The Man from Snowy River and Other Verses
. A&R confirmed the existence of Australian talent – and an audience hungry for Australian content. The company went on to add some of the most famous names in Australian literature to its list, including Henry Lawson, Norman Lindsay, C.J. Dennis and May Gibbs. Throughout the twentieth century, authors such as Xavier Herbert, Ruth Park, George Johnston and Peter Goldsworthy continued this tradition.

The A&R Australian Classics series is a celebration of the many authors who have contributed to this rich catalogue of Australian literature and to the cultural identity of a nation.

These classics are our indispensable voices. At a time when our culture was still noisy with foreign chatter and clouded by foreign visions, these writers told us our own stories and allowed us to examine and evaluate both our homeplace and our place in the world.
– G
ERALDINE
B
ROOKS

Janette Turner Hospital grew up in Brisbane and was educated at Wilston State School, Mitchelton High, the University of Queensland and Kelvin Grove Teachers’ College. She taught high school north of Cairns, but since her post-graduate degrees in Canada, she has taught in universities in Canada, Australia, England, France and the United States. She has won a number of prizes for her eight novels and four short-story collections, which have been published in numerous languages. In 2003, she won the Queensland Premier’s Literary Award and the Patrick White Award, and received a Doctor of Letters
honoris causa
from the University of Queensland. For twelve years, she held an endowed chair as Carolina Distinguished Professor of English at the University of South Carolina. In 2010, she was a Visiting Professor at Columbia University in New York. She continues to be involved with the University of South Carolina as Carolina Distinguished Professor Emerita.

In 2012
Forecast: Turbulence
received the Steele Rudd Award for the year’s best collection of short stories. Her novels include
Orpheus Lost
and
Oyster.
www.janetteturnerhospital.com

The Ivory Swing

The Tiger in the Tiger Pit

Borderline

Dislocations

Charades

Isobars

The Last Magician

Collected Stories

Oyster

North of Nowhere, South of Loss

Orpheus Lost

Forecast: Turbulence

A&R Classics

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

First published in 2003 by HarperCollins
Publishers

This edition published in 2014

by HarperCollins
Publishers
Australia Pty Ltd

ABN 36 009 913 517

harpercollins.com.au

Copyright © Janette Turner Hospital 2003

The right of Janette Turner Hospital to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted under the
Copyright Amendment (Moral Rights) Act 2000
.

This work is copyright. Apart from any use as permitted under the
Copyright Act 1968
, no part may be reproduced, copied, scanned, stored in a retrieval system, recorded, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

HarperCollins
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National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry:

Hospital, Janette Turner, 1942-

Due preparations for the plague / Janette Turner Hospital.

978 0 7322 9845 6 (pbk)

978 1 4607 0173 7 (epub)

A823.3

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