Four

I married but once.

It was New Orleans. I was only sixteen but, thanks to the Great War that had just ended, gainfully employed as a clerk for one of the great shipping lines on the Mississippi River. At my desk I labored over bills of lading, inventories, and accounts, familiar to me from my father’s business. Here, mine was one desk in a row of desks, each occupied by a young lady like me, all of us in white cotton gloves to keep the ink off our hands. Down below our offices, the wide and muddy river lay like a sleeping alligator; when we stood to stretch, we could look out at it, at the steamboats with their paddle wheels, at the crowds of men and wooden towers of crates, and know we were contributing to all that. I don’t know about the other girls, for I never became real friends with any of them, but I felt a small thrill to be close to the center of such commerce. It was a bustling, alive place where a great deal of money changed hands. A place of power. A masculine place.

At noon we were allowed to leave the building. I most often brought my lunch wrapped in paper and ate it on a bench near the wharf. But sometimes I wandered the French Market instead, and ate fried oysters on bread, or coffee and hot, sweet beignets, sitting at an open-air table like a lady of leisure. So I was doing that day.

All the other tables were full; I had an extra chair at mine. The man who was to become my husband smiled at me from beneath the thick hank of blond hair that fell into his eyes, and I knew, as women do, that for some time at least our destinies were to be linked.

He was an actor, a writer, a schoolteacher, and a student—all at once. He’d come home from the war early—he didn’t say, but I assumed he’d been wounded. His name was William. He gave me tickets to the vaudeville show in which he was to appear that night. I went, drawn by curiosity to this handsome young man who had asked so politely if he could share my table and then, once he sat down, had brazenly taken my hand and kissed it and said, “Thank God not every woman has eyes like yours.”

I took my hand back and put it on my lap. “And why is that?” I said. I could not help but smile a little; he looked such a monkey.

“Because the world would come to a stop.”

“And why is that?” Letting him play out his joke.

“Because we men would be smitten at every turn,” he said, “and none of us could get a thing done.”

You have to understand that no one had ever flirted with me before. You have to understand that despite the steamy New Orleans air, inside I was frozen but longing to melt. Maybe this explains why I let him sweep me away. Or perhaps I was just in need of a friend.

The theater was both elaborate and small, like a velvet-lined jewel box trimmed with gold. When the lights went down, I saw that the ceiling was a night sky in which starry constellations moved about magically. The crowd, which had been chattering away, became strangely subdued under this nighttime illusion, and then the show began, a series of skits and moral tales interspersed with songs that ranged from melancholy to winsome and bawdy. William had warned me that he played several parts throughout the evening, but at first I did not see him at all, because he played them in women’s clothes. It was only during a quiet moment in the second skit—about the evils of alcohol, I think—that his eyes came to rest on me in the audience and I recognized their impish glee. Thereafter I was fascinated to watch him act like a woman, at which he was entirely convincing, his expressive mouth dressed in red, his cheeks rosied, his lashes curled and darkened. In black wig and with shadowed eyes he played a woman of the Far East; in white curls and hoop skirt a lady of the royal court. His voice was similarly malleable, piping high for this role, low and sultry off his tongue for that.

I suppose I ought to have been put off by this ability, if only because it showed what a chameleon he could be. Instead, I thought: a man who understands women this well . . .

An usher brought me a perfumed envelope, in which was an invitation to come backstage at the evening’s end. But, not yet ready for such an encounter, I penned my regrets—and then, on impulse, an invitation to meet again, lunch hour next day.

Despite my youth, I had come to New Orleans with a past—a past that William dismissed as easily as he dismissed my missing finger, my apparent lack of family, my apparent poverty. “You are beautiful, smart, hardworking, and kind,” he said. “What more could I want?” I suppose I had as much to overlook as he; his own family, back in Arkansas, had disowned him; he had little money; much of his past was a mystery to me. But, having never been courted before, I was so warmed by his attentions and so astounded when he asked me to marry him that I hesitated only a moment before agreeing. I wrote my father with the news of our engagement; by the time he responded with a generous wedding gift, we were already married.

We could not afford a honeymoon, so planned instead to spend the first night of our married life together in the house we had rented, a long, narrow house in Faubourg Marigny, a neighborhood of long and low and narrow houses, pinched fronts facing the street. At that time in New Orleans, property taxes were charged by street footage, and thus many houses were built as ours was, the rooms like railroad cars, one after another with a corridor of doors through the center, so that you could have shot a rifle straight through the house and out the back door without hitting a thing.

But if it was not the house of my dreams, it was, at least, not the rooming house in which I had been living till then, sharing a single toilet with twelve other young women and a bed with two of them. And it was well located: within walking distance to the French Quarter and a short streetcar ride to William’s employment, just on the other side of Canal Street. Unfortunately, across the street too was a saloon frequented by boatmen whose boozy voices traveled easily into our little home.

So it was that first night. Both exhausted, we moved about our new rooms as if in a daze, rearranging the few sticks of furniture William had brought with him. And then it was time to retire. “I’ll step outside for a smoke,” he said, which I recognized as his gracious way of letting me disrobe in privacy, which I did, putting on my nightgown, but nothing underneath. Then I was faced with a dilemma. William had owned one small bed already, and it had been cheapest to buy another for me, so there were two beds in our room, a small lamp table between them. Was it appropriate for me to slip into his bed, or my own? Should I come to him, or him to me? Feeling shy and uncertain, I slipped into my own bed and turned out the light.

For a while I lay there in the dark, listening to rats scratching in the attic and to the sounds of our neighborhood: music, men arguing, someone calling someone’s name over and over: Mally, Mally, Mally. . . . I listened hard, waiting for William to come in. But he took so long that I fell asleep.

When I felt him on me, I thought at first it was a dream, a dream I’d had before on those cold nights of my journey. A dream of warmth and security. I welcomed it. I wanted to reach up, to put my arms around him and hold him. But I couldn’t.

I opened my eyes and saw, in the dim light that came through our window, my new husband above me. His eyes were closed; he was still clothed, but I felt him moving in me, a distant sensation of short jabs. I tried to move too, but his hands on my arms discouraged me, and then as quickly as it had begun, it stopped. William sighed, released my arms, and was gone.

I listened to him undress and climb into his own bed, and then I lay there in the dark again. Perhaps, I thought, this was the way of respectable Catholic husbands and wives. Maybe this was why I had hardly ever been aware of my parents’ own couplings. It made sense: if the purpose of sex was procreation, why indulge excessively? I wished it weren’t so pleasureless; felt, even knew it didn’t have to be so. But if this was sex without sin, then I ought to feel lucky to have such a chaste and thoughtful husband.

Thereafter, William came to me once a week, always when I was sleeping, always quick, always without a word.

Still, I was happy to be married, even though it soon became clear that ours was to be no ordinary marriage. If I had left my job to stay at home, as did most wives those days, we would soon have landed in debtors’ prison. William was a man of many talents, but none particularly lucrative. His acting brought in nothing, really; I did not realize this at first, but his professional performances were intermittent at best. To keep bread in mouth, he had turned to teaching, for which he had an equal talent. He taught at a private school for boys, where his manic manner and glib tongue made him popular, if not well paid. Literature was his subject, and theater, of course; he directed the fall musical and the spring drama, for which the boys played all the parts, male and female, and in which he sometimes gave himself a small role, so as better to model for them the skills of performance.

William’s third vocation—and, unfortunately, lesser talent— was for the writing of drama itself. This he loved above all, studying the craft with a great and formerly well-known play-wright whose wisdom was imparted by weekly mail for a sum that William considered a pittance and I considered a small fortune, given our circumstances. But even I had to admit that, with both our salaries, we could afford the expense.

Then, when we had been married just over a year, William announced that, with the advice and encouragement of his mentor, he had resigned his teaching position. Of course I supported his decision; as a good wife, I believed in his talent even though I’d never read any of his work, which he felt was unready for public consumption. I agreed to draw on my father’s wedding gift, which till then we had saved, to pay for his “sabbatical.”

Our story, then, might well seem the familiar one, of misdirected ambitions and the failure of love. For no matter how much I loved him, no matter what I did for him, he could not become what he was not. He disdained the real talents he had— acting and teaching, those sister abilities—for one that would always remain just beyond his grasp. He had neither the temperament for lonely work nor the patience for delayed rewards that writing requires. What he loved was an audience, and the only audience his writing brought was his mentor, who praised him with all the objectivity one might expect from an old man struggling to make a living.

But here we diverge from that more familiar plot. It was neither William’s failure at writing nor the lack of money that destroyed our marriage. By dint of my native frugality we maintained a stable household economy, and William was ever hopeful, keeping at his craft day in and day out, and acting in local performances just often enough to feed his craving for applause. At odd moments those first years, William would take my hand and look into my eyes and tell me, “Marguerite, you give me joy.” And I could, with all honesty, say in reply, “And you me.” We were happy.

It was in the fourth year that William changed. He began to have trouble sleeping, long nights of insomnia followed by fretful days. I thought the moodiness might be due to exhaustion and encouraged him to seek a doctor’s help. He did, but the strange territory of sleeplessness persisted, and I began to feel from him a bottomless anger, as if I had done something wrong, something quite particular for which I ought by rights to apologize or make amends—what, I could not imagine. Meanwhile, any increased kindness to him from me seemed only to fuel his animosity, and his eyes grew more and more weary, like those of someone who has lost all hope.

When the weekly nighttime visits stopped entirely, I became even more worried. Perhaps, I thought, his deep sadness came from my failure to fulfill his needs. I would have sought the counsel of an older woman had I known any, but at that time I did not. So I did what I did without advice or counsel, relying on my instincts not as a wife but as a woman.

The best feature of our house was the neglected garden onto which our bedroom windows opened. Gardenias were in bloom that night, their scent sweet and almost cloying. Above us in the attic the rats still scrabbled. William always claimed they were river rats that come in through the vents in the roof. I had tried to close off those avenues—stuffing them with steel wool—but to no avail. At times I wondered if instead the house were haunted by some murdered soul.

This night, after we had retired to our beds and turned out the lights, I took a deep breath of gardenia scent and arose. Nervous, I dropped my nightdress to the floor and slipped in beside William where he lay. I slid my hand inside his nightshirt, stroked his chest; touched his face with my lips. The past had taught me that men could be aroused easily, but there my husband lay, awake but motionless and stony, as if my touching him were something to tolerate, something offensive but necessary. I brought my hand lower, lower still, to touch what he had never permitted me to touch, my hand reaching the hair low on his belly; a moan escaped his lips, and I felt encouraged.

But then he gripped my hand in his, clamped it tight. “Don’t” was all he said, as if his anger wouldn’t permit him to go on.

“William,” I said, my voice soft, my mouth next to his ear.

The next moment I found myself shoved from the bed to the floor, where I sat, stunned, for a long moment before I managed to speak. “William,” I said, keeping my voice low, “I am your wife. Can’t you tell me what the matter is? Why can’t we—”

“What’s the good of it,” he muttered into the darkness, “if there are to be no children?”

“No children.” With those words, the truth I had long been avoiding gripped my heart and squeezed it, and I knew that the past I had run away from had come back to haunt me. I cried then, cried for myself and for the babies that would not be, cried for William. Then, as best I could, I explained what had happened and begged forgiveness for not telling him sooner.

He could not forgive me.

Instead, over the next months, his despondency turned again to anger, and this time the anger came at me. My bruises pained me less than the knowledge that our marriage had brought a gentle, funny, cheerful man to such a pass. For I was certain that if I had loved him enough, or differently, or if he had loved me enough, or differently, he would have had the strength to face reality, give up chasing hopeless dreams, and love the life he had, rich in its own right, if childless. And we would have been happy again.

The more he hurt me, the more I blamed myself. Until I too became despondent beyond my control. Days I was able to tolerate: I kept busy with work. But nights grew unbearable. We continued to sleep in the same room, except that I could barely sleep; the very sound of his breathing in the bed so close and yet so far away kept me awake, listless. Green nets of thought trolled my mind. I loved and could not leave him, yet I could not stay.

I was trapped.

So I began to drink, just a little at bedtime, to help me sleep. Then a little more, and more, until I opened a cheap bottle of wine at dinner and nursed it to emptiness through the evening, and fell into bed only at the moment of passing out.

Prohibition was by then in full effect. But this being New Orleans—in many ways, a country and a law unto itself— alcohol’s availability was unaltered; only its price was almost out of reach. I began to cut back on other essentials so as to have enough for my evening wine. I bought day-old, then two-day-old bread. Fewer fruits and vegetables. We ate cheese instead of meat. I repaired my old clothes to make them last longer, until even my undergarments were brailled with small stitchings. We fell into a life poor in every way: poor in daily sustenance, poor in prospect, poor in love.

Don’t think I didn’t realize what I was doing. In the clear light of a Monday morning, dressing myself for work, I would swear to change, promise myself that things would be better. But as the end of the day approached, I could not return home without knowing a bottle awaited me, something to get me through the night.

Serendipity saved me.

One evening, rushing to get home, I stumbled through the open door of my most recent purveyor of wine to discover that he had changed locations, as these fly-by-night operations were wont to do. Before me instead was a forest of artists’ easels, each with a stool before it, only one of them currently occupied. “May I help you?” asked the man sitting there in paint-stained shirt. “Are you interested in painting lessons?” The smells of paint and turpentine filled my nostrils; I shook my light head. The man looked at me quizzically, then smiled. “Drawing, then? Drawing lessons?”

I found myself, almost against my will, nodding. And that was the beginning of a new life for me.

That first night in the drawing studio, learning to see with my eyes and not with my brain, I fell in love with this simple art for which, if I could believe my instructor (I did not always), I seemed to have a natural talent. To afford it took every penny I could scrape together—I even gave up drinking for it. At first that was hard, but after a day’s work and an evening’s drawing, I found I fell asleep easily and no longer needed drink. Once a week I attended class, where my teacher pressed me to experiment with various media: gouache, India ink, pastels, silver-point, watercolor. On my way home from work and on Sundays, my one day off, I roamed the city in search of drawing subjects. New Orleans was home to so many sorts of people, people that had fascinated me when I first came to the city, so unfamiliar were they to me: jazz musicians, the black men who swept the walkways and streets, exotic dancers scurrying from cab to nightclub. But I found that, for drawing, I preferred things to people, and certain kinds of things to others, certain textures and shapes and patterns: a pile of dishes for sale at the flea market, an old felt hat on a table. I could not name what these objects had in common, but they compelled me in a way faces did not.

I was wandering around like this after work one late-spring day when I discovered one of those side rues so narrow that it is dark even at noon, a slit between buildings hardly worthy of the term “alley,” much less “street.” In the dim light one window gleamed cleanly, drawing me to it. A small white sign— Quiltmaker was all it said, in fine script—stood propped inside the window, against a quilt that glimmered unlike anything I had ever seen before.

I stepped through the open door. Inside was brighter than outside, freely lit with electric lamps. From wooden frames hung more quilts like the one in the window. They were made of fabrics rich in texture and finish and pattern and, most of all, color: the greens and blacks of olives, the purple of eggplant, the red of blood on a platter, the blue of juniper berries. And the diamonds, triangles, squares, and octagons of these fabrics were themselves arranged in elaborate patterns—swirling out of the center like a whirlwind, or marching across the quilt first this way, then that, like wheat blown in different directions by a fickle wind.

My mother had made quilts. Growing up, I had taken them for granted, had slept under one as if it were any blanket, worthy of no more respect than a piece of scratchy wool. Her quilts, I realized now, had been well enough sewn but unimaginative. She had made them from remnants of old dresses—hers and mine—and used techniques passed on to her by her grandmother, no patterns except those created by the accidental repetition of fabric across the field of large, plain squares. Her quilts had been warm, durable, not unpleasing to the eye, but mainly frugal. Made for the body, not for the soul.

In contrast, these quilts were works of art. I stood gazing at them, one after the other, and felt myself drawn into them. I began to see in them tableaux, stories that could not be put into words or pictures, but that nonetheless conveyed great emotional depth—much in the way music can. I wanted to take one home with me and wrap myself in it.

No one else was in the shop. I reached a hand out and touched one of the quilts. Its surface was cooler than the air, as cool as its colors: so many shades of blue, all taken directly from nature, from the sky, from lakes, oceans, ponds, and from blue blossoms—bachelor’s button and larkspur and monkshood. I lifted the folded quilt from its rack. It was heavier than I expected. It occurred to me that I could take it with me; simply walk out of the door with it in my arms. It would be mine, and that would be that. The blue coolness in my arms.

A voice said, “Blue suits you.”

The speaker stepped out from behind some racks at the back of the room. It was a tall woman with a face younger than the nearly white, bobbed hair that surrounded it. White was also what she wore: a long narrow white skirt topped by a white linen shirt, collar open and sleeves rolled to elbows. Her dark eyes passed over me quickly, as if appraising my ability to pay; then she launched into a kind of a sales pitch. “We make them from silk,” she said in the gravelly voice of so many Southern women, and came forward and ran her hand over the blue quilt in my arms. “From the remnants of men’s ties. Based on Quaker patterns.” I looked again, and could see the familiar designs: the paisleys, the jacquards, the stripes of men’s ties. “We buy the silk from local haberdashers. Would you like to see how it’s done?”

She gestured toward the back of the room, where I saw, nearly concealed, an open doorway. I nodded, replaced the quilt, and followed her into a studio lit by skylights. There, half a dozen young women were at work, leaning over huge frames, taking stitches with minuscule needles. I was surprised to see brown and yellow women working beside white women, all clothed like the proprietress, which is to say they looked rather more comfortable than I felt, in my hot layers of petticoats and undergarments and stockings. They were barefoot, too, their shoes in a neat row to the right of the entranceway.

I watched them stitch a quilt of reds and golds for a long time before I realized that the white-haired woman was watching me watch. “I’m Judith,” she said, extending a hand.

“Marguerite,” I said, taking hers.

She took a silver case from a slit at her hip, opened it, and offered me a cigarette. I shook my head. She fingered one loose for herself, replaced the case, lit the cigarette with a match, and eyed me through the smoke. I thought I had never seen a woman so elegant, the long white cigarette between long fingers not quite so white. “You’re not here to buy, are you, Marguerite?” Her eyes appraised me again, as if in the sunlight my circumstances were revealed.

Embarrassed by the evident shabbiness of my own clothing, I shook my head and began to explain, fumbling for words. I hadn’t yet revealed my new hobby to anyone except William; it was hard to express to her how important drawing was to me, why I had been wandering around, pad under arm. But she simply smiled and nodded, peering into my eyes and saying, “Yes, I see.”

She invited me to have coffee in her courtyard. There, over the next hour or so, her interested gaze and gentle questioning made it so easy to talk that it wasn’t until I left that I reflected with surprise on the intimacy of our conversation, my own candor. I had even told her—although not in much detail—about William, our situation, my unhappiness. She told me that she had been married too, and had divorced. And despite the regret in her voice, I could see that she had survived, had even thrived, and took solace in that.

But the real surprise was the joy I took in our discussion of art and artists. My enthusiasm must have seemed naive; what was so new to me was familiar territory to her. There was no name I could mention of which she had not heard; she had been to Paris, to London, to New York; had visited the great galleries, had bought great works. “I can introduce you to some people,” she said, “who might take an interest in your work,” and I knew then that she intended to become my friend.

Most important, by the end of that day, I had the impression that if she liked my drawings, she might let me display them in the shop, and this thought—the thought of my work being seen and sold—gave me incredible pleasure. I was to bring my best work to her the next morning. As I hurried home at sunset, my mind raced. I wanted to bring her something fresh, something that would show the best of what I could do. I wanted to produce something that would have on her the same kind of effect her quilts had had on me.

I searched my options for an appropriate subject, but none came to me. Everything seemed hackneyed, used up.

By the time I got home, I had fallen into something like despair. Instead of going inside, where William would certainly be slouched in his own moody funk, I stepped through the gate and into our garden. Decaying and neglected, the garden had come for me to be a symbol of our marriage, and so I usually avoided it. Two broken rattan chairs leaned on one another in a corner; the brickwork floor had come loose in places, exposing soil that had invited weeds to take root. The only clues to former glory were a dark-leafed magnolia whose white blossoms still filled the air with the scent of citronelle in early spring, the camellia’s faded blooms, and a dead rosebush’s thorny, leafless stems. But these were strangled by a wild growth of vine and native weeds, some large as trees.

I gazed mindlessly at these plants, these weeds, and gazed at them some more. And slowly their seeming disorganization gave way, and I began to be able to distinguish among them. At the time I could not identify them—that came later. Then, I only saw, in the tangle of their leaves and flowers, the shapes and colors I had been searching for. Here was my subject for drawing.

I worked through sunset and beyond. Sometime long after midnight, William came to stand in the doorway, gaping at me at work in the dark, with kerosene lamps all around and drawing board propped on the rattan chairs. We had long since reached a wordless plateau. I looked up at him but did not speak; he disappeared.

In the morning, exhausted, I covered the drawing carefully and took it inside, where, trying not to wake him, I bathed and dressed and ate and waited till the hour Judith had said she would expect me.

Sunday morning in the French Quarter was quiet, save for the sound of mops as black menservants swabbed doorsteps after Saturday night’s revel. Like most businesses, the quiltmaker’s shop was closed. But when I arrived the door was open. I made my way inside, wove through the racks of quilts and into the studio at the back. It was empty, but the door to the sunny courtyard was open. And there was Judith, in nightgown and striped satin robe, sitting at the ironwork table that was set with coffee and croissants for two. She was reading a paper, her feet up on the other chair. “You’re here!” she said and, giving me a delighted smile, took her feet down and gestured at the chair with her cigarette, inviting me to sit.

I shook my head. “If I don’t show you the drawings right now, I am going to die of anticipation,” I told her.

“Then show me,” she said.

I showed her the things in the portfolio first. Bowls of fruit, stacks of dishes, old hats. She nodded and made small, pleased sounds, but said nothing. Then I showed her the new one, still tacked to my drawing board, lifting the tissue from it for her to see. She gave a low whistle. “When did you do this?” she asked.

“Last night.”

I looked at it with her. It was a drawing, primarily, of what I later learned was the blossom of an Angel Trumpet, Datura wrightii . Huge, white, unfurled like a narrow umbrella—a horn, a trumpet, with sharp tips that marked where its petals would have been divided, had God chosen to divide them. I had drawn it largely by negation—by inking the leaves around it in black, as they had looked to me in the strange light of my lamps. The flower itself I had detailed in pastels—its pale shadows faintly lavender and yellow, and, at its center, the glowing orange pistil and anthers. As I looked at it, its musty, sour smell came back to me. It was a plant both beautiful and evil—being, as I later discovered, quite poisonous, a member of the nightshade family.

Judith said nothing more. But when I turned to look at her, she was smiling at me, and I knew she liked it. “May I buy it?” she said, quite suddenly.

My response surprised even me. “You may have it,” I said to her. “A gift.”

She gave me a long, quiet look. For the first time, I noticed the color of her eyes—a deep hazel, combining the warmth of brown and the coolness of green. “What can I give you in return?” she asked, but it was not a real question; we both knew. Her friendship, her patronage, would be my reward.

The exhibit was to be called “Floralius”—festival of flowers. It was Judith’s idea. Among her books she discovered one, quite old, that listed native flowers and gave their Latin names, genus and species, with descriptions but no illustrations. “Imagine this book with your drawings,” she said, and I immediately could.

For two months I drew like a demon whenever I could steal a moment: early mornings, late evenings, even lunch hours. On Sundays I sought the flowers out in vacant and overgrown lots, among the rocks along the Mississippi, in the swamps, studying their names and descriptions in the book, bringing back specimen after specimen and storing them in Judith’s icebox, wrapped in tissue. For these outings, I took Judith’s advice and wore men’s pants and shirts and heavy shoes, with my hair stuffed under a hat—in part because my own dresses and shoes were inappropriate to the kind of walking and climbing I had to do, and in part to make myself less vulnerable to unwelcome approach from the vagabonds who also wandered such places. Soon I began to feel as though I lived life on a mirror with two sides, one side reflecting a wife and diligent clerk, the other an independent woman and artist, a wanderer across southern wastes. This disjuncture caused no discomfort, however; I was quite happy with the balance it granted me.

The exhibit opened. We had hung it in Judith’s courtyard, where my flowers looked as if they had grown there. I had told no one else I knew about the exhibit, not even William—if I was going to fail, I wanted to fail as discreetly as possible. But, to my amazement, dozens of people came; a few were friends of Judith’s, but the rest were strangers drawn by her advertisements, bills pasted on lampposts and fences and walls in the neighborhood. Several drawings sold, for more money than I could have imagined possible; Judith oversaw the sales, playing one collector against another to raise the prices. She was an avid agent for me, driven, she said, by her genuine belief in my talent and potential.

As twilight came on, the drawings faded into the walls and our guests left us standing in the courtyard. “You are a wonderful artist,” Judith said. I hugged her. “You are a wonderful friend,” I told her. “How can I ever thank you?”

She stepped back from me. “You can’t,” she said with a casual shrug of her shoulders. “Nor do you need to.”

Judith was my first real friend, accepting me completely as I was. While William had overlooked my faults, she embraced them. “Everything that has happened to you,” she told me, raising my hand up so that we both could see the scar where my finger had been, “has made you what you are today. There is no shame in that, only pride.”

We shared secrets. I learned that Judith’s husband had been wealthy but cruel. Still, she took the blame for the end of their marriage: her personality, she said, was “too willful.” She was a firm believer in divorce. Of course, she was not Catholic.

One day, as we were lunching, she wiped her mouth, put down her napkin, and made a pronouncement: “You should divorce William,” she said, as if after long consideration. “He is a parasite on you. He sucks your money away for those self-indulgent ‘lessons.’ He sucks your pride away. He sucks the joy from your eyes—I see it every time you leave here.”

I knew what she said was true, but some part of me, some remnant of childhood religiosity, would not accept the notion of divorce. It seemed a failure of profound proportions, a denial of solemn vows. It would vanquish me from the Church forever. I could never tell my parents.

I had not told Judith everything, though, and when I did, at last, admit that there was no longer a physical aspect to our union, this only made her more determined in her arguments. At last I was persuaded to broach the subject with William, to let him decide for himself. “I’ll invite him to dinner,” Judith said, sensing my reluctance. “We’ll talk to him together.”

Surprised to be invited, William surprised me even more by accepting the invitation.

It was the first evening of gaiety I had shared with him in a very long time. Judith poured bottle after bottle of wine. I abstained, having sworn off alcohol, but William was seduced not only by the luxury of the meal—three kinds of meats, a table set with linens and real silver—but also by Judith, by her charm and, I imagine, her throaty Southern laugh. Over chocolate torte and cherries poached in burgundy, Judith leaned across the table and fixed her eyes on William’s flushed face. “William,” she said, “will you give Marguerite a divorce?”

William turned to me a shocked face. “Would you divorce me?” he said. “Could you?” He took my hands in his. “I thought . . . ”

It took a moment for me to understand that he was not refusing me.

“Yes,” I said. “If it’s what you want.”

His gaze seemed to turn inward for a moment, as if he were consulting his heart. “Yes,” he said finally, and a great smile filled his face. I had not seen him so happy—well, since the day we married. “Yes,” he said again, and squeezed my hands with the love I had thought long since dead.

I was surprised by the happiness of my own response. It was as if some dark and heavy spirit had exited my body. I was free again.

When the divorce was final, it seemed natural to move in with Judith. She was my friend; she had a spare room. As she put it, “We divorced spinsters can grow old taking care of one another. Who needs husbands?” She was forty, and joking. Fifteen years her junior, I did not imagine either of us a spinster, or growing old, but I was happy to have such an elegant place to live—the quarters above her shop were spacious—and happy to have such a friend to live with.

In preparation for my arrival, Judith refurbished what she called “the ballroom,” her top story, an attic unlike any attic I had ever seen. High ceilings and shining floors, huge windows at either end, it was hard to imagine what its original purpose could have been, although Judith insisted it was for dancing. As we walked up the steps that day, she confessed to me that she was nervous. “I tried to imagine what you would like,” she said. “You and I are so different.” She was right: her taste ran to brilliant colors, and she was a collector—her spaces were so full of objects that one’s eye could never rest. As much as I enjoyed that, it wasn’t for me.

But when I opened the door of my room that first day, my eye met a most pleasing room; a better combination of simplicity and luxury I could not have imagined, and still cannot. The walls had been painted an astounding shade, not white but not quite another color, either; depending on the light that hit them, they glowed yellow, pink, or bluish, and the effect was soothing, almost as if they changed color to suit—or counteract—one’s mood. Under one window sat a round table with straight legs and two matching chairs, all in dark wood; on the table, atop a piece of starched linen, sat a vase filled with blue larkspur. Against a wall was a couch upholstered in rose brocade, with a table and lamp on one side of it and a small shelf for books on the other. In the center of the floor was a round rug braided in shades of blue and red. Under the window stood a four-poster bed dressed in white linens—and folded at its foot, the beautiful blue silk quilt I had once coveted.

“Oh, Judith” was all I could manage to say.

“It’s all right?” she said.

To answer, I could do nothing but embrace her.

Judith seemed a little embarrassed as she pulled away, but pleased. She went to the bedside table, where she had champagne on ice for us, twin glasses.

I stood speechless for another minute, gazing at my beautiful room, the impeccable furnishings, the loving touches. Finally, I spoke—a bit rudely, I’m afraid. “Judith, you spent too much,” I said.

“Money’s meant to be spent,” she said, and poured champagne. “To your happiness, my dear.”

In Judith’s courtyard grew an avocado tree whose fruits fell to the ground and lay there till we needed them. There was a fig arbor, too, figs hanging like little brown sacks, resistant to the teeth but sweet and gritty, and a lemon tree, the lemons almost too sour to eat, but good for lemonade on a hot day. It was like Eden, and the next few years were as close to bliss as I ever came. I left my job and spent my time drawing and designing quilts for Judith. We displayed the drawings next to the quilts and sold as much of one as the other. We changed the sign in the window: HAND-SOME ARTS , it read, DRAWINGS AND QUILTS FOR THE DISCERNING COLLECTOR. It was a brief but prosperous time for us both, those years between my divorce and the Great Depression.

This bliss was domestic, as well. Judith and I fell into happy routines. We rose early, ate breakfast together, either in the courtyard or in her room, fresh croissants or muffins and chicory coffee and fruit. Then we worked till about eleven, when we sent everyone home for lunch and siesta, then made ourselves a luscious lunch of one sort or another. At two we resumed work, at six o’clock stopped again. Dinner we cooked slowly, sherry in hand, talking and laughing in the kitchen. We grew a little plump, I admit, from the pleasure we took in food and its preparation, but what matter?

Evenings found us reading, Judith in her easy chair and I on the settee in the room she called her study. She introduced me to what I had missed as a child, extending my education into new areas of literature, art, philosophy, history. I found myself able to think more clearly, able to consider the past in a new light, even able to see my parents as they really were, and to forgive them at least for those things over which they had had no control. My love of learning rekindled, I enrolled in classes at the women’s college, and eventually got my degree, yet another thing for which I owe Judith, who paid the tuition and gave me the time to study.

I felt myself maturing into a woman—not a woman as worldly and wise as Judith, but a woman in charge of her own destiny nonetheless. It was in this state of mind—full, you might say, of myself—that I met Charles.

He came into the shop late on an afternoon when Judith was away buying silk. He wasn’t the usual sort of customer we had; he wore rather rough trousers and a pair of suspenders over a collarless shirt, and on his feet were dirty brogans. But one look at his face and I knew he was a “discerning collector,” quite possibly a man richer than his clothing suggested. Smooth-skinned and fine-featured, he had intelligent eyes and a strong jaw and mouth.

The combination of roughness and refinement attracted me. When I introduced myself, hand out, and he took my hand and shook it as he would a man’s, I felt an instant liking. He explained why he had come: his mother’s birthday. “She’s a hard woman to please,” he said.

“We can please anyone,” I said, flushing when I realized the double entendre.

He smiled but ignored the opportunity to make fun of me. “I like your confidence,” he said, and I could tell he meant it sincerely.

I sold him a fine quilt that day, an elaborate design of geometric roses. On his way out the door, he paused before one of my drawings, itself a wild rose, Rosa rugosa. “What’s this flower?” he asked. “I’ve never seen it.”

I confessed that it did not grow in Louisiana; I had drawn it from memory.

“You drew this?” he asked. I only nodded. “Let me have that too, then,” he said.

“Your mother will be well pleased,” I said, taking the drawing down to wrap it.

“Oh,” he said, with another smile, “but the drawing is for me.”

That evening as I told Judith about the quilt and the drawing, she gave me a long look, then finally said, “You’re leaving something out.”

“No,” I said, shaking my head but avoiding her look by peering into the pot I was stirring.

“Yes,” she said.

“All right,” I said, putting the spoon down. “Yes. It’s the man who bought them.”

“Name?”

“Charles Morley.”

“Morley,” she said. She took a cigarette from her case, lit it, drew in, gave a cough. “Morley. A very good family hereabouts,” she said, her voice raspy from the smoke. “A very good family. And this Charles?” she said, giving me an opening.

“He’s taking me to the theater,” I said.

Judith seemed pleased. “That’s lovely, ” she said. “Lovely.”

Charles and I began to spend time together. Once, at most twice a week. At first I was not certain it was a romance at all, so slowly did it begin. But gradually I recognized it for the genteel kind of courtship it was. We were getting to know one another—really getting to know one another, in a way which I had never done with a man. And I found it endearing, the way this man methodically went about teaching me about himself, and himself about me. Each outing was to someplace new, but always somewhere that ensured talk. After the theater, walking home; over the table in a quiet restaurant; in a carriage touring the city; a waterfront picnic. One Saturday morning he took me to see his family’s business, a shipping enterprise not far from where I had once worked, and there he took the time to show me everything, bales of cotton yet to be ginned and tobacco leaves wrapped in paper and wooden crates filled with machine parts. It was straight from this work that he had come the day we met, and as we traveled the docks, he wore those same dirty brogans—but a clean, white, collared shirt, clearly in honor of me.

Finally, he invited me to meet his family—his mother and sisters, his father having long since died. When I told Judith, “I’m happy for you, Marguerite” was all she said.

The night before this momentous occasion, I could not sleep. I suppose it was because I had not yet been completely honest with Charles. As kind as he was, I was afraid that he, like William, wanted children and would reject me when he knew I could not have any; it seemed dishonest to visit his family without telling, but I lacked the courage to do so. So I lay there, eyes burning in the still, hot, wet night. Finally I got up, changed into a dry nightgown, and descended to the second-floor kitchen to get a drink of water.

Judith’s room was on my way, her door closed as it usually was. As I passed, I thought I heard her coughing. I put my hand on the knob, hesitated. I knew she hated me to dote on her; should I go in? But just then the sound grew worse, became an awful gagging. I knocked, loudly. No reply; the noise continued. I burst in. “I’m sorry—” I said. In the light of her bed lamp I saw Judith, tears streaming from her eyes. “Oh my god, Judith,” I said, going to her. She put her hands over her face, tried to turn from me.

I put my arms around her. “What’s the matter?” I said. “Tell me, you can tell me.”

“You know,” she said, her face still buried.

I couldn’t imagine what she meant. I shook my head, stroked her hair. “Tell me,” I said again.

She pulled away from me, looked at me with red-rimmed eyes. “Well,” she said finally, sitting up straighter, squaring her shoulders. “Well,” she said again, clearing her throat. “It seems that I love you.”

I let go of her, sat down, averted my own eyes—not so much as not to see her as to give myself a moment to think. When I looked up again, she was gazing at me, her eyes full of such sorrow that I went and put my arms around her again, consoling her with the only words that would: “I love you too, of course I love you too.”

When she was finally sleeping, I returned to my room, shaken—yes, disturbed—but uncertain why. I was not unhappy to know that Judith loved me. But I did not know what meaning to make of it. I wanted to be friends with her always; I could not imagine a life without her in it. Yet at the same time I had not imagined a life with her. I knew, of course, that some women loved each other, even physically; I was naive but not ignorant. But I did not feel that attraction for Judith. For her I felt something more abiding, less transitory. Yes, I admitted to myself, I loved her; not as one does a friend, nor quite as one does a wife, or a husband, but I loved her nonetheless, and more than I had ever loved anyone.

For a long while I lay awake in the bed Judith had given me, lay with my head at its foot so that I could stare out into the night sky. I watched as it grew light, black shading to blue much as the quilt under my head did. And as the palest shade signaled morning, I thought to myself: Does anything matter but love? And I told myself: No.

The next morning, I went to see Charles. He took the news with the kindness and understanding I had come to expect from him. I told him our time together had been wonderful, glorious. But it did not match, nor did it promise to match, the times I had with Judith. We were the same species, she and I; we knew each other as only members of the same species can, understood each other more than any man and woman ever could. We loved each other as only true friends can: unconditionally, sweetly, without demands or expectations. And we had built a life together that neither of us could imagine giving up. I knew what choice I had to make.

Did Judith and I become lovers? We were intimate in every way—intellectually, emotionally. We gave each other the solace of affection when it was needed; we lay down together when we were cold or lonely. We loved each other; therefore, we were lovers. Whether we crossed that final boundary or not is irrelevant, and no one’s business but our own.

The Great Depression struck New Orleans as hard as it struck anywhere else in the country. When the market crashed, people we knew did what so many other people did, taking their own lives in moments of deep despair. In the city it was a time of great sorrow and fear, and it was one time when I wished we were back on Grain Island, where poverty was a natural state, survival a way of life, and money the least useful commodity.

As soon as it became clear that the hard times would last a while, we shut down the shop. Throughout that horrible decade, though, we never stopped designing and planning for the future. And I kept drawing as long as my supplies lasted.

We settled down to a frugal, quiet life, our main consolation that we had not invested in stocks, and that the bank in which we kept our money had—miraculously—not collapsed. Our nest egg was intact, although we worked to preserve it, to save as much of it as we could, not knowing how long the lean times would continue. We gave to others as much as we could; the women in our neighborhood knew that they could come to us for food when their children were hungry, and as long as she could afford it, Judith saw that her former workers received a small monthly stipend to help them survive. We had a strong roof over our heads; in the courtyard we had the vegetable garden, which provided most of our food; we counted every penny, rose and retired early to save light, mended our old clothes. And so we weathered the Depression together, one year after another, until it was over.

Then came the war. All the silk went to parachutes then. Judith surprised me with her patriotism, going to work at a factory that produced boots for soldiers. I went back to work at the docks and collected old shoes for refugees. The war rose and fell like a wave, and we rose and fell with it.

After the war ended, I convinced Judith, despite her claims that she was too old, to reopen the shop. We had preserved my drawings and the remaining quilts in moisture-proof boxes in the cool air of the root cellar; now we took them out and aired them in the courtyard. They were as beautiful as ever. We painted and redecorated the shop, and placed advertisements in the Times-Picayune, and soon we were rediscovered. After nearly two decades of frugality, people were hungry for beauty, for luxury. Money flowed again. Judith was happy. So was I.

Judith cut her white hair short, so that it framed her face like an aura. She had changed, of course; she had begun to show her age. Yet, though she was older than I, I had always expected I would die before she did; she seemed stronger, indomitable.

And I think she would have outlived me, if not for the cigarettes. For years her coughing had kept her from sleeping well; now she became so short of breath that conversation was a challenge. She laughed at what she called her “furry” voice. I begged her to see a doctor.

The winter that year was unusually cold. In January, temperatures began to slide below freezing with alarming regularity, and sometimes at night fell to the single digits. The green of the city faded, turned brown; it was like living in a sepia-toned photograph. Until then, we had always gotten through the winters with nothing but an occasional fire to take the chill off; now we had to keep a fire going at all times. Still, pipes froze and burst.

The shop had no fireplace, so I convinced Judith to buy a small kerosene heater, reasoning that customers stayed longer if it was warm, and the longer they stayed, the more the quilts could work their magic. Judith didn’t like the smell, and worried about the quilts taking it on. I worried about her health. I knew that sitting day after day in that cold, damp shop would not be good for her.

One night I discovered a handkerchief spotted with blood. Judith tried to dismiss it, pretended it was from the meat she’d been making for dinner, but I didn’t believe her. Finally I managed to get her to a doctor. Within a week or two, we learned what was happening. The doctor told us he’d seen this in other smokers; he admonished Judith to quit. She only raised her silver case up and removed another cigarette, the elegance of the gesture canceled by the coughing that ensued.

For the next year I did the best I could to nurse her. I knew she would not get better; I only hoped to prolong her life, and thus ours together. The doctor advised us to leave New Orleans, leave its damp heat and mildew, which only irritated her symptoms, but Judith would not, and I didn’t want to either. I wanted nothing but to stay home, home with her.

As she grew worse, I spent many hours by her bedside, reading to her. When she slept, I looked at her face and thought of all the reasons I loved her, not least of which was how, even as she lay dying, she continued to love me.

One day we had a terrible argument. She had continued to smoke for a long time, but now that she was no longer able to leave her bed unassisted, I had begun to mete out the cigarettes, saving them for the times of day when I knew she most needed them: with her morning coffee and just after supper. But that day the supply had run out after breakfast, and I suggested that this would be a good time to stop altogether. “Do you have no understanding,” she said, “of how few pleasures remain to me?”

I was tired; I was tense. Still I have no excuse; I ought not to have responded as I did. “Put someone else ahead of yourself for once,” I told her. “Think about me, for once.”

The hurt on her face was almost more than I could bear. “ All I think about is you,” she said.

Within the hour, I was walking home from the store, another pack of cigarettes in hand. It was a crystalline day in February 1950, the week after Mardi Gras, the gutters still glittering with beads and coins here and there. As I walked, a strange, acrid smell filled the bright air. But I made nothing of it, till I came to find our little alley clogged with smoke.

The firemen were still there, the ambulance gone. The upper stories, they told me, had suffered only smoke damage. The shop, meanwhile, was a total loss. “Silk doesn’t burn easily,” the fire chief told me. “The fire must have been pretty hot.” I remember his sooty face, white teeth, blistered lips. And the bitter, bitter smell of burnt silk.

Someone must have taken me to the hospital, but I do not remember the ride. I remember only the dingy room where I waited alone. The sky outside was still bright and clear, but the grim filter of an unclean window dirtied it. I sat there for hours, vaguely aware that time was passing and that somehow I was being ill-treated, ignored, but lacking the will or courage to rise from my chair and ask questions. I did not think; I could not think. I could only listen to the thoughts my mind produced of its own accord, random and furious and incoherent as a bee trapped in an airless jar.

Finally, a nurse came in and took me to Judith. She was inside an oxygen tent, her face so bandaged that her eyes were all I could see. At my insistence, the nurse let me inside the tent. I put my mouth to Judith’s ear and said her name. The hazel eyes fluttered open. She couldn’t speak. I took her bandaged hand in mine.

We had only a few moments before they sent me back to the waiting room. In a while a man came in. I watched his mouth move. A pair of liver-colored lips in a sallow face. I heard what he was saying. He was explaining to me that there would be an autopsy. An autopsy was standard in such cases, he said. Whenever foul play might be suspected. In this case, luckily (he actually used that word—luckily) there had been no foul play. However, there was some chance it was suicide. After all, she had been dying, she had access to laudanum. In such a case, suicide was hard to prove, of course. She might simply have fallen, knocked the heater over, and been unable to rise. In any case, most certainly the insurance company would pay . . .

I believe he was still talking as I left the room.

Judith had been dying, that last moment we spent. I had not known this until the man began to speak. I had, without realizing it, assumed that she would somehow recover, if she received the care she needed. But she had been dying, and I realized suddenly, with certainty, that she had wanted to die; that, even if she had not started the fire herself, she had let it burn.

And now she was to be dismembered. Cut up. Her body violated by this man whose only purpose was to give her death a name. I thought of Judith, her skin flayed away from her, pulled back to reveal the blackness in her lungs, her unmoving heart. My beautiful Judith. Dead, and now to be destroyed.

I turned back. I found the man with the gray lips. “No,” I told him. “No autopsy. I won’t allow it.”

He asked what gave me the right to stop it.

I am her lover, I wanted to say, might have said—maybe even did say, given the expression on the man’s face.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “But only a family member has the right . . . ”

At the funeral I insisted that the coffin remain closed. No one questioned my right to do so.

I paid someone to demolish the shop and studio, to empty them of everything but the timbers that supported the rest of the house. The weather warmed. I stayed home and sat in the cool sun in our courtyard. I felt hollowed out, haunted.

Judith’s lawyer came to see me. I had not thought about her will; we had never talked of it; there had seemed time, she’d been only sixty when she died. She’d left me everything, of course—the house, her savings, her investments. But, the lawyer said, there were complications. A challenge to the will from her son.

Her son. I heard the story at last. How she had divorced her husband, how he had paid her handsomely to leave the boy with him. How badly she must have wanted to get away, I thought. Then the boy came to me, now a man, seeking his birthright. Like his mother, he was tall, but there the resemblance ended, for he was selfish, with the oily skin and desperate eyes of a man who has reached the middle of his life without a thing to show for it, and he let me know in no uncertain terms that he would fight me as long as it took to take my inheritance away. Seeing the father reflected in the son, I thought I knew why Judith had left.

I did not have the strength to fight him, and did not want to. I could not live in a house so full of my own sorrow, and I would not sell the memories it bore. Judith’s house was a burden to me that I could neither shirk or discard. So I gave it to him.

I moved into a hotel. Temporarily, or so I told myself. My life became a series of moments that piled up into hours, days, months. With nothing but the storefronts to remind me, I lost track of seasons and years. I woke only when I learned of my parents’ deaths: first my mother’s, then my father’s, in the winter of 1955. It had been so long since I had seen them, I didn’t so much mourn as add them to the catalog of my losses. Still, settling their estate gave me something to do—gave me a purpose, if only temporarily. So I left the city at last, and came home to the island, bringing with me only one thing to remind me of the past.

How you loved Judith’s quilt.

When you were a baby, I would lay you on it to change your diaper, and sometimes leave you there, naked, to roll about on the slippery silk. Like a little eel you were, squirming there, squeaking, singing. So hard to imagine you now, ever that small. The little arc of your pee when I didn’t get the diaper on soon enough.

And later, when you were older, on rainy days the quilt became our blue sky, a tent over our heads as we played games: cards, Indians, house. And when you were sick with fever, it was the blue quilt that calmed you, that cooled you down, as it did me.

Two days after Caroline signed the papers that gave you to me, I went to the deputy’s house to bring you home. You can’t imagine the sinking fear in my heart when I knocked and no one came. Through a window I could see his wife—Alma was her name—sitting at the kitchen table, her back to me. I rapped on the pane. She did not turn, but I could hear what she said. “Go away, old woman,” she said. “He’s mine. You’ll never get him.” Like a witch in a fairy tale. To this day, I don’t know whether she truly said those words or I only thought she did. But I know she felt them.

I pitied Alma, I truly did. She must have wanted a child very badly. And I knew how easy it was to love you. But you were my boy, mine, and I would not give you up.

Sense told me to wait for the deputy. I stood in the dooryard there, under the leafless trees, watching the road for him. The thaw that had begun a few days before had continued; what snow remained lay in shrunken heaps where it had been plowed. If I had been a smoker, I would have smoked; this was the kind of moment cigarettes were made to fill. But nothing filled my moment but restlessness and an increasing fear of what she might do to you, what she might already have done.

I walked around to the back of the house, looking for something to use. Evidently the deputy had been building a barbecue the summer before; here was a handy pile of leftover bricks. I took one and went back to a front window and broke a pane— only a small pane. Quietly, carefully, so that she did not hear me and so that the glass would not hurt you if you were nearby. I reached in a hand, unlocked the window, slid it up, and climbed in. Once inside, I was a little surprised at myself. Standing in their living room, heart racing, I wished it had not been necessary to take such a risk. But it was what any mother would have done, her son in danger.

It was, I suppose, the kind of home you should have had. Small, cozy, immaculate. Warm, even cheerful. Afghan on the back of the couch. Overstuffed chairs. Ruffles at the windows. Even a television set, something I would never have in my house. A few of your toys sat piled in a corner, but no sign of you. So I listened harder, and heard your small movements, your voice, behind a door.

Opened it. Steps led down. It was a cellar. Was she keeping you in the cellar? You looked up at me without surprise. “Hello, Tante,” you said. You were playing on the cold dirt floor, toy soldiers arrayed in rows. “James,” I said, “time to go home.”

You stood up without question, came to me and took my hand. We went up the stairs. But when we stepped back through the door, there she was. What came out of her mouth was more a wail than a word, a sound more sorrowful than any sound I had ever heard: “No!”

“Come on, James,” I said, putting my arm around you, my hand gripping your shoulder, keeping myself between you and her.

“No!” she wailed again, coming for you, her hands reaching like claws.

I pushed her away. She stumbled back, nearly fell. Instantly I wished you’d never seen that, but it couldn’t be helped. I moved us toward the door, which opened as if by miracle as we reached it. The deputy stepped back and let us through.

“She’s there,” I said, pointing behind me, moving us toward the truck.

He only nodded and went inside.

The next day I sent him a check for the window. We never spoke of it again.

I had a room ready for you. Your toys in it, your clothes, all your things from the trailer. On your bed, the blue silk quilt. The first night, I asked if you wanted to sleep with me. No, you said. You wanted to sleep in your new room; you were excited to sleep in it. I started a fire there, made sure it was safe, and went away. But I could not leave you alone, so I slept just outside your open door. Every sound I heard I thought was you. But you did not stir. You slept well.

I knew what people would say. About what I did to the deputy’s wife. About how I paid Caroline to get you. People would say terrible things; some might even want to go to court, to have you taken away. But somehow I knew that the deputy would stop all that. I thought he understood, and I was right.

Aside from your staying with me at night, our life was substantially the same. On the surface, you scarcely seemed to notice that your parents were gone. When you asked me about them, I reminded you of the simple fact—that they had died with your uncle Homer—and you nodded solemnly and went back to your clay or blocks or truck. So I thought you understood it, accepted it, would come to love me as you had loved them. I was glad when spring came and then summer. The further we were from those events, the more secure I felt.

You had always loved strawberries. So, the year before, I had planted a strawberry patch in the sandy soil to the south of the house, where the morning sun shone longest. Your summer living with me would be our first crop. You turned five that June, old enough to help. I had grand plans for us to make jar after jar of delicious jam, and to sell what we did not need at the farmers’ market. I thought it would be good for you to see how labor produced income. I pictured you on a stool by the stove, stirring the pot of steaming jam; I pictured you counting out change of a dollar for customer after smiling customer.

As soon as the snow melted and the three-leafed plants appeared, you began to make daily trips to check their progress. They grew fast, bright green and bushy from the manure I added to the soil. On the day the first flowers budded out, you came to me flushed with excitement. Then the white petals fell and the green nubs swelled with spring rain. How slowly they ripened! First the faintest pink, then deeper and deeper. Then one day you came and took my hand and dragged me from where I was hanging clothes on the line. “Is it ripe, Tante?” you asked, pointing, and yes, there it was, the first red strawberry. “May I eat it?” you asked, and of course I said yes.

They came on fast after that. A pint the first day, two the next, and then the deluge. Every morning before the heat of the day, the two of us crouched in the rows, picking, filling buckets and pails. Then into the house to clean them. I gave you a sharp knife and taught you how to use it, and you cut off the stems and sliced up the berries, and I put them into pots with sugar and pectin, and we cooked them. The steaming jars and lids ready to be pulled with tongs from their bath. The glistening dark jars lining the countertop as we finished them. Jar after jar of delicious jam. You ate strawberries fresh, you licked the pots before I washed them. We scarcely ate anything but strawberries for two entire weeks.

It was at the first farmers’ market that we noticed it. Or rather, that it was noticed. We set ourselves up in the shade, displayed our jars on the tailgate of the truck. Fifty cents each was what we asked. The customers did not flock as I had imagined, but we had some, we had a few. One of them smiled down on you and said, “What a lovely boy you are.” And when you handed her the two quarters in change for her dollar, it was she who said, “My, child, what’s that on your finger?”

Dark red, the growth was, the size of a pea; no surprise, really, that it had gone unnoticed till then. You washed your own hands, took your own baths; you were quite a boy already. But now as I took your hand in mine and looked at it, I tried to shrug it off. “Oh,” I said, “just a mole. Nothing to worry about.” The woman smiled through her grimace and went off; since you seemed unperturbed, I soon forgot it.

A week or two later you came to me. “Tante,” you said, holding out your hand. The mole had grown; it was the width of your index finger now, and when I pressed on it, it bled. “It’s like a strawberry,” you said, and it did look like a small, ripening berry. I smiled, tried to make light of the coincidence. “Maybe we ate too many,” I said, “and this is what we get.”

But I was frightened.

Doc Milton was new to the neighborhood then. He had bought the land across our road and brought his little girl, Faith, to vacation in the trailer where your parents had lived. I’d spoken to him once or twice, but that was all; I knew he was a doctor, but not what kind or how he would receive us. But I put you in the truck that very minute and drove you to the trailer.

We were lucky to find him home. “Yes?” he said, coming to the door. I showed him your hand. “Miss Deo,” he said, “I’m an ophthalmologist. An eye doctor. I have some instruments here, but this kind of surgery takes a delicate hand, precise control. The boy’s finger is small, the nerves close to the surface. And there ought to be a biopsy. This kind of cancer can come back. You understand that?”

I hadn’t understood that. Cancer. That’s what it was, then, this strawberry growth. The word scared me, scared me more than I had ever been scared. But only made me more determined. I had already let it grow too long; I would not wait. And besides, I felt certain that, if I took you to anyone else, you would never come home again. To go to the village doctor, to go to the mainland would be to reveal to everyone that I was failing, failing in my role as your guardian, your mother. It would be proof to them that they were right about me. It might cost me you. “If you can operate on an eye,” I said, “a finger should be no problem.”

“I can’t in good conscience . . . ”

“Please,” I said.

He must have seen the fear in my eyes, the determination. With a sharpened and disinfected scalpel and two careful incisions, he removed the growth. You did not cry, I remember that. But that is all I remember, so caught up in my own distress was I. The girl was there then, she must have been; the two of you must have met then, for the first time. But she would have been small, and I don’t remember seeing her; I was too focused on you, I suppose. I was so worried about your finger, I didn’t think of anything else. I had even forgotten one thing more important: that this was your first visit back to the trailer where you had been born.

On the ride home you held your bandaged hand high, as the doctor instructed. Your silence then seemed natural to me—it was a frightening thing, to have a man slice into you with a knife. It wasn’t till that night that I began to worry. You could not eat your supper, even though I made your favorite, ham steak and potato pancakes. You started to, but after a bite, stopped. I could not tempt you, even with ice cream. I thought that you’d wake hungry during the night, but it never happened. And the next morning your eggs and sausage grew cold. “James Jack,” I said, using my angry voice. “You eat now. Don’t waste your food.” You looked up at me then. I expected to see rebellion, but there was none in your eyes. “I can’t,” you said. “I can’t.” You took a forkful of eggs into your mouth but couldn’t swallow; you had to spit it out. And I realized you were telling the truth.

I thought and hoped it was a reaction to the surgery. I feared it meant something more, something worse. Another day went by, then two. “Do you want something to eat, James Jack?” I said periodically. You shook your head. You were hungry, I knew, but could not eat.

You lay about on the settee, weak and pale. Outside, summer was in its glory, hot and green during the day, cool and breezy at night, but you stayed indoors. You wanted the shades pulled. Even in midafternoon, you slept under Judith’s quilt, as if you were cold. I took your temperature; it was normal. We discovered that you could sip a bit of water, but that was all. We tried every kind of food I could imagine. You could not eat. I asked you why. “Everything tastes bad to me,” you said. “Bad how, baby?” I asked. You grimaced at me; you hated when I called you baby. “Dead,” you said. “Everything tastes dead.”

On the fourth day, I drove to the doctor’s again, thinking to ask his advice. But he had gone home. I sat there in the truck, my view of the closed-up trailer blurring through tears. As I sat, I remembered the day I had come there with the zwieback cookies, the fat little baby you had been, bouncing in your walker, smiling at me and at your mother. It dawned on me then: this had been your home only months before, until one morning you had left it, never to return. And when you returned, your parents were gone, replaced by a strange man with a knife. Their things gone, everything changed. I had told you many times that your parents had died, that they were dead. Could it be that until that moment, you hadn’t understood? “Dead,” you said. “Everything tastes dead.”

I came back to the house without a plan, not knowing what I could do, but at least now believing I knew what was wrong. Sitting in the cooling truck, I made up my mind to call the mainland, to take you to the hospital there, to the emergency room. I had to do it, no matter what it might mean. I could not let you starve.

I got out of the truck. All around the house, flowers were in bloom. Glorious flowers, fragrant flowers. July’s end was the best time for my garden, the fullest time, the most promiscuous. As I passed by the bank of daylilies that ran alongside the house, I smelled their spicy scent and plucked a petal from one and put it in my mouth. It tasted clean and crisp, alive. It gave me an idea.

I pulled my shirttails into a pouch and began to gather petals. Daylily, nasturtium, violets, even rose petals. A beautiful, glorious salad of flowers, caught in the net of my shirt like sleeping butterflies.

I rushed into the house. Found a bowl and filled it. Brought it to you where you lay, eyes half closed, on the settee. “James Jack,” I said to you. “Here’s something alive to eat.”

You opened your eyes, sat up a little. “Flowers?” you said.

“Flowers,” I said. “Just picked.”

You reached into the bowl, pulled a purple petal from it, placed it cautiously on your tongue. I imagined it there, all but melting. I watched, waiting to see if it would make you gag. “Spicy,” you said. You swallowed it, took another from the bowl, the golden-yellow petal of a daylily, so big it required you to bite it in half. You did so, chewed and swallowed one half, then the other. “Oh,” you said. “Sweet,” you said. You ate another, a nasturtium this time. “Bitter, like pepper. But I like it.” And on you ate, until they were gone.

Afterward, you slept. I sat by your side and watched you sleep, as I had done when you were very small. When you opened your eyes again, I was still there. “Tante,” you said. “I’m hungry.”

Later that night we sat on the porch, looking out into the darkness, listening to the summer sounds, smelling the evening-blooming flowers. I explained to you that not all flowers could be eaten; I promised to show you which next day. You came to me and sat on my lap then, as you still did sometimes, although more and more rarely, when you were afraid or unhappy. For a long time you didn’t say a word, but just clung to me there. Then you spoke, in a voice so small I thought at first I imagined it. “Tante,” you said, “you’ll never die, will you?”

I held your small face in my hands, looked you in the eye. “No, I won’t,” I promised.

And so I kept my promise, and grew very old, after all.

Your first shoes. Soft white leather, soles thin as paper. Learning to walk, you held on to my fingers, first with both hands, then with one. We went everywhere together for three months. When finally you walked alone, one hand remained in the air, holding on to my invisible finger.

You outgrew the shoes before they wore out, so I sent them off and they came back bronzed. Creases, scuffs, the little convexities of your toes, all preserved, sweet record of the baby you were. I cannot look at them without remembering, without feeling the love I felt, then and now. This is the love I want you to have; this is the love you have to find.