Outside the saloon a storm was raging, echoing the turbulence within as Veronica, changing Second John’s dirty diapers on a wooden cardtable, got set upon by all the barroom rowdies offended by her little boy’s childish antics with his pistol. They were both sprayed with beer and pelted with cigar butts and peanut shells and candy wrappers and lashed with a thunderous barrage of uncouth insults, mostly having to do with the contents of his diaper but some calling his origins into question and others deriding her exposed backside, which she couldn’t help. It wasn’t fair. “If I had an ass like that, I’d sell advertising space!” “The last time I saw an ass like that, it was pulling a plow!” That didn’t stop them from attacking it, she could feel them crowding up behind to make painful use of it as Maynard so often did, and she certainly didn’t like it, but what could she do, she had both hands full and open safety pins in her mouth and her baby was crying: “I been caught with my diapers down, Ma! You gotta hold them off any way you can!” The few gas lamps he hadn’t shot down were swinging on their chains as though buffeted within by the storm without, sending shadows flying about like wheeling bats, and tables and chairs were crashing as the men clambered forward, their vile threats and humorless laughter like a hot beery breath on the back of her neck. Though she shielded her son from the worst of it, they were both being drenched in buckets of beer, her backside their last line of defense, all too easily breached. There was nothing to do finally but pick the baby up, dirty bottom or no, and make a run for it. But she could find no way out. All the exits were blocked. The men surrounded them, brandishing hard penises and baring their tobacco-stained teeth as they closed in. The saloon seemed on fire from the dancing light of the swinging lamps. “We’re done for, Ma!” Second John cried, clinging painfully to her breasts. “Do something!” He was slippery and getting heavy, she almost couldn’t hold him, and the smoke from his cigar was making her nose sting and her eyes water. Then, just as she was about to collapse from exhaustion and despair, First John’s wife came in with a fresh diaper, made the men put their penises back and return to their tables, settled the lamps down, took the baby’s cigar away and threw it into a cuspidor, cleaned his bottom, gave him a change, and wrapped him up in a towel the barman gave her. “Come on, now, let’s send him back where he came from,” she smiled, and led Veronica out the door to a windy railway platform, where a train was just pulling in through the thunderstorm. “I didn’t know the train still came through here,” Ronnie said, putting her breasts back inside. “You have to know where to find it.” Her friend handed the baby to the conductor, who tossed it behind him, and the train pulled out, seeming to pull the storm away with it as it went, and Ronnie started to cry. “It’s all right now,” her old classmate said gently, helping her up out of the lawnchair. “It’s letting up. You can go home now.” “I’m sorry,” she sniffled. “I’m afraid I split the seat …” “It’s not your fault. It’s been left out too many times in the rain.” “No, I meant—” “Here, you’re completely soaked, poor thing. I’ve brought you your nightgown, which is dry at least.” She took off the ruined linen dress and dried herself with the towel offered her and pulled on the nightgown and thanked her hostess for the lovely party, begging her pardon for having stayed so late, then stumbled out by way of the darkened driveway and headed wearily home through the wet streets in the lightless early dawn.
Though there was no sign in the sky that the black stormy night had ended, Barnaby, sitting alone by his window watching the wet orange glow that had taken his daughter away get swallowed up in the darkness, knew by his own knowing that dawn had arrived. All night, she’d been at his bedside, listening to his bitter tale of duplicity and betrayal, but then the glow had appeared which, even in his crackbrain confusions, he knew to be a fire, though he’d thought it was his own house burning, the one they’d all lived in when she was a little girl and Audrey was young and beautiful. He’d worried aloud about Audrey’s safety, her life might be in danger, and his daughter had said, yes, she’d better go see, but not to worry, she’d be back soon, get some rest. “Be careful!” he’d rasped as she left, though he couldn’t be sure she’d heard him. “I love you!” Had it really been his daughter? Maybe, maybe not. In retrospect, she’d looked a little like the resident nurse, at least when she departed, if not when she arrived. He’d staggered to his chair by the rain-lashed window to watch the lightning explode and the rain whip past like crashing tides and the fire slowly die and to wait for his daughter’s return, though now he no longer expected her. What a night. He was a crazy old buzzard, like the lady said. Thought he could change what could not be changed, a delusion he shared with builders the world over. He’d found the gun he’d intended for saner purposes and shot up the place, lucky not to have killed someone. Or unlucky. Though he now knew that the woman who had left with Mitch last night was not Audrey, he still felt deceived, certain now that the heart of the woman whose hand he’d won had never been won at all. That silly woman who’d pretended to be her knew more than she knew. Audrey, too, had only pretended to be Audrey, or at least the Audrey who’d lived with him. The knowledge saddened him and added to the sorrow and emptiness that engulfed him in these rare dawn moments of lucidity, but he knew it was more his fault than hers. He the builder who had not built well. That house deserved to burn. The only light on the horizon, now gone, too. He imagined the charred ruins: his hopes. His daughter wandering through them, grieving: his legacy. He wandered there, too — tottered and shambled, rather, all grace vanished — and he tried to speak to her but could not. Though he could almost reach out and touch her, there was a distance between them that could not be bridged, as between past and present, or between part and whole. He shuffled through a door, thinking about his burning lumberyard. The waste, the waste! He looked at his image in a mirror and was not surprised to find it broken up into ill-fitting fragments. He had more than two eyes, which accounted for his lack of focus, a mouth whose parts did not all join up. Of course, it was the mirror that was broken, though it cast back a truer image than when it was whole. He leaned forward, bracing himself on the sink. It was crunched in the middle with cracks radiating outwards like a spiderweb. Had he tried to drive a nail in it? Or had Audrey?
Across town, Audrey — or Opal, rather: that dangerous game was over — had also, as though in mirror image of that broken man, been sitting sleeplessly by the window, watching the glow of the fire fade in the sudden crashing downpour, the downpour itself slowing fading as though dying with the fire. It was dawn, but a dawn that shed no light. The only light shed had been shed within and that in the blackest depths of the night when that old fool, who was her annoying husband and also an old family friend she hardly knew, started shooting at her while she was sitting on the toilet. As Audrey, she knew then that, as Opal, she had been her disappointed husband’s second choice, not merely when he’d married her, but for all the years thereafter while Audrey was still alive. Had she and Mitch consummated their affair? Even as Audrey, whose memories of her past romances were suspiciously dim, she could not be sure, although, as Opal, she was certain they had had a fling of some kind even if nothing came of it, Audrey being, for all her harsh banter, something of a tease and more insecure than Opal had ever supposed. But it didn’t matter what they’d actually done. Audrey had married Barnaby, perhaps to avenge an imagined wrong, or a real wrong, for Mitch had always shamelessly played the field (he had?), and Mitch had replied in kind, their marriages a private dialogue between them, their partners little more than analogues of spite. So shattering had this revelation been, so complex and disturbing her feelings about it, she’d not even been able at first to rise from the stool when Mitch turned up at Barnaby’s door. For, as Audrey, she now loved Mitch in a way that, as Opal, she never could nor ever would, while, as Opal, she resented his intrusion upon this revelatory drama, still unfolding, and at the same time was grateful to him for his timely rescue from a crazed old man. With whom, however, she now felt a deep bond not unlike that of an understanding lover, or at least the best of friends, and for whom she feared more than for her would-be rescuer when the gun went off. Which startled her and made her jump up off the seat, for, as Opal, she was embarrassed to be caught so compromised, even though she somehow felt it was she who was catching Mitch with Audrey, who wished to be caught in dishabille, so to speak, by an impetuous lover whom she would rebuke even as he burst in and laid eyes upon her, refusing his advances in spite of the gallantry for which Opal was so grateful, while gazing directly in his eyes as she slowly pulled her panties on, letting him know clearly what it was she was refusing him, even as Opal pulled them on with modest haste, too flustered even to remember to flush. All of which made her start to cry, whether as Opal or Audrey, she wasn’t sure, and when she opened the bathroom door and saw them both standing there, her husbands, or her lovers, one of them with a gun in his hand, the other one tottering as though he’d been shot, it was all so mixed up that she was suddenly terror-stricken, and all atremble, ran over to embrace one of them, but she didn’t know which until Mitch opened up his arms (“You all right, hon?”) and then, thank goodness, she had no choice. Mitch had wanted to call the police, but she’d dissuaded him, saying, since no one was hurt, they should let John handle it, and she’d begged him to take her home (to Opal’s home), she couldn’t bear to see another soul tonight, if he wanted to go back to the party he could go without her if he liked, and then, looking as though she’d just rebuffed him (who had he thought she was?), he’d done just that, or gone somewhere, at dawn gone still.