Madeleine's Ghost (49 page)

Now from over the wall the sound of a car backfiring, and in a great rush of wings, the ducks rise from the pond into the air like a flock of pigeons. We watch them ascend toward the clouds, flapping and bickering among themselves; then they wheel around and alight in the pond again to float and paddle as placidly as before. In the next minute, over Philadelphia and the Schuykill, the heavy gray shifts a little. A few bright theatrical rays of sun break through here and there; then all is gray and heavy again.

“You should have called me,” I say. “I waited for you to call; then I thought you'd never call again. You should have called the minute your father died. He was a good man. I would have come down for the funeral. Shit. You should have called me before you took all those pills. Shit.”

“I was scared at first,” Antoinette says, a catch in her voice, “because I didn't really know how I felt about you; then I decided and I did call. I called ten, fifteen times, but all I could get was your answering machine. I called in the morning, and I called at night. I couldn't leave a
message until yesterday. I wanted to talk to you, to see if you were mad at me for—for letting you down again like I did ten years ago.”

I reach for her hand beneath the blanket and give it a squeeze before she pulls it away.

“No, listen, please.” This is very hard for her. “I called, but you weren't there. Then I couldn't think anymore, and I took the pills.”

“If you had died, Antoinette, my God! I wouldn't—” But she shakes her head and turns away from me, a flush of color in her pale cheeks.

“I've got something else to tell you now,” she says. “Something I haven't told the doctors or the therapists that they keep sending to my room here. Something about Dothan. And I don't want you to talk before I'm through, O.K.?”

“O.K.”

“The real reason why I left Dothan the first time when I was a kid and we were living together in Spanish Town is that I got pregnant and he made me get an abortion, and the abortion went bad. We went to the clinic in Baton Rouge, and they scraped it out or whatever they do, and afterwards—I don't know why, maybe because it was a nice day—we went fishing on the river. Fishing, can you believe it! So, there we were in this aluminum outboard in the middle of the Mississippi, and he was spearing some night crawlers on his hook—they were still alive and wiggling, you know—and I started to hemorrhage. I felt this wet feeling between my legs, and I looked down, and the whole front of my dress was red. It was like my insides were leaking out. Dothan rowed like hell for the shore, but the bottom of the boat filled up with blood, and I passed out. Then he threw me in the car like a sack of feed and raced at top speed to the hospital. By the time we got to the emergency room, I was stone white. I had lost half my blood or something. Ruined the car—this stolen Corvette he drove around back then. They gave me a transfusion and patched me up, and I was all right in a few days, but shit, I came this close.

“I'm telling you all this, Ned, not to give you another chapter of my sufferings, but to explain myself to you. Why I have such a hard time
being really intimate with someone, what the doctors here call emotionally unavailable. Why I just close up when we start getting close. Ever since that abortion thing, it seems I haven't been able to trust anyone at all. I was close to Dothan, I loved him, and I wanted to keep the baby and get married, but he said I was too young. So I got the abortion and almost died, and it wrecked me. I never told anyone this story, not even Papa. It seems like my life was broken by what happened. Afterward I was old suddenly, and there was this whole half of myself locked away in cold storage somewhere.

“Papa knew something had happened, of course. I think he sensed that something was different about me, but he never knew exactly what it was. I didn't know myself maybe, until he died.…”

She is crying now, the tears rolling off the end of her nose and her chin and spotting the blanket. I try to reach up and take her in my arms, but she holds me off with a hand on my shoulder.

“So I can't promise you anything,” she says. “I can't tell you that everything will be all right, that I will ever be completely O.K. I can't tell you that I'll never take any of the pills again, that I'll never feel sad and shut off from everyone—”

This time I won't let her finish. I've got my arms around her up under the blanket, which falls away like a layer of old skin, and I'm holding her as tight as I can, and she's crying into the collar of my shirt now and against my neck, and I feel the sobs rack through her, and I hear her saying, “Oh, baby, oh, sweetheart,” over and over again until I put my lips over hers and we fold into each other like the petals of a single bloom, and in the next second, despite the gray and heavy Pennsylvania sky, the horizon to the south seems full of wild light and color, and I can smell Louisiana on the wind.

W
E CLIMB
up to the promenade in Brooklyn Heights to say our good-byes to the city we are leaving. Tonight the stars are up in a black sky, and
Manhattan lies below, marvelous and windswept as a castle on a moor, connected to the reality of the mainland only by the spiderlike tracery of its bridges. Now the streets and avenues between the towers are flooded with a brilliant artificial light. This is entirely appropriate. After all, it is the idea of this city that matters. Not the real streets, but the dreams we have of them.

Rust takes off his hat and wipes his forehead with the back of his hand. For him it's been a long day on the range, nearly fifteen years, but he's on his way back to Wyoming tomorrow to pick up where he left off. I've got a week or so, just until I can get things straightened out with Father Rose.

It's a hot night, a small reminder of the torturous days of summer. Lovers line the benches along the promenade, nuzzling in the gloom. I hear the snap of cotton underwear, a soft moan. Ice cream melts in paper cups. The nineteenth-century town houses sit back, disapproving in the darkness of their gardens. I lean over the parapet to catch a breeze from the harbor but instead get a lungful of carbon monoxide. The BQE roars just underneath the shelf of masonry, on its way from nowhere to nowhere, a continuous and never-ending loop of taillights and exhaust.

We're silent for a while, each remembering our years in the city, the thousand amazing details, the faces lost in the crowd. For us, New York is like a wreck sinking into deep water. Now the bow is down, now the winch and wheelhouse; soon it's just an oil stain on the surface.

“What will you miss the most when you're gone?” Rust says in a quiet voice, almost to himself.

“What's to miss? The crime, the high cost of living? Eight-dollar six-packs of Genessee Cream ale? Pay phones that don't work?” But I regret this cynicism. “Cawalloway's,” I say suddenly. “Remember Cawalloway's, Rust?”

“Whatever happened to that place?”

“Gone.”

“That was a good bar, cheap. And the women.”

“Yeah.”

“But you know, I think I'll miss the subway,” he says. “Never knew
what you'd see on the subway. Like a moving carnival. Just yesterday this crazy lady comes through, two hundred and fifty pounds of meat in a pink nightgown and fuzzy bedroom slippers, handing out dollar bills to every third person.”

“All right. This is going to sound like a stock answer, but I'll miss the Brooklyn Bridge,” I say. “A beautiful span. Walking across to the city in the summer at dusk, then up through the crowds of Chinatown and all the fish and squid and eels laid out and reeking, then up into the East Village, and beautiful, hip women getting out of cabs.”

“I'll be in Cheyenne by tomorrow night.” Rust shakes his head. “Shit. Hard to imagine it after all this time. And the farm. I was twenty-two when I left that dusty-ass place for good. Now I'm going back.”

“A change of pace, Rust,” I say. “We can't go on like this forever.”

For once he doesn't squint toward the horizon but looks down at the toes of his cowboy boots. “I suppose I can write my book back there as well as I can write it here, probably better,” he says. “But I'll have a big spread to take care of. And my jackass brother's got a kid. A little girl, seven years old. The mother ran off after a year, so I'm the legal guardian. Way I see it, you can't take care of a little girl without a wife. I suppose now I'll have to get myself a wife.”

“Anyone in mind?”

He shrugs.

Suddenly there is a touch of panic in my gut. This is New York. People sacrifice everything to be a part of the teeming life of this city—their dignity, their health, their standard of living—because on certain evenings you can almost imagine the streets are still paved with gold. Who knows what could happen tomorrow or the next day or next year? If we could just stick it out. Maybe then the city will open its doors to us, hand us the keys to the future. Maybe we are giving up too soon!

“You know that story about Dick Whittington, Rust,” I say when I catch my breath.

“Used to play for the Yankees. Shortstop, right?”

“No.” I smile. “It's a story I read once when I was a kid. A kid's
story. About this country boy, Dick Whittington, who leaves his home to seek his fortune in the big city. In this case, London.”

“So?”

“So he's there awhile, and times are tough, and his only friend is a stray cat he can't afford to feed. Then, one day, he's had enough of the heartache, puts the cat in a bag, and decides to go back to the country. He's on the highroad a few miles out of town when the bells of the churches start pealing and he hears this voice from the bag saying, ‘Turn back, Dick Whittington, turn back.' ”

“It's the cat talking?” Rust says.

“Well, Dick takes the cat out, and it won't say anything, so he puts it back and goes on his way. Then he hears it again. ‘Turn back, Dick Whittington,' and the same thing happens again, three times in all. But the last time he turns back and eventually becomes lord mayor of London, thrice, as the story goes.”

“How's that?”

“The cat is sold for a fortune to a foreign prince from a catless country with a big rat problem. Then Dick marries the boss's daughter and goes on from there. That's not the point, though.”

“So what's the point?”

“Come on, Rust.”

He thinks it over for a while. “You hearing talking cats now, Ned?” he says.

“Not really,” I say. “The point is Dick Whittington turned back and we're leaving.”

“I'll tell you what,” Rust says, and sweeps his hat to Manhattan. “This is not London. And in New York any man who listens to a talking cat is a fool.”

He straightens and puts his hat back on, and his face is lost in shadow, and he turns and walks down the promenade, worn heels of his boots scuffing against the pavement. I take a last look at New York glittering through the haze, breathe in a last breath of New York air damp from the sea and both fragrant and stale from the life of cities, and a moment later turn to follow him.

In silence then, for the last time, we descend together across the park, under the Gothic arches of the Brooklyn Bridge, under the creaking steel of the Manhattan, through the dangerous neighborhoods, and along the cobbled streets of Molasses Hill into the darkness of the warehouses.

A
DIRGE FULL
of oboe and trombone sounds low over the Mississippi. This is the first funeral on such a grand scale on the river in a hundred years. It seems the whole parish has turned out to watch it pass. The barge carrying Madeleine's coffin and black obelisk churns up midstream, followed by powerboats full of jazz musicians, journalists, caterers, and a TV news crew. Police speedboats from New Orleans lead the way, their sirens turning soundless and pale in the sunlight. Fishermen and curious pleasure boaters in Chris-Craft are anchored to the sandbars. Spectators watch from the batture and from the roofs of cars pulled over on the Belle Chasse Highway, beer cans in hand. Down this part of the country it's any excuse for a party.

The coffin barge wavers in the current and pulls toward the far bank. A sodden black silk drapery trailing off the stern is churned under in our wake, then resurfaces twenty yards distant like the body of a drowned man. The flat prow is decorated with a black wreath. It is the latter part of October, but hot as any July day up North. Antoinette tells me I'd better get used to the heat, that in Louisiana, it's sweltering three-quarters of the year. I tell her I remember it well, that I'm already shedding my northern skin, taking my siesta and cool bath in the long hot afternoons like any good Creole.

Now I sweat into my new linen suit and peer through my sunglasses into the green distance. At the next bend in the river we should come to Belle Azure. The great house is gone now, but the crypt is there, dug into the faint rise above the levee. And Madeleine's niche, empty all these years, lies waiting to receive her earthly remains.