— I never talked to anyone like her. You’ll see.
I think then I envisioned the most beautiful and desirable Jehovah’s Witness in the world. Would we try conclusions over Isaiah? I warn you, Irma, I know the Book and other books beyond number. I am a prince in the kingdom of words, and I have seen raw respect flushed up unwillingly in the eye of other lawmongers, and have had my work mentioned favorably in appellate decisions which, in their small way, rule all this land.
— Here you are, I said.
She smiled at me as if I were a child who had brought his mother a cool drink unasked.
— Howard came to see you, she said, sipping the martini as if gin bruised with vermouth were her common fare. — Can you help me... help him?
— He wants a divorce, I said, confused, trying to get things in focus.
— No, she said. Not aggressively, only firmly. Her information was better than mine. I have used the same tone of voice with other attorneys many times. When you know, you know.
— He only wants it over with, done with. That’s what he wants, she said.
Bert nodded. He had heard this before. There goes Bert’s value as a checkpoint with reality. He believes her. Lordy.
— You mean... the marriage?
— No, not that. He knows what I know. If it was a marriage, you can’t make it be over. You can only desert it. He wouldn’t do that.
I shrugged, noticing that she had made no use of her beauty at all so far. She did not disguise it or deny it. She allowed it to exist and simply ignored it. Her femininity washed over me, and yet I knew that it was not directed toward me. It had some other focus, and she saw me as a moment, a crossing in her life, an occasion to stop and turn back for an instant before going on. I wondered what I would be doing for her.
— He says he wants a divorce.
She looked down at her drink. Her lashes were incredibly long, though it was obvious she used no makeup at all. Her lips were deep red, a color not used in lipsticks since the forties. I understood why Bedlow drank. Nine years with a beautiful woman you love and cannot touch. Is that your best idea?
— He told you... I’d been unfaithful.
Bert was shaking his head, blushing. Not negating what Howard had said, or deprecating it.
— He said that, I told her.
— And that our baby... that Albert Sidney wasn’t... his?
— Yes, I said. Bert looked as if he would cry from shame.
She had not looked up while we talked. Her eyes stayed down, and while I waited, I heard the Beethoven tape, turned down but not off, running out at the end of the — Appassionata. It was a good moment to get up and change to something decent. I found a Vivaldi Chamber Mass, and the singers were very happy. The music was for God in the first instance, not for the spirit of fraternity or Napoleon or some other rubbish.
— What else? she asked across the room. I flipped the tape on, and eighteenth-century Venice came at us from four sides. I cut back the volume.
— He said you... hadn’t been man and wife for nine years.
— All right.
I walked back and sat down again. I felt peculiar, neither drunk nor sober, so I poured another one. The first I’d had since they came. — Howard didn’t seem to think so. He said... you wouldn’t let him touch you.
She raised her eyes then. Not angrily, only that same firmness again. — That’s not true, she said, no, whispered, and Bert nodded as though he had been an abiding presence in the marriage chamber for all those nine long years. He could contain himself no more. He fumbled in his coat pocket and handed me a crumpled and folded sheet of paper. It was a notice from American Motors canceling Howard Bedlow’s franchise. Much boilerplate saying he hadn’t delivered and so on. Enclosed find copy of agency contract with relevant revocation clauses underlined. Arrangements will be made for stock on hand, etc.
It was dated 9 May 1966. Bert was watching me. I nodded. — Eight years ago, I said.
— Not ten, Bert was going on. — You see...
— He lost the business... six months after... the... Albert Sidney.
We sat looking at the paper.
— I never denied him, Irma was saying. — After the baby... he couldn’t. At first, we didn’t think of it. What had we done? What had gone wrong? What were we... supposed to do? Was there something we were supposed to do?
— Genes were wrong... hormones, who knows? I said.
Irma smiled at me. Her eyes were black, not brown. — Do you believe that?
— Sure, I said, startled as one must be when he has uttered what passes for a common truth and it is questioned. — What else?
— Nothing, she said. — It’s only...
She and Bert were both staring at me as if I had missed something. Then Irma leaned forward. — Will you go somewhere with me?
I was thinking of the Gulf coast, staring down at the face of my watch. It was almost one thirty. There was a moon and the tide was in, and the moon would be rolling through soft beds of cloud.
— Yes, I said. — Yes I will. Yes.
III
It was early in the morning when we reached Alexandria. The bus trip had been long and strange. We had talked about East Texas where Irma had grown up. Her mother had been from Evangeline Parish, her father a tool-pusher in the Kilgore fields until he lost both hands to a wild length of chain. She had been keeping things together working as a waitress when she met Howard.
On the bus, as if planted there, had been a huge black woman with a little boy whose head was tiny and pointed. It was so distorted that his eyes were pulled almost vertical. He made inarticulate noises and rooted about on the floor of the bus. The other passengers tried to ignore him, but the stench was very bad, and his mother took him to an empty seat in back and changed him several times. Irma helped once. The woman had been loud, aggressive, unfriendly when Irma approached her, but Irma whispered something, and the woman began to cry, her sobs loud and terrible. When they had gotten the child cleaned up, the black woman put her arms around Irma and kissed her.
— I tried hard as I could, miss, but I can’t manage... oh, sweet Jesus knows I wisht I was dead first. But I can’t manage the other four... I got to...
The two of them sat together on the rear seat for a long time, holding hands, talking so softly that I couldn’t hear. Once, the boy crawled up and stopped at my seat. He looked up at me like some invertebrate given the power to be quizzical. I wondered which of us was in hell. He must have been about twelve years old.
In the station, Irma made a phone call while I had coffee. People moved through the twilit terminal, meeting, parting. One elderly woman in a thin print dress thirty years out of date even among country people kissed a young man in an army uniform good-bye. Her lips trembled as he shouldered his dufflebag and moved away. — Stop, she cried out, and then realized that he could not stop, because the dispatcher was calling the Houston bus. — Have you... forgotten anything? The soldier paused, smiled, and shook his head. Then he vanished behind some people trying to gather up clothes which had fallen from a cardboard suitcase with a broken clasp. Somewhere a small child cried as if it had awakened to find itself suddenly, utterly lost.
Irma came back and drank her coffee, and when we walked outside it was daylight in Alexandria, even as on the Gulf coast. An old station wagon with a broken muffler pulled up, and a thin man wearing glasses got out and kissed Irma as if it were a ritual and shook hands with me in that peculiar limp and diffident way of country people meeting someone from the city who might represent threat or advantage.