At her Garden Club’s Annual Spring Tea, Letice excused herself from the table and walked as steadily as she could to the powder room. She believed she was doing quite well—left foot, right foot, left foot, right foot, keeping her eyes fixed on the powder room door. “Almost there,” she said to herself, and thought of the delicate flask inside her purse, and of how she would go into a stall and relieve her craving instead of her bladder.
Cora Davis, a Garden Club member Letice had known all her life, followed her into the powder room. When Letice came out of the stall, Cora caught her arm and turned her around.
“Look at me, Letice. You’re drunk, aren’t you?”
“I most certainly am not! How dare you say such a thing?” Letice spat.
“Oh, Letice. I know you’re in pain; we all know you’re in pain. Let us help you.”
“Do you want to help me, Cora? Do you really want to help me? Because if you do, then leave me alone.”
After that, Letice stayed home from Garden Club events and from all other social activities. Six months later she found herself staring into amber liquid and planning to end her life. That’s when she turned to God and asked him to take her back. What followed were two weeks of anguish. And then, during the evening hours of a difficult day, tortured in mind and body, Letice determined that God did not care. She could almost hear the sounds of a bottleneck touching a glass rim, and of blended scotch whisky pouring into it, and she could smell that liquor’s mellowness, and savor its pain-easing taste. In those moments there was nothing else in Letice’s world, not even her eight-year-old son. The craving for whisky simply took hold of her. All she wanted was to feel it wash down her throat and flow through her veins. And then the craving battled with self-loathing, and finally self-loathing won. In an act of desperate determination, Letice walked into Remington’s study, a room in which she knew there was a small pearl-handled gun. The door closed behind her with a quiet catch.
Standing on the brink of destruction and staring into the icy waters of despair, Letice jumped in and got caught in a roiling current that rushed her, body and soul, over punishing rocks and through the jutting, deadly arms of fractured sorrows. She ached with coldness, and when she couldn’t take it anymore, she surrendered to the desire to finally drown. She let her body go limp and felt it crash into boulders.
She opened the door of a cherrywood cabinet, reached into its darkest recesses, and closed her hand around the gun. Determined though she was, Letice’s hand shook.
Then just as she tightened her grip on the revolver, it dropped from her hand and was replaced by a root that grew out of the bank of her frigid, roaring misery. It took her a moment to realize her hand was not wrapped around an imagined tree root or a real revolver but curved instead around a leather-bound book. She pulled the Book of Hours from the cabinet, and the book fell from her hand to lie open and bright upon her lap. Chilled to the bone and dripping with a death wish, Letice looked down upon the words of evening vespers:
O God, come to my aid. O Lord, make haste to help me.
And she knew then that God had not left her and that he never would.
The very next day she called on an architect and ordered plans for a private chapel to be drawn. Letice lost her taste for blended scotch whisky as she pored over sketches, and imagined Cipollino marble and long velvet drapes. She considered her chapel to the last detail, from the wood of the crucifix to the scoop of the holy water font. She favored sparseness in her design, reminiscent of the cells inhabited by prayerful monks. But that is not to say she kept her costs down. Quite the contrary, in fact; no expense was too great, and so the building materials were the best to be found in several corners of the world. It was the lines and shape of the place that mattered to Letice, the expanses of flatness where nothing could hide within the blank, smooth planes of ceiling and floor. She wished her chapel to represent the ideal of her soul—hollowed-out and filled with purity, with nothing for sin to hold on to.
There were two straight-backed pews and a stand for the votives. The only other furnishings were a small prie-dieu upon which she could kneel, and a crucifix that bore the figure of Christ. The Christ figure was an interesting one. Letice had commissioned it to show the muscular form of a hardworking carpenter, his body slumped forward and collapsed in suffocation, every rib countable, arms pulled from shoulder sockets, head hung to chest, blood and water flowing from his sword-pierced side. It was Sacrifice rendered in plaster, and it made Letice wonder how she’d ever dared despair.
Light was provided by the votive candles and through the clear-glass window that looked out upon a garden. And rendered in mosaic with the promise of life in her glittering glass eyes was the face of the Angel Lailah, guardian of babies from conception to birth. Letice had her reasons for that. And beneath the angel there was a niche in the wall in which rested a carved wooden box. Letice had her reasons for that too. She needed to take responsibility for what she’d done, she needed to be penitent, and she needed to hope that what was inside that box was held in safekeeping. It was a difficult thing that she tried to do, this holding on to something while giving it back to God.
Every time she went to her chapel, Letice looked at that box and told the relic how sorry she was. Then she would turn to the Gospel of Luke for comfort:
Are not five sparrows sold for two pennies? Yet not one of them is forgotten by God.
G
ENTLY,
and with subtlety, Letice taught her daughter-in-law the finer ways of living: how to determine quality, how to dress, how to eat. But she didn’t want to change that which made Dancy who she was: an unmistakable honesty that Letice knew was one of the reasons William had loved her.
The relationship between the two women is best described as strength surrounding hollowness, like a steel pipe. The steel had to do with shared loss, the hollowness with unshared belief in God. But despite that considerable philosophical difference, the two women enjoyed a peaceful coexistence. For the most part. Sometimes the years of stifled grief and self-imposed guilt found a way to escape Dancy’s control and turn her into someone she wasn’t. A red-hot rage could come up from nowhere and sweep through her without a breath of warning, gathering up the hatred she felt for William’s killer and the anger she felt at a God she ignored. When that happened, she yearned to tear every page from her mother-in-law’s missal, to throw her holy water, and to smash her religious statues with an axe, sparing not even the bust of a thorn-crowned Jesus or the small green marble Pietà. She wanted to destroy them all, especially the Pietà. She knew that the sculpture of a grieving Mary holding the body of her crucified son was Letice’s favorite, knew that her mother-in-law drew consolation from the statue, even identified with it, and Dancy wanted to smash it until it was reduced to little more than a powder that could be swept up with a broom and tossed into the trash to be mixed in with eggshells and old coffee grounds.
At the start of one of these rages, Dancy was always able to summon the self-control necessary to manage it, but the control never lasted and she would become snappish with Letice and short-tempered with Bonaventure. The slightest thing would irritate her and she would stomp through rooms and slam cupboard doors.
More and more often, when she felt herself burning from the inside out, she would go to her room, open that jelly jar she kept in the darkness of her closet, and pour liquor over the lump in her throat. Then she would light a Pall Mall cigarette and smile grimly over the fact that gin looked just like water.
And William would push against the thought that love looked just like pain.
Letice was on to Dancy, having been down that road herself. She knew to tread carefully so as not to offend the girl or make her defensive. Letice prayed for the wisdom to know what to do to cauterize the young woman’s nerves. She suspected that when Dancy lost William she had also lost God, and the thought of it caused Letice agony, for she was more certain than ever that it was she who’d brought this tragedy upon them. Yet she could not confide her secret, could not risk being seen as a hypocrite.
Dancy was like an amputee who’d been left with a bloody stump in the place where her life had been, and she was wracked by phantom pains. She knew that people thought it had been long enough, that she should let go and move on. But they didn’t know what it had been like to love and be loved by William. They didn’t know that he had been proud of her, or that he had chosen her over prettier, wealthier, better-educated girls who knew the right way of speaking, and which fork to use, and how to arrange cut flowers in a vase. They didn’t know that he had begged her to meet his mother, that she, not William, was the one who felt she didn’t measure up. They didn’t know that he had sung to her and taught her to drive and let her cut his hair for practice when she was studying at the beauty school above Slocum Brothers Furniture. They didn’t know that her heart still turned over at the thought of him and brought her a few seconds’ worth of remembered happiness. They didn’t know he was her once-in-a-lifetime. But most of all, they didn’t know that she owed him.
William knew very well why Dancy felt she owed a debt. But he chose not to think about it, dwelling instead on those seconds of happiness she felt when her heart still turned over at the thought of him. He was sorry for those times when she went to her closet and drank booze from a jar and smoked cigarettes. William knew that closet was a harmful place because that’s where she kept her guilt.
B
Y
June of 1956, six-year-old Bonaventure’s hearing went beyond vibrations and out and away from frequencies and wavelengths. It sliced through pressure. It defeated time and space. He liked to curl up in his favorite chair on the sunporch and listen to exploding sunspots, and sometimes on nights he just couldn’t fall asleep, he listened to stars being born. A long time ago his dad had told him that everybody couldn’t hear the things he heard, and Bonaventure always wished that they could, or at least that he could wrap up the sounds and make them into gifts. But he couldn’t, and it caused him to feel a crushing isolation.
In the best sound times, the world became a womb expanded, its open folds filled with an amniotic sea of brilliant, irresistible sound. Day after day, he sailed that sea both wakeful and dreaming, and he made wandering explorations of Bayou Cymbaline, at least those parts he was allowed to travel. Bonaventure wasn’t always alone on these excursions. Sometimes William was with him.
“I used to play baseball over there.”
—What was the name of your team?
“The Bayou Cymbaline Blue Gators.”
—Why were you called that? Gators are green. I never saw a blue gator. There’s no such thing as a blue gator.
“I dunno. Somebody just thought it up, I guess.”
—Who?
“Don’t know that either.”
Bonaventure scratched his nose, which was something he did when he was trying to solve a problem.
—Was it the coach?
“Coulda been, I guess.”
—Hey, Dad!
“What?”
—Where does a baseball bat eat its dinner?
“I dunno. Where does a baseball bat eat its dinner?
—On home plate.
“Ha. That’s funny.”
—I know. It’s a joke. Hey, Dad: Knock-knock.
“Who’s there?”
—Broccoli.
“Broccoli who?
—Broccoli doesn’t have a last name. Hey, Dad.
“Hey, what?”
—Where do babies come from?
“Is that a joke question?”
—No. It’s a real one. We’re done joking.
“Oh. Sorry. What did you ask me? Where do day-bees come from? What are day-bees? I never even heard of day-bees.” This was a stalling tactic on William’s part.
—
Babies
. I asked where
babies
come from.
“Oooohhhh.
Ba
bies. Ask your mom. She might know.”
—I asked her already; well, really I asked her where I came from, but I think she just made up the answer.
“What did she say?”
—She said I came from Rubenstein’s. It’s a department store on Canal Street in New Orleans.
William had to smile at Dancy’s sort-of-true answer. “Well, we did get you in New Orleans, but I think it was somewhere on Washington Avenue right around Coliseum. Or maybe it was Rubenstein’s. I was too happy at the time to notice the details.”
—Okay. But I don’t think that’s where all babies come from.
“Yeah, you’re probably right. I’ll bet only special ones come from Rubenstein’s.” Then William pointed out where the best climbing trees were and took Bonaventure to the place two yards over where a family of rabbits lived. He was killing time, trying to figure out how to broach an important subject, when Bonaventure unintentionally did it for him.
—Did you ever find out why I’m the only one who can hear you?
“As a matter of fact, I did. I heard it was something God decided. He has a job for us, and you have to be able to hear a lot of things and we have to be able to talk to each other so we can get it done.”
—But how can we do a job together? I’m here and you’re in Almost Heaven.
“Well, it’s like this: I have to do a few things to get to Real Heaven, and I’m going to need your help with one of those things. That’s what the job is about.”
—Okay. So what’s the job?
“It has to do with your mom. She’s keeping something she shouldn’t, something that makes her sad. It’s in her closet.”
—Why does she keep it if it makes her sad?
“It’s a mistake is all. My part of the job is to tell you about it, and your part of the job is to go get it.”
—There’s lots of stuff in her closet. How will I know what it is?
“You’ll have to listen for it.”