A covenant with death, p.12
A Covenant with Death, page 12
Crossing the square I was lucky: on a Gambel oak I saw a walkingstick move. Many people pass a lifetime among walkingsticks and never see one move. I observed him. He was some three inches long, six twiggy legs and a twiggy body, two hairlike antennae whipping back from his head. He sensed my presence, and was still, melting into the rough bark. I looked away—at the courthouse, brown, shining, homely in the afternoon sun; at the municipal building with the high wall embracing the exercise yard where Bryan Talbot would be hanged; at Juano’s Stanley Steamer, exhausted and somehow limp at the dusty curb; down Main Street toward the distant corner of Pueblo Street, on which stood the shrine that had once been Connie’s place. Then I looked back, and the walkingstick was gone. I found him about ten seconds later, in the same spot; he might have been a roughening of the bark, or a single, wasted, leftover tendril from some prehistoric ivy. I left him there. He would have a short season and be soon gone.
Geronimo stood in his doorway and favored me with a flippancy. “How,” he said. “Paleface hanged yet?”
“Almost,” I said. “Don’t let John hear you talk like that.”
“A good boy, John. What are you doing here?”
“My duty,” I said. “I have a marriage ceremony to perform. I am a servant of the people.”
“What were they doing in court?”
“Dietrich was finishing. It should go to the jury in an hour.”
“And come back again in five minutes.”
“You think it’s that clear?”
Geronimo shrugged. “It’s pretty clear. I’ve been thinking about it.” He was in khaki, with a bandanna around his neck to catch the sweat. He was old and lined, blinking in the sunlight. “It’s like the World’s War,” which is what he always called it, “when the atrocity stories came out. Nobody believed them. Not really. Did you ever find anybody who believed them really? No. But we pretended to believe tham because we needed an excuse to hate Germans. People like to kill. You take early man. Prehistoric. He killed from necessity, and he felt good when it was done. So that’s a tradition, a deep tradition, no getting away from it. Right? Everybody likes to kill and now nobody will admit it. So they’ll punish Talbot to show how they hate murder, and they’ll get him hanged because they love it. Right?”
“You sound as though you don’t think he did it.”
“Oh, he did it, all right. No question. A cold man. But they’d hang him anyway. Because they know why he did it. He had his fun and now they’ll have theirs. See?” He waggled a hand at me in impermeable triumph and swept on. “Always. Always it happens that way. When a jury has to acquit, they’re disappointed. I’m glad you’re not mixed up in this. Talbot did it, all right. No question.”
“A deep thinker,” I said. “Is that why you’re such a good card player?”
He laughed joyfully. “No, no. The cards is from my Jewish half. Pinochle when I was a boy.”
“I see. And the thinking is from the Apache half.”
“No. From my Apache half is knowing how men love to kill.” He smiled dreamily, like a sage, and nodded. It was the repeated, impervious, charitable nod of the man who is sure, whose nod is merely the final confirmation of a truth he has vouchsafed the world. “Now go make your wedding,” he said.
Which I did. Clambering up the musty stairs I whiffed again at that faint odor of wrong, but I shook it off at the door and entered my office resplendent and bubbling. A wedding. A wedding! How unique and glorious! Smiles and nods; Miss Wendt giggled, Mr. Golub crushed my hand in his manly grip. Mother Wendt was crying. Father Wendt was slightly embarrassed, slightly uncomfortable: my daughter, he seemed to be saying, will spend the night in this lout’s arms. John was a self-effacing usher; but I noticed, with admiration, that he had arranged assorted blossoms in our one vase; the office was all but festive.
I did not hurry the ceremony. These upright young things would, with luck, be married only once; I owed them a pleasant memory, and was therefore properly benign, sprinkling this symbolic pollination with a fine spray of official approval, as though under instructions from the good Harding himself. I performed few marriages, and was curious: why had these fine young Americans not hied themselves to a church? Atheists? Of different and irreconcilable religions? None of my business; I beamed upon them. When I said, “I now pronounce you man and wife,” Mother Wendt exploded like a paper bag full of water, showering my threadbare carpet, a cloudburst in the desert. I added, “You may kiss the bride,” which was not part of the ceremony but sounded like an order from the State House and sometimes inspired a shy groom who might otherwise have felt that the dignity of judicial precincts estopped any such barbaric sexual assault. He kissed her; they clung, eyes closed, sweet and twenty. Father Wendt kissed her. Mother Wendt kissed everybody, blindly, including me and John; her tears wetted my cheeks. I too kissed the bride, and as my face approached hers a mischief almost burst within me, and I had to check a gorgeous impulse: what would happen, I wondered as the cold, rubbery, moist lips met mine briefly, if I were to seize this unspeakable child and embrace her in Chaucerian enthusiasm, hands on her buttocks, eyes aflame, feverishly roaring “Good luck! Good luck! Be happy!”? I withdrew chastely, nodded like a sachem, refused the two dollars preferred by a tremulous groom, and escorted them, in a muggy cloud of asphyxiating platitudes, to the door. When John closed it behind them it was as though a convention had left town.
John would not leave me alone. “You can’t do this,” he said.
“Oh, come on,” I said. “I’m doing it. It’s not so terrible. I’ll be staying at the Bench Club.”
“What’s he going to say?”
“He won’t like it,” I admitted. “But what good would I do around here? I’m sick of the whole business. Just leave me alone. You’re not even a citizen. Why don’t you go back where you came from?”
“All right, all right,” he said. “I’ll wire you. Back Monday?”
“Sunday night.” Prudently I added, “If not sooner.”
It was much sooner.
7
I scuttled out of town. Not lurking in doorways; but I avoided the courthouse and made a roundabout way to the depot. Doubtless prompted by obscure sentiments I cut through Pueblo Street, touching my hand to my heart as I passed Connie’s. A shingle outside announced STATE POLICE; a placard in the window advertised NATIONAL GUARD. That window had once been framed in Burgundy swag curtains with a gaudy ball fringe, and afternoons Connie—Consuelo Gracián—sat there crocheting and drinking beer and nodding like a chatelaine, which indeed she was, to friends in the street. Of which I had the honor to call myself one beginning in 1911, September, when upon a sudden high resolve I picked up my suitcase and a stuffed wallet, left the house to go to college, and got on a train three days later, incurring penalties for late registration but bringing to academe a far more rounded scholar than the ignoramus who had begun the journey. Within a week I had a note from my father, one of the three or four he ever wrote me; to wit, Dear Ben, Were you in that hussy shed last week? Your father, Graeme. He was angry because he had heard through my mother, who had heard from Connie through a network of cousins, and it did not seem just to him that he should depend on women for manly news.
He was right. I owed him something. I had made a good impression socially by remembering half a dozen of his paternal asides, enunciated at odd removes and apropos of random events. My father effused a rough gallantry all his life because he believed that a woman was a lady until she lied and he was too much of a gentleman to doubt a woman’s word. So when I arrived at Connie’s, gangling, the suitcase banging at my knees, and entered the parlor with all the blood in my body momentarily concentrated above the neck, I was prepared to comport myself with at least a gauche good grace. Though I believe that if the piano had fallen silent, if my three or four colleagues had broken off their conversation to stare, I would have fled like a jackrabbit. The piano tinkled on; the clients, gentlemen to the marrow, veiled their curiosity; Connie herself welcomed me. I thanked her, offered beer to the house, and sat opposite her at a wooden table. The young ladies chatted quietly with their visitors and the music was subdued; barring certain irregularities of dress we might have been in the parlor of the First Methodist Church. I won the honors of the house when Connie asked me if I had made a choice and I observed ruefully that I imagined she herself no longer took an active part. She grinned then, at the art and not the sentiment, and I blushed, and she complimented me on my upbringing, which was her way of telling me that she knew who I was and considered herself a friend of the family. I said that maybe she could choose for me better than I could for myself, which won me another smile, another flash of silver molar, and also won me Isabel Rosarias, with whom I spent forty-eight hours of ruinous bliss and whom I loved deeply, genuinely, blindly, and exclusively for the next three months with a purity, a tenderness, and a self-effacement I was never to know again. Isabel went off somewhere during the war, and Connie, who was in her fifties when I met her, died shortly after the Armistice. I missed her funeral but would have attended if I had been home in time. My father told me that several men of position and respectability were at the cemetery and no one was embarrassed or made a joke. Sometimes it was possible to admire Soledad City.
The train was on time. I swung into the coach and settled down, removing jacket and tie and twisting a kerchief under my collar. Trains were an abomination. I had the classic choice between two asphyxiations: plain Southwest, or flaming air, and fancy Pompei, or hot cinders. I chose the local variety because I was wearing white, and lolled moribund, tongue on chest, for three and a half hours. Clack, clackety, clack, clackety, and the desolate right-of-way, and the sweat dripping off my fingers onto The Education of Henry Adams. Every half hour I went to the men’s lavatory and unbuttoned and sat over the bottomless pit in Bacchanalian glee while warm winds whistled upward, refreshing. A vulgar and obsolete piece of expertise to be passing along, you will say, but it had survival value, like escaping a fire with a wet cloth over the mouth, and was, to the connoisseur, a small, gritting but soul-satisfying victory over the industrial revolution.
The railroad had one virtue: trains ran fast over a hundred miles of flat, almost waterless plain. We joined the Rio Grande at San Marcial and from there on the view was more various; by then the evening sun lay low, and just the aspect of the river diminished the heat. By Belen, where assorted revelers clambered aboard, destination the big city, I was no longer sweating, and when I swung off the train into the twinkling lights of Albuquerque at dusk I was almost cool. I hired a taxi and checked into the Bench Club, thinking that Bryan Talbot’s jury was out, and telephoned Rosemary. She had not dined. Politely, she invited me to chicken salad and iced tea. Her roommate was away for the weekend. I accepted with reserved delight and solemn protestations of continuing respect. It was an ignominious conversation; I was reduced to a Reverend Mr. Collins, gravely informing his Elizabeth, “And now nothing remains for me but to assure you in the most animated language of the violence of my affection.” But I slicked back my hair and adjusted my cravat and stepped nervously into the moonless purple night. I walked—it was a mile or so—searching for a florist’s, but none was open. I was suddenly very tired. This would be a weary, stale, flat and unprofitable evening, and as I walked a couplet—from what? I never knew—circled endlessly through my mind:
If a man be so spent
That his wife keepeth Lent …
If a man be so spent
That his wife keepeth Lent …
If a man be so spent
That his wife keepeth Lent …
Rosemary was born on a farm, not even a small ranch, not far from Athens, Texas. The Bergquists were hard-working, God-fearing sons of the soil, et cetera, pious Lutherans whose existence was simply bleak. The family had originated, as far as they knew, near a place called Umeå in northern Sweden, not quite Lapland though I had my little joke about that too, which annoyed Rosemary. They did not dance or play cards and refrained from laughter on Sunday. God knows what they did: they worked, they set their lips to keep from pestering Jehovah, they procreated, they read the Bible. The farm barely kept them alive, though they were never in deep debt. Hearing Rosemary talk about it, I congealed, turned away sick and rebellious from the aridity, the grubbing toil, the dry sweat that defined the silent, aching, gloomy Bergquists, whose salvation had never come in this world. Rosemary was born in 1900 and survived, the family’s one triumph over a grudging, almost savage, Nature. But the old man wore himself out and ground to a halt in 1905; Mrs. Bergquist found work with the church in Athens and survived ten years more. It was the church that took care of Rosemary from then on, seeing her through high school and into a denominational college, where she took care of small children, waited on table, and made beds in return for her education. A bachelor of arts in 1921, she noted opportunities in Albuquerque—found a squib in a teachers’ magazine—and came west to make her fortune. She was highly moral and untouched by human hands.
I met her in 1922, eight or nine months before the beginning of this story. Her eyes were large, brown and direct under brows slightly darker than her hair. Her nose was not neat and Grecian but a trifle too big. Her lips were full and her teeth regular and white. When she moved I saw that liquefaction of her clothes. What a foolish catalogue! I noticed none of that at the time, and knew only that some unformed lust for utter perfection lurking within me as within every man needed no longer be blind and shapeless; here was its object and its fulfillment.
All right: drivel. A purplish way of saying that I saw a woman I wanted immediately, and that in ten seconds I had stripped her and bedded her and taken ten thousand meals with her and grown old happily. What the hell: better that than marrying for money or to win a competition or to make an advantageous alliance. Men marry for hundreds of reasons and I did not know then and do not know now any better reason than to make of life a fruitful orgy. The day I met her I asked her to dinner and she blushed and did nervous things with her hands and said, “Well, I don’t know,” and at first I thought she was making fun of me with her voice, imitating one of her eight-year-old charges. When I realized that she was not, that she was a natural chirper, I just grinned. I would not have cared if she had bellowed like a bull. In the end I took her to dinner and then to see The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse with Rudolph Valentino. I kissed her goodnight; that was easy because it was unthinkable, and she had no notion of what I was about to do until my lips were touching hers. She pulled away horrified and squeaked “Judge!” and ran inside. For all I knew she would lie awake all night waiting for labor pains. I was very happy and sang a bit on my way to the hotel, no words, just that mandolin serenade from Don Giovanni. I had seen it in Paris, only once, and loved it. My French friends told me it was a wretched performance, and I felt sorry for them. That night in Albuquerque I pitied them even more: I had found my Elvira and no one else had, ever. If I had asked her to marry me in those first weeks—but I did not, and then I discovered that she was not perfect, and neither was I. I was so desperately in love with that unformed image of utter perfection that I became petulant, and a pompous masculine surliness cankered my heart. I see all that now. Now I am over seventy. You will not understand why I bundled my mother into an automobile a month later for a two-week visit to Ignacio’s. Nor did I at the time. The answer was there, but it wanted finding.
Rosemary lived on the ground floor of a three-story building. Two more teachers occupied the second floor and the landlady, a widow, the third. Rosemary and her roommate had two bedrooms, a living room, and a kitchen with a gas range and an icebox. The furniture was all horsehair-and-maple but the draperies were bright, yellow and red, and the living-room floor was covered by a scattering of pretty Navajo rugs. The girls did not keep liquor or cigarettes, but a large and misshapen fired-clay ashtray announced their emancipation. There were some Audubon prints on the walls, some Navajo knickknacks, a clipper ship under full sail.
I stood outside the building for a moment, warring with an odd reluctance to see her. I was safe on the sidewalk, and perhaps if I did not enter I would never learn the worst. But native optimism, and even a point of dry curiosity, carried me forward. I rang the bell, and she came immediately to let me in. She was smiling. “Hello,” she said.
“Hello.” I closed the door. “Why the grin? I expected cold silence. Rosemary all in black, buttoned up to the chin.” She wore an Indian skirt, imitation buckskin, and a light green blouse. On her feet were moccasins, deerhide, soft soles.
“Now don’t be intense,” she said. “Please?”
“All right.” I smiled. “I tried to find flowers for you but the stores were closed.”
“That’s better. You’re forgiven.”
“Will you kiss me?”
“Of course,” but it was only a meeting of lips; it asserted nothing. I sat neutrally on the sofa and looked down at magazines: Scribner’s, McClure’s, Vanity Fair, The Delineator.
Rosemary sat in an armchair, smiling, politely, faintly; head high, eyes cool.
Soon I said, “Let’s eat. I’m hungry. It’s a long, dull trip.”
“It’s a long, dull trip the other way too,” she said, and I grew even more neutral. Would she have preferred that I come here each weekend? To pace the streets of Albuquerque? To watch Tom Mix and take ceremonious leave at her doorstep? She was unreasonable.
I followed her to the kitchen. The table was set. She served chicken salad, went back to chip ice, poured tea. The kitchen walls were white and the light bulb overhead was naked. In the flat brightness flaws sprang out: a tiny mole on her neck, a dry upper lip, a faint wrinkle beneath each eye. But delights too: shadows on the pale green blouse. She wore scent; weak, trailing, it called in whispers. “Now you eat,” she said, and smiled again. “You just have to let me be a woman.”
