Chapter Twenty-One
Baby girl McTell died on November 19th, on a starless, overcast morning, a little after 2:00 A.M.
The phone in my motel room dredged me from sleep. Topmost levels of my mind came instantly awake; I waited as others drifted up to join them. Lights from a car in the lot outside made a shadow screen of my wall, everything outsize and tipped at odd angles as in old German Expressionist films. The car’s idle was set too low; every few seconds it began sputtering out and the driver had to tap the gas pedal.
“Yeah?” I said.
“Mr. Griffin?”
I said yes, and Doctor Arellano told me they had done all they could.
I thanked him, said I’d be in later to see to arrangements, and hung up. There was nothing to drink, or I would have drunk it. Outside, a car door slammed and a woman shouted, as the car pulled away, Damn you! You hear me? God damn you!
I splashed water on my face and sat for a while staring out into the darkness with late-night radio blathering behind me. Then I turned on water in the shower to give it time to warm while I shaved. I was climbing in when the phone rang again.
“Lew? Teresa. Becky Walden just called. The nurse who was taking care of our girl tonight. She knew I’d want to know. I’m so sorry, Lew.”
I watched dampness spread slowly over the carpet at my feet.
“Lew, are you okay?”
“Fine.” Clearing my throat, I said it again.
“Listen, it’s my night off. Would you like me to come over? Maybe it’s not a good idea for you to be alone tonight. I’m up anyway-I can’t ever sleep like a normal person, even on my nights off-and watching old movies. I could be right there, provided you don’t mind stay-at-home old clothes and aboriginal hair. There’s no sense in your going in to the hospital till morning, anyway. None of the administrators are there before nine.”
“I’d like you here,” I said after a moment.
“Then I’m on my way.”
Her stay-at-home old clothes turned out to be designer, French and recently pressed. The aboriginal hair looked pretty much the way it always did.
Myself, I’d barely managed a dash through the shower, jeans and a T-shirt.
“Lew,” she said when I opened the door, “I’d like you to meet Beth Ann, the only reason I’m still here in the States. I hope you don’t mind my bringing her along.”
Her companion was a stunning, tall woman with light brown skin, golden eyes and elaborate Old South manners. She took my hand and seemed for a moment on the verge of curtsying.
“Beth Ann’s from Charleston. She’s never been able to quite get over it.”
“Now that I’ve seen her, I’d be surprised if Charleston ever got over
“What did I tell you?” Teresa said to Beth Ann.
“You told me he was a good-looking charmer. And you were at least half right.”
“Does the word coquettish come to mind?” Teresa asked me.
“Among others,” I said. Mutual admiration was flowing thick in there. Pretty soon we’d have to hack our way through it with machetes.
“I’m sorry about the little girl, Mr. Griffin.”
“Lew. And thank you. Though I guess it’s what we all had to expect.”
“That doesn’t make it any easier.”
“No. No, it doesn’t.”
Teresa lowered a paper bag onto the dresser and reached in, pulling out three mugs, each fitted with its own lid. She handed one to each of us, kept one herself. Mine was so hot I could hardly hold on to it.
“Mistake,” Teresa said. “Trade. This is coffee: yours. B.A. and I have tea.”
“Tea’s wonderful. Split it with me?”
“Of course. But I didn’t know you were a tea drinker. You’ve always had coffee.”
“When in Rome,” I said.
“Quite.”
I had never told her about Vicky. Now I did.
“You loved her,” Teresa said when I finished.
“Oh yes.”
“And you let her go.”
“The way one lets the wind blow, or the sun come up. She made her own choices, her own decisions. There wasn’t much I could do.”
“There are always things we can do, Lew. You could have gone back with her. She asked.”
I shook my head, much as I had done all those years ago. I handed Teresa the mug. She drank and passed it back.
“Do you hear from her?”
“I did, for a while. Less and less as time went on. She had a family, a son, a busy husband doing important things, a new daughter. And her own career, of course. Ties loosen. Memories get hung on walls or put away in the corners of drawers and life goes on.”
Teresa held out the almost-empty mug and, when I shook my head, drank off the last swig of tea herself. Then she pried the lid off the coffee, sipped, passed it on to me. We were all sitting on a long plastic-covered couch under the picture window with its theater-curtain drape, looking at cinderblock painted green and light from the bathroom spilling out over brown carpeting.
“You miss her,” Teresa said.
“I miss a lot of things-”
“She wasn’t a thing, Lew.”
“-but the train keeps moving on.”
“When I was ten,” Beth Ann said, “my sister, the one who raised me after my folks died, put me on a train to Chicago, to see my grandparents. I’d never been out of Charleston, never been much of anywhere but home and the Catholic school I attended. I was scared to death. I didn’t even know there were bathrooms on the train. And I was starved. I’d left home at six in the morning without breakfast and everybody around me now was eating chicken or sandwiches out of bags and boxes. I hadn’t moved this whole time. I was just sitting there, half a step from peeing my pants, when a conductor walked up. I’ll never forget him. A white man, in his thirties I guess, though he seemed horribly old at the time. And he just said: Come with me, girl. Took me back to the club car, showed me where the bathroom was, the one he and the other employees used. And the rest of that trip he kept bringing me ham sandwiches. Just a slice of ham, two pieces of white bread and mayonnaise, but they tasted better than anything else I’d ever had in my life.”
We’d long ago finished the coffee, but had kept passing the mug back and forth in one of those spontaneous, unspoken inspirations that occasionally arise. Whoever held the mug (we now realized, all at once) had to speak.
Teresa: “Many women have loved you, Lew.”
Beth Ann: “Life could be worthwhile without Terri, I know that. There would be reasons to go on living. I would find them. But right now I can’t imagine what they might be.”
Teresa: “Coming here, to the States to live-for a single year, I thought then-I felt as Columbus must have felt. I was falling off the edge of the world, leaving civilization behind me. Then I discovered malls! fast food! credit cards!”
Me: “Once in the sixties I remember seeing spray-painted on the wall of a K amp;B: Convenience Kills.”
Teresa: “ ‘For arrogance and hatred are the wares peddled in the thoroughfares.’ ”
B.A.: “Yeats.”
Me: “ ‘A Poem for My Daughter.’ Now
