Love Maps Page 23

  “Happy are the cicadas,” his father had said, “for their wives are mute.” He could see his father stepping back in mock retreat, his mother glaring. Happy are the cicadas. It was a phrase from one of Badinoe’s Greeks, Xenarchos. He could hear his father saying it, delivering that last “chos” in an extravagant, almost tender whisper.

  *

  The warmth of the day was gone and he shivered in his suit and still she screamed. He leapt up, rubbing his arms against the cold, then stopped abruptly. He had no right to be comfortable, not with her in such a state. He sat. He shivered. The stars came out and a cloud rolled over the moon. Her screams grew weaker. They didn’t sound human or generative. They sounded bad. He marched through the dark, tripping over things. Below him, the lights of Pristina glimmered faintly. He watched the lights go out, one by one, until all but the workings was black. This could not happen. She was too young and brave and free. He had a terrible urge to pray, to grind his knees into the dirt and pray. Never, not even as a child, had he felt such a desire. It took every ounce of his strength not to.

  He ran to the stables and felt his way to Generalissimo’s stall. He imagined her boot slipping into the stirrup, the graceful, impatient way she pulled herself up. He pressed his face against the salty muzzle. “She will,” he whispered. “She will. She will.”

  It was quiet. Very quiet. Quiet! Owen ran outdoors. The yard was unbearably still. The parlor window seemed to float, unmoored in the dark. “Doe!” he shouted, his voice cracking. A trapezoid of yellow light spread out onto the porch. A figure appeared. Badinoe. Owen ran forward, aware of every break of scrub under his boots. Another figure. Alma. He raced up the steps. “How is she?”

  “Very tired,” said Badinoe. “But the bleeding has stopped. She should be all right.”

  He could see her through the window, lying on the daybed, eyes closed, hair everywhere. “Doe,” he whispered. He put his hand on the pane. “Doe.” She opened her eyes. He smiled, the dust on his cheeks cracking. She raised her hand in a mock military salute. He laughed, wanting once again to get down on his knees. You could thank Nature, couldn’t you? Even if she could not hear, could you not thank Nature when good came to pass?

  “Mr. Scraperton?” Alma stood behind him, her broad Indian face beaming, her arms wrapped around a bundle of white cotton.

  “Congratulations,” said Badinoe. “She’s all there. Ten fingers and ten toes.”

  “Huh?”

  “The baby.”

  “Oh, yes. She?” said Owen.

  “Yes,” said Alma. “You have a daughter.”

  Owen leaned over the bundle. In between the folds shone a delicate face with long, wet lashes. “A girl? Was she that in the womb?”

  “Do you want to hold her, sir?”

  “My goodness, those kicks?”

  “Shall I take her upstairs?”

  “No, give her to me.” He reached for her, his hands trembling. She was so small. A tender, tiny breath of flesh. Her heartbeat was alarming. “Her pulse isn’t too fast?”

  “No, no, everything is as it should be,” the doctor said, smiling calmly.

  Everything was all right. As it should be. His mother had been a girl too. He kissed her, experimentally, gingerly. She withstood him just fine. He handed her back. Alma readjusted the blanket, cooing tenderly until she noticed the dusting of cinnabar he’d left on the baby’s forehead. Her brow puckered. As gently as she could, she tried to brush it away.

  Sweat pooled between Dolores’s breasts, wetted the crooks of her elbows and knees, glued her thighs together. She groaned. She fanned herself. She only got hotter. It was her damn hair; she had too much. She twisted it into a knot and patted around the bed for the barrette. It was a horrid barrette, embossed with a pair of crudely wrought, love-drunk doves, but it was the only one she had left. She lost barrettes. Earrings too. She was always catching herself with one lobe adorned and the other naked. Her sister, Refugio, never had that problem. No wonder, as all Refugio ever did was rock in that chair, hair unmussed, earrings symmetrical. Riding was what did it, Dolores thought, patting her lobes, because now that she wasn’t riding—she’d stopped it, no more, never again, she would instead become an expert in riding the bed, a bedwoman—both earrings were in place. Demure little pearls. No point in wearing anything more excessive. Bedwomen looked foolish dressing up.

  She found the barrette and fastened her bun, but it didn’t help. She flapped the neck of her nightgown, airing her bloated, milk-filled—ugh, she couldn’t even look at them. The bun hadn’t done any good at all. She was stifling. It wasn’t her hair. It was the house, Owen’s house. Hot in the summer, drafty in the winter. Why couldn’t he have used adobe or brick or something sensible? But he wasn’t sensible. People just thought he was because of his voice. When she first met him, his voice confused her too. That was when he still spoke to her in Spanish. He told her she was bonita, and everybody said that, but when he said it, he stretched out the word, pushing it in different directions, enlarging it, making it crackle. God, he had fooled her. He didn’t want a woman at all; he wanted an enterprise-sharer. Shopkeepers, he said, had the best marriages because they were immersed in the same enterprise. Did she look like a shopkeeper? Is that what he had seen?

  She flopped back on the pillow. The ceiling fan squeaked. The blades needed dusting. She wouldn’t tell Alma. Alma would only want to clean them, which would mean that Dolores would have to get out of bed. Absolutely not. She only left the bed to relieve her bladder, an errand that—through an act of enormous will—she had reduced to two, sometimes three times a day. She kept staring at the fan, hoping to hypnotize herself. It spun and spun, a smaller version of a ship’s propeller. The house had reminded her of a shipwreck when she first saw it. The way it slanted on its hill, lopsided, like it had slogged on a sandbar. She had had ships on her mind. She rubbed the nape of her neck. Don’t think about ships. She closed her eyes and there was the Vera Cruz pier, the throbbing engines, the wet salty winds, the first time, the only time, she had looked upon the Atlantic. Incredible, that water. And at the other side—a whole world.

  Don’t think about it. But how could she not? She rolled over and searched through the papers on her wobbly bedside table. She had told Owen that she wanted French furniture, and he responded by buying her cheap gilt with spindly, uneven legs. With a house like this, it was just as well that she didn’t have guests. She found the envelope, well-worn and postmarked Paris, France. Incredible. Some little French functionary had sighed his little French sigh and stamped this very stamp. Some facteur had put it in his bag and driven down rues and boulevards, perhaps the Champs-Elysées itself. She slipped out the letter and frowned at Isabel’s neat, obedient handwriting. Dated 14 de octubre de 1898, the first letter she wrote after Owen canceled the honeymoon. How sorry Isabel was! She would have loved to have seen her. She had been thinking of her just the other day. A friend had invited her on a motorcar excursion! They drove over the Seine and through the countryside, scaring peasants and scattering leaves. She fancied that Dolores would have enjoyed it, although, she had to admit, she found it a bit overexciting. Dolores snorted at the injustice of it, a motorcar being wasted on her cousin. She had written back, asking for more details—the model, the engine, the speed, the sensation—but Isabel couldn’t remember, didn’t care, was on to talcum powder and the smell of lavender. To be in Paris and be thinking about talcum powder!

  The baby stirred. Dolores held her breath. The baby had been a demon this morning, red-faced and howling. Owen never saw her like that. She gurgled practically every time he entered the room, but the moment the baby was left to her—oh, this morning had been indescribably bad. Nothing worked. Nursing and rocking and humming and crooning her name, but you can’t calm a baby with a name like Victoria. It’s that damn “ict”; you can’t coo it. You can’t say it gently. It’s hard and rocky and unforgiving. “Vic-a-dee, Vic-a-doo”— that’s how Owen got around it. Dolores had tried, but when she sai
d Vic-a-dee, she sounded like a frantic bird, and Victoria screamed all the louder. She’d jammed her back in the cradle, too hard. Too hard. Dolores crawled back to the baby, repentant. She had arranged the room so that everything bordered her mattress. The cradle was at the northeast corner, a white cradle with Victoria’s name written in red paint, and below, the date of her birth: April 1, 1900. The first Fools’ Day of the twentieth century. “Sorry,” she whispered, touching the air above her, afraid of waking her. Then, because she didn’t feel like the English carried any weight, “Lo siento, mi amor.” The baby’s face twitched. Her hands balled in tight little fists. Dolores rocked the cradle, clucking and humming a lullaby her nurse had sung long ago.

  She kept rocking, even after the baby had safely returned to sleep. It was the creak-creak of the cradle; it sounded like Refugio’s rocking chair. She had never imagined that she would miss Refugio. She had not believed, back in Coahuila, that the world possessed a person more isolated than she. But there had been Refugio, her mother, her father, the vaqueros and their families, the brightly painted wagons delivering piles upon piles of cousins. There had been Indians sitting on the porch, clicking their gums, waiting for someone to dole out a chicken. There had been salesmen and soothsayers. There had been acrobats, button peddlers, men up to no good. Everyone stopped by on their way to Piedras Negras. Here, there was a town of eight hundred, but she might as well have been wrecked on the tip of Tierra del Fuego. No one would talk about anything except for Clarity and Unity and Natural Satisfaction, the Mexicans included. If possible, they were worse than the Anglos, parroting them in stilted English. The peons were probably the same as peons all over, but they were hardly fit for company, and besides, she never saw them. They had no reason to come to Casa Grande. Owen would not give them anything, not even oranges on their saint day. He hated saint days. True religion, he said, was watching an ant wiggle up a cactus thorn. She didn’t care much for mass, but his reasoning made no sense. You couldn’t confess to an ant.

  She reached under the bed and pulled out the sewing basket. Refugio had sent the fabric as a present for having had the baby. It was lovely, white silk with lilac flowers that brought out the color in her hair. It would make a fine dress, something to celebrate her waist returning to normal. She threaded the needle and sewed, stopping now and then to stare at the space in front of her. Her stitchwork was minute and beautiful but, unlike her riding, not known for its rapidity. Not that it mattered when she completed it. No opera. No motoring over the Seine. No getting out of bed for that matter. Well, she’d get out of bed if they were ever invited anywhere. But they wouldn’t be. Since she’d arrived, they’d been invited to exactly one party outside of Pristina, a local rancher’s barbecue, a veiled attempt by the rancher to get Owen to fund a railroad. Dolores had gone, hoping to make friends. And she could have. There were two perfectly nice ladies she’d invited to tea. But the moment they stepped into her parlor, they glared and sniffed and smoothed their skirts. She didn’t even get a chance to ask if they took sugar. She had no idea what had happened until the doctor explained. The picture on the mantle was not of one of Owen’s ancestors, but Brown John or John Brown, one of those simplistic Yankee names you could never keep straight—in any case, a great enemy of the South. Even she, who knew nothing, knew that you didn’t flaunt a portrait of an abolitionist in a Texas parlor.

  The baby screamed. Not a yelp or a whelp or a waking whimper, a full-on furious scream like a knife through the head. Dolores tossed her sewing across the room. The baby’s hands and feet moved in tight, quick circles. Dolores took a deep breath. Maybe this time she wasn’t screaming simply to torture her. It might be, it should be hunger. She was due for a feeding. Dolores unbuttoned her robe. Another one of Owen’s grand ideas. No wet nurse, no bottles. Her role in the improvement of evolution, which seemed a lot more like devolution, turning ladies into barnyard animals. Victoria clamped her mouth around a nipple. Dolores, relieved that she had figured out what to do, leaned against the headboard, feeling rather pleased with herself until she saw her sewing thrown in a heap in the corner of the room. She’d thrown it way too far away, she would never be able to reach it from the bed.

  Afterward, sated with milk, Victoria nestled into her, surprising Dolores, for the baby usually pushed away the moment she was through, her tiny arms remarkably strong. Touched, Dolores leaned down and smelled her skin. How wonderful when she was like this, how easy to love every ounce of her. She kissed her tummy, sweet and soft, smooth and perfect, then changed her diaper, laughing at the fat baby legs that wiggled in the air. She wouldn’t mind doing the same thing. The problem with being a bedwoman was the crampiness and stiffness. It was no way to live! She rang for Alma. Soon she’d get Otto to construct a garbage chute from her bedroom down to the kitchen. That way she’d be able to toss the soiled rags down the hole without bothering anyone, but for now, she needed Alma. The bell clanged flatly. “Mas como un cencerro que una campanilla de mujer de cama, no?” Victoria kept wiggling her legs. Alma arrived, panting from the stairs. She took Victoria’s diaper and opened the shutters.

  “Thank you, Alma,” Dolores said.

  Alma clomped back down. Merde. She’d forgotten to ask her to pick up her sewing. She put Victoria in the cradle, got the pole, and crawled to the northwest corner of the bed. The fabric had hit the wall and slipped down to the baseboard where it lay bunched in silky folds. Dolores leaned over the side, arms stretched, hands clasping the pole. It almost touched the closest fold. She squirmed an inch closer. She had to put a hand on the floor for support. She reached as far as she could—but she didn’t have the strength to manipulate the pole with only one hand. She dropped the pole and crawled back to the headboard. But it had felt good to stretch. She mimicked Victoria, rolling back and kicking up her legs. The nightgown slipped, and there they were, not fat and heavy, but long and pale, scissoring through the air. She heard Alma trudging back up the stairs and quickly scooted her legs under the sheet.

  “Alma, would you mind getting my sewing? It seems to have slipped.”

  “Of course, Mrs. Scraperton.” Alma pressed her hands to her knees and painfully lowered herself. “Here you are.”

  “Thank you.”

  Alma took Victoria away for her bath. Dolores found the needle and returned to her stitching, but she couldn’t concentrate. The light was getting low. She turned on the bedside lamp. Perhaps she would write a letter; she owed many—to Isabel, to her mother, to Kern Hook, the Australian ranch hand responsible for getting her into this predicament. No, she got herself into it, or wagging-tongued, jealous cousins, always assuming the worst—they got her into it. That was one good thing about Owen; he didn’t care about reputations, ruined or otherwise.

  He came back. Dolores felt it before she heard it, a shift in the atmosphere, a crackling alertness. His boots pounded up the stairs, pricking up the beginnings of another headache. He paused at the landing, then started again, not toward her room, toward the bathroom, his tread now softer. Now his voice and Alma’s murmured over the splash of water. Dolores imagined Victoria’s skin, glistening and slippery wet, Alma holding her underneath the armpit, Owen bending down, letting her squeeze his finger. There would be an expression of awe on his face. The bathroom door creaked, and he strode down the hall, his footfalls back to their normal, general-onparade clack-clack-clack; she pressed her palms to her ears. El jefe glorioso! Striding down the avenue, flowers raining from balconies. The clacking stopped. He stood on the other side of her door. There was silence, a palpable hesitation. When the door opened, he was dark and solid against the warm light of the hall. A mild panic rose in her chest. She stared down at her nightgown, saw a milk stain, covered it up.

  “Dolores. Alma has enough to do without bathing Victoria.”

  Well, what did he expect? Only allowing her one servant. At home, in spite of their scrimping, they still managed to keep some semblance of a household. The springs groaned as he sat on the edge of her bed. He h
overed over her. His lean, taut face, his singular eyebrow, the hair almost as thick over the nose as over the eyes.

  “Still don’t feel any better?”

  She shook her head.

  His fingers grazed her hip, tentatively. Her body still mystified him; it was, as far as she could make out, her only advantage. And youth. He’d get old soon and when this happened, according to her mother, he’d become more manageable. But not according to Marina—not that man, she’d said, that man and age are playing a different game. She had predicted a disastrous marriage. She was probably right about the age too. He certainly didn’t act fifty. Fifty was her father, stooped shoulders, molars ground to stubs, glorifying forgotten forbears. Owen’s shoulders were square and his teeth were sharp. Ancestors? Droughts? Locusts? Pah! He smoothed a lock of hair from her forehead.

  “Badinoe says you should get out of bed a couple times a day. Exercise. You’ll never regain your strength if you stay there the whole day through.”

  She told him she would as soon as she was able.

  “Generalissimo misses you,” he said. “He’s getting fat. No one to ride him.”

  “You can ride him.”

  “Not like you can.” He fumbled a kiss. She blinked back hot tears. Bedwomen didn’t cry.

  End of Excerpt

  More about The Mercury Fountain

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  “Eliza Factor’s first novel, The Mercury Fountain, explores what happens when a life driven by ideology confronts implacable truths of science and human nature. It also shows how leaders can inflict damage by neglecting the real needs of real people. Though the action takes place between 1900 and 1923, the resonance feel alarmingly contemporary … Factor counters convention with a sharp sense of character, evocative subplots and the dangerous allure of mercury itself.” —New York Times Book Review (Editor’s Choice)