Listening to Billie (17 page)

That night she slept badly, to be awakened at what seemed a raw, ungodly, early hour: her doorbell. It would have to be Reed, whom she had somehow summoned?

It was not Reed. It was two panting, cross men from Air Express, who had brought her a large and curiously crated box. “All the way up them stairs. Lucky we didn’t drop the flithering thing, or break our necks.”

This came from the older, heavier man of the two, at whose word “flithering,” which she liked very much, Eliza
looked up and smiled. He smiled back, a raunchy pirate’s grin, and he handed her something to sign. Should she ask him in? What would he make of that? And why not, really? But of course she did not.

Uncrating the box required all Eliza’s meager supply of tools; she worked at it until her kitchen was littered with split slats and twisted nails and excelsior, at which some visiting cats sniffed interestedly: another nice present for them.

What it turned out to be was the most ornately and intricately carved small bench (it could be called a footstool) that Eliza had ever seen, or could imagine. To which was attached an envelope with her name, in Harry’s familiar bold crazy hand. Inside was a round-trip ticket to Portland, Maine, and a tiny note: “Shouldn’t one of these cures work? Love, H.”

Harry was somewhere in Texas, shooting.

A week or so later, Eliza and Josephine were in Maine, sitting on those old wicker chairs, on the long porch of that house. September, and Eliza thought how totally unlike a California fall this was. September and sometimes October around San Francisco were hot and yellow, a blur of tawny fading hills, smooth Bay water and golden haze above a pastel city. Whereas in Maine everything was sharpened: colors, shapes of mountains, the very air, which was brilliantly blue and cool. The lake, a deeper blue, was whipped into waves, white-capped with foam, as high as waves in some small foreign sea. Birch leaves fluttered yellow, in clumps near the beach, on the dark green lawn. Behind the house, in the orchard and then the woods, were wildflowers of the most intense purple, most vivid pink or gold. And violent crimson leaves.

Eliza, who had been looking out at the lake, the islands and mountains beyond, now looked down at her hands, which were in even worse shape than usual: nails broken and stained, fingers also stained, and blistered. She had been unable to resist several hours of work on Harry’s present; blessing him, she had labored
with Jasco and steel wool, sandpaper and most of her muscles.

So far, it had been one of their better visits, for Eliza and Josephine. Josephine had been sympathetic but sensible about Catherine; she had said, in effect, that it was not what they would choose to happen, but what could they do, besides providing some support? And they had also agreed (not surprisingly, given both their histories) that Catherine’s decision was probably better than the ones they both made at an age not much beyond hers; it was certainly better not to base a marriage on an unplanned pregnancy. They had agreed, too, that for the moment Daria might well not be told; her history of miscarriages made this delicate.

From Daria they proceeded to Smith, about whom they were more and more able to feel in accord. “God knows how much money he’s given those people in Washington,” said Josephine, and Eliza muttered agreement.

Most recently, Smith had started a collection of guns. “He seems to forget that I’m the crazy one,” Daria had written. “Or that those with guns are often the ones who get shot.”

The tone of this had reassured both Josephine and Eliza; they recognized Daria’s flashes of wry black wit; when she sounded like that, she was okay, they said to each other.

“It’s interesting,” mused Eliza. “Daria seems calmer as Smith gets more excited.”

“Actually I hope not. I’ve seen those seesaw marriages. Jason and I were a little like that,” said Josephine. (Jason, that Greek shit.)

“Yes, and I hope she doesn’t get too calm,” agreed Eliza, who then voiced what they both felt: “If only she could be having a child instead of my dumb brainwashed daughter.”

“Yes, or if only Smith would let her adopt one.”

“Yes, but of course he won’t.”

“Of course not.”

•  •  •

That night after dinner they decided that it was cold enough for a fire; together they piled up paper, kindling, some birch logs. They lit it and sat back to watch the flames.

“Don’t you want some music?” asked Josephine. “I miss the records you girls were always playing. They’re all still here. Who was that woman, your favorite?”

“Billie Holiday.” But Eliza was not in a mood for hearing Billie. Consciously, she had “got over” Reed, but Billie’s voice might reach depths or crevices that she didn’t know about, and she wouldn’t risk that, not just now. “On the other hand, why not a little Brahms?” she asked, knowing Brahms to be a great love of Josephine’s.

Later, as warm violin and piano notes filled the room’s empty spaces, Josephine said, “Do you know, I’d never really heard Brahms until I met Franz? Just the trite familiar things.”

Eliza knew this, Josephine had said it before; but she knew, too, how passionately Josephine had cared for Franz. Her rare remarks about him arrived like presents.

“I seem to have only minor love affairs,” Eliza now said to her mother, possibly by way of exchange. “I had a really foolish one this summer. With a dumb blond.”

“Well, possibly that’s better for your work? To keep them minor?”

“Possibly.” And Eliza laughed, feeling freed, at last, of something.

Almost abruptly, before any of the familiar troubles between them could erupt—and simultaneously—Josephine and Eliza got up to go to bed. “Tired,” they both said, and they smiled and bent toward each other, brushing cheeks. Good night.

It was a good night.

Later, in her room, at her desk, in the apple-smelling cool September night, something amazing happened to Eliza. An entire poem arrived, whole, in her mind, so that she had only to write it down, quite quickly.

Catherine, pregnant and no longer herself a child at all, looks most strange in my gleaming white-on-white living room. She is on her way to Big Sur, in her Levis and bulky red sweat shirt, her hair long and loose, her big chunky dirty feet in sandals.

“Catherine, don’t your feet get cold?” I can’t help asking, although with Catherine I am not generally maternal.

“Oh, no.” She laughs in her fat and placid, tolerant way. “They’re used to it.”

This is winter, an especially cold January, but Catherine has become a total Californian; she has lost that so identifiable accent which marks the rest of us in our family, and along with it has banished any sense of seasons. She has a Californian’s mild surprise at any change in weather; in their blood it is always summer. All year round she is sun-browned, her blond hair is bleached in streaks, her eyes are wide and blue and a little vacant. “Non-intellectual” is what both Josephine and Eliza say about Catherine; the truth is that she is not remarkably bright—“high average” probably, which to either Josephine or Eliza would be dumb. I don’t care at all about those things; how could I?

And perhaps since I am so curiously placed in terms of age—ten years younger than Eliza, the exact same number older
than Catherine—I am able to like Catherine in a comfortable, non-intimate and thus non-demanding way; which would be impossible for her mother, or, for that matter, for her most demanding grandmother, for Josephine.

I ask her how she feels. Politely, not out of any genuine curiosity, not yet.

“Oh, really neat. He kicks a lot. It feels good.”

I wouldn’t like that; it’s just as well that it didn’t happen to me, I think. “You’re sure it’s a boy?” I ask Catherine.

“Oh, really sure. I can feel it, his being a boy.”

“What will he look like?” I am becoming more interested.

Catherine laughs. “Oh, just like his father, I guess. Isn’t that how it is with women in our family? What does Josephine always say about it?”

“ ‘No generic effect’ is what she says.”

“Well, yes, isn’t that true? Mom looks like her father, she says, and she says I look like Evan Quarles, my dad, and you—”

I laugh. “I look like that Greek shit, my old man. But how about that boy, the father of the baby?”

“Oh, he’s beautiful,
really.
The most gorgeous blue-black hair, and terrific dark brown eyes, and this fantastic body.”

“You don’t miss him? You’re not sorry he’s in Hawaii?”

“Oh, no, he had his thing to do. I know some other people almost as neat. We’re friends—I’ll let him know about the baby when it’s born. He might want to see him, I guess.”

“Which island did he go to?”

“Kauai. He says it’s really neat there. Flowers and all. Fantastic surf. He’s the greatest surfer on the coast.”

It is during this conversation that I realize that eventually, somehow, I will be the one to get Catherine’s child. Not as my own; she would never give it to me, not stubborn Catherine (nor would Smith ever allow me to adopt a child). But I am sure that it will occur to everyone as a good idea, and in an interested way I will watch to see how this comes about.

•  •  •

Smith says, “But you’ve never wanted to go to Hawaii. I’ve suggested it.”

“Well, now I really do.” There are many advantages to being considered a little crazy; and Smith likes having a whimsical wife, whimsy being somehow very wifely.

Thinking about it, he says, “The Mauna Kea is supposed to be very nice. Built with Rockefeller money, wonderful food, on the big island.”

“No, I don’t think there. Kauai, the most flowers and the fewest people. We could lie on the beach and watch the surf, the surfers.”

Smith is putting on weight, which gives him a vague but puzzlingly effeminate look. No time ever to exercise, he says. He sighs, in a new sad fat way, so that I feel a surge of pity for him. But I want to go to Hawaii.

The father of Catherine’s child is unmistakable—and she is right; he is beautiful, a wide-shouldered, darkly tanned black-haired young god. Lying white and fearsome on that whitest of white beaches, we watch him every day. (Of course Smith does not know who he is.) And what he does on the water is truly godlike: he glides along the undercurl of those glistening steep and wickedly breaking waves; he glides, glides—he is astounding, the nerve and balance and grace.

There is really no need to find out his name or speak to him; what on earth would I say? We lie there, Smith with his papers and periodicals, I with my books, our fair well-tended skins turning gently from pink to tan. With awe we watch the boy’s magnificent swift performance. And when he walks past us, out of water, we never stare. Although I am able to see at close hand the long marvelous shape of his legs.

And so, in that way, before anyone else, I know what Catherine’s son will eventually look like, and I have some idea of what sort of boy he will be.

“Catherine, darling, I
need
that room, the space. I can really use it. I’m sorry if you think I’m selfish. The point is you can’t live here and in Mendocino, and you certainly can’t live here with a baby. I’m too old for babies. You were the only one I could stand. Catherine, please try to understand. I’m tired of working in stray corners of the house, or in bed. I want a room for nothing but my work. A room of my own. Before you left, I was thinking about renting one. Catherine, I’m a writer, a poet, and in two years I’ll be forty. I need my own room.”

Late January, in San Francisco, a suddenly warm bright false spring day. False green on the hills of Marin, which Eliza saw as she spoke on the phone to Catherine. What she was looking at when Catherine called. Catherine, although six months pregnant and living in several other places, Mendocino to Big Sur, did not want to move out entirely; she still wanted to keep her room full of clothes and books, magazines, souvenirs. This morning’s conversation was the last in a series (Eliza hoped).

She, Eliza, had spoken in a firm, controlled way. Believing herself to be right, to be within her rights, she had stated her case to Catherine much more definitely and clearly than before.

And, in response, Catherine had made sounds of comprehension, even of acceptance.

Why, then, hanging up, did Eliza observe that her strong, stained and unkempt but capable hands were trembling, out of control? Why did she feel herself to be near tears? Was she not supposed to be a writer? Was she supposed to be, for the rest of her life, Catherine’s mother?

A month later, a cold, relentlessly wet February, Eliza had her room. A long wide desk, the oak top supported by two small filing cabinets, also oak. All the wood stripped down to a smooth bare whiteness—stripped until Eliza suspected herself of postponing more difficult work: her own difficult poetry. Walls lined with bookcases, a small cupboard of supplies. A table with a double burner, things for coffee. A wide and undraped window that looked out to a wall of dark green wet leaves.

All that remained of Catherine was her narrow girlish bed and, invisible in a closet, some discarded girlish clothes, which Eliza meant to give to the Goodwill. Surely Catherine would never dress like that again?

There was Eliza at her desk, with nothing to keep her from work. Enough money to live on coming in, no terrible bills, no time-consuming lover. And she had “got over” Reed, except for an occasional moment of wonder that she was ever in love with him in the first place.

There she was, with fewer demands and obligations than she had ever known.

From her desk Eliza stared out into the rain and the glistening thick leaves; she was thinking of the year when at just this time it was so hot, thinking of the sound of firecrackers in the unnatural heat. She thought of her hospital job, now remote, of Gilbert Branner. And Miriam—where was she?

A couple of months ago, Miriam had called Eliza, obviously high; but warm, very friendly. Curious about and anxious to see Eliza. And Eliza asked her to come to lunch on her day off. She made a nice chicken salad, rolls, and, remembering Miriam’s fondness for sweets, bought pastry in North Beach. And Miriam didn’t show up. Eliza felt several things: hurt, irritation and comprehension—high, Miriam simply didn’t remember. Still, it
was hard to know what to do next, and Eliza had done nothing.