Butterfly (6 page)

familiar about the tired-looking young woman in the hospital bed, a newborn baby cra-

dled in each arm.

It wasn’t until later that night—as Rachel lay perfectly still under her blankets on the

sofa, which was where she slept in the trailer, waiting for her father to snore himself to

sleep (she always tried to be as invisible as possible whenever he was around, especially

when he was drunk)—that she started thinking about the photograph.

And then it hit her.

Although she looked much younger, the woman was Rachel’s mother.

But who were the two babies?

Well past midnight, as the thin-shelled trailer grew cold and the silence of the desert

drew close, Rachel crept from her bed, got hold of the flashlight they used whenever the

electricity was cut off—which was often—and retrieved the cigar box, which she had

carefully replaced earlier that day. She studied the babies in the picture. There was no

doubt about it. One of them looked almost exactly like the one of herself, which her

mother kept in her wallet.

Rachel frowned. If this was a picture of herself when she was born, then—who was the

other baby?

She bided her time. Rachel’s mother was not always an easy woman to approach. If she

wasn’t drunk or having one of her “sick” mornings, she was over at the trailer-park office

listening to Arthur Godfrey on the radio. But there were times when Mrs. Dwyer
was

available, usually when Rachel’s father was gone on one of his sudden absences. During

these spells Rachel’s mother didn’t seem to need to add the bourbon to her coffee; she

would wash and curl her hair, clean up the trailer and talk about planting geraniums in

the dust outside. On such days Rachel actually heard her mother hum, saw the lines van-

ish from her face, watched her go around in an ironed dress and listened to her laugh with

the neighbors. It was on a day just like that when Rachel went up to her mother, who was

hanging clothes on the line and singing “Prisoner of Love” with wooden pins in her

mouth, and asked her startling question.

The child was too honest for her own good, Mrs. Dwyer often thought. Where had

Rachel gotten such a streak for speaking the truth? Like today, just blurting out that she

had found the hidden cigar box and had gone through the contents. Really, you couldn’t

spank a child for such honesty, even if she was confessing to snooping. “Am I illegitimate,

Mommy?” she asked, referring to the discrepancy in the dates between her birth and her

parents’ wedding.

“Where
do
you learn words like that, honey?” Mrs. Dwyer asked as she ran her hand

through the child’s brown hair. “It’s all them books you read. Never known a youngun to

read the way you do.” Then she knelt in the dust and took her daughter gently by the

shoulders. “No, honey. You ain’t illegitimate. It don’t matter when your father and I got

married. All that matters is that we did. You’re Rachel Dwyer. He gave you a last name.”

“But…” Rachel’s lower lip trembled. She had so hoped to hear something else from

her mother. “You mean he’s my real daddy?”

24

Kathryn Harvey

“Of course he is, honey!”

“I kinda thought, you know, because you got married later, that I musta had another

daddy.”

“I know, honey,” the mother said gently, taking the child’s pain into herself and shar-

ing it. “But he is your daddy. We had you before we thought about getting married. He’s

not the settling-down type, you know. He likes to be free. But I told him he had a respon-

sibility to me and his baby. There was a war on and we thought he was gonna get drafted.

So he married me.”

“Did Daddy go to war, Mommy?” Rachel didn’t exactly know what “war” was, but she

had heard enough of other people’s talk to know that to have been in it was some sort of

honor. Maybe there
was
something to love about her daddy, after all.

But Rachel’s mother said with a sigh, “No, darling. Your daddy didn’t pass the med-

ical. Something wrong with his lungs, they said. That’s what makes him so angry some-

times, you see. That all the other men went, but he didn’t.”

Then Rachel asked about the
other
baby, and a shadow swept over her mother’s face,

even though there wasn’t a spot of cloud in the vast sky. “That other baby died, honey,”

she said so softly that she could hardly be heard over the dry desert wind. “She was your

twin sister. But she died a few days after you were born. She had a weak heart.”

After that, books took away the pain and disappointment; they always did. Books

closed bad doors and opened good ones. Rachel couldn’t remember when she had read

her first book; she couldn’t recall a time she had never been reading. It was her mother

who had come home one day with some borrowed Dick and Jane books and taught her

daughter to read; Rachel knew almost nothing of formal schooling. There was a brief time

in Lancaster, California—another barren desert—when she had sat in first- or second-

grade classes. Not always as the object of derision as she was in some schools—at least in

the Mojave there were other children like herself. But there had been that one terrible

spell when her father had managed to get himself a job in a service station and they’d lived

in a rented house for a while and Rachel had gone to a real school. The kids there had

made fun of her bare feet and too-short dresses. Feeling sorry for the child who never

brought a lunch pail and never seemed to have money for the school cafeteria, a teacher

had shared a lunch with her one day. But the humiliation of it, even in one so young, had

made Rachel throw up. The teacher had gotten mad, as if she had done it on purpose, and

hadn’t shared after that.

But Rachel hadn’t been long at that school. Her dad had lost the new job as usual and

spent the next year on welfare checks, cursing the government and picking fights in bars

with any guy in uniform.

It was Rachel’s greatest skill, and her gift—reading. She could never understand why

folks made such a big deal of it. After all, when you get pleasure from something, you keep

at it and naturally you get good at it. And pleasure was what books gave her, just about the

only pleasure her childhood ever knew. With each new strange town they moved into, with

each new neighborhood and new faces, with each new fear of the new place, with each

prayer that Daddy would keep
this
job and let them live in this town long enough for her to

make friends, with each drunken homecoming and the ranting about the motherfuckers

BUTTERFLY

25

that got him fired and the inevitable abuse of her mother—the screams and begging from

the bedroom—with each new desperation and disappointment and deepening of her lone-

liness and alienation from the rest of the world, Rachel escaped into a book.

Sometimes she and her mother read together. They would sit in the little trailer and

take turns reading pages out loud. “Education’s like gold,” her mother would always say.

“I want better for you than I ever had, Rachel. I want you to make something of yourself,

and be happy.” But mother and daughter read not just for education but also for escape;

they helped each other along the road of fantasy so that, for a while, both could forget.

But there was another reason why Rachel ran from reality. She discovered it quite by

accident on the day she turned eleven.

She was brushing her hair in the mirror in the dingy room of a motel where they were

temporarily living, in a town they were just passing through. Her mother had gotten a job

as a maid at this motel, and while her father went “job hunting” in the bleached little

town somewhere between Phoenix and Albuquerque, Rachel was once again left on her

own.

She was trying her hair in different styles, with the aid of a movie magazine, when it sud-

denly struck her:
She wasn’t pretty.
In fact, she realized in dismay, she was downright homely.

The popular pinups of the day were Betty Grable and Veronica Lake—Rachel held

their magazine photos up beside her face and tried to see what exactly was wrong. The

list, it seemed to her eleven-year-old mind, was endless. Thick eyebrows, ironing-board

straight hair, slightly recessive chin, and—worst of all—an impossible nose.

As if that discovery weren’t painful enough, as if she didn’t already know it, her father,

in a booze haze one night after a trying day of “job hunting,” remarked, “Christ, that kid’s

getting ugly.”

Bones in children shift and deceive all through childhood. It is not until preadoles-

cence that the facial features decide to find their place and settle down. From age six

Rachel’s face had been one of those usual kid blurs—she looked like any haunter of play-

grounds. But at eleven she was entering the readying stage, and her face, on cue, was tak-

ing its final form.

The nose, strangely, was hawkish; it would have looked good on a boy. In fact, on a

man, it would have made him look aggressively handsome. On a woman, unfortunately,

even more so on a little girl, it looked grossly out of place. And Rachel knew it.

She watched herself for the next few months, hoping and praying that it was only a

phase and that nature would correct its mistake. But the more she watched, the more she

realized that this was the way things were going to be from now on, and therefore the

more she started to avoid her own reflection. Which was why, when they passed the win-

ter in Gallup, New Mexico, and a kindly neighbor lady, taking pity on Mrs. Dwyer and

her homely daughter, had offered to give them both Toni home perms, Rachel had

protested so loudly that the lady had been offended and avoided the Dwyers after that.

But Rachel’s mother understood, and tried from then on, in her awkward, unpracticed

way, to reassure the girl and give her the love she so obviously, so desperately hungered for.

The sad fact was, Mrs. Dwyer was caught in a trap of alcohol and abuse. To please her

impossible-to-please husband, she went with him to taverns, shared cheap bottles brought

26

Kathryn Harvey

home, and allowed him to keep her down. Mrs. Dwyer’s episodes of loving her daughter

were sporadic, unpredictable, and often off target.

But there were people who did know how to show love, and upon whom Rachel could

shower her natural gift for intense loving—people who lived in books.

She would read anything she could get her hands on. Sometimes it was outdated

movie magazines, or a
Life
or a
Post
thrown away. Rarely were they juvenile books. But she

did read Nancy Drew, all of whose detective adventures Rachel devoured. The local

library was her gateway to her fantasy world, and nearly every place, no matter how small

and shabby, had a library. Even the trailer park they lived in when she was ten. It was

miles from any real town and was just a kind of neglected collection of gas station, general

store, and tavern. But the office of the trailer park had a shelf of books. When people

moved, they left behind their well-thumbed books so that folks moving in could trade

their
old ones in for new ones. It was the invention of Mrs. Simons, the old lady who ran

the park, and Rachel quickly went through the rack.

Lonely and uncertain, unpretty and starved for affection, Rachel placed her shy hand

into the outstretched hands of faceless authors and escaped into the exciting world of make-

believe. She shared the adventures of Frank Slaughter and Frank Yerby; she walked ancient

highways with Mika Waltari and Lew Wallace; she experienced rapture and innocent love

with Pearl Buck; she explored the stars with Asimov and Heinlein. There was nothing

Rachel would not read; every book offered its own avenues of escape, its own rewards and

comforts and joys. Altogether, they created the fantasy world that sustained her and kept her

heart clean and trusting. Arthur Clark’s spacemen were good and bold and valorous; for

Rachel Dwyer, they, not flesh-and-blood men, were the only ones she would ever love.

Strangely, however, although she perforce read many adult novels, Rachel nonetheless

remained curiously naive and unworldly. It was as if, she decided in later years, her mind,

when encountering anything that smacked of reality or came too close to home, would

automatically edit it out. Rachel was nine when she read
Forever Amber,
but if quizzed

about it later, she would have been unable to explain the exact cause of Amber’s downfall.

It was enough for Rachel that Amber lived in a romantic age, wore old-fashioned gowns,

and was wooed by dashing men. The other elements—out-of-wedlock pregnancy, dis-

grace, and abandonment—were completely missed by Rachel.

Which was why, she later supposed, that at fourteen she was still very innocent, vul-

nerable and unprepared for what life was about to deliver.

It was raining. One of those suddenly-come-and-suddenly-go desert storms. The

inside of the trailer was filled with a terrible racket.

This was a different trailer from the one the Dwyers had rented when Rachel was ten;