“Charlotte,” Charlotte said. “Her name is Charlotte.”
“Carlota,” the doctor said, and made the sign of the Cross before he signed the certificate.
Carlota Douglas was buried in a short coffin which the doctor’s brother-in-law would not close until Charlotte had inspected his work. He was very proud of the work he had done on the baby. He was very grateful to have the job and he wanted Charlotte to be pleased. He had wrapped the baby in a lavender nylon shawl and put a bow in her hair and tiny red shoes on her feet. Charlotte had looked once and then away. She had paid the doctor and his brother-in-law in American ten-dollar bills. Before she left Mérida she called Leonard in San Francisco and told him that the baby was dead.
“I’ll come get you if you want,” Leonard had said.
“Whatever you want,” Charlotte had said.
“You have to say.”
“They put shoes on her feet. Red shoes.”
“It’s over. Forget it. You never should have seen it. You never should have.”
“Warren’s not responsible. For my coming down here. If that’s what you think.”
“No,” Leonard had said. “That’s not what I think.”
“I think I better call you back later,” Charlotte had said, but she had not called Leonard back later.
She had not called Leonard back later and she had not called Warren at all.
In the evening before the plane left for Antigua she had gone back to the cemetery and tried to find the baby’s grave but she could not. It was not a large cemetery but there seemed a large number of small fresh unmarked graves. She left the bougainvillea she had torn from the wall of the hotel on one of them.
FOUR
1
FEVERS RELAPSE HERE.
Bacteria proliferate.
Termites eat the presidential palace, rust eats my Oldsmobile.
Twice a year the sun is exactly vertical, and nothing casts a shadow.
The bite of one fly deposits an egg which in its pupal stage causes human flesh to suppurate.
The bite of another deposits a larval worm which three years later surfaces on and roams the human eyeball.
Everything here changes and nothing appears to. There is no perceptible wheeling of the stars in their courses, no seasonal wane in the length of the days or the temperature of air or earth or water, only the amniotic stillness in which transformations are constant. As elsewhere, certain phases in these transformations are called by certain names (“Olds-mobile,” say, and “rust”), but the emotional field of such names tends to weaken as one leaves the temperate zones. At the equator the names are noticeably arbitrary. A banana palm is no more or less “alive” than its rot.
Is it.
I tried to tell Charlotte this but once again Charlotte did not quite see my point.
Charlotte did not take the equatorial view.
Of anything that had happened.
Charlotte did not even remember much of what had happened during the six months between leaving California with Warren and taking the baby to Mérida. She remembered certain days and nights very clearly but she did not remember their sequence. Someone had shuffled her memory. Certain cards were lost. She and Warren had been in the South. She knew that much. They had been in New Orleans a while in January and February, and then again when it was hot and raining and the baby was showing, she remembered that. She remembered arriving at the New Orleans airport. The airport must have been in January because the second time they arrived in New Orleans, the time it was hot and raining and the baby was showing and the girl was with them, they had not flown in but driven in, from Greenville. They had eaten some crab bisque once in Greenville. They had made that crab bisque in Greenville. She had bought the crabs and Warren had shown her how to make the bisque.
“You’re ruining it,” she had said. “You’re putting in too much salt.”
“You don’t know anything about it.”
“Taste it, it’s brine.”
“Taste it yourself,” Warren had said, and pushed the wooden spoon in her face. The soup had gone up her nose and she had choked and he had hit her between the shoulder blades until she stopped. “I never cared for anybody like I cared for you but you never knew your ass about food.”
Everyone else had liked that crab bisque but they had stayed too long in Greenville, they had stayed too long everywhere. After-three-days-guests-like-fish-begin-to-stink. She had heard that all over the South with Warren. After three weeks of hearing it from Howard Hollerith in Greenville she and Warren had moved from Howard Hollerith’s place to a motel in town near the levee but Warren had kept on seeing Howard Hollerith’s wife. And Howard Hollerith’s girl too. The wife and the girl. “I want them to do it together,” Warren said to Charlotte. The girl went to New Orleans with them.
But Greenville was May, June. She knew that Greenville was May or June because Birmingham was July.
The Mountain Brook Country Club in Birmingham was definitely July.
The New Orleans airport had been January.
Warren had been drunk and had twisted her arm behind her back at the Hertz counter.
“I don’t have to be here,” she had said. “I’m going home.”
“Go home,” Warren had said. “I’ll send you home. I’ll ask Porter for the fare, go into debt and send you home. How do you think you’re going home without sending me into debt.”
“The way I came,” Charlotte said, and Warren had hit her.
“It’s all right,” Charlotte kept saying to the Hertz girl, and “No. Don’t call. Please don’t.” The Hertz girl was calling the airport police and Warren was buying a postcard and mailing it to Leonard. The postcard showed a Confederate flag and a mule and the legend PUT YOUR HEART IN DIXIE OR GET YOUR ASS OUT. “It’s all right,” Charlotte said to the airport police. “It’s nothing, it’s personal, it’s all right.”
Delta had lost her bags but it did not seem to matter.
“You forgot your map,” the Hertz girl said.
“Lower that white-trash voice,” Warren said.
In the Hertz car they had driven from the airport to Porter’s new house in Metairie and it began to appear that Leonard had been right again. Porter did not appear to be dying but Warren did. Porter told her that. Porter told her that while Warren was upstairs calling a girl he knew in Savannah and telling her to come down. Porter hoped that Charlotte would understand why she and Warren could not stay with him. Porter hoped that she would not think it inhospitable for him to have made a reservation for her and Warren at the Pontchartrain. By the way the reservation would be in her name because the last time Warren had stayed at the Pontchartrain there had been a little unpleasantness, Porter would not say what.
“Warren doesn’t show his best side as a houseguest, Charlotte, you recognize that. If Warren has to leave us, I want to recall his many virtues only.”
“What do you mean, leave us.”
“About time he came home, stopped catting around New York. ‘Dying Is But Going Home,’ am I right? Ever hear that?”
“What are you talking about, dying.”
“Used to see it on gravestones. ‘Dying Is But Going Home.’ ‘The Angels Called Him,’ that was popular too. At least around here it was popular. I don’t know about out there.”
“You said if Warren ‘has to leave us,’ Porter, what did you mean?”
“Don’t bother yourself, Charlotte. I’m going to persuade Warren to let Ping Walker have a look, you remember Ping, Lady Duvall’s boy? Lived up east a while? Came back down home around the time Lady married her fancy man?”