CEYX WAS THE SON OF LUCIFER, the light bearer, and Halcyon was the daughter of Aeolus, the king of the winds. Their marriage was one of passionate love and enduring tenderness, and their home on the sunlit Grecian coast was filled with bliss. When Ceyx decided he must journey over the wild and storm-tossed seas in order to consult a distant oracle, Halcyon was filled with foreboding, a premonition of death. She begged him not to go, but even though he loved her, he would not stay. She stood on the rocky coast, desolate, and watched his boat vanish beyond the horizon.
The next day, alone and far from any shore, Ceyx fell prey to the tempestuous seas. The violent waves battered his boat to pieces, and Ceyx himself was dragged to the bottom of the sea and drowned.
Alone in her empty home, Halcyon kept vigil for her husband, praying to Hera every day for his safety, not knowing he was already dead. Finally, after many days, Halcyon’s prayers touched the tender heart of Hera, and she had pity on the faithful woman. That night, Hera sent the god Morpheus to visit Halcyon in her sleep. Stealing into her room on silent wings, Morpheus took on the appearance of the dead Ceyx and, thus arrayed, touched the sleeping Halcyon and entered her dreams.
“Poor wife,” he whispered to her, “I am dead. There is no hope for me anymore.”
At first light, Halcyon, her heart heavy with dread, made her way to the lonely beach and gazed out to the sea. Far in the distance, she spied an object floating shoreward on the incoming tide. She waited and watched, her doom stealing inexorably upon her, as the object came nearer. At last, it reached the shallows in front of her, and she saw, as she knew she would, the dead body of her husband. With a cry, she flung herself into the water. But in that instant, the goddess Hera, from the boundless pity in her heart, transformed Halcyon. Instead of a grief-stricken widow, she had become a magnificent seabird. Ceyx, too, was transformed, rising from the sea on spreading wings. Halcyon soared over the water together with her mate. According to the Greeks, the two birds are seen together always, skimming across the waves, never parted.
And every year, Halcyon and Ceyx build a nest of twigs and flotsam and grasses that they gather from the beach. They build this nest not on the rocky cliffs or the branches of the olive trees or the sand dunes, but on the waves themselves, floating tremulously in the very heart of the swells. Halcyon is charmed, the Greeks say. Every year while she broods on her nest, with Ceyx watching over her, the restless seas become for once calm and tranquil. These are the halcyon days—the days of serenity, when the winds are soft and the seas are tamed, when the faithful Halcyon floats on her twig nest and waits for her children to be born.
Jake had said he would write from Rio, and I waited to hear from him. In the meantime, we all listened to the radio, hoping to hear of Vaslav or to hear one of his songs and find out that they had had some success somewhere. We all felt that songs as beautiful and haunting as Vaslav’s couldn’t possibly stay hidden forever. But time went by and we heard nothing on the radio, and no one in town heard from Jake.
Finally Danny drove me down to the state facility in Delphia one Thursday afternoon, and we asked the attendant on duty if we could see Jake’s mother. But the attendant said we had to be on an approved list to get in, and we weren’t. He said he was sorry there was nothing he could do for us.
So Danny told him that really all we wanted was to get in touch with Jake, and did he know if Jake had sent his mother any letters, or did she send him any, and where did she send them to? The attendant flicked his eyes down to my belly, where it was starting to be unmistakable that a baby was on the way.
“There are no letters,” he said, shaking his head. “She’s not . . . There really couldn’t be any letters.”
“Nothing coming in?” Danny asked him.
He looked sad and said again, “I’m sorry I can’t help you.”
In the lilac evening, Rosalita and I, each holding one of Bertie’s hands, tottered gently down to the old wooden boat dock at Lost Pond. Bertie squealed with joy and paddled her baby feet in the warm water at the edge of the dock while Rosalita held her carefully around her chubby baby tummy. I sat with my feet in the water, too, getting splashed a little bit on my own swollen tummy. I remembered swimming here with Rosalita and Tom when it was Rosalita who was going to have a baby, the baby who was happily splashing me now.
The moon began to rise and the fireflies came out.
“I wish Tom were here,” I said.
“Oh, he is,” Rosalita answered me.
I looked at her.
“I feel him all the time,” she said simply, stroking Bertie’s auburn curls. “He’s with us everywhere.”
She smiled serenely into the soft darkness. Bertie stopped splashing and climbed into her mother’s lap. The fireflies came closer, and Bertie clapped her hands, laughing in delight.
Rafi and I drove out to the abandoned cotton mill. The air in the old spinning room was sultry and still. Broken window glass crunched under our feet. The gray-eyed boy shifted inside me and then was still.
“Do you ever wonder if things had been different . . . ?” I stopped.
“What things?”
“I don’t know. Like suppose Danny and Jake hadn’t stayed late to play pool that night? Or suppose I had never asked for your newspaper that first day, the day I came to town? Suppose I had never come to this town at all? It was only by chance.”
“I would have still been here,” Rafi said.
“But you and I wouldn’t know each other.”
“No. But you would have met some other Rafi in some other town. And Vera would have hired some other barfly who was at hand at the time. I’d be standing here with a pregnant Hank, probably.”
“But maybe there is no other Rafi,” I said. “Maybe this is all destiny. Maybe you and I were meant for each other.”
“Meant by whom?”
“Fate?”
“Maybe fate is what we call the lives we make for ourselves when we’re trying to make sense out of what we did,” he said.
“Maybe I fucked up when I ever looked at anyone but you. I should have just jumped you the first minute I set eyes on you.”
“Maybe I’m not the pushover you think I am.”
“Probably not,” I sighed. “But anyway, now we’ll never know.”
“Besides, if everything had ended up different, you and I might have ended up hating each other.”
“Oh, no,” I said. “Lots of things might have been different, but not that. I never could have done anything but love you.”
“Do you wish, though . . . ?” He stopped.
“What?”
“Do you wish things had been different?”
I stroked my belly and felt the butterflies rustle inside me. “Not really, I guess.”
“Do you regret it?” he asked.
“No. Do you?”
“Only sometimes.”
He took my hand and side by side we picked our way carefully out through the debris into the tangled, sunlit weeds outside.
That summer, songs from the Low Lifes’ first album were everywhere, on all the radio stations, floating out the windows of the cars passing by on Juniper Street, playing on the little loudspeaker in front of the record store where Charlie Blue’s picture smiled out from promotional materials and posters plastered all over the front windows. Vera got a tape from Charlie in the mail and played it in the Cave in the early evening before the night’s band showed up. We saw the Low Lifes twice more on TV before they left for their world tour.
I didn’t grow a garden that summer—the gray-eyed baby, I felt, was enough for me. In July, I ate, at long last, the last jar of tomatoes. I ate them sitting at my little kitchen table during an afternoon thunderstorm. The rain hitting the tin roof of my shotgun shack sounded deafening at first, but as the storm spent itself, gradually the rain sounded only like rain.
“There, now,” I said to the baby after I had eaten the last tomato. “From now on, I will grow just you.”
High summer came again, and wildflowers crowded together by the roadsides and in abandoned lots all over town. In the nicer neighborhoods, the yards had only grass; the flowers were strictly contained in carefully edged beds or in planters and porch pots. On the main square in town, the grand old magnolia trees opened their blossoms and the air all around was heady and lemon scented from them. But in the parts of town nearer to the river, black-eyed Susans and Queen Anne’s lace and tiny, no-name pink and white daisies sprang up everywhere, even from the cracks in the cement sidewalks and between the steps of people’s front porches.
Rafi and Jordan were out early one morning when they ran across Pancho holding a bunch of wild pasture roses. Rafi said he didn’t think too much about it at the time, and it wasn’t until he saw Pamela that afternoon with a pasture rose in her hair that he put two and two together. After that, Pamela came down to the Cave to play cards sometimes after she got off work, but more often Pancho went uptown at closing time and then walked her home in the warm night air.
“I don’t suppose you ever hear from Jake at all, do you?” Vera asked me.
She had found a wooden rocking chair at the thrift shop and bought it and brought it to me. I was sitting in it on the porch and she was sitting on the steps, leaning back on her elbows.
“Not a word,” I said.
“Do you suppose we ought to be worried that something has happened to him? Something bad? It seems like somebody would have heard something from him by now.”
“Well, you know Jake. Just because he doesn’t say anything, just because he doesn’t write, it doesn’t mean he isn’t thinking about us.”
“Do you miss him still?”
“Of course. Don’t you?”
“Yes,” she said. “But it’s not the same for me as it is for you, is it?”
“I miss him,” I said. “I miss him all the time. But at the same time, it’s funny how I keep forgetting stuff.”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know. Little stuff. I can remember the color of his eyes and things like that, but I can’t remember anymore—really remember exactly—what he tasted like.”
I blushed. Vera laughed.
“Beer, I bet,” she said.
I laughed, too. A sudden picture flashed across my mind and I saw the way his hand rested on the steering wheel.
“No wonder I can’t remember,” I said. “How long has it been since I tasted a beer?”
“I don’t imagine you’ll ever come down to the Cave much anymore now,” Vera said.
“I’ll come sometimes. But not much, I guess. It’s probably not good for babies to spend too much time around Hank, after all.”
“Not just babies—that could be hazardous to anyone’s health.”
“You’d better hope no one turns you in to OSHA for wantonly exposing your employees to him.”
“Oh, he doesn’t come around too much anymore. Word is that he and Stinky spend most of their time in the lounge at the Ramada Inn out by the airport.”
“That sounds festive.”
Vera rolled her eyes and shook her head.
“Do you suppose he’ll ever come back?” she said.
“Stinky? Not if we’re lucky.”
“I mean Jake.”
“Oh, I don’t know. I imagine we’ll see him again someday, maybe. Probably years from now,” I said.
“You’ll have a lot of explaining to do.”
“I’ll worry about that when the time comes. After all, who knows what things will be like by then?”
“I guess you’re right,” Vera said. “Life sure does have a way of changing.”
“Anyway,” I said, “he left us. He couldn’t have thought everything here would stop and that we’d all stay the same as we were the day he drove away.”
“But that is exactly what everyone always thinks, isn’t it?”
“Maybe. They shouldn’t, though. They should know better.”
“Well,” Vera said, “the things people should know better about—they make a long, long list.”
In Symposium, Diotima asks Socrates, “What is the purpose of love?” and when he doesn’t know, she answers that the purpose of love is to “give birth in beauty.” This is cryptic even to Socrates, so Diotima explains.
Reproduction, she says, is as close as we humans can get to immortality. Because things to which we give birth—whether they are babies or poems or philosophical ideas—live on after us, partaking in a kind of immortality, it is in reproduction that we come closest to being like the gods. Through our offspring, and the offspring of our offspring, it is possible in a way for us to live forever. It is possible for us to be divine.
We are all pregnant, Diotima says—all of us, whether it is with babies or with ideas. And when the time is right, we all need to give birth to the things that are growing inside us. In order to be immortal, in order to be like the gods, we must release our children into the world.
But the purpose of love, Diotima says, is not just to give birth, but to give birth in beauty. We will give birth to our children only when we are surrounded by the good in spirit. We will bring our beloved children into the world only when the time is right, so they will be greeted by kindness and grace.
Pancho’s generosity meant that we could order books again at the bookstore—not just textbooks for classes, but books to fill up the vacant places on the shelves, too. Rosalita and I worked together in the afternoon, flipping through the catalogs that publishers sent us, some still with Tom’s name on the address labels.
“There are so many,” I said to Rosalita. “How do we know which ones to get?”
“No lo sé,” she said, turning the pages and looking quizzical.
“How did Tom decide?”
“He just knew,” Rosalita said. “He had been to college, you know. Maybe he learned there.”
We looked at each other across the pile of catalogs between us. I could tell we were both thinking the same thing.
“We should go to college,” Rosalita said finally.
“You and me?”
“We could go together.”
“How?”
“We will ask Rafi,” Rosalita said. “He went to college. He will know what to do.”
Rafi went with us the next day to the Extension School office at Waterville State and helped us look through the list of courses offered for the fall semester. Classes were scheduled to start right after Labor Day, and my baby was due right before then.
“How will I manage?” I asked them.
“We will help each other,” Rosalita said.
“Everyone will help,” Rafi said.
So Rosalita and I signed up for a class called “Great Books” that met once a week in the evening after the bookstore’s closing time. Rafi helped us fill out the enrollment forms. The class cost four hundred dollars. I took the money that Uncle Joe had given me when I left home and handed it over. I had been saving it all this time. Rosalita looked solemn while she was filling out the forms, but when we got back to the bookstore afterward, she kept breaking into bright laughter at the thought of being a college student. Every time she laughed, Bertie would laugh, too.
“Tom is so happy,” Rosalita said.
In the dog days of summer, even the bookstore stopped being cool. The dust sifting gently down onto the floorboards had a faint baked smell to it, as if we were making bread. Tom’s coat was still hanging on the back of the door, but the smell of him had long since faded away, replaced by the slight stinging scent of pine resin in the heat.
The managers at Tia’s ran the air conditioner out front where the tables were, but the kitchen was a sweltering steam bath. Two of the dishwashers even temporarily gave up smoking because, in a straw-that-broke-the-camel’s-back kind of way, getting that close to lit matches was more than they could stand.
An argument broke out at the café uptown over the direction of the ceiling fans. Some of the staff argued that setting them to blow upward would pull the warm air to the ceiling and cool off the room. Others thought that was hogwash—and said so in terms considerably more direct than they were accustomed to using in cooler weather—and argued instead that they would rather have just the breeze. Everybody was looking a little peevish and sweaty around the eyeballs when Danny went down to the SaveMart and came back with a large supply of bags of discount frozen peas that the staff started wearing wrapped in dishcloths draped around the backs of their necks. This helped considerably.
Blossom managed to stay cool and sweet smelling all day, and when we asked her the secret, she told us that it was to think cool thoughts and to talk slower. I followed her advice as best I could but found that it worked most effectively if I practiced thinking cool thoughts while lying in a hammock under the shade trees in the backyard with a package of peas under me.
That’s what I was doing the last time I ever spoke to Orla. I was just thinking about closing my eyes for an afternoon nap when her snapping-turtle face thrust itself around the corner of the house. She was moving much more quickly than Blossom would have recommended and started talking even before she was all the way into the yard. She had three worn-out, itchy-looking sweaters hanging over her arm, and I knew she had been cleaning out her closets and that I was once again the intended recipient of her charity, whether I liked it or not.
“I suppose you’ve been wondering why I haven’t been by to see you in so long,” she said. While I tried to gather up my heat-addled and scattered thoughts, she forged ahead into a preamble about rectal fissures. I swung the hammock back and tipped myself out of it and stood.
Orla gasped.
For one moment, there was a shocked silence with only the buzzing throb of the katydids to emphasize the sudden stillness. Orla gaped at me with her mouth open, and the sweaters fell to the ground. I put my hands protectively over my belly, and we stared across the distance at each other. I watched her face as she started to pinch it up, reminding me suddenly, vividly of Stinky.
“Are you pregnant?” she asked.
“Yes,” I said, feeling the butterflies fluttering under my hands.
“Are you married?”
“No,” I said. The butterflies were stronger now, like sparrows stretching their wings toward the sun. The gray-eyed little boy inside me was laughing in delight.
I tried not to think about Stinky much. But now, as Orla began to lecture me on my sins and mistakes, I couldn’t get him out of my head. This would have no doubt surprised Orla, since Stinky was a vile drunk and Orla was a staunch and formidable pillar of her church. But there it was. Anyway, Orla was not pausing long enough for me to get a word in edgewise, so I couldn’t have told her about this amazing mental conjunction even if I had wanted to.
“Let’s kneel together,” Orla was saying. “Kneel and beg God for forgiveness for your sins. Beg Him to stay His mighty vengeance against your iniquity, that it might not be visited on this child. Kneel and beg!”
Her words drifted slowly through the haze of heat, and it took me a minute to get the gist of what she was saying.
“But,” I said, “isn’t it . . . isn’t it better to die standing than to live on your knees?”
Orla was momentarily perplexed by this, as if it seemed somehow familiar to her but she couldn’t place it. She shifted tactics. “You don’t even seem to care that this child you’re bringing into the world will be a bastard. That’s what everyone will say behind its back. A bastard.”
I would like to report that I responded to this with an eloquent rebuttal, a moving defense of everything I held dear, an unassailable argument in favor of my life and my choices.
But that is not what happened.
“Orla,” I said. “Fuck you.”
She abandoned the sweaters lying on the ground, and later that afternoon I threw them in the trash.