Читать книгу Mortal Sins - Penn Williamson - Страница 9

Chapter Four

The first time Maeve Rourke looked into the eyes of the man who would become her lover, it was over the prostrate body of the Virgin Mary.

Later, she would decide that the moment must have seduced her with its whimsy. For until then she had always arranged her life as it ought to be: laying it out for herself on a road, straight and well marked by signposts, so easy to follow. So true. She was nineteen that day her own heart played a trick on her, teaching her that it had a free will and a sense of direction all its own.

She had been six when she decided that she had better plan her life very carefully, otherwise it was likely to go seriously awry. She’d lived in Ireland then, and though she had grown to womanhood holding little of that time in her heart, she could always remember every warp and weave of one particular morning.

In her memories, turf smoke from the fire fills the tiny shibeen, with its solid mud walls and thatched roof. She sits on a stool with a bowl of potato gruel in her lap, gruel so thin she can see through it easier than she can see through the water that collected in the rain barrel in the yard. Her da lies sprawled on his tailbone before the hearth, his mouth pulling on a jar of poitín, and in her memories the harsh, peaty smell of it bites at her nose.

And always, in her memories, her mem shuffles across the beaten dirt floor in her bare feet and opens the door, so that sunlight spills inside the windowless hut, warm and white. Chasing out the darkness and the smoke, and the other, brutal memories of the night before.

Her mother lived her life in the dark. It weighed on her soul like a pile of heavy stones put there one by one. Even at six, Maeve could mark the way the stones had mounted. One for every day black crepe hung over the door for another babe born and buried. One for every day her mother dug for potatoes in a stubble field, heavy-bellied with another child that would die. One for every winter night when no turf burned on the fire, and the wind blew cold across the bleak bogs and the black hills. Stone by stone for those other nights when Da, lying on the pile of straw in the corner, rutted and grunted over her mother’s body, and her mother wept.

Stone by stone, one at a time, and so her mother was always seeking the sunlight, even on the coldest of days.

But that morning Da had wanted none of the sun. He stared at the wash of light that poured through the door, his mouth hanging slack, his red eyes blinking.

“Shut the bloody door,” her da had said, only that, but her mem obeyed with shoulders bowed and her mouth pulled in tight. In the instant before the shibeen was plunged once more into smoky murkiness, Maeve had been looking at her father’s big hand where it was wrapped around his jar of poitín. At the way the wiry red hair curled over his thick knuckles and the dark freckles on his skin might have been splashes of her mother’s blood.

And she thought, I will never marry a redheaded, freckled-face man with hands as big and heavy and thick as peat bricks that are always ready and willing to be made into fists.

No, she hadn’t really thought such a thing, not in concrete words like that—she had been too young. Yet, still, the promise had been made to herself that morning, arriving full-blown in her heart. Even then she had known the strength of her will, and the shape of it.

She was never going to live her mother’s life.

On the day Maeve Rourke first looked into the eyes of the man who would become her lover, she had come into the St. Louis Cathedral to get out of the bruising summer sun. Four years already gone from Ireland, four summers lived in New Orleans, and she still hadn’t become used to the terrible heat.

She sat down on a pew near the altar of the Most Blessed Virgin of the Rosary not to pray, but because her feet were hurting like the very devil. She did say a couple of Hail Marys, though, as penance for what she was about to do. No sooner was the last amen past her lips than she was unhooking her stiff new high-button shoes and wrenching them off, along with her black lisle stockings.

She wriggled her bare toes as she leaned over to rub the ache out of her blisters, and saw a pair of plaster feet hanging off the end of the pew in front of hers.

She half stood up and peered over the pew’s high round wooden back. The Most Blessed Virgin of the Rosary lay stretched out the length of the seat, as if she had just climbed down off her marble-slabbed altar to take a little nap.

A heel scraped on stone, and Maeve looked up. A man stood in the aisle and he, too, was staring at the statue lying on the pew. He raised his head, and their eyes met, and they shared a slow smile.

Maeve’s gaze fell back down to the prostrate virgin. Her white plaster hands were folded in prayer on her plaster chest, her plaster blue eyes stared up at the vaulted ceiling. She had, Maeve noticed now that she was getting such a good up-close look at her, a rather pink and prissy plaster mouth, but then she had probably never suffered from blisters.

The thought nearly startled a laugh out of Maeve. She bit her lip and swallowed hard. She pressed her hands together as if in prayer and covered her face.

The man in the aisle did laugh, trying at the last moment to turn the noise into a cough. Maeve snorted.

She snatched up her shoes and stockings and her shopping basket, and she ran, banging her hip on the pew arm so hard she would find a bruise a couple of days later and wonder how it had come to be there. She was laughing so by the time she burst back out into the sun-drenched square that she couldn’t stand up anymore, and she had to sit down on a wrought-iron bench and grab at the stitch in her side.

He followed her out; well, she had known he would. His face was flushed and slightly damp. His eyes, looking down at her where she sat, gasping, on the bench, were bright with his own laugh tears. It hadn’t been that funny, surely, the sight of the Virgin Mary taking a nap on one of the pews. Maeve couldn’t imagine why they both had carried on laughing so, two strangers together.

He was still smiling as he waved a hand back at the cathedral. “How do you suppose she …?”

Maeve shook her head and pressed her lips together to keep from smiling back at him. “Oh, the saints do preserve us. It must’ve been the sight of my bare feet what did her in.”

He laughed and that set her off again too, and their laughter mixed with the jingle of streetcar bells, the ring of mule hooves on cobblestones, and the echoing booms of ships unloading bananas at the wharf.

When their laughter died, it seemed all the world hushed as well. The quiet that followed held a weight to it that came from the intimacy the shared moment had stirred.

She slanted a look up at him. He was jauntily dressed in a tight-buttoned linen jacket with a high collar. He had the look of the Creole about him, in his dark hair and eyes, and in the way he held himself—old blood, old money, old name.

She had chosen a bench next to a blooming magnolia tree, and the air around them was cloyingly sweet. Beneath her bare feet, the stones of the square burned hot from the sun. She liked the feel of it, soothing and exciting both at once. “You wouldn’t happen to be having a button hook along with you?” she said.

He actually patted down his pockets as if there was a chance he might find one, then he shook his head, smiling.

She smiled back at him this time, and longer than she should have. “Never you mind. I’ve blisters on me blisters, as ’tis.”

She stood up, smoothing down the crisp white apron she’d put on that morning for going to the French Market. In just that instant her smile had gone. She felt a scratchiness in her throat now, and her nose had grown pinched. She was ridiculously close to tears for no reason she could name, and he was looking at her as if he knew what she was thinking, which was so unfair since her thoughts were a mystery to herself.

“I’ve my shopping still to do,” she said.

He tipped his straw hat at her, but instead of turning away he stepped closer. So close his shoulder nearly brushed hers, and she could see the smile creases at the corners of his mouth and a little mole the size of a cinder above the flush of color along his cheekbone.

“May I come along?” he said. “I can carry your shoes for you.”

He held out his hand. It was a beautiful hand, slender and long-fingered, and he wore a wedding ring. But then her finger sported a ring as well, and he could see it plain since she’d had to take off her gloves to unbutton her shoes. She thought she would tell him no thank you and send him on his way.

She put her shoes into his hand.

The sky above them was hard and bled nearly white by the relentless summer sun. They walked together through the market, beneath the shade of the scrolled colonnades, past crates of cantaloupes and strawberries and plump Creole tomatoes. Past shallots hung in bouquets and big silver bells of garlic. Past bins of shrimps on ice and pyramids of oysters and latanier baskets of blue-clawed crabs. She carried her own little shopping basket over her arm, but he walked beside her, and so she was too flustered to buy anything.

His presence beside her disturbed her, and not because of the wrongness of the moment—her, a married woman, walking barefoot through the market with a strange man. He disturbed her because he made her want something from him, although what that something was she couldn’t even formulate into a thought, let alone put into words.

He didn’t cast quick looks at her, the way she was doing with him; he studied her openly. She knew what he was, and she knew what he wanted.

They came to the end of the colonnade, where a Negro woman sat on the sidewalk balancing a big basket of rice fritters on her head. “Bels calas,” she cried with the voice of an opera singer. “Bels calas, tout chauds.”

He bought them all a fritter to eat, even the cala woman herself. Maeve thanked him and smiled, and then as if he’d only just thought of it, as if it hadn’t mattered before this, he asked her what her name was. She stumbled over the giving of it as if wasn’t really hers, or shouldn’t have been.

“Maeve,” he repeated after her, rolling her name around on his tongue as if tasting it. “How lovely.”

She felt another strange smile come over her face at the compliment.

Out on the river a tugboat tooted its horn, and a great flock of seagulls rose up from the market’s tiled roof. Together they tilted back their heads and watched the birds fly off between the spires of the cathedral. She thought she should tell him that she had to go back home now, that she was late as it was.

“Some days, after I’ve done with my shopping,” she said, “I go for a walk along the levee.”

The levee had always fascinated her, from the first moment she’d set foot in New Orleans. From the road you could look up at the tall grass bank and see masts and smokestacks floating disembodied across the sky, as if the sky itself were a river.

They walked along the spine of the levee for a while and then sat beneath the lime green shade of some willow trees, among a splattering of buttercups. He had taken off his fancy jacket for her to sit on, so then he rolled up his shirtsleeves and rested his forearms on his bent knees. He had taken off his hat, too, and it dangled from his long fingers.

The sheen of his hair was like the purple and black colors of a crow’s wing. His mouth looked soft, and full enough to belong to a woman.

She looked away from him, at the gray mud banks of the river. The batture was covered with hundreds of little mud chimneys, which were built by mud-divers—those ugly, crusty bugs that turned into locusts and made so much noise she couldn’t sleep at night. Some people had fashioned houses out of driftwood among the cane brakes and the mud-divers’ chimneys. It seemed a whimsical way to live, in those driftwood houses. She would never have chosen such a way for herself.

His voice broke into her thoughts, asking her what she saw when she looked at the river.

And she said, without thinking, “It’s a mud-diver’s heaven that I see.”

He threw back his head and laughed. She stared at his throat, at the way the strong muscles moved and the sweat glistened on his skin. His skin wasn’t olive like so many Creoles; it was deeply golden, the color of apple cider in the sun.

She liked it that she had made him laugh, and when he was done laughing he told her what he saw when he looked at the river. His words sounded like poetry; she didn’t try to make any sense of them.

When he asked about her husband and children, she told him about her Mike and their two boys as if she felt no shame. She knew what he was, all right, and what he wanted from her, and still she was letting him steal her innocence and her honor, though he had yet to touch her.

He said, “My wife and I are about to have our first. I hope for a son, of course.” He smiled, and his teeth were white and even in the dark gold of his face. “But I will settle for what she gives me.”

Maeve wrapped her skirt tighter around her bent legs. She thought she ought to get up and wish him a good day and walk away. She thought that, but she never did it.

By the time she got home, she was so late for her baby’s feeding that her breasts ached and were leaking milk. Still she lingered on the stoop a moment. The sky had darkened with rain clouds, but the house glowed golden as if it had saved up the morning’s sunshine just for her. The red bougainvillea that clung to the trellis over her front door trembled in the wind.

Her Mike made a good living as a city policeman and he was proud of how he had provided for her. He had provided her with a home, one-half of a shotgun double. He had provided her with shoes so new they gave her blisters, and a colored girl named Tulie to come help with the cooking and the cleaning and to watch her babes for her while she went walking the levee with another man.

In her hand she carried a key, and it pressed into her flesh like a brand. A key to a house on Conti Street. She thought she ought to have thrown it in his face. She thought she ought to go around back now and throw it into the cistern, where it would be lost forever.

She slid the key deep into her pocket.

She walked through the house and back into the kitchen. Her firstborn son, Paulie, had gotten into the dish cupboard and was banging pot lids together. Somehow Tulie’s new baby was managing to sleep through the racket in a basket, which had been set on top of the icebox. A pot of red beans bubbled on the stove.

Tulie sat at the pine table with its blue-checked oilcloth and the yellow crock of lard and the shaker of Morton salt that always sat in the center of it. The girl was nursing Daman for her, and her baby son’s pink lips were pulling on the girl’s nipple. His tiny hand grabbed at her breast, which was round and brown and soft, like a baked apple.

“I’m that sorry I’m late,” Maeve said. “I hope he wasn’t fussing too badly.”

Tulie smiled. She had a big gap between her front teeth, and one day she had shown Maeve how she could whistle through the hole like a boy. And she had beautiful dark eyes, like wells, that always seemed to have been carefully emptied before she raised her thick-fringed lashes to let you look into them. Maeve thought the slaves had probably met their masters’ stares with such an emptiness in their eyes.

“Now, never you mind takin’ your time, Miss Maeve,” Tulie was saying. “I’s milk enough for both our boys.”

“I went to the cathedral,” Maeve said. “And then I went for a walk on the levee. In my bare feet.” She held up her shoes so that Tulie could see. She had almost forgotten them, almost left them lying there on the levee. He had run back to the willows for her, to get them.

Tulie smiled to see the shoes, but whatever she thought of them, she kept it to herself.

Maeve’s breasts were aching something fierce now and leaking milk. She wanted to take her son back from Tulie, to hold his weight heavy in her arms and feel his suckling, to breathe in his baby smell of milk and talcum and soft, moist flesh. Yet she stood there, saying nothing, watching the way his lips moved in and out as he nursed at Tulie’s breast, how his little fist clenched and unclenched. Paulie took after her, but Day was all his father’s son: fair, with that ready, dimpled smile. His eyes, too, came from his father. Midnight blue, people said they were, though she’d never understood the expression, since every midnight sky she’d ever seen had been black as pitch.

Later that evening, when her Mike came home for supper, she saw how his eyes were very nearly the same color as his policeman’s uniform, and she wondered why she hadn’t noticed such a thing before.

As she set the plate of red beans and rice and fried sac-à-lait down in front of him, she told him she had gone for a walk on the levee. She asked him what he saw when he looked at the river.

Mike Rourke shook his head at her. “What kind of a question is that?” he said around a mouthful of beans. “I see water. Muddy water.”

She stared back at him and she hated herself for what she was thinking, what she was feeling. He was a good provider and a good man, kind to her most of the time and affectionate with his sons. He was always touching the boys, cuddling up to them.

She turned away from him without another word and went into the bedroom. She lay down on the bed but got right back up again. She went into the bathroom, ran cold water in the sink, and splashed it on her face.

Mike’s shaving things were laid out neatly on the shelf above the sink: the porcelain mug, the badger-hair lather brush, his warranted Perfection razor.

She stared at her husband’s razor and thought of how she would come awake sometimes at night with her husband sleeping heavy beside her, and she would feel such an aching, echoing emptiness inside. Hot tears would overflow her eyes and roll down the sides of her face, into her ears, and she would wonder when Mike Rourke had become, with no warning and with no reason, this thing to run away from, like her da.

She picked up her husband’s razor, hefting it in her hand as if to feel its weight. Her mother had killed herself with Da’s razor. Mike had told her once that most people didn’t do it right—they cut across instead of up. But her mem had known how to do it.

Maeve pulled open the razor and ran her finger along the blade. Her skin split open, and the pain shocked her, and the way the blood welled up so fast and dark. The razor slipped from her hand, clattering on the tile floor.

She looked into the mirror above the sink and saw a strange woman with dark hair and dark eyes and a white face. She said the strange woman’s name the way he had said it at the market that morning, rolling it around on her tongue.

“Maeve … Maeve … Maeve …”

She walked into the kitchen with blood dripping from the end of her finger.

“Sweet Jesus!” Mike shouted when he saw her, jumping up from the table, snatching his napkin off his neck, wrapping it around the small, bleeding cut. “What have you done?”

“I wanted to see what it would feel like,” she said, but that wasn’t exactly true. She had wanted to see if she could feel it at all.

He stared at her. He looked frightened.

“It hurts,” she said.

“Aw, darlin’.” He tried to kiss her, but she jerked away from him. For a moment she thought she might retch. “I want to be alone,” she said.

She went back into the bedroom and lay down on their bed. She brought her knees up to her chest. She took the key out of her pocket and pressed it between her palms, and then she pressed her clasped hands between her bent knees. She thought she would get up later and go out into the yard and throw the key into the cistern, where it would be lost forever.