4

WHEN I CONSIDER THE PATTERN OF THEIR DAYS AND nights during those five months I see again that nothing outside that pattern happened at the Mountain Brook Country Club.

I wonder again why Charlotte left that night and not some other.

Charlotte could never tell me.

“But I had to leave,” Charlotte would repeat, as if until ten minutes past eleven P.M. on the eighteenth of July there had been some imperative to her staying. “He’d been with this girl and he’d hurt her and he was acting crazy. After I left the Clarks took her to the hospital, she had a concussion. Mild.”

Had not other such evenings occurred during those five months?

Charlotte said that she could not remember.

Bear in mind that I am talking here about a woman I believe to have been in shock.

Everywhere they went during those five months they ended up staying in a motel. Charlotte did remember the motels. They had stayed a while with Howard Hollerith in Greenville and they had stayed a while with Billy Daikin in Clarksdale and they had stayed a while with other people in other places but after a certain kind of evening they would always move to a motel. Usually Warren would not be present during the early part of this certain kind of evening. Usually Warren would be upriver or downriver or across the county with their host’s wife or sister or recently divorced niece. Never daughter. Warren never went upriver or downriver or across the county with the daughter of a host.

Charlotte learned early to recognize the advent of such an evening.

For the day or two before such an evening Warren would announce his inability to sleep.

“I’m restless, I’m wired, I got the mean reds,” he would say.

“Don’t cross me,” he would say.

“Don’t mess with me,” he would say.

For the day or two before such an evening their host would announce his inability to provide minor but key aspects of his normal hospitality.

“Wouldn’t be surprised Warren’s used up all those Peychaud bitters he can’t take a drink without, what a shame, can’t buy them up here.”

“Damn that plumber, can’t get here before Tuesday, daresay you’ll be glad to get somewhere they’ve got the pipes in working order.”

A familiar drift would emerge. Not only toilets but guest-room telephones would go out of order. Men would arrive to drain the swimming pool. Suggestions would be made for traveling before the rain set in, or the heat, or the projected work on the Interstate. Reminders would be made about promises to visit Charlie Ferris in Oxford, or Miss Anne Clary on the Gulf.

Doors would be closed.

Voices would be raised.

The evening itself would begin uneasily and end badly.

“Hope Warren has the courtesy to leave a little something for old Jennie, all the extra picking up she’s done, you might remind him, Charlotte. Or isn’t that the custom where you come from.”

And: “Most interesting the way men where you come from allow their wives to traipse around as they please, must be very advanced thinkers in California.”

And then: “The idea, your friend Warren going off and leaving you here alone, might not matter to you but it matters to me, a man insults a lady in my house he insults me. You wouldn’t understand that, Mrs. Douglas, I’m certain it’s all free and easy where your people come from.”

And finally: “You say you’re going to bed ‘and fuck it,’ Mrs. Douglas, I believe that is your name, just what am I meant to conclude? Am I meant to conclude there’s a woman in my house who’s certifiable? Or did my ears deceive me.”

After Charlotte went to bed there would be silence for a few hours and then more raised voices, Warren’s among them, and Charlotte would bury her head in one pillow and put another over her belly so the baby could not hear and the next day she and Warren would move to a motel.

“I don’t like these people,” she said to Warren after one such evening. “I don’t like them and I don’t want to be beholden to them.”

“You’re not beholden to anybody. You’re too used to Arabs and Jews, you don’t know how normal people behave.”

“I can’t help noticing Arabs and Jews are rather less insulting to their houseguests.”

“Not to this houseguest they wouldn’t be, babe.” In the wreckage of these visits Warren seemed unfailingly cheerful. “You show me an Arab who’ll put up with me, I’ll show you an Arab doesn’t get the picture.”

In all those motels he wanted the curtains shut in the daytime.

In all those motels she would sit in the dark room a while and watch him sleep.

It seemed to her that toward the end of the five months they had spent more time in motels than toward the beginning of the five months but she could not be sure. Warren always paid for the rooms with crumpled bills fished from various of his pockets and she paid for meals, when they ate meals. She ate regularly, usually alone. She forced herself to eat, just as she forced herself to take her calcium and see an obstetrician in any town where they spent more than a day or two. There was no need for her to see an obstetrician that often but she wanted to have a number she could call in the middle of the night. An obstetrician would not question her reason for seeing him. An obstetrician was the logical doctor to see.

“You’re sick,” she had said the first time she saw Warren gray and sweating. He had swerved abruptly off the highway and stopped the car on the shoulder. “You’re sick and you need a doctor.”

“Not going running to any doctor.” His breathing was harsh and shallow and he did not seem to have strength to turn off the ignition. “Not sick. Ran over a moccasin is all.”

They sat in the idling car until his breathing evened out. He did not speak again but took her hand. When he finally put the car into gear and drove on she glanced back at the highway but of course there was no moccasin. It was after that day when she began to find an obstetrician in every town, began to get the questions done with early and the telephone number in hand. Some night in some town she was going to need to call a doctor and ask him for something and she wanted that doctor to take her call. She did not let her mind form the word “cancer” and she did not let her mind form the word “dying” but the word Demerol was always in her mind. She had not been there when her father died but Pete Wright had told her about the Demerol, the night they had dinner at the Palm.