The Evening Star (34 page)

Also, the processing seemed to be going at a snail’s pace. Every fifteen minutes or so a couple of bored-looking matrons would take their time strolling down the hall to the big holding cell and would call out two or three names and take two or three girls back with them to be processed, but it was not lost on the crowd of women that newcomers were being added a lot faster than old-timers were being taken out. Most of the women’s Saturday-night makeup jobs were melting horribly in the heat, and their impatience was evident.

Melanie didn’t blame them. She herself hated to wait—Bruce was always berating her for being so impatient—but in the crowd she was with at the moment she felt she’d better just summon as much patience as she could and not get anybody mad.

A black woman who looked to be in her thirties was positioned right by the cell door, obviously hoping to be next out once the cops came, but the cops came three or four times without taking her, and the black woman began to get too pissed to keep quiet. The next time a cop came and stuck another woman in the cell, she spoke up.

“How many of us do you think you can put in this fuckin’ black hole?” she said. “Can’t you see it’s full?”

The cop didn’t change expression or say a word. He just locked the cell and walked away.

“Fuckhead!” the black woman said as he was leaving.

The cop turned briefly and pointed his finger at her. “Watch your language, Denise,” he said, and kept on walking.

Melanie began to wish that she could at least make it over to a wall so she’d have the wall to lean on, but every inch of wall space was already taken by women who had been brought in before her, and the very second one of them got taken out, the wall space got filled by women who were a lot closer to the wall than she was. There didn’t seem to be any hope of ever getting a spot on the wall, though that soon came to be her dream of comfort.

All she could do was stand there with the other women, hoping that sooner or later her name would be called. An hour passed, or maybe more; she stopped thinking about the time, though now and then she would think about how nice it would be to get a drink of water or to lean against the wall. She didn’t really think about anything else—mainly, her mind was a blank. It was a very unusual situation, being in a cell with fifty or so hookers, but she was too tired even to look around. All she really wanted was for it to be over.

Then a time came when she was aware that a pain was cutting through the blankness. It cut through and then diminished and went away, but it soon cut through again, and every time it cut through it got a little worse. It was low down, like a cramp, only worse—it was twice as bad as any cramp she had ever experienced and pretty soon she was squirming and really having to try hard to keep herself from groaning and stuff.

“Wow,” she said one time, grimacing when it came real bad.

A small Hispanic woman was standing beside her, chewing gum and waiting stoically, not complaining like some of the other women. But she heard Melanie say “Wow” and saw her distorted face. It seemed to Melanie that she had sympathetic eyes.

“You sick?” the woman said.

“I guess I could be,” Melanie said. “I don’t know what it is—I’m getting these real bad cramps.”

“You don’t look so good, honey,” the woman said, putting a hand on her arm.

Just then a real bad pain came and Melanie had to yelp a little—it was just real bad. Some of the other women turned to look at her. Up to that point Melanie had been scared of her cellmates—her strategy had been to just keep quiet and not be noticed. But all of a sudden she was hurting too much—it was scary. Her legs began to feel real shaky, she wasn’t sure she could stand up any longer; she felt a great urge to lie down. There was a blankness; she felt she might be falling; it seemed like several people grabbed her. Then everybody was yelling so loudly she couldn’t think anymore, she just kept falling and let it all go.

12

“Aurora, don’t come,” Patsy said, “Couldn’t you just this once trust me and take my advice? I’m here and Katie’s here and Melanie is in no danger. We’ll get her back on her feet, and then if you want to come, fine.”

“Are you
sure
she’s in no danger?” Aurora asked again—the call from Los Angeles had come at 4
A.M.
Fortunately, Hector slept through it. The second call came at 6:15; in the intervening two and a quarter hours Patsy and her daughter had managed to get Melanie out of jail and into Cedars of Sinai, a hospital where, Aurora seemed to recall, Elizabeth Taylor had had several of her operations. In her view, a hospital that had managed to keep Elizabeth Taylor alive should be able to deal with Melanie’s miscarriage; nonetheless, the hours between the call from the jail and the call from the hospital had been acutely anxious ones. Aurora remembered her own miscarriage—not so much the pain as the sorrow. Rudyard had not been much of a comfort to her—in fact he been
no
comfort to her—in that sorrow. Perhaps it was not really his fault—men were not the ones who had the little one inside them; there was really no way they could feel the
loss as a woman felt it—but that very fact only made her sorrow the more lonely and the more acute.

Now Melanie had that loneliness and that sorrow too—Patsy had not even had time to go find Bruce and tell him what happened. Of course it was a very lucky thing—almost a miracle—that Patsy had happened to be visiting Katie when the trouble occurred; she had only arrived in Los Angeles that afternoon. It was lucky, it was a miracle, and yet it only made Aurora feel the more wrong—she and Rosie had been talking for three weeks of going to L.A. to see how things stood; but they had dithered. Rosie had her new, evidently flourishing romance with Willie Cotts, a prison guard, and she herself had her strange, feverish—not to mention pointless and degrading—infatuation with Jerry Bruckner. Almost the worst sin, in Aurora’s reckoning, was to let men take precedence over children, and yet she and Rosie, the two people who loved Melanie most, had done just that, more or less—it was Patsy Carpenter who had been there to catch their baby when she fell.

“It don’t matter if it was Patsy and not us,” Rosie promptly informed her. “She loves Melly too—thank God she was there.”

Aurora, unable to bear her anxiety alone, had awakened Rosie and Willie. All three of them, a bleak trio, had sat for two hours in the kitchen, waiting for the phone to ring again. By the time it finally did, Aurora and Rosie were at their wit’s end. Willie Cotts had never met Melanie but was at his wit’s end, too, from having consumed too much coffee, too early in the day, not to mention from having to be in the company of women who frightened him badly.

“Caffeine makes me jumpy,” he said several times.

“Then stop drinking coffee, you’re like a jumping bean anyway,” Rosie said, annoyed that Willie had not managed to be more of a comfort in this, their first crisis. Just when she needed a steady hand on the tiller, she had yet another man who didn’t seem to know how to put
any
hand, steady or otherwise, on the tiller.

“I suppose you’re right,” Aurora said to Patsy. “I suppose
I should wait a day or two until everyone’s calmer. For one thing, if I came now, I might tear the head off that young man for prodding that child into shoplifting. And I might also tear the head off Professor Horton, for not at least seeing that his daughter had money for food.”

Patsy chuckled. “Aurora, I’d be happy to snap both those heads off for you,” she said. “It’ll be like snapping peas.”

“May I talk to her at least?” Aurora asked.

“She’s sleeping,” Patsy said. “I’m sure she’ll want to talk to you as soon as she wakes up, though.”

Patsy looked over at Melanie, pale in the hospital bed—it was easy to tell that she was quite alive because she was snoring a little. Her own daughter, Katie, had been so tired by the time they got Melanie to the hospital that she had been sent home to bed. The two girls were only eight months apart in age; both of them, when tired or sick, still looked about twelve years old.

“I can’t believe they put this child in jail in Oxnard,” Patsy said. “How’s Rosie bearing up under this news?”

“Ask her yourself, I’m handing her the phone,” Aurora said. “Thank you, of course. Thank you.”

“Hello,” Rosie said. “It’s just a miracle you was out there. Are you coming back in time for exercise class, or what?’

Just then General Scott stumped into the room. He was down to one crutch and was feeling much more himself—yet he had awakened with a sense of apprehension. Aurora was not beside him. That was often the case, of course, but this time her absence felt different. He would have been hard put to say how an absence could be different, feel different, yet this one did. He thought he heard voices from downstairs, an unusual thing, since it was still dark. Perhaps a burglar had broken in and was holding Aurora at gunpoint. Or perhaps they were merely chatting. He remembered that a harmless madman had somehow managed to get into the bedroom of the Queen of England—the Queen had chatted amiably with him until help came. Perhaps Aurora was chatting amiably with just such a person, but that theory left several questions unanswered, such as why she had gotten
out of bed in the first place, and, more critically, why she had gone downstairs. If she merely needed to go to the bathroom, as she sometimes did in the night, there would have been no need for her to go downstairs.

It was all very puzzling and a little worrisome. He thought he heard Rosie’s voice, though he couldn’t be sure. If he did, that merely added to the mystery—it certainly wasn’t time for Rosie to appear. Besides, now that she had Willie Cotts, her new lover, she frequently didn’t appear even when it
was
time for her to appear.

He finally decided he had better get up and see what was going on. In his haste he forgot to take off his nightcap, though he did put on his slippers and his bathrobe. To his surprise, Aurora was sitting at the kitchen table with her head in her arms. Rosie was talking on the telephone, and Willie Cotts, a fellow with whom he was having difficulty establishing much rapport, was there too, nervously drinking coffee.

“Oops, the General’s up,” Rosie said into the phone. “He’s still got on his sleeping cap.”

“Why oops?” the General asked, removing his cap. “Why can’t I just be up, since I’m up?”

“Hector, don’t you be cute!” Aurora said, looking up at him indignantly. “Melanie’s been arrested for shoplifting and now she’s had a miscarriage. It’s no time for witticisms.”

“Good lord, I’m sorry,” the General said. “It wasn’t much of a witticism anyway.”

“I agree, and that’s all the more reason you shouldn’t have made it while we’re all in this anxious state,” Aurora said, wiping her eyes with a napkin.

“He was looking pretty good, but now Aurora’s just chewed him out,” Rosie informed Patsy, who had inquired about the General’s health.

“Why do you suppose he puts up with her?” Patsy inquired.

“Sex—why does anybody put up with anybody?” Rosie said, giving Willie Cotts a tart look. The look caused him to squirm, and also to slurp his coffee in a way that annoyed everyone.

“Who’s she talking to?” the General inquired. “If it’s the police, why is she talking about us in this way?”

“It’s only Patsy, and Patsy has long since known what a mixed bag we are,” Aurora informed him, wondering why Rosie had looked with such annoyance at Willie. From what she had seen of him, Willie was an almost desperately obliging man, rather in the mold of her old admirer Vernon Dalhart, whose plane had gone down in Alaska. Willie was twice Vernon’s size, but not twice as obliging. There were not enough hours in a day for anyone to be more obliging than Vernon, a thought that caused her to feel sorrowful, since Vernon was dead. Somehow she had not even managed to seduce him, though surely she could have if only she had summoned a degree or two more boldness. Possibly if she had been able to be just a bit bolder, he would have proved as obliging in bed as he had been out of bed—though, she reflected, there would have had to be a rather lengthy training period before Vernon would have even known what obliging was in the context of bed. The sad fact was that it was often empty men like her therapist, Jerry Bruckner, who turned out to be obliging in bed.

It seemed disgraceful that such thoughts persisted in running through her head, even as her granddaughter lay sick in a hospital far away; lately, to her frequent discomfort, or even shame, her thoughts insisted on running in such embarrassing and unproductive directions, willy-nilly, and at the wrong time. It seemed to her that her will must have been damaged, finally, else such things wouldn’t happen. The thought made her look grave.

Her grave look frightened the General, who began rather absently to massage the back of her neck. In times of stress Aurora generally welcomed a bit of massaging, but this time, to his horror, his efforts had the opposite effect.

“Don’t touch me!” she yelled, jumping up from the table. Her sudden action scared Willie Cotts so badly that he sloshed coffee all over his pants.

Aurora ran upstairs crying, only to run back down, still crying, but purse in hand, seconds later. Before anyone could say a word she was out the back door and gone.

“Good lord,” the General said, feeling lame in every sense.

“The General tried to rub her neck, she ran upstairs, she ran downstairs, and now she’s out the back door and I just heard her start the car,” Rosie said, giving Patsy play-by-play coverage.

“You should let her go, she’s just upset,” Patsy advised. “She’ll go have a cry and come back feeling a lot better, probably.”

“That’s your opinion. I think what we’ve probably got here is a car wreck in the making,” Rosie said, wondering why Patsy was always so optimistic.

“That’s right. Willie, could you stop her? I can’t move fast enough,” the General said. “I’m sure she’s not in a fit state to drive.”

Willie Cotts didn’t rise—he got several paper napkins and mopped gravely at the large coffee stain on his pants. Much as he had come to love Rosie Dunlup, his dumpling, as he called her in tender moments, there were times such as the one he was just living through when he wondered if trying to keep loving her was quite worth it. There was certainly nothing wrong with Rosie herself, a little flat-chestedness apart, but the family she worked for was both crazy and scary; just being around them made being a prison guard seem like relaxing work. He didn’t know what to say to any of them, Mrs. Greenway least of all.