“As you know,” I said, “I grew up very familiar with the seeds of death; I had a special taste for them always. But when I heard about Gertrude something happened. It was as if I had struck a new variety. Her camel’s-hair coat, her pink mules, her cuticle sticks scattered on the floor, her dark glasses left lying on the unmade bed in the U-Drive-Inn, I saw the whole thing, for that moment understood her poor strangled solitude, understood exactly what it is like to be one of the unwanted dead. Suddenly Gertrude and I were being washed together in the same warm tide. But in our grief we were casting up only a single shadow— you.”
Quickly, artfully, I gave the bosun’s mate a shove with my sea-going hip and, heavy as I was, stood hovering, sagging in front of Cassandra. I held her, with a moistened finger I touched her dry mouth, I raised her chin — unsmiling dimple, unblemished curve of her little proud motherhood — I watched her gray eyes and I waited, waited for the sound of the voice which was always a whisper and which I had never failed to hear. And now the eyes were tuned, the lips were unsealed — moving, opening wide enough to admit a straw — I was flooded with the sound of the whisper and sight of a tiny golden snake wriggling up the delicate cleft of her throat — still no smile, never a smile — and curling in a circle to pulse, to die, in the shallow white nest of her temple.
“I think you would like to know,” she began, whispering, spacing the words, “you would like to know what I did with the guitar. Well, I burned it. Pixie and I burned it together.” And in her whispered seriousness, the hush of her slow enunciation, I heard then the snapping of flames, the tortured singing of those red-hot strings. Even as I dropped her hand, let go of her waist, brought together my fat fingers where the Good Conduct Ribbon like a dazzling insect marked the spot of my heart in all that wrinkled and sullied field of white, even as I struggled with the tiny clasp — pinprick, drop of blood, another stain — and fastened the ribbon to the muslin of her square-collared rumpled frock, even while I admired my work and then took her into my arms again, hugging, kissing, protecting her always and always, and even while I gave her the Good Conduct Medal — she the one who deserved it; I, never — and shook long and happily in my relief: through all this hectic and fragile moment I distinctly heard the gray whisper continuing its small golden thread of intelligence exactly on the threshold of sound and as fine and formidable as the look in her eye.
“Pixie and I were alone, mother and daughter, and we did what we had to do. I think she disapproved at first, but once I got the kerosene out of the garage she began to enjoy the whole thing immensely. She even clapped her little hands. But you ought to have known,” taking note of the ribbon, touching it with the tip of her pinky — no other sign than this — and all the while whispering, whispering those minimum formal cadences she had learned at school and gently moving, turning, arching her bare neck so I should see how she disciplined her sorrow, “you ought to have known the U-Drive-Inn was no place for a child. …”
I blushed again, I glanced down at the small bare feet in the strapless shoes — scuffed lemon shells — I welcomed even this briefest expression of her displeasure. “It was no place for you, no place for you, Cassandra,” I said, and wished, as I had often wished, that she would submit to some small name of endearment, if only at such times as these when I loved her most and feared for her the most. A name of endearment would have helped. “You were too innocent for the U-Drive-Inn,” I said. “I should have known how it would end. Your mother always told me she wanted to die surrounded by unmarried couples in a cheap motel, and I let her. But no more cheap motels for us, Cassandra. We won’t even visit Gertrude in the cemetery.”
She caught my spirit, she caught my gesturing hand: “Skipper?”—at least she allowed herself to whisper that name, mine, which Sonny had invented for me so long ago before we sailed —“Skipper? Will you do something nice for me? Something really nice?”
She was still unsmiling but was poised, half-turned, giving me a look of happiness, of life, in the pure agility of her body. And hadn’t she, wearing only the frock, only a few pins in the small classical lift of her hair, hadn’t she come straight from a sluggish bath tub in the U-Drive-Inn to the most violent encounter ever faced by her poor little determined soul? Now she held before me the promise of her serious duplicity, watching and gauging — me, the big soft flower of fatherhood — until I heard myself saying, “Anything, anything, the bus doesn’t leave for another hour and a half, Cassandra, and no one will ever say I faltered even one cumbersome step in loving you.” I gripped her small ringless hand and fled with her, though she was only walking, walking, this child with the poise and color and muscle-shape of a woman, followed her through the drunken sailors to the door.
In the dark, whipped by pieces of paper — the tom and painted remnants of an old street dragon — a sailor stood rolling and moaning against the wall, holding his white cupcake-wrapper hat in one hand and with the other reaching into the sunken whiteness of his chest, the upturned face, the clutching hand, the bent legs spread and kicking to the unheard Latin rhythm of some furious carnival. But on flowed Cassandra, small, grave, heartless, a silvery water front adventuress, and led me straight into the crawling traffic-it was unlighted, rasping, a slow and blackened parade of taxicabs filled with moon-faced marines wearing white braid and puffing cherry-tipped cigars, parade of ominous jeeps each with its petty officer standing up in the rear, arms folded, popping white helmets strapped in place — led me on through admiring whistles and the rubbery sibilance of military tires to a dark shop which was only a rat’s hole between a cabaret — girl ventriloquist, dummy in black trunks — and the fuming concrete bazaar of the Greyhound Bus Terminal — point of our imminent departure — drew me on carefully, deftly, until side by side we stood in the urine-colored haze of a guilty light bulb and breathed the dust, the iodine, the medicinal alcohol of a most vulgar art.
“But, Cassandra,” I said in a low voice, flinching, trying to summon the dignity of my suffering smile, all at once aware that beneath my uniform my skin was an even and lively red, unbroken, unmarked by disfiguring scars or blemishes, “look at his teeth, smell his breath! My God, Cassandra!”
“Skipper,” she said, and again it was the ghostly whisper, the terrifying sadistic calm of the school-trained voice, “don’t be a child. Please.” Then she whispered efficiently, calmly, to the oaf at the table — comatose eyes of the artist, the frustrated procurer, drinking her in — and naturally he was unable to hear even one word of her little succinct command, unable to make out her slow toy train of lovely sounds. He wore a tee-shirt, was covered — arms, neck, shoulders — with the sweaty peacock colors of his self-inflicted art.
“There’s no need to whisper, lady,” he said. Up and down went his eyes, up and down from where he fell in a mountain on his disreputable table, watching her, not bothering to listen, flexing his nightmare pictures as best he could, shifting and showing us, the two of us, the hair bunched and bristling in his armpits, and even that hair was electrical.
She continued to whisper — ludicrous pantomime — without stopping, without changing the faint and formal statement of her desires, when suddenly and inexplicably the man and I, allied in helpless and incongruous competition, both heard her at the same time.