Dorothea Dreams (Heirloom Books) (14 page)

Shake, shake, shake. The stuff tasted awful if the frozen slush wasn’t fully dissolved.

“You can’t hold your soul hostage in order to get favors from God, Mrs. Cantu. Our Lord will not be blackmailed. By this stubbornness of yours you cut yourself off from God when you most need Him.”

“I pray every night to the Virgin, Father. She was a mother too, she understands what I’m doing. She speaks to our Lord for me.”

“We must not elevate the Virgin above God and his Son,” the priest said with real distress in his voice.

Blanca poured herself a cupful of lemonade and went into her room and shut the door. She was in the middle of reading a book from the school library about a wild horse that a girl tamed all on her own, someplace in California.

Later, when the priest had gone, her mother called her to come clear up the mess she had left in the kitchen. Besides, they had some dishes from breakfast to wash. Grimly, in silence, Blanca dried each plate and spoon as they were handed to her. Her mother’s silent rage depressed her. The same small pretty woman who smiled at people in the discount store and wished even the crankiest old shoppers a nice day and cried at home so much was the same one who could stand up to the priest and make conditions with God Himself. Mom was a crier, but she knew how to win in the end.

Any day now, Beto would leave, like Mina. Great-uncle Tilo would die, and nobody would be left with Mom but Blanca, the invalid, the one who couldn’t leave.

5

The singing and shouting mounted in volume. The dreamer, place on the page lost yet again, rose to look out the open window.

Dorothea, watching against her will, saw someone look back in. A head on a pole, bobbing high above the heads of the mob below, gaped in at the window. This time she managed to blur her vision so that she didn’t have to see it clearly. The others, the members of the mob, she saw more clearly than ever.

The people in the crowd had been looting. They had loaves of bread, and garments slung over their shoulders. A man carried a neat, child-sized chair extended in front of him as he swept along on his roller-skates at the edge of the crowd.

“Hey,
citoyen!”
the man at the window was hailed. “What is your trade?”

“I study the law,” he replied. The shadow of the pole and its burden jiggled across his worn woolen sleeve.

A woman bawled, “Look well, then,
citoyen
, for we are the law now!”

People laughed. Dorothea had just time to notice that the woman who had shouted was Claire, and then someone lobbed something up at the judge. For a nauseated instant Dorothea expected to see a bloody collop of flesh. If he flinched from it they would call him a traitor and rush up the stairs to tear him to pieces. Don’t flinch, she begged him silently.

He caught a peach, hard and green.

She woke up whimpering and lay a while with her head buried under the pillow. It’s getting worse, she thought. Maybe we’re making it worse, not better. She blew her nose, sat down at her writing desk with her robe pulled on over her shoulders, and wrote.

Ricky sat back with his fingers laced behind his head and stared at the beamed ceiling. On Thursday Dorothea had found for him, at the bookstore, a wonderful work by Richard Cobb, a classic study of Revolutionary and post-Revolutionary France titled
The Police and the People.
Ricky had read it once before, during an illness one winter in London, at first for want of anything better but then with increasing fascination. Having just used Cobb’s book to refresh his memory, he was clear on the details of the judge’s period. At least I know enough, he thought, to fill in the gaps in Dorothea’s wretched American education.

The Revolution had produced a police state, as revolutions historically do. Workingmen had to carry passbooks, called
livrets,
signed by their employers. The police made constant searches of travelers, stopping coaches on the roads, even bursting into homes and lodging-houses in the middle of the night, Gestapo style. If a country relative came to stay with you in town, you were supposed to report this to the police. A veritable mania about disguise spurred the authorities to harass the life out of used clothing peddlers.

The point of making mobility so difficult was not primarily to inconvenience spies and counter-revolutionaries, nor to entrap fleeing aristocrats. It was simply to control the roving bands of beggars and deserters from the French army, who plagued the countryside, spreading alarm and unrest.

Before whom would someone picked up for unlawful travel be brought? Or a working man caught without his
livret?
Or a merchant accused of hoarding food by spiteful neighbors? Or anyone accused by his enemy — another farmer who covets one’s lower pasture, a rival tradesman who desires one’s clientele — and charged with unenthusiastic support of the Revolution, or the Emperor Napoleon, or later, the returned king? Who would be responsible for fining, imprisoning, or deporting to the Seychelles in the Indian Ocean these victims of official paranoia and repression? The ghost in Dorothea’s dreams, of course: the judge.

Worse still — there is always worse — some provincial judges aided and abetted outright murder. The death toll of the Red Terror — the relatively short-lived reign of Madame Guillotine — was probably far exceeded by the death toll of the counter-revolutionary reaction.

This movement, called the White Terror for the white lilies of the deposed royal Bourbons, brought a wave of killings that began as soon as Robespierre fell. His place was taken by more moderate Republicans who withdrew the protection of the government from Robespierre’s radical followers.

The country people had throughout remained both royalist and devoutly Catholic. They now turned with fury on the radical firebrands, who had been sent from Paris to rule the provincial districts under Robespierre, and also on any locals who had collaborated with these strangers. Fleeing ex-officials were arrested in neighboring towns, where many were butchered in their cells by rampaging mobs.

Some judges, informed that an ex-official was to be brought back for trial, would deliberately release the details of the homecoming (often set for mid-day, when people had free time). The townspeople would meet the shackled wretch at the town gate, wrest him from his unresisting military escort, and beat him to death on the spot.

Ricky reflected on the way Dorothea’s ghost repeatedly threw sacrifices to the mob (or to the soldiery, men in uniform, officialdom of all sorts). This is a ghost, surely, like so many of its ilk, with a guilty conscience! The judge no noble part in these events. No Scarlet Pimpernel here.

If he could be identified by name, what a coup that would be, what a legacy to leave Dorothea! Pity it wasn’t as easy as saying, it’s famous old Judge Whatnot, my dear, everyone knowledgeable in the field knows his name; nothing simpler. The dreams were not so direct as that. Anyway, suppose the judge was even important enough to show up in the written histories of the time: how to recognize him among the many like him? One would need to sift the stories of hundreds. I haven’t the sources, not here, probably not outside France itself. And I may not have the time.

Ridiculously on cue, the chipped Seth Thomas clock on the mantle gave out a series of muted chimes. The afternoon was nearly gone. Ricky looked down at the blue tracery under the thin skin of his wrist.

Who was it, awaiting execution, who remarked on how wonderfully the approach of one’s death concentrated the mind? In one afternoon, this new pattern had fully emerged and clarified itself: our judge as an official functionary, perhaps even an Eichmann-like monster. And the occasional, accusatory young voice that Dorothea thought was Claire’s? The judge’s own younger, more idealistic self, perhaps, making its own judgment? Too complicated.

A motor roared and died outside. Ricky sat still. Go away, no one is home. He and Dorothea had made their peace again, and he wanted nothing and no one to disturb it.

Whoever it was rapped briskly on the door. Ricky struggled up out of his chair — how could his shrunken body weigh so much? — and went to answer. There stood George.

“Hi, Dick, how’re you doing? I had a message from Dorothea —”

“She’s not in just now.”

“But she left word she had some pictures for me to look at.”

“I’m afraid you’ve missed her, she’s gone out.”

“Well, can you tell me where —”

Here came Mars hallooing round the corner of the house and practically leaping into George’s arms, with gray Brillo trotting daintily in his wake, and of course Dorothea behind them both. She must have stopped at the shed to clean up and drop off her tools, for she came empty-handed and wiping her fingers on her shirt-tail.

“I got your message,” whooped George. “Dorothea, you’re terrific! I knew you’d wake up and see it my way. Dick, here, was just telling me you’d gone out.”

“I was taking a walk,” she said calmly, “with the dogs. Come on in, George, and I’ll show you what you can choose from.”

The drawings were taken out of the bureau in the living room and exclaimed over — black and white, wonderful, not expensive to reproduce, and of course they would do a class job, nothing cheap, this one was clearly the best, and George had brought a contract with him. They headed for the kitchen and the back patio, George carried ahead by his long, ebullient stride.

Ricky stayed behind, his thoughts locked in black anger. All that energy, all that life, stuffed into a bounding ape who hadn’t the first notion of what to do with it.
Intolerable.

She built a fire because it was cool on summer nights, up this high, and she knew he was susceptible to the cold. They watched
Doctor Who,
caped and capped like Sherlock Holmes, take on a giant rat (that is, a regular sized rat in a small metal tube seen very closely by the camera) in the sewers of Victorian London.

“My God,” Dorothea said, “it’s such nonsense, but it’s actually literate. Those are lines the actors are speaking, not comic-strip captions. Doesn’t it make you homesick?”

“Not a bit,” Ricky said. “The most popular television show in England isn’t
Doctor Who,
it’s
Dallas,
didn’t you know that?”

“Doesn’t anything make you homesick?” she persisted gently. When he did not reply she added, “Was that another letter from your sister yesterday?”

“Yes.”

He didn’t want to talk about this, that was obvious. But it needed talking about. “She wants you to come home, doesn’t she.”

“Of course she does. She is a perfectly conventional creature, and convention has it that one comes home to die. Therefore, I must come home.”

Apprehensive about the answer but determined to get one, she said, “Are you considering going?”

“Would you like me to?” he said, not looking at her.

“Maybe you should, regardless of what I’d like. You tell me not to hide here, Ricky, but am I the only one who’s hiding?”

Pause. He watched the flames. She had difficulty imagining herself sitting here watching the flames alone, with him gone away out of her house. The fire spat. Now he looked at her with his wide blue gaze.

“You mean that I am?”

“Yes, with every good reason, but I don’t think you can do it forever. I don’t think you should. Do you realize that you never talk about yourself? I mean your life, your travels, your family, your childhood. You came to my house like a man without a past, and you live here totally concentrated on the moment — the dreams, or whatever we’re doing — as if you were a ghost yourself. Already. And you’re not; that’s the point.”

She stopped, but he said nothing. She forced herself to go on.

“You have family, Ricky, and friends, and I don’t know who else, people you haven’t seen in years but who probably need to see you, people maybe you need to see. Everyone has those people clustered in their lives. I can’t believe that you don’t. If you have time before you die, you try to see them and settle things with them, say what needs to be said, or write them long letters, or think about them. You don’t just toss your whole past away like a worn-out sock and sink yourself in somebody else’s problems.”

“How do you know what I think about?” he said.

“I know what you talk about: art, music, the country up here, what you see around you from day to day. The dogs. Me, my dreams, my life. Are you going to tell me that all that is a smoke-screen and that behind it you’re thinking about your own affairs?”

He sipped juice from the glass on the table at his elbow. He slowly uncrossed his legs and crossed them again, but he did not answer.

Dorothea looked into the fire. Well, you’ve started this, you might as well get along to the end of it. You don’t want to go through this strain and tension for nothing.