The Infinite Plan (40 page)

In August Gregory took Shannon to Italy. She had worked for the firm for less than a year and was not entitled to vacation time, but that created no problem since she had handed in her resignation, to take a job with a modeling agency. Gregory spent the trip suffering in anticipation; he hated the idea of seeing her exposed to everyone's eyes in the pages of a magazine but did not dare voice his concern for fear of appearing hopelessly old-fashioned. He also refrained from mentioning his objections to Carmen, because he knew she would rib him unmercifully. As he walked down a flower-lined path on the shores of Lake Como, blinded by Shannon's incomparable charms to the misty mirror of the water and the ocher-toned villas clinging to the hillsides, it occurred to him how he might keep her by his side. He proposed that if Shannon came to live with him she would not have to work and could enroll in the university to study for a career. She was intelligent and creative; wasn't there something she would like to study? No, not at the moment, Shannon replied, with the easy laugh that came after several glasses of wine, but she would think of something. That night Reeves picked up the telephone to tell Carmen, on the other side of the ocean, his news, but could not reach her. She and Dai had left on a trip to the Far East.

Bel Benedict did not know her exact age, nor did she want to find out. The years had slightly rusted her bones and darkened her burnt-sugar skin to a tone nearer chocolate, but nothing had altered the topaz glitter of her wide eyes or entirely quenched the fires in her loins. Some nights she dreamed hotly of the only man she had loved in her life and waked moist with pleasure. I must be the only randy old woman in history—sweet Jesus, forgive me, she thought, secretly more prideful than ashamed. Shame is what she felt when she looked in the mirror and saw that the body once sleek as a young mare's now sagged like an old nag's; if my husband could see me now, she thought, he'd be frightened away. She never rationalized that were he alive, he too would have suffered the passing of the years and not be the lithe, joyful, and lusty man who had seduced her when she was fifteen. But Bel could neither allow herself the luxury of lying in bed remembering the past nor stand before the mirror lamenting her decline; every morning she rose at dawn to go to work, except on Sundays, when she went to church and to market. During the last year she had not had a spare minute, because when she finished work she had to hurry home and look after her son. She had started calling him Baby again, as she had when she held him to her breast and sang him lullabies. Don't call me that, Mama, my friends will tease me, he protested, but in fact he no longer had any friends; he had lost them all, along with his job, his wife, his children, and his memory. Poor Baby, Bel Benedict sighed, but she did not feel sorry for him; she actually envied him a little. She did not intend to die for many years to come, and as long as she was alive he would be safe. Step by step, one day at a time, was her philosophy; it was no good worrying about a tomorrow that might never come. Her grandfather, a Mississippi slave, had told her that we have our past before us: the past's the only real thing we have, and we can learn a lot about living from it. The present is nothing but an illusion; as fast as you blink your eye it's already part of the past. And the future? The future's a dark hole no one can see; it may not even be there, because while we're talking, death can come and carry us away. Bel had worked for Timothy's parents so many years that it was difficult to imagine the house without her. When she was hired, she was already a woman of legend, one of those narrow-waisted black women who move as if they are swimming underwater.

“Marry me,” Timothy would say in the kitchen when she treated him to pancakes, her one skill in cooking. “You're so beautiful you should be a movie star instead of my mother's maid.”

“The only blacks in the movies are whites in blackface,” she would say, laughing.

When she was very young, a black vagabond with an uproarious laugh had wandered down the road looking for a patch of shade where he could sit and rest. They had fallen in love at first sight, with a passion so torrid it could alter the weather and change the course of time. That love engendered King Benedict, who was to live two lives, just as Olga had foretold that day during the Second World War when the truck bearing the sign of
The Infinite Plan
had picked him up on a dusty country road. A few days after King was born, Bel had forgotten the nine months of carrying her son's weight beneath her heart and the anguish of giving birth and was again chasing her man around every corner of the farm. They made love in a pool of blood beside the cows in the stable, the birds in the cornfields, and the scorpions in the barn. When the young King began to take his first hesitant steps, his father, exhausted by love and fearful of losing his soul and his manhood between the legs of that insatiable voluptuary, ran off, taking as a souvenir a lock of Bel's hair, cut while she slept. In the turbulence of their rutting, Bel had turned a deaf ear to the insistence of the pastor of the Baptist church that they contract holy matrimony in the eyes of the Lord. For Bel, a signature in the church records had little bearing; she considered herself married. For the rest of her life, she used her lover's name and told the many men who sought repose in her bosom that her husband was out of town on a trip. She said it so many times that she came to believe it, which was why she was enraged when she saw herself naked: If you don't hurry back you're not going to find nothing but a bag of bones, she scolded the memory of her absent lover.

One January morning half a century later, when the city was swept by a strong wind from the sea, Bel Benedict put on her turquoise-colored dress, hat, shoes, and gloves, her Sunday and party best. She had noticed that Queen Elizabeth always wore a monotone ensemble and could not rest until she had a similar outfit. Timothy Duane was waiting for her in front of the modest building where she lived.

“You won't live forever, Bel. What will happen to your son when you're gone?” Timothy had asked.

“King won't be the first fourteen-year-old boy who has to make it on his own.”

“But he isn't fourteen; he's fifty-three.”

“For all practical purposes, he's fourteen.”

“That's just what I mean. He'll always be a kid.”

“Maybe not; maybe he'll grow up. . . .”

“If you had some money put aside, things would be a little easier. Don't be stubborn, woman.”

“I've already told you, Tim. There's nothing I can do. The lawyer for the insurance company told us straight out that we don't have a claim. Just to be nice, they're going to give us ten thousand dollars. But not yet; there's lots of papers to fill out.”

“I don't understand these things, but I have a friend who can give us good advice.”

Gregory Reeves welcomed them in the jungle of greenery in his office. Bel made her triumphal entry, dressed like a queen, sat on the long-suffering leather sofa, and proceeded to tell the strange story of her son, King Benedict. Reeves listened attentively, while he searched his infallible memory for the source of that name, which resonated with a distant echo of the past. It's impossible to forget a name like that; I wonder where it was I heard it. King was a good Christian, the woman was saying, but God has not granted him an easy life. They had always been poor, and in the early years they had moved from place to place as she looked for work, bidding new friends goodbye and putting King in yet another school. He had grown up fearing that his mother might run off with one of her boyfriends and leave him alone in a room in some nameless town. He was a melancholy, shy boy, and two years of the war in the South Pacific had not helped erase his insecurity. After the war he married, had two children, and earned a living as a construction worker. Then his marriage went bad, his wife threatened to leave him, and his own children felt sorry for him. Bel noticed that he was tense and sad, and she was afraid he would begin drinking again, as he had in previous crises; things went from bad to worse and finally culminated in his accident. He had been working at the second-story level, when the scaffolding collapsed and he fell to the ground. The shock knocked him out for a few seconds, but he got to his feet, apparently with only a few bruises. As a precaution, he was taken to the hospital but dismissed after a routine examination. As soon as his headache passed, however, and he began to speak, it was obvious that he did not recognize his family or know where he was; he thought he was a teenager again. His mother soon ascertained that his memory stopped at the age of fourteen; from that year on there was a void as deep as the ocean. He was given every test known and questioned for weeks; his orifices were probed, his brain was wired, he was hypnotized and X-rayed down to his soul—all without a logical reason being discovered for such a dramatic memory loss. Medical science could detect no physical trauma. King began to act like a manipulative child, inventing clumsy lies to trick his children—whom he treated like playmates—and to evade the watchful eye of his wife—whom he confused with his mother. He did not recognize Bel Benedict because he remembered her as a young and beautiful woman. Stranger that she was, however, he clung to that old woman like a limpet; she was his only security in a world of confusion. Relatives and friends doubted his amnesia; they thought it might be hysteria and soon tired of prying into the corners of his mind for a sign of recognition. The insurance company, too, was unconvinced; they suspected that King was perpetrating a hoax to collect disability; in their eyes he was a charlatan who would spend the rest of his life drawing an invalid's pension for a bump on the head. Every time his wife left the house, King felt abandoned, and when she started bringing her lover to the house to spend the night, Bel Benedict decided the moment had come to intervene and took her son home to live with her. For months she had carefully observed him without detecting the slightest thread of memory following his fourteenth year. Gradually King had settled down; he was good company, and his mother was happy to have him with her. The only irrational aspect of his behavior was that he claimed to hear voices and see angels; although the doctors discounted them entirely, mother and son became accustomed to the presence of the phantoms of his imagination. Timothy Duane had brought copies of the hospital records and letters from the insurance company lawyers. Reeves barely glanced at them, feeling the familiar fire of battle race through him, the street fighter's fervent anticipation, the thing he liked best about his profession: he thrived on complicated cases, difficult challenges, the actual skirmishes.

“If you decide to take this to court, you'll have to do it soon, because the statute of limitations is one year from the time of the accident.”

“But then they won't give me my ten thousand dollars!”

“This case may be worth a great deal more than that, Mrs. Benedict. They may have offered you money to gain time, time in which you lose your right to file a claim.”

Although fearful, Bel agreed to file; ten thousand dollars was more than she had saved in a lifetime of working, but Reeves inspired her confidence and Timothy Duane was right: she must do something to protect her son from an uncertain future. That evening Reeves presented the case to his boss, so excited he could scarcely get the words out, recounting the story of the handsome black woman and her grown son who had reverted to childhood because of a fall. Just imagine, if we win, we'll change these poor people's lives. . . . But he was met with diabolic eyebrows raised to the hairline and an ironic gaze. Don't waste time on such foolishness, Gregory. We don't want to open up that can of worms. He explained that the chances of winning were slim, that it would require years of investigation, dozens of experts, many hours of work, and possibly zero results, because unless they found a cerebral lesion that justified the loss of memory, no jury would accept the amnesia story. Reeves felt a rising wave of frustration. He had obeyed others' decisions long enough; every day he was more restless and more disillusioned with his work, and he saw no promise of being able to proceed independently. He clung to that sense of rebellion as he delivered to the old man of the orchids the farewell speech he had so often rehearsed in private. When he went home that night he found Shannon lying on the living room floor, watching television; he kissed her with a blend of pride and anxiety.

“I just resigned. From now on I'll be on my own.”

“That's something to celebrate!” she exclaimed. “And while we're at it, Greg, let's drink a toast to the baby.”

“What baby?”

“The one we're expecting.” Shannon smiled, pouring a drink from the bottle by her side.

When she divorced her second husband, Judy Reeves kept all the children, including her husband's by his first wife. Over the years the marriage had become a nightmare of bitterness and quarrels in which the man usually came out the loser. When the time came for them to part, there was not even a thought that the father would take his offspring: the affection between Judy and the two dark-skinned youngsters was so solid and so warm that no one remembered they were not hers. She remained unmarried for only a few months. One hot Saturday she took her brood to the beach, where she met a husky veterinarian from northern California who was vacationing in a van with his three children and a dog. The animal's hindquarters had been paralyzed after it had been hit by a car; rather than dispatch it to a better life, however, as was indicated by his professional experience, the vet had improvised a harness so that the animal could get around with the help of the children, who took turns supporting her rear while she ran on her front legs. The spectacle of the crippled beast playing in the waves and yelping with glee caught the attention of Judy's four. That was how they met. Judy was overflowing the seams of a striped bathing suit and downing one ice cream after another. The doctor stood watching, horrified and fascinated by such quantities of naked flesh, but after exchanging a few words they struck up a friendship; he forgot how she looked and by sundown invited her to eat. The two families ended the day devouring pizzas and hamburgers.