Dinner Along the Amazon (8 page)

She raised her paper cup and Jo-Jo raised his.

Miss Kennedy smiled.

They drank.

To herself Miss Kennedy said: “Afternoon children—dear God—never let them know what I have done.”

Dim beyond the curtains, which hung like stagnant fog across the windows, Mrs Renalda Harper Dewey’s bedroom looked, if one could have seen it by daylight, like a stage-set at the close of a slapstick battle that had employed everything from cream pies to flower vases.

Her clothing was strewn from one end of the room to the other and on into the bathroom. Three glasses had been broken, a hand mirror shattered, a bottle of scent had been splattered against one wall and the powder bowl from the dressing table had been emptied all over the rug. The telephone by Mrs Dewey’s bed had been disconnected (after a surge of anger at not being able to contact her lawyer), and the lamp there had been overturned and an enormous hole burnt in its shade by the light bulb.

Mrs Dewey lay on the bed face downwards with her arms clutched around the pillows, her lipstick smeared on the sheets and her negligee, all undone, caught around her waist in a tangle.

At about four-thirty in the afternoon she awoke.

She lay very still. She had no idea where she was and no recollection of where she had been. At first, she felt no sensation whatsoever, being almost numb from the effect of the pills that Bertha had given her, but gradually she became aware of her arms pulled tight around the pillows.

She mumbled something into the sheets and pulled the pillows closer. “Peter?” she murmured. “Peter?” Suddenly however her fingers became aware of the texture beneath them and she pushed the pillows away with lonely disgust. Presently she tried to lift her head but pain seized the back of her neck and stopped her. She groaned.

She focused her eyes on the bedside table and she saw the telephone and the lamp in their disarray.

“What on earth has happened?” she said out loud.

She rolled over painfully and dragged herself into a sitting position with her back against the head of the bed. She reached around behind her and pushed the discarded pillows into place and sighed back against them.

She closed her eyes. Sitting so still, she began to feel a little clearer and she reopened them.

The sight of the wreckage about the room drew a weak sound of bewilderment from her which again touched off the pain in the back of her neck. She put her fingers against her forehead.

Nothing made any sense. She recognized her own bedroom, but she couldn’t think why it was in such disorder nor why she was there at this time of day. Her bedside clock said four-thirty and she had never been still abed at such an hour in her life, unless because of sickness. She concluded that she therefore must be ill. She certainly felt ill—but she couldn’t define what, exactly, was the matter with her.

The thick smell of the perfume, from the wall where it had been splattered, made her feel sick to her stomach and she rose further to sit on the edge of the bed. The motion of swinging her legs over the side made her even more nauseous and she nearly fell forward onto the floor.

She attempted to stand, but this was even worse and she knew that she would have to be sick there and then. She lunged towards the bathroom but couldn’t reach the toilet or the sink and was sick on the tiled floor. “How disgusting,” she said. “How revolting.”

After a moment she recovered and took a towel from the towel rack and wet it under the taps in the bathtub. She wiped off her face and her hands and threw the towel into the corner, looking after it as though it were a discarded victim of the plague, then she took another towel, soaked it in cold water and returned to the bedroom, shutting the bathroom door behind her.

Back on the bed she put the cold towel behind her neck and lay back on the pillows. However, the smell of the perfume soon began to reattract her attention and she looked about her to see where it was coming from. Finally after scrutinizing the floor and the bed, and after holding her negligee sleeves up to her nose, she noticed the stain on the wall. She closed one eye to look at it, then she opened that eye and closed the other. But she couldn’t focus her mind on it. She stared at it—opening and closing her eyes—but she could make nothing of it. Finally she just sighed its presence out of her mind and decided to open her window.

At the window, the glare of the afternoon sun stunned he:

and she fell back into the shadows. In doing so she stepped on a piece of glass and cut the ball of her right foot painfully.

“Oh God,” she muttered, “what is
happening
? What is
happening
to me?”

She limped into the middle of the room and stood there swaying back and forth, looking from corner to corner, trying to make sense of what she saw.

“I’m going to get blood on the rug,” she thought. “There will be blood all over the rug.
A—ll
over the
ru—g
. All over this bea-u-ti-ful god damn rug.” She felt oddly as though she were dreaming, and so, with the callous recklessness of a dreamer, without the responses of reality, she abandoned her bleeding foot with the same sense of useless incomprehension as she had the perfume stain on the wall.

From beyond the open window she heard laughter. Pulling her negligee around her she walked delicately across to the window, where she leaned weakly against the sill. She could only barely see through the chiffon curtain, but she was afraid to expose her eyes again to the flat glare of the sun, so that she peered almost blindly out through the gauze.

There was more laughter and at the end of the driveway she made out the black umbrella and the orange deck chair with Miss Kennedy sitting in it with Jo-Jo on her lap. Harper and the other children were gathered about her.

“What on earth is she doing?” she wondered. “What is she doing in my deck chair? And that umbrella—that’s Peter’s umbrella. No!” she cried out. “No. No. That doesn’t make sense even. No one’s ever touched that—that was Peter’s—that was Peter’s—that was his. No one has ever touched it.”

Perhaps she only imagined that she was calling to them because no one turned in her direction and there was no sign whatsoever that she had been heard. “I guess they know,” she said. “Of course they know.”

Relieved, she tottered uncertainly back in the general direction of the bed, but she missed it and found herself suddenly sitting in the middle of the floor.

For a second she was too stunned to react to what had happened but then a spasm of tears burned up towards her eyes from her throat and she wept, with her legs stretched out before her and her hands caught in the disorder of her negligee. She looked like a broken doll.

After the tears a wild confusion of images appeared before her—some real, some flickering in and out of the picture from the past, some, distortions of the actual. She saw her own tears where they remained upon her husband’s mute umbrella for a moment, and then she saw Harper as he stood with his back to her at the foot of the driveway. She saw the mess of powder and blood on the rug, a furious kaleidoscope of colour that was perhaps the drapery, perhaps an overturned vase of flowers, perhaps only the vaguery of madness, and then she saw her own prone self stretched upon the floor.

It occurred to her to wail, as a child would wail, from the midst of some self-created ruin of shattered glass or fallen cutlery, but suddenly anger rose in her, the anger of private degradation and the fury of her fallen pride.

She crawled in a splurge of remembrance to her dressing table and took from beneath it the half-finished bottle of gin, which was the bottle that Harper had left behind in deference to its near emptiness.

She took a mouthful straight from the bottle, which gave her the strength to rise and cross to the bathroom.

“Everything else is broken,” she announced to herself.

In the bathroom the stench of vomit on the floor nearly drove her out, but she threw a towel over it, grabbed the tooth glass from its shelf and ran into the bedroom slamming the door behind her. “They were all broken, I had to,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

She poured a full glass of gin and crossed to the window. She swallowed two mouthfuls without stopping, and for a moment she thought that it would make her throw up again, but it gradually burnt its way into her bloodstream and her stomach relaxed. After a moment she felt better.

She watched Harper.

He was standing alone and silent, a little to one side of the group of children around Miss Kennedy, and he had his hands behind his back. He seemed not to be listening to them talking; he seemed, instead, to be thinking of something private and sad of his own.

She smiled and spoke his name quietly to herself, “Harper.” It gave her no comfort. “Harper Dewey,” she said. “Harper Peter Dewey.”

She pulled back the curtain with her free hand and shaded her eyes with the hand that held the glass of gin.

She blinked and looked at her son.

“Harper Dewey,” she said, as though in conclusion.

After a moment she took another mouthful of gin and swallowed it slowly and deliberately, almost meditatively. Harper, below on the sidewalk, turned to look at the house and Mrs Dewey dropped the curtain slowly, hoping that he had seen her. He stared at her window for nearly a full minute, pulling at the green eye-shade of his sun hat.

“Harper Dewey,” said Mrs Dewey and she waved at him. But she knew he hadn’t seen her, because he shifted his stance and looked back towards Miss Kennedy and the children.

Desperately Mrs Dewey finished her glass of gin and poured another which emptied the bottle. She looked down at her bleeding foot and said, defeatedly, with a broken sigh, “Peter,” and she lifted her glass. “Success! He’s as blind as a bat.”

She pulled the chair from the dressing table over to the window and sat down. The children were laughing again at something Miss Kennedy had said to them and they laughed for a long time as though it must have been something very funny indeed that she had said.

Harper, however, aloof from their amusement, walked over to the driveway and picked up a stone. He stood with his back to the house, with his feet apart, apparently listening to the end of Miss Kennedy’s story. The others continued to laugh, but Harper turned around and gave his mother’s window a long, slow, tearful stare. His hand went to his eyes.

“Harper Dewey,” said Mrs Dewey. “Harper Peter Dewey. Blind as a bat,” and she smiled.

After a moment she looked down at her glass and had just put her head back with it held to her lips, prepared to take a long swallow of gin, when the window in front of her was shattered by a stone that fell at her feet.

She was holding it in her hand when they found her.

In his bed in the dark, no more a cave, no more a safe place alone, he sat waiting.

What he was waiting for he did not know—but he felt that there was action coming. This action, whatever it might be, could, he began to suspect, come from any side, even from some inanimate object right there in his own room.

The windows might fly open of their own accord—(they were shut because the summer rain had finally come in a great cloudburst)—or the bureau might topple, or the pictures fall. God might put his hand into the room, even, and take him away and leave him somewhere on a hilltop or in the middle of some foreign and frightening field.

If only he knew, or if he could at least guess, what it was that he was waiting for he might be able to prepare himself for defence. He could barricade the door or hide in the cupboard. He could even leave the room and ask to sleep with Bertha, his distrust of her aside. But he sensed that all of these resorts would be utterly useless, because he knew that what was there, waiting to happen, would happen in spite of anything that he could do to prevent it.

He tried to think about Woolworth’s and about all the jewelry he had seen there. He pictured the prices and carefully went over, again, his accounts from the bazaar sales of the afternoon. He thought about the pane of glass from his mother’s window and knew that he must pay for that as well. He thought about Jo-Jo in Miss Kennedy’s lap and about his father’s umbrella.

Above him in the attic Bertha shunted her flat form across dry sheets, grating it, as she did, to a sitting position on the edge of her bed. Harper listened to her crossing over to her bedroom door and heard her open it and descend to the second floor. She came and stood outside his door and he coughed to let her know that he was still awake. Then she went down the hall and stood outside his mother’s door listening, he could tell, to some mysterious noises beyond it, because she spoke, very quietly, Mrs Dewey’s name.

Apparently, however, she was satisfied that all was reasonably well, because she came back down the hall and went downstairs to the kitchen, probably, Harper decided, to brew herself another of the inevitable cups of coffee.

Harper began a half sleep. He was still aware of his room and of the storm beyond it and of his arms resting against the cold sheets, and yet he slept. He slept and he dreamed.

Again, as in Miss Kennedy’s oak tree, he dreamt of his father and of his ‘Duty Letter’ and of his father’s voice. But this time instead of offering Harper the letter his father took it away from him and tore it up so that the pieces blew about in a funnel of wind just between them—obscuring and disfiguring his father’s face.

After that he had a dream about ‘The War.’

‘The War,’ to Harper, was a big city where there were men running and also men driving in jeeps and men riding on horses—and all of them, all of these men, made wild shouts into the air and their faces were all puffed out with this shout.

There were men, too, who were silent, but these men were lying on the ground or they were standing against the walls of the city with blood running from their eyes like tears and they moved their lips silently as though they were beggars who had voiced their cry so often that they had no voices left.

‘The War’ was very noisy though, all about these silent soldiers, and the noise was of running feet, and galloping horses, and of cars being driven so fast that you couldn’t see them, and of aeroplanes that flew so low that you could reach up and touch them with your hand. The noise was of a rushing—of everything being rushing onwards and there was no end, neither to the noise nor to the rushing.