Ondine tilted her head and looked at her employer sideways. She raised her eyebrows slowly and then squinted. It was as though she saw Margaret for the first time. She shook her head back and forth back and forth in wonder. “No,” she said. “I wasn’t thirty-five. I was twenty-three. A girl. Just like you.”
Margaret put her forehead into her palm. The roots of her sunset hair were brown. She held her head that way for a moment and said, “You have to forgive me for that, Ondine. You have to.”
“You forgive you. Don’t ask for more.”
“You know what, Ondine? You know what? I want to be a wonderful, wonderful old lady.” Margaret laughed a rusty little bark that came from a place seldom used. “Ondine? Let’s be wonderful old ladies. You and me.”
“Huh,” said Ondine, but she smiled a little.
“We’re both childless now, Ondine. And we’re both stuck here. We should be friends. It’s not too late.”
Ondine looked out of the window and did not answer.
“Is it too late, Ondine?”
“Almost,” she said. “Almost.”
AT SOME POINT in life the world’s beauty becomes enough. You don’t need to photograph, paint or even remember it. It is enough. No record of it needs to be kept and you don’t need someone to share it with or tell it to. When that happens—that letting go—you let go because you can. The world will always be there—while you sleep it will be there—when you wake it will be there as well. So you can sleep and there is reason to wake. A dead hydrangea is as intricate and lovely as one in bloom. Bleak sky is as seductive as sunshine, miniature orange trees without blossom or fruit are not defective; they are that. So the windows of the greenhouse can be opened and the weather let in. The latch on the door can be left unhooked, the muslin removed, for the soldier ants are beautiful too and whatever they do will be part of it.
Valerian began going back to his greenhouse. Not as early as before; now he waited until after the breakfast rain. He was still telling Margaret, “Tomorrow. Perhaps tomorrow.” But he did not change anything in there. Didn’t sow or clip or transpose. Things grew or died where and how they pleased. Isle des Chevaliers filled in the spaces that had been the island’s to begin with.
He thought about innocence there in his greenhouse and knew that he was guilty of it because he had lived with a woman who had made something kneel down in him the first time he saw her, but about whom he knew nothing; had watched his son grow and talk but also about whom he had known nothing. And there was something so foul in that, something in the crime of innocence so revolting it paralyzed him. He had not known because he had not taken the trouble to know. He was satisfied with what he did know. Knowing more was inconvenient and frightening. Like a bucket of water with no bottom. If you know how to tread, bottomlessness need not concern you. Margaret knew the bottomlessness—she had looked at it, dived in it and pulled herself out—obviously tougher than he. What an awful thing she had done. And how much more awful not to have known it. Which was all he could say in his defense: that he did not know; that the postman passed him by. Perhaps that was why he had never received the message he’d been waiting for: his innocence made him unworthy of it. The instinct of kings was always to slay the messenger, and they were right. A real messenger, a worthy one, is corrupted by the message he brings. And if he is noble he should accept that corruption. Valerian had received no message, but after waiting so long, to receive, know and deliver its contents, imperceptibly he had made it up. Made up the information he was waiting for. Preoccupied himself with the construction of the world and its inhabitants according to this imagined message. But had chosen not to know the real message that his son had mailed to him from underneath the sink. And all he could say was that he did not know. He was guilty, therefore, of innocence. Was there anything so loathsome as a willfully innocent man? Hardly. An innocent man is a sin before God. Inhuman and therefore unworthy. No man should live without absorbing the sins of his kind, the foul air of his innocence, even if it did wilt rows of angel trumpets and cause them to fall from their vines.
9
“THIS IS a town?” Jadine shouted. “It looks like a block. A city block. In Queens.”
“Hush up,” he said squeezing her waist. “This is not only a town, it’s the county seat. We call it the city.”
“This is Eloe?”
“No. This is Poncie. Eloe is a little town. We got fourteen miles to go yet.”
Now she understood why he wanted to rent a car and drive to Florida. There was no way to fly to Eloe. They had to go to Tallahassee or Pensacola, then get a bus or train to Poncie,
He drove them to Eloe asking pointed questions all the way. Son said he was an army buddy of a man named Soldier—that they were out of Brewton on their way to Gainesville. Thought he’d look in on old Soldier, he said. Carl said he knew of Soldier but had never met him. He had never seen a cashmere sweater with a cowl neckline, or Chacrel boots, and didn’t know they could make jeans that tight or if they did who but a child would wear them since no honest work could be done in them. So he looked in the rear-view mirror with disbelief. Nobody dressed like that in Brewton, Alabama, and he suspected they didn’t in Montgomery either.
He followed Son’s directions and dropped them off in front of a house Jadine supposed was in Eloe since Son paid the man and got out.
“Where are the ninety houses? I see four,” asked Jadine, looking around.
“They’re here.”
“Where?”
“Spread out. Folks don’t live all crunched up together in Eloe. Come on, girl.” He picked up the luggage and, grinning like a groom, led her up the steps. A frame door was open to the still March morning. They both stood in front of a screen door through which they could see a man sitting at a table with his back to them. Son didn’t knock or move, he simply looked at the back of the man’s head. Slowly the man turned his head and stared at them. Then he got up from the table. Son opened the screen door and stepped in with Jadine just behind him. He didn’t move closer to the man; he just stopped and smiled. The man did not speak and did not smile; he kept on staring. Then he raised his hands, clenching them into fists, and began to jump up and down on both feet, stamping the floor like a kid jumping rope. Son was laughing soundlessly. A woman ran in, but the man kept on jumping—pounding the
