— I couldn’t take it anymore. Knowing what I know...
Bedlow began to cry. Bert looked away, and I suppose I did. I have not seen many grown men cry cold sober. I have seen them mangled past any hope of life, twisting, screaming, cursing. I have seen them standing by a wrecked car while police and firemen tried to saw loose the bodies of their wives and children. I have seen men, told of the death of their one son, stand hard-jawed with tears running down their slabby sunburned cheeks, but that was not crying. Bedlow was crying, and he did not seem the kind of man who cries.
I motioned Bert back into the kitchen. — What the hell...
— This man, Bert said, spreading his hands, — is in trouble.
— All right, I said, hearing Bedlow out in the parlor, still sobbing as if something more than his life might be lost. — All right. But I don’t think it’s a lawyer he needs.
Bert frowned, outraged. — Well, he sure don’t need one of... them.
I could not be sure whether he was referring to priests or psychiatrists. Or both. Bert trusted the law. Even working with it, knowing better than I its open sores and ugly fissures, he believed in it, and for some reason saw me as one of its dependable functionaries. I guess I was pleased by that.
— Fill me in on this whole business, will you?
Yes, he would, and would have earlier over the phone, but he had been busy mollifying Sammie and some of his customers who wanted to lay charges that Bert could not have sidestepped.
It was short and ugly, and I was hooked. Bedlow’s wife was a good woman. The child was a hopeless defective. It was kept up at Pineville, at the Louisiana hospital for the feebleminded, or whatever the social scientists are calling imbeciles this year. A vegetating thing that its mother had named Albert Sidney Bedlow before they had taken it away, hooked it up for a lifetime of intravenous feeding, and added it to the schedule of cleaning up filth and washing, and all the things they do for human beings who can do nothing whatever for themselves. But Irma Bedlow couldn’t let it go at that. The state is equipped, albeit poorly, for this kind of thing. It happens. You let the thing go, and they see to it, and one day, usually not long hence, it dies of pneumonia or a virus, or one of the myriad diseases that float and sift through the air of a place like that. This is the way these things are done, and all of us at the law have drawn up papers for things called “Baby So-and-so,” sometimes, mercifully, without their parents having laid eyes on them.
Irma Bedlow saw it otherwise. During that first year, while the Rambler franchise was bleeding to death, while Bedlow was going half crazy, she had spent most of her time up in Alexandria, a few miles from the hospital, at her cousin’s. So that she could visit Albert Sidney every day.
She would go there, Bert told me — as Bedlow had told him — and sit in the drafty ward on a hard chair next to Albert Sidney’s chipped institutional crib, with her rosary, praying to Jesus Christ that He would send down His grace on her baby, make him whole, and let her suffer in his place. She would kneel in the twilight beside the bed stiff with urine, and stinking of such excrement as a child might produce who has never tasted food, amidst the bedlam of chattering and choking and animal sounds from bedridden idiots, cretins, declining mongoloids, microcephalics, and assorted other exiles from the great altarpiece of Hieronymus Bosch. Somehow, the chief psychologist had told Howard, her praying upset the other inmates of the ward, and at last he had to forbid Irma coming more than once a month. He told her that the praying was out altogether.
After trying to change the chief psychologist’s mind, and failing, Irma had come home. The franchise was gone by then, and they had a secondhand trailer parked in a rundown court where they got water, electricity, and gas from pipes in the ground and a sullen old man in a prewar De Soto station wagon picked up garbage once a week. She said the rosary there, and talked about Albert Sidney to her husband who, cursed now with freedom by the ruin of his affairs, doggedly looking for some kind of a job, had nothing much to do or think about but his wife’s abstracted words and the son he had almost had. Indeed, did have, but had in such a way that the having was more terrible than the lack.
It had taken no time to get into liquor, which his wife never touched, she fasting and praying, determined that no small imperfection in herself should stay His hand who could set things right with Albert Sidney in the flash of a moment’s passing.
— And in that line, Bert said, — she ain’t... they... never been man and wife since then. You know what I mean?
— Ummm.
— And she runs off on him. Couple or three times a year. They always find her at the cousin’s. At least till last year. Her cousin won’t have her around anymore. Seems Irma wanted her to fast for Albert Sidney too. Wanted the cousin’s whole family to do it, and there was words, and now she just takes a room at the tourist court by the hospital and tries to get in as often as that chief psychologist will let her. But no praying, he holds to that.
— What does Bedlow believe?
— Claims he believes she got Albert Sidney with some other man.
— No, I mean... does he believe in praying?
— Naw. Too honest, I guess. Says he don’t hold with beads and saying the same thing over and over. Says God stands on His own feet, and expects the same of us. Says we ain’t here to s... around. What’s done is done.
— Do you think he wants a divorce?
— Could he get one...?
— Yes.
— Well, how do I know?
— You brought him here. He’s not shopping for religious relics, is he?
Bert looked hurt. As if I were blaming him unfairly for some situation beyond his control or prevention.
— You want him in jail?
— No, I said. — I just don’t know what to do about him. Where’s he living?
— Got a cabin at the Bo-Peep Motel. Over off Veterans Highway. He puts in his time at the car lot and then goes to drinking and telling people his wife has done bastardized him.
— Why did he wait so long to come up with that line?
— It just come on him, what she must of done, he told me.
— That’s right, Bedlow said, his voice raspy, aggressive. — I ain’t educated or anything. I studies on it and after so long it come to me. I saw it wasn’t mine, that... thing of hers. Look, how come she can’t just get done mourning and say, well, that’s how it falls out sometimes and I’m sorry as all hell, but you got to keep going. That’s what your ordinary woman would say, ain’t it?
He had come to the kitchen where Bert and I were standing, his face still wet with tears. He came in talking, and the flow went on as if he were as compulsive with his tongue as he was with a bottle. The words tumbled out so fast that you felt he must have practiced, this country man, to speak so rapidly, to say so much.
— But no. I tell you what: she’s mourning for what she done to that... thing’s real father, that’s what she’s been doing. He likely lives in Alex, and she can’t get over what she done him when she got that... thing. And I tell you this, I said, look, honey, don’t give it no name, ’cause if you give it a name, you’re gonna think that name over and over and make like it was the name of a person and it ain’t, and it’ll ruin us just as sure as creaking hell. And she went and named it my father’s name, who got it after Albert Sidney Johnston at Shiloh... look, I ain’t laid a hand on that woman in God knows how many years, I tell you that. So you see, that’s what these trips is about. She goes up and begs his pardon for not giving him a fine boy like he wanted, and she goes to see... the thing, and mourns... and g. . . t to hell, I got to get shut of this... whole thing.