The Annunciation, page 28
“He isn’t here,” she said. “He’s over at David’s. I have to go now. I have a lot to do this morning. I hope the storm lets up.” She hung the phone up without waiting for a reply. She hung it up very carefully, then reached up and unplugged it from the wall.
She walked into the front room where Charles and three servants were hanging the huge flocked tree from the ceiling. It was a tradition at 1864 State Street to hang the tree from the ceiling on Christmas Eve. The people the Clares had bought the house from had begun the tradition. Barrett had kept it up. People in the neighborhood liked to walk by on Christmas Eve and see it hanging in the wide front windows as if suspended in air. Every time someone in the neighborhood walked down State Street and saw the tree hanging in its place in the windows of the old Georgian house they knew that one more year had escaped being gobbled up by the cold future. Every time they looked in that window on Christmas Eve they were reassured to know that at least a few people in the world still had enough money to do things right.
The Clares’ gardener was up on a ladder pulling the cable through the ring. His wife was measuring the distance from the floor with a yardstick. She was in a bad mood. She had nine children and fourteen grandchildren to cook for if she could ever get through with this silly shit and Dalton was acting like a Tom, something he always did around the Clares, especially at Christmas.
Barrett’s housekeeper, Sara, was standing by the window getting irritated about all the flocking that was getting on the rugs and the tinsel Charles was running around throwing on the chairs and sofas as if he didn’t have good sense.
“When’s Mr. Charles coming home?” the gardener said, seeing Barrett in the door. “I was hoping to get to tell him Merry Christmas before we leave.”
“He’s in a snowstorm,” she said. “He’s out of town on business.”
“He works so hard,” Dalton said. “Mr. Charlie too young to work so hard.” Barrett ignored that and started walking around the room picking up pieces of the tinsel Charles was throwing on the furniture. The doorbell was ringing.
“You think this is in the middle?” Dalton said. “Rose, let Miss Barrett see if she thinks this gonna do. Go on, stand back, I got it now. What you think?”
“That’s fine,” she said. “That’s perfect. That ought to be just perfect.”
“You want to go outside and see how it looks from the street?”
“No, it’s all right. It’s fine. Charles, stop doing that. Go find something else to do till we get through.”
“Someone’s at the door for you,” Sara said. “He says his name is Will Lyons. He says you’ll want to see him.”
Barrett felt the blood rush into her arms and legs, into her face and hands. She stood burning in the center of a still room. All around her the black faces made tiny precise movements and the huge white tree swung on its cable in the window and Charles ran back and forth very slowly and in the center of all that she was alone. She looked across the beautiful walnut floors and the soft pale rugs to the foyer where the morning sun was throwing prisms from the leaded-glass doors all over the walls. Nothing on earth will keep today from happening, she thought. Nothing will keep me from opening that door.
She walked across the room. The young man standing on the other side of the glass doors didn’t look like the bearer of bad news. He just looked like a very tall blond boy who needed a haircut.
She walked out onto the porch. Will moved back. They positioned themselves about four feet apart as if they were going to begin a dance. “Why did you come here?” she said. “Why are you doing this to me?”
“Because your mother needs you. Because this has gone on long enough. Because, I don’t know. Because this is what I’m supposed to do. Look, I’m a nice person. I’ve never hurt anyone in my life. I’ve never even been in the army.”
“Stay here,” she said. “Wait here. I’ll be back.” She went back into the house and spoke to Sara. Then she came back out onto the porch leaving both doors open behind her. “Come around to the side porch,” she said. “We can sit down there.” She led him to a part of the porch where a set of white wicker furniture was arranged around a swing. She motioned him to a seat, then sat down on a small white sofa. A white china elephant holding a plant with small fernlike leaves was beside the sofa. The shadows from the leaves lay all over her blouse and across her arms. Will felt like he was in a play. A slow-motion play, a pantomime. Everything on the porch was so new, so perfect, so shiny. Everything they were doing seemed so slow, so dangerous, so unreal. Why am I doing this? he was thinking. What in the world made me come here?
Barrett looked up at him and began to cry without making a sound.
“I shouldn’t have come here,” he said. “I don’t know why I’m doing this. Except sooner or later someone had to do it. I can’t believe I’m standing here on your porch making you cry. This isn’t what I came here for.”
“It doesn’t matter,” she said. “Nothing matters. Tell me everything you know. I want to know. I have to find out anyway. Because of Charles, my little boy. Because he’s so high-strung. I have to find out if there’re any diseases or anything. I have to know about these things. I don’t know what else to say. I don’t know what you came here to do to me.”
“I’m not going to tell you anything that’s bad,” he said. “Nothing I’m going to say will hurt you in any way.” He was trying to look at her, trying to concentrate, but his mind kept wandering all around the freshly painted porch and into the yard to the severe hedges and the flower beds that looked as though they had been laid out by a geometer. He was thinking of Amanda’s overgrown hillside, the jagged paths she and the Traylor boys cut through the wildflowers to the swing. He caught his breath, wondering what it looked like now, in late December, the bare trees, the brush all turned to seed. I’ll be there tonight, he said to himself. I’ll be there before the sun comes up again.
“Go on and tell me what you came here for,” she said. “I don’t care what it is. I want to know where I came from. I want to know where Charles came from. He’s the only thing in the world that matters to me. I want to know about my mother. I want to know who deserted me.”
“She didn’t desert you,” he said. “She was only fourteen years old when you were born.” He folded his long legs around the rungs of the wicker chair until it squeaked from the pressure. “When she talks about you she sounds like she’s fourteen years old right now.”
Barrett looked up. For a moment it seemed possible. For a moment she could actually imagine such a thing, could imagine being loved and lost and mourned for.
“I came here to tell you that she needs you,” he went on. “Well, I don’t have any right to tell you this. She didn’t send me. I came on my own.”
“What is her name? Tell me who she is.”
“She’s a wonderful person. She has spent her whole life mourning you one way or the other. She’s remarkable. She’s the most unusual person I’ve ever known. If she were my mother I would want to know her. The only reason she doesn’t come find you is because she thinks it will mess up your life. If she thought for a moment you wanted to see her, she’d be right here. She is…I don’t know how to tell you about her. She used to live here, in New Orleans. She used to live around here somewhere. She lived on a street called Henry Clay.”
“What is her name? I want to know what my name is. Tell me my name.”
“Her name is Amanda. Amanda McCamey. That’s her real name. She used to be called something else when she lived here.”
Barrett dug her nails into her folded arms. Now she was burning again. “I know her. I met her. You’re making this up. This isn’t true. If she was my mother why didn’t I know? Why didn’t she know?”
“I don’t know the answer to that. But I’m going to be with her tonight. If you let me I’ll tell her she can call you. She has waited thirty years to talk to you.”
“You’re going there now?” Barrett said. “To where she is?”
“As soon as I leave here. She lives in Arkansas. In a little town where I’m from.”
“I know who she is. I know all about her. You’re going there now?”
“As soon as I leave.”
“Then I’m going too.” She undid her arms and straightened her shoulders and looked up at him and for the first time he saw Amanda in her. “I’m going with you. Will you take me? Will you take me with you?”
“What ābout your little boy? You can’t leave him. It’s Christmas Eve.”
“I’ll take him with me. I’ll take him too. Will you take us? Will you let me go?”
“I would like to,” he said.
“Then take me.” But already Barrett knew she was being deserted again. She had been seeing the expression on Will’s face all her life. All her life she had been begging for love and watching the faces she begged from get ready to dole out what they wanted her to have. She knew that weighing. She knew that set of scales. “You won’t do it, will you? You won’t take me there. You come here to my house and start this and now you aren’t going to take me there.”
“It isn’t that I don’t want to,” he said. “It’s just that I don’t know if you should go up there right now. I guess that might not be a real good idea.”
“Why not? Why won’t it be a good idea? If she has mourned me all these years as you say she has? Why isn’t it a good idea? I’ve seen her. She doesn’t look to me like she ever mourned a thing. Why isn’t it a good idea for me to go and see her? You said she wants to see me.”
“She doesn’t know I’m doing this.”
“What is it then? Why did you come here and do this to me?” She was almost screaming. She was almost raising her voice to him. “What is it? Why can’t I go see my mother? If this is true? If she really is my mother.”
“She’s going to have a baby. She’s going to have a baby in a few weeks. That’s why I came here.”
“That’s impossible. She’s too old to have a baby.” She stood up from the wicker sofa and began tearing leaves off the plant in quick unconscious little movements, not looking at him now. Not really looking at anything in the world. “That isn’t true. None of this is true.”
“She’s only forty-four years old. And it’s true. At least I think it’s true. She wrote me and told me that.”
“Why would she write and tell you a thing like that? She couldn’t be having a baby.” Barrett’s eyes swept over him, taking in the corduroy pants and the tennis shoes and the old shirt and the unkempt hair. She could not see beneath these things. Nothing she had ever learned had taught her to see anything but surfaces.
“I’m telling you the truth about everything I know,” he said. “I wouldn’t have any reason to come and tell you things like this for a joke. Your father found out who you are. And he told your mother and sooner or later this is all going to blow wide open and, somehow or other, because I’ve been out on the ocean I guess, I got it in my head that it was up to me to do this. I’m sorry. I’m sorry as I can be that I came here.”
“She’s having a baby,” Barrett said. “She’s having a baby and because of that I can’t get in that car with you and go and see my mother. Who are you to come and tell me things like this?” But Sara was there now and Barrett pulled one last leaf off the plant and crumpled it in her left hand and the black woman moved over beside her and put her arm around her waist.
“I should leave,” he said. “I shouldn’t have come here.”
“Did you get Gustave?” she said to Sara. “Could you get him? Did he say he’d call?”
“They said he’d call back in a minute. They said he’d call back soon.”
“That’s who loves me,” Barrett said. “That’s who cares for me, Mr. Lyons. Tell my mother that when you see her. Tell her not to worry. Tell her I have the best psychiatrist in the whole world and he loves me no matter what I do. He loves me whether I deserve to be loved or not. He loves me anytime I want him to.”
“Should I tell her about this? About seeing you?”
“Why are you asking me?”
“Do you want me to tell her?”
“Could I stop you? Would someone who would come here like this stop at anything they wanted to do?”
“Oh, please. Oh, look, I’m sorry. I’m really sorry. I thought you would want to know. If you knew her you would want to know this.”
“Come inside,” Sara said. “Mrs. Clare, you come on in now. I think you better be going on,” she said to Will. “I think we ought to get inside the house.”
“Do you want to talk to me anymore?” he said. “Do you want to know how to call her?”
“I can find her,” Barrett said. “If I want to I can find her.”
“Forgive me,” he said. “Please forgive me.”
“Call him again,” she said to Sara. “Call them and tell them to find him. Tell them it’s an emergency. I don’t have anything to forgive,” she said turning back to him. He was in pain too. It was something she understood. It was something she knew how to relate to.
“I have to go in now. I have to call my doctor. She was fourteen years old?”
“She was only fourteen years old. She didn’t have a thing to do with it. It was done to her.”
“I don’t know what to think.” She started into the house, then turned back one more time, hanging on to Sara’s hand as she turned. “Would she love me? Do you think she’d love me?”
“She has always loved you,” Will said. Then he walked slowly and awkwardly down the marble stairs to the street and got into the car and drove down Saint Charles Avenue to Carrollton and started the long drive home. He stopped at a doughnut shop on the edge of town and filled a thermos with coffee and took a twenty-milligram Dexamyl Spansule and started driving toward the hills.
I did it, he thought. Maybe it was right and maybe it was wrong but anyway I did it. Sooner or later someone had to do it. I’m going to tell her that I did it. As soon as I see her I’m going to tell her.
When he was gone Barrett stood in the foyer, half in, half out of the doors, holding on to Sara’s arm, digging her fingers into Sara’s thick, cool skin. Are you my mother? she said to herself. Are you my mother? She was laughing, holding on to Sara and thinking about a children’s book she had hidden from Charles because she hated reading it to him. It was a book about a newly hatched bird that falls from its nest and wanders around trying to find its mother. Are you my mother? it says to a cow. Are you my mother? it says to a truck. Are you my mother? it says to a boy. Are you my mother? Barrett said to herself, imagining standing across a room from Amanda saying it, waiting to see what would happen next. “Call him again,” she said to Sara. “Tell him he has to call me right away.”
29
All afternoon a slow gray rain fell on the mountain. If Amanda looked out of any window it seemed to her that the little house was floating inside a gray cloud. There was no wind. The rain hardly seemed to fall. Everything was very still except for the sound of wet air moving against the clapboards, with here and there the clear sharp call of a bluejay. Late in the afternoon the cloud lifted a few feet off the earth and the birds came down from the trees and were all over the place frantically hunting for food. Amanda threw all that was left of a sack of popcorn into the yard. Then she walked around the kitchen looking for something to feed the squirrels.
What an old maid I’ve turned into, she thought. Feeding all the little animals. Jesus. She found a handful of peanuts in a jar and threw them far out into the yard. The movement of her arm brought a sharp quick pain to her right side and she stopped. Oh, God, she thought. You aren’t supposed to throw things at the end. Oh, well, that’s probably some old wives’ tale. Earth mother, feeding her little creatures, hmm. Well, there’s nothing here to feed them. Damn it.
Amanda had been trying not to keep food in the house so she wouldn’t gain weight. She rummaged around in a cabinet and found a box of Rye Crisp and a jar of peanut butter. She made some very small peanut butter sandwiches and went out on the balcony and threw them down under the tree, trying to make them land in the dry spots.
A fat squirrel came scurrying down the tree trunk, then stopped halfway to the ground, hanging upside down, sniffing the air. He wants it so bad, she thought, but he’s afraid to go down there and get it.
Amanda closed her eyes, trying to send good karma to the squirrel but the squirrel wasn’t having any. He just kept on hanging there halfway down the trunk sniffing the air.
“All right,” Amanda said. “I’ll bring it to you.”
She made a handful of tiny sandwiches and went out into the yard and started putting them in dry places under the tree.
She felt another pain, this time in her back. She leaned up against the house until it passed. It can’t be the baby, she thought. It’s too soon. It’s two weeks away.
When she got her breath back she went into the house and lay down on the sofa. The pain came a third time. She picked up the phone and called Katie. “I may not be able to come to dinner,” she said.
“Why not?” Katie said.
“I think I might be having this baby.”
“I’ll be right over,” Katie said. “Sit still. Don’t do anything.”
“Don’t get excited,” Amanda said. “I saw Luke yesterday. He said nothing was happening yet.”
“Have you called him?” Katie said.
“No, I called you instead.”
“Call him,” Katie said. “Call him right this minute. Clinton has the car. I’ll have to walk. I’ll be right there.”
“There isn’t any hurry,” Amanda said. “It’s probably nothing anyway.”
The wind was picking up. A front was moving in from the southwest, coming in through the saddle in the mountain. Katie felt it on her face as she ran along the road. She looked up and saw it in the distance. Oh, shit, she thought. That’s all we need now is snow.
She came tearing in the house and made Amanda lie down. She built a fire and called Luke and left word for Clinton at the tennis club. He got there before Luke, bringing a sack of groceries. “If I have to help with this birth, at least I’d like to have something to eat,” he said. “Amanda never has any food in the house.”
