“What do you and Walter want to do with Allie?”
“Just me. Walter has copped out. He’s agreeable to anything. All he can think about are what he calls his Ayrabs. He and his Ayrabs, as he calls them, are going to turn the island into a 144-hole golf course with an airport big enough to take 727s from Kuwait.”
“Very well. What do you want to do with Allie?”
“Allie.” For the first time the merry Polly Bergen wrinkles at the corners of her eyes ironed out, showing white. Her eyes went fond and far away. “Allie Allie Allie. What to do with Allie?” Her eyes came back. “Let’s face it, Will.”
“Okay.”
“Alistair’s been telling me this for years but I couldn’t or wouldn’t believe him.”
“Alistair?”
“Dr. Duk.”
“What’s he been telling you?”
“Will,” said Kitty and in her voice he recognized the sweet timbre, the old authentic Alabama thrill of bad news. “Will, Allie can’t make it. Allie is not going to make it, Will. She can’t live in this world. No way.”
“Me neither.”
“What?” said Kitty dreamily.
“Nothing. How do you know she can’t make it?” On the contrary, he thought. She may be the only one who can make it.
“Because Alistair told me. And because I know her and I know what happens when she tries. Do I ever know.”
“What happens when she tries?”
“At first she’s bright as can be. Too bright. Everything is Christmas morning. And that’s the trouble. She can only live if every day is Christmas morning. But she doesn’t know how to live from one Christmas to the next.”
“What happens when she tries?”
“She can’t cope.”
“What does that mean?”
“I mean that she literally does not know how to live. She can’t talk, she can’t sleep, she can’t work. So she crawls into a hole and pulls it in after her. Twice I’ve saved her from starvation. I can’t take that responsibility any more.”
“What do you want to do with her?”
“What is best for her. The best-structured environment money can buy, and all the freedom she can handle.”
“You mean you want to commit her.”
“I’ve talked it over again with Alistair. She can have her own cottage. She can do anything that you or I can do. The only difference is that I intend to make sure she will not injure herself. She will be around people who understand her and with whom she can talk or not talk as she chooses. She will have everything you and I have — books, music, art, companionship, you name it. And you and I will be here if she needs us.”
He must have fallen silent for some time because the next thing he knew she was poking him in her old style.
“What?” he said with a start.
“Wake up. I was talking about Allie.”
“I know.”
“Tell me something, Will.”
“Okay.”
“Does Allie’s life make sense to you?”
“Well I don’t—” he began.
“It’s like Ludean said. Ludean, Grace’s wonderful old Nigra cook. You know what she told me? She said: That chile don’t belong in this world, Miss Kitty.”
He was silent. He was thinking about firelight on Allie’s face and arms and breasts as she knelt to feed logs into the iron stove.
“You know what she meant, don’t you?”
“No.”
“In her own way she was expressing the wisdom of the ages. I’m sure Ludean never heard of reincarnation, but what she was saying in her own way was that Allie had come from another life but had not quite made it all the way. That does happen, you know. I can’t find much written on the subject but it seems quite reasonable to me that some incarnations are more successful than others, that some, like Allie’s, don’t take. That’s why we use expressions like she’s not all there. Though I would say she’s not all here. You ought to see her eyes. She’s seeing something we don’t see.”
He thought of Allie’s eyes, the quick lively look she gave him, lips pressed tight, after she hoisted him onto the bunk, her hands busy with him like a child bedding down a big doll.
“There is no other explanation for it, Will. If I didn’t know what I know, I couldn’t stand it. As it is, it is so simple, so obvious.”
For a fact, she did seem to know something. There was in her eyes just above the Mercedes seat the liveliness (so like Allie yet unlike) of someone who knows a secret you haven’t caught on to. “Don’t you see it, you dummy, or do I have to tell you?”
“What is it you know?”
“Allie did have another life. Unlike most of us, you and me for instance, her karma is so strong she almost remembers it. Sometimes I think she does. In fact, after one session with Ray at Virginia Beach, she did remember it.”
“Ray?”
“A true mystic — and you know how hardheaded I am about such things. Well, I can tell you there was no humbug here. After trance and regression, first Ray’s trance without Allie present, then Allie’s regression, both wrote down what they saw. I was there, I took the papers, I read them. It’s scientific proof. The particulars differ but there is enough to know what sort of life Allie had and the explanation of what she’s going through now. The upshot is that our duty is to protect her and take care of her while she works it out.”
“Works what out?”
“The karma of that life. Or lives.”
“Lives?”
“They described two lives but essentially they were the same. Allie’s version was that she had been a camp follower of the Union Army before the battle of Chancellorsville. Now here’s the fascinating part. When Allie would get down on herself and crawl into her hole, she would say over and over again: I’m no good, I’m a liar, I’m the original hooker. Over and over again she would say, I’m the original hooker. Now, that’s not Allie’s style — I doubt if she ever even heard that word. But we look up the word and guess what. It turns out that the word hooker was first applied to camp followers of General Hooker’s army who fought — guess where? — at the battle of Chancellorsville. So when she said I’m the original hooker she was telling the literal truth. Those that have ears—?
“What was the other version?”
“Okay. Here’s what Ray had written after his trance. Allie had been not a hooker but a courtesan spy for the North in Richmond, where she was known as a great Southern belle who charmed many officers with her wit and conversation. Later we figured out that they might both be right. There had been a famous Union spy in Richmond who had been a prostitute, a hooker. Isn’t that fascinating? But of course what really matters is how it explains her present life.”
“How?”
“Don’t you see? Then she was too much of this world, she knew too many men, talked too much, lied too much, and abused her body. So now she is not of this world, knows nobody, can’t talk enough to lie, doesn’t use her body at all. Or as she would put it: my body doesn’t work — implying that, before, her body worked.”
Kitty went on smoothly from Allie to herself and her karma and to him and his Scorpio tenacity: “Oh, I could have told you twenty years ago if you’d asked me, that you would have to undergo trial and exile before you finally won, like Napoleon and Lenin and Robert Bruce. Your destiny is the Return.”
“Napoleon didn’t win,” he said.
Her belief in such matters was both absolute and perfunctory. There was a plausibility to it. Things fell into place. Mysteries were revealed. Why could he not be a believer? Who were the believers now? Everyone. Everyone believed everything. We’re all from California now. Yet we believe with a kind of perfunctoriness. Even now Kitty was inattentive, eyes drifting as she talked. In the very act of uttering her ultimate truths, she was too bored to listen.