In the Land of Dreamy Dreams Page 9

  This time the reconciliation involved two psychiatrists, a social worker, and the head of the English Department.

  “It will work out,” they told her. “It’s all a balancing act. Intelligent people can solve problems. Man can control his destiny.”

  They found a small house near Janet’s mother. The child was a roly-poly two-year-old. He built elaborate structures out of blocks of wood, knocked them over, stacked the blocks in neat rows, built again, amused himself for hours.

  “What an angel,” everyone said. “What a beautiful little boy. What a joy to behold, what a reason to live.”

  It was spring. Sun poured in the windows. Janet went back to work on her paper on Virginia Woolf.

  One day for a surprise Philip came home for lunch. He played his records for a while, borrowed some money from her, then went into the bathroom and took all the drugs out of the medicine cabinet.

  “We don’t need these anymore,” he said, stuffing them in a paper bag, “we’re through with analgesics.” He stuffed in the Seconal and Valium and Empirin #3 with Codeine and the aspirin and Tylenol and Percodan and cough syrup.

  He kissed Janet goodbye and walked out toward the car. She stood in the open door with the Keith Jarrett pouring out into the bright crisp April air.

  Philip drove down to the hardware store and bought some things he needed. He bought saws and ice picks and hammers and knives and staplers and drills. He bought ice and kerosene and weed killer.

  He went by the whiskey store and bought brandy and gin and vodka and bourbon and sherry.

  He drove out into the country, into the woods overlooking their old condominium. He drove off the road and along the creek bed until he lodged the Oldsmobile between two birch trees. He trudged back to the road and shoveled dirt on top of the tire tracks and threw the shovel deep into the woods.

  Then he went back to the car and went to work on himself. Every now and then he stopped and wrote on the letters.

  Dear Joshua,

  Sylvia and Anne and John and Blake and I are waiting… How long will you keep us waiting?

  Dear Bitch,

  Don’t take this personally. This is just a way of killing time. This is just another way to be creative.

  1957, a Romance

  It was June in northern Alabama. Upstairs Rhoda’s small sons lay sleeping. Somewhere in North Carolina her young husband sulked because she’d left him.

  Rhoda had the name. She had fucked her fat, balding gynecologist all Wednesday afternoon to get the name. She had fucked him on the daybed in his office and on the examining table and on the rug in the waiting room. Now all she needed was five hundred dollars.

  No one was going to cut Rhoda’s stomach open again. She had come home to get help. She had come home to the one person who had never let her down.

  She went into the downstairs bathroom, washed her face, and went up to his room to wake him.

  “I have to talk to you, Daddy,” she said, touching him on the shoulder. “Come downstairs. Don’t wake up mother.”

  They sat down together in the parlor, close together on the little sofa. He was waking up, shaking sleep from his handsome Scotch face. The old T-shirt he wore for a pajama top seemed very dear to Rhoda. She touched it while she talked.

  “I have to get some money, Daddy,” she said. “I’m pregnant again. I have to have an abortion. I can’t stand to have another baby. I’ll die if they keep cutting me open. You can’t go on having cesarean sections like that.”

  “Oh, my,” he said, his old outfielder’s body going very still inside. “Does Malcolm know all this?” Usually he pretended to have forgotten her husband’s name.

  “No one knows. I have to do this right away, do you understand? I have to do something about it right away.”

  “You don’t want to tell Malcolm?”

  “I can’t tell Malcolm. He’d never let me do it. I know that. And no one is going to stop me. He got me pregnant on purpose, Daddy. He did it because he knew I was going to leave him sooner or later.”

  Rhoda was really getting angry. She always believed her own stories as soon as she told them.

  “We’ll have to find you a doctor, Honey. It’s hard to find a doctor that will do that.”

  “I have a doctor. I have the name of a man in Houston. A Doctor Van Zandt. A friend of mine went to him. Daddy, you have to help me with this. I’m going crazy. Imagine Malcolm doing this to me. He did it to keep me from leaving… I begged him not to.”

  “Oh, Honey,” he said. “Please don’t tell me all that now. I can’t stand to hear all that. It doesn’t matter. All that doesn’t matter. We have to take care of you now. Let me think a minute.”

  He put his head down in his hands and conferred with his maker. Well, Sir, he said, I’ve spoiled her rotten. There’s no getting around that. But she’s mine and I’m sticking by her. You know I’d like to kill that little son of a bitch with my bare hands but I’ll keep myself from doing it. So you help us out of this. You get us out of this one and I’ll buy you a stained-glass window with nobody’s name on it, or a new roof for the vestry if you’d rather.

  Rhoda was afraid he’d gone back to sleep. “It’s not my fault, Daddy,” she said. “He made me do it. He did it to me on purpose. He did it to keep me from leaving…”

  “All right, Honey,” he said. “Don’t think about any of that anymore. I’ll take care of it. I’ll call your Uncle James in the morning and check up on the doctor. We’ll leave tomorrow as soon as I got things lined up.”

  “You’re going with me,” she said.

  “Of course I’m going with you,” he said. “We’ll leave your mother with the babies. But, Rhoda, we can’t tell your mother about this. I’ll tell her I’m taking you to Tennessee to see the mines.”

  “It costs five hundred dollars, Daddy.”

  “I know that. Don’t worry about that. You quit worrying about everything now and go on and try to get some sleep. I’m taking care of this. And, Rhoda…”

  “Yes?”

  I really don’t want your mother to know about this. She’s got a lot on her mind right now. And she’s not going to like this one bit.”

  “All right, Daddy. I don’t want to tell her, anyway. Daddy, I could have a legal abortion if Malcolm would agree to it. You know that, don’t you? People aren’t supposed to go on having cesarean sections one right after the other. I know I could get a legal abortion. But you have to have three doctors sign the paper. And that takes too long. It might be too late by the time I do all that. And, besides, Malcolm would try to stop me. I can’t take a chance on that. I think he wants to kill me.”

  “It’s all right, Honey. I’m going to take care of it. You go to bed and get some sleep.”

  Rhoda watched him climb the stairs, sliding his hand along the polished stair rail, looking so vulnerable in his cotton pajama bottoms and his old T-shirt, with his broad shoulders and his big head and his tall, courteous body.

  He had been a professional baseball player until she was born. He had been famous in the old Southern League, playing left field for the Nashville Volunteers.

  There was a scrapbook full of his old clippings. Rhoda and her brothers had worn it out over the years. DUDLEY MANNING HITS ONE OVER THE FENCE; MANNING DOES IT AGAIN; DUDLEY LEADS THE LEAGUE.

  You couldn’t eat headlines in the 1930s, so when Rhoda was born he had given in to her mother’s pleadings, quit baseball, and gone to work to make money.

  He had made money. He had made 2 million dollars by getting up at four o’clock every morning and working his ass off every single day for years. And he had loved it, loved getting up before the sun rose, loved eating his quiet lonely breakfasts, loved learning to control his temper, loved being smarter and better and luckier than everyone else.

  Every day he reminded himself that he was the luckiest son of a bitch in the world. And that made him humble, and other men loved him for his humility and forgave him for his success. Taped to his dresser mirror was a
little saying he had cut out of a newspaper, “EVERY DAY THE WORLD TURNS UPSIDE DOWN ON SOMEONE WHO THOUGHT THEY WERE SITTING ON TOP OF IT.”

  He was thinking of the saying as he went back to bed. As long as nothing happens to her, he told himself. As long as she is safe.

  Breakfast was terrible. Rhoda picked at her food, pretending to eat, trying to get her mother in a good mood. Her mother, whose name was Jeannie, was a gentle, religious woman who lived her life in service to her family and friends. But she had spells of fighting back against the terrible inroads they made into her small personal life. This was one of those spells.

  This was the third time in two years that Rhoda had run away from her husband and come home to live. Jeannie suspected that all Rhoda really wanted was someone to take care of her babies. Jeannie spent a lot of time suspecting Rhoda of one thing or another. Rhoda was the most demanding of her four children, the only daughter, the most unpredictable, the hardest to control or understand.

  “What am I supposed to tell your husband when he calls,” she said, buttering toast with a shaking hand. “I feel sorry for him when he calls up. If you’re leaving town I want you to call him first.”

  “Now, Jeannie,” Rhoda’s father said. “We’ll only be gone a few days. Don’t answer the phone if you don’t want to talk to Malcolm.”

  “I had an appointment to get a permanent today,” she said. “I don’t know when Joseph will be able to take me again.”

  “Leave the children with the maids,” he said. “That’s what the maids are for.”

  “I’m not going to leave those babies alone in a house with maids for a minute,” her mother said. “This is just like you, Rhoda, coming home brokenhearted one day and going off leaving your children the next. I don’t care what anyone says, Dudley, she has to learn to accept some responsibility for something.”

  “She’s going with me to the mines,” he said, getting up and putting his napkin neatly into his napkin holder. “I want her to see where the money comes from.”

  “Well, I’ll call and see if Laura’ll come over while I’m gone,” Jeannie said, backing down as she always did. Besides, she loved Rhoda’s little boys, loved to hold their beautiful strong bodies in her arms, loved to bathe and dress and feed them, to read to them and make them laugh and watch them play. When she was alone with them she forgot they were not her very own. Flesh of my flesh, she would think, touching their perfect skin, which was the color of apricots and wild honey, flesh of my flesh, bone of my bone.

  “Oh, go on then,” she said. “But please be back by Saturday.”

  They cruised out of town in the big Packard he had bought secondhand from old Dr. Purcell and turned onto the Natchez Trace going north.

  “Where are we going?” she said.

  “We have to go to Nashville to catch a plane,” he said. “It’s too far to drive. Don’t worry about it, Honey. Just leave it to me. I’ve got all my ducks in a row.”

  “Did you call the doctor?” she said. “Did you call Uncle James?”

  “Don’t worry about it. I told you I’ve got it all taken care of. You take a nap or something.”

  “All right,” she said, and pulled a book out of her handbag. It was Ernest Hemingway’s new book, and it had come from the book club the day she left North Carolina. She had been waiting for it to come for weeks. Now she opened it to the first page, holding it up to her nose and giving it a smell.

  “Across the River and into the Trees,” she said. “What a wonderful title. Oh, God, he’s my favorite writer.” She settled further down into the seat. “This is going to be a good one. I can tell.”

  “Honey, look out the window at where you’re going,” her father said. “This is beautiful country. Don’t keep your nose in a book all your life.”

  “This is a new book by Ernest Hemingway,” she said. “I’ve been waiting for it for weeks.”

  “But look at this country,” he said. “Your ancestors came this way when they settled this country. This is how they came from Tennessee.”

  “They did not,” she said. “They came on a boat down the river from Pennsylvania. Momma said so.”

  “Well, I knew you’d have something smart-alecky to say,” he said.

  “The first book I read by Ernest Hemingway was last year when I was nursing Bobby,” she said. “It was about this man and woman in Paris that loved each other but something was wrong with him, he got hurt in the war and couldn’t make love to her. Anyway, she kept leaving him and going off with other men. It was so sad I cried all night after I read it. After that I read all his books as fast as I could.”

  “I don’t know why you want to fill up your head with all that stuff,” he said. “No wonder you don’t have any sense, Rhoda.”

  “Well, never mind that,” she said. “Oh, good, this is really going to be good. It’s dedicated ‘To Mary, With Love,’ that’s his wife. She’s terrible looking. She doesn’t wear any makeup and she’s got this terrible wrinkled skin from being in the sun all the time. I saw a picture of her in a magazine last year. I don’t know what he sees in her.”

  “Maybe she knows how to keep her mouth shut,” he said. “Maybe she knows how to stay home and be a good wife.”

  “Oh, well,” Rhoda said, “let’s don’t talk about that. I don’t feel like talking about that.”

  “I’m sorry, Honey,” he said. “You go on and read your book.” He set the speedometer on an easy sixty miles an hour and tried not to think about anything. Outside the window the hills of north Alabama were changing into the rich fields of Tennessee. He remembered coming this way as a young man, driving to Nashville to play ball, dreaming of fame, dreaming of riches. He glanced beside him, at the concentrated face of his beautiful spoiled crazy daughter.

  Well, she’s mine, he told himself. And nothing will ever hurt her. As long as I live nothing will ever harm her.

  He sighed, letting out his breath in a loud exhalation, but Rhoda could not hear him now. She was far away in the marshes near Tagliamento, in northern Italy, hunting ducks at dawn with Ernest Hemingway. (Rhoda was not fooled by personas. In her mind any modern novel was the true story of the writer’s life.)

  Rhoda was reading as they went into the Nashville airport and she kept on reading while they waited for the plane, and as soon as she was settled in her seat she found her place and went on reading.

  The love story had finally started. “Then she came into the room, shining in her youth and tall striding beauty, and the carelessness the wind had made of her hair. She had pale, almost olive colored skin, a profile that could break your, or anyone else’s heart, and her dark hair, of a thick texture, hung down over her shoulders.

  ‘Hello, my great beauty,’ the Colonel said.”

  This was more like it, Rhoda thought. This was a better girlfriend for Ernest Hemingway than his old wife. She read on. Renata was nineteen! Imagine that! Ernest Hemingway’s girlfriend was the same age as Rhoda! Imagine being in Venice with a wonderful old writer who was about to die of a heart attack. Imagine making love to a man like that. Rhoda imagined herself in a wonderful bed in a hotel in Venice making love all night to a dying author who could fuck like a nineteen-year-old boy.

  She raised her eyes from the page. “Did you get Uncle James on the phone?” she said. “Did you ask him to find out about the doctor?”

  “He told me what to do,” her father said. “He said first you should make certain you’re pregnant.”

  “I’m certain,” she said. “I even know why. A rubber broke. It was Malcolm’s birthday and I was out of jelly and I told him I didn’t want to…”

  “Oh, Honey, please don’t talk like that. Please don’t tell me all that.”

  “Well, it’s the truth,” she said. “It’s the reason we’re on this plane.”

  “Just be quiet and go on and read your book then,” he said. He went back to his newspaper. In a minute he decided to try again.

  “James said the doctor will have to know for certain tha
t you’re pregnant.”

  “All right,” she said. “I’ll think up something to tell him. What do you think we should say my name is?”

  “Now, Sweetie, don’t start that,” he said. “We’re going to tell this man the truth. We’re not doing anything we’re ashamed of.”

  “Well, we can’t tell him I’m married,” she said. “Or else he’ll make me get my husband’s permission.”

  “Where’d you get an idea like that?” he said.

  “Stella Mabry told me. She tried to get an abortion last year, but she didn’t take enough money with her. You have to say you’re divorced.”

  “All right,” he said. “I’ll tell you what, Honey. You just let me talk to the man. You be quiet and I’ll do the talking.”

  He lay back and closed his eyes, hoping he wasn’t going to end up vomiting into one of Southern Airlines’ paper bags.

  He was deathly afraid to fly and had only been on an airplane once before in his life.

  A taxi took them to the new Hilton. Rhoda had never been in such a fancy hotel. She had run away to get married when she was seventeen years old and her only vacations since then had been to hospitals to have babies.

  The bellboy took them upstairs to a suite of rooms. There were two bedrooms and a large living room with a bar in one corner. It looked like a movie set, with oversize beige sofas and a thick beige tweed carpet. Rhoda looked around approvingly and went over to the bar and fixed herself a tall glass of ice water.

  Her father walked out onto the balcony and called to her. “Rhoda, look out here. That’s an Olympic-size swimming pool. Isn’t that something? The manager said some Olympic swimmers had been working out here in the afternoons. Maybe we’ll get to watch them after a while.”

  She looked down several stories to the bright blue rectangle. “Can I go swimming in it?” she said.

  “Let’s call the doctor first and see what he wants us to do.” He took a phone number from his billfold, sat down in a chair with his back to her, and talked for a while on the phone, nodding his head up and down as he talked.