Mrs. Mary Jeansonne always knew when her husband's shrimp boat left the dock. The telephone started ringing. If it hadn't been such a small town, so hard to keep a secret, they would have been knocking at the door.
She brushed her hair, let it ring. They were right, those men who called. That's what made her angry, their being right. She was ready for an affair. Dying for one, in fact. Dying for anything. Mary Jeansonne sometimes felt like she was going stark, raving mad.
She was not from that little Cajun shrimping village. She was from Little Rock, Arkansas. This country was as different from her own as a place can be without a different-colored passport.
Everybody in town was blood-kin except her. She was a big hit when Julien brought her home. A strange woman and lovely, too, with auburn hair, she made a splash like a movie star.
It was fun at first. She even tried to learn a little French. And, with a cookbook propped up by the stove, she could do any of those Cajun dishes. But that's all there was to it: cook, clean, wait. Then it stopped being fun and got ugly.
Even with Julien home, it was ugly. He was so morose. He couldn't afford a deckhand. He was going to lose the boat. Jobs in the oilfield weren't there like they used to be. Almost everyone they knew who couldn't make it shrimping anymore went on unemployment. The younger ones took welfare. Then they were ashamed, the good ones, not the ones who called her.
The telephone stopped ringing. She had been counting the rings with the strokes of the brush, one stroke for each ring, one long stroke through her thick, auburn hair. She was vain about her hair, admitted it.
In the beginning, it had been fun for Julien, too. He was proud of her. He had gone out into the world of the other Americans and plucked back a choice prize. That's what she felt like, choice. A cut of meat.
After a while, it got to her. And then it got to him. A boat captain has to be away a lot and he can't leave his mind or his heart at home. It was just one more strain. Julien couldn't believe any longer that she was faithful. She had too much temptation. He knew he would have given in, so he could not believe that she had not.
The telephone started again. At first, Julien's not believing her was painful, like a bruise deep inside a muscle. After a while, though, that place got numb.
She was a faithful wife. Her body was faithful, anyway, inviolate. Twelve rings, this time.
They couldn't come to the door. There was a code down here. What they wanted from her could get them shot. Her, too. They wouldn't come to the door. Their wives and sweethearts and mothers … yes, some of them were young enough to still worry about their mothers' disapproval and some of them whatever their age, even some of the big, strapping brawlers, only worried about their mothers' disapproval … the entire village would know. It would be up and down the canal in ten minutes.
Nobody could truthfully say anything about her being unfaithful. She would give them nothing to say, not the slightest excuse. So the telephone was their only way.
Mary finished dressing, but she had nowhere to go. She didn't need anything from the store. The house was spotless. Julien thought children would solve the problem. He wanted her to get pregnant. But she'd be damned if she'd get pregnant to give herself something to do or to create little watchdogs around the house.
The telephone started ringing again. She made tea in the kitchen. Only eight rings, must be a new one.
She took her coffee into the front room, unplugged the telephone and watched Love Boat. Love Boat made her angry. Here were all these ... millionaires or something walking around a luxury liner making everything come out all right in love and war with canned laughter between the scenes. She thought Love Boat was dangerous, a dangerous program. It said you could walk into fire and not get burned. She watched the whole program to reinforce that feeling.
Then she reinserted the telephone plug; and, before they could begin calling again, she picked up the receiver and dialed One, Five-Zero-One, and his number. Then, suddenly, with her heart racing wildly and her breath practically panting, she hung up. She hung up before the first ring.
The telephone bill! Julien could hang her with the telephone bill. Slowly, now, feeling in the telephone a tingling, electric vibration, she redialed, this time beginning with Zero instead of One.
"Collect to Jim Mitchell from Mary … Mary Harrison," she said.
"I thought it was something French, now, your last name." he said in that old happy way when he had accepted the call.
"It … it still is," she said.
"Didn't you know if you just said Mary I'd know who it was?" he said, and that made her very happy. He was saying she was still important to him. "Well, how are things in bayou land?"
She smiled at the way he said bayou. Baa-oh, the way she used to say it.
"Oh, things are fine," she said. Then, quickly, because she knew it was a lie and that he would know it, she added, "Well, the truth is I miss you."
That wasn't the truth, either, not the full truth. The full truth was that it wasn't so much him she was missing but being in a warm, uncluttered, non- threatening, loving and passionate embrace with a man. Jim had held her this way, Jim and Julien, too, she admitted, at first. Now it was different with Julien. But all of this was too much for one telephone call, so she just said she missed him.
"I miss you, too," he said seriously, and she knew he meant it in that other way. Then they didn't say anything for a while. He broke the silence with triviality.
"Well, how's the shrimping business?" he asked, avoiding the issue delicately. He was delicate in that way. Strong, of course, but he always considered his effect on other people. It encouraged her.
"Is your company still flying people up from Lafayette every weekend?"
"Uh … yes."
"Can you come down on the plane?"
"Hmmm. Well, if I can't, I'll just come down commercial. This weekend?"
"Right this very minute," she said. Now she felt the old thing she had with him. They would sometimes just shut up, not say anything for a whole day. It was too good to talk about too much.
"Call you back in half an hour. I've got your number, looked it up six months ago."
She chuckled.
"Bye," she said. Now she felt like there was a balloon somewhere inside her. A balloon filled with helium. She paced the room, ringing her hands but pleasantly. Anticipation, not frustration.
Outside on the sidewalk, some boys on bicycles stopped. They stood there, balanced one foot on the ground. They stood there for all the world like those long-legged cranes Julien had shown her, standing on one leg hardly moving. And they stared with open mouths directly through the window at her.
She gestured them away, brushing her hand backward toward them. Shoo! They did not move. Angry, now, she went to the door, opened it enough to emit her head and shoulders and yelled:
"Get out of here! Passé!"
It was as though she had thrown cold water or hot oil on them. Startled, they glanced to her at the door, then back to the window. The pedals went like pistons as they raced on their bicycles to the corner and beyond like they were being pursued by the Loup-Garou, the werewolf himself. Now she was sorry she had yelled so loudly. It was just that they seemed to be looking in at her in the very moment she wished most for privacy. It was funny, too, though, the way they scooted away.
The telephone was ringing. She hurried back inside, picked it up happily. But it was a local call, another one of those. This time when she said she was a married woman, it didn't sound the same to her. But Jim called next.
"Missed the freebie," he said. "But coming in on Acadian Airlines at ten-oh- eight."
"Then I'll look for you at eleven," she said. They both chuckled.
'Things are that laid back down there, eh? All the flights an hour late."
"I didn't mean at the airport," she said. "I meant at your motel."
"Mmm-humm," he said in that old mischievous way. "Allll-right! They got me booked into Howard Johnson's. They're expecting Mrs. Mitchell, too. You're Mrs. Mitchell."
"Tonight," she said. She was feeling like a girl again.
"You know you're something special," he said.
'Tell me that at eleven-thirty," she said. She didn't want to talk too much. They got off the line quickly, but the boys had already returned with old Mister Mouton from down the block.
There they were, all of them. The boys were afoot, now, but they were staring at her as before, their fingers pointing at her through the window. And now the old man, too, was staring open-mouthed. In fact, his hand had drawn up to his chin the way people do when they're heavy in thought. Or horror-struck.
"I'll put a stop to this," she said to herself angrily as she tromped to the door. She swung it open and stepped out and stomped toward them. They hardly noticed. They were still staring through the window.
"La visage, la visage," the old man was saying, still staring at the house. In French, it sounded like their way of saying village. She began to order them away, but one of the boys said it in English.
"The face, Mrs. Jeansonne," the boy said very politely, "the face in the window."
Now she saw that one could not see inside the house. The house was dark and the day was bright. They had not been looking at her through the window. They had been looking into the eyes of a woman in the glass of her window.
It was not a full face, merely the eyes and cheekbones, eyebrows and part of the bridge of nose. But it was the face of a woman, all right. And it seemed alive. She did not move. The face was as still as a painting or a statue. But her eyes – perfect in every detail – were alive. Mary was certain of it. And in that moment, she stood as silently transfixed as those cranes Julien had shown her except that she stood on both feet. She needed two feet to stand on, that's the effect that face had on her.
Because, as she watched, the face seemed to grow more distinct. Colors filled in the way a painting takes shape under the brush of a master. Magically, like the colors in the old Walt Disney cartoon, Fantasia. Slowly, as slow as organ music in a solemn high mass.
"Mon Dieu," Mister Mouton said, falling to his knees on her lawn and beginning a string of muttered French prayers. The boys seemed to be losing their footing, too; but it was only a nervous jig before they scattered through the village spreading the word with pre-pubic high-pitched, excited voices. Mary admitted to a tremble in her step, too, as she advanced toward the window.
She went toward it in a wavering line, a true bee-line, and at some angles the face was not visible at all. Head on, though, even close up so that she could see the telephone table and telephone and the kitchen beyond, the face was every minute more discernable. And the eyes, eyes she felt she knew, were staring straight at her. In fact, the eyes seemed to follow her the way the eyes of some trick paintings seem to follow a viewer through a gallery.
Mary shuddered. She had to pull her eyes away, feeling an almost physical, magnetic connection. That's when she became aware of the hum of voices behind her. The hum was from prayers as well as exclamations. The crowd was forming. They came running up from each corner. Fontenots, Delcambres, Romeros, mostly. Some of the men in the crowd looked into her face instead of the woman in the window, looking at her with a different look.
She went into the house. She locked the doors and shut the curtains. But then Mrs. Beauxis came over to ask her to please open the curtains since the lighter background made it harder to see the woman.
Angry at her own acquiescence, she complied. Now her window was open to the world, and it seemed all the world wanted to look into it. She did not feel she should leave her house to the stares of her neighbors. She tried shutting herself in the bedroom, even moved the television set in there for company. But it was no good. She was as drawn to the window as they were. Looking out, she could only see the crowd of the curious and devout. They laughed and pointed or knelt and prayed as though it were Fatima or Lourdes.
Her sister-in-law and mother-in-law came, but only the younger woman would come inside. Mrs. Jeansonne thought it was a sign from God that her son should not have married an outsider, an American. Mary knew that old woman had been looking for that sign for a long time, from the first.
Jacqueline was no comfort. When she went for the priest, Mary was relieved to have at least a few minutes alone. While she was gone, though, Mr. Bessard brought over some black cloth which he volunteered to hang behind the window. It was to back up the image for the crowd to see rather than to give her privacy. He crossed himself before he put it up and he crossed himself again after it was done.
Now, at least, the window was shut off to her inside. But Mary's attention did not diminish. She did not dare touch the curtain, but she peeked from other windows in the house. Father Labbé stood outside with Jacqueline. The young priest was one of the curious, not one of the devout. He stood among the crowd, giving blessings when asked for it, blessing the kneeling and crossing parishioners absently, the way an author signs books at an autograph party.
She watched them come up the walk. Now cars were cruising by and every curb was bumper-to-bumper with parked trucks and vans and automobiles, bicycles, and motorcycles.
"Don't be surprised if they don't start coming in from Rouen and even Abbeville and New Iberia on buses," Father Labbé said, when he had finally asked to enter the house, taking a very light tone. Investigating, he seemed surprised that the vision was like a one-way mirror. From inside-out, it was only a window. "This kind of thing has happened before … I mean here in Acadiana, in recent years."
"A miracle, ainh Father?" Jacqueline asked. She was now wearing a mantilla draped about her head like the blue one that had formed above the face of the woman in the window. The priest smiled almost shyly.
"We tend to use the word phenomenon these days," he said to her, but turned kindly and concernedly toward Mary. "Perhaps you shouldn't stay here. Maybe over at Jacqueline's house or with Mrs. Jeansonne."
Mary shook her head.
"Then have somebody stay with you," he said. "This will get much worse."
"I'll stay with her, Father," Jacqueline muttered swiftly.
"No!" Mary snapped.
The priest looked at her, considering.
"Well, I'll get Junior Dooley in here for crowd control," he said. Junior Dooley was the chief of police in the two-man department. "And I'd like to bring a friend in, if I may, Mary. He's a doctor. From Abbeville. Jimmy LaCoeur. He's studied things like this, I believe, he's a general practitioner but also a licensed psychiatrist. Nice man."
Mary nodded. In the past few hours she had felt her jaws go slack, as though she could no longer talk. Then she was left alone. Junior Dooley earned his money. The priest was right about the buses. In fact, the sheriff's department assigned a deputy, too. Doctor LaCoeur had a lot of explanations she didn't want to hear. But he also had tranquilizers.
Mary was in her bedroom, all the doors locked and bolted, watching the headlight beams of the cars traverse her drapes, when she remembered about Jim. But by then it was too late. Her eyelids were closing as inevitably as a curtain on the final act, the tranquilizer bringing them down.
Deep in the darkness of the night and her personal opiate oblivion, she heard the ringing of the telephone and answered it to Jim's voice. Hollowly, she heard her own muttered explanation. And then there was nothing except a pounding of pulse in her ears.
By the light of morning, she knew the pounding was at the door. She was still fully clothed, groggy and confused. It was Julien. He was wearing those short, white, rubber boots the fishermen all wore. A few years later, they would begin, jokingly, to call them Delcambre Reeboks. And, by the stubble on his cheeks and the red rims of his eyes, she knew he had not slept.
He came in wordlessly and took her in his arms. She was glad to be held, happy to be against his strength, enveloped by it. He tilted her face, kissed her mouth, eyes, forehead. Smoothed her hair, rubbed her shoulders.
"You're not supposed to be here. You're supposed to be shrimping," she said in a soft, little girl's voice. The drug had still not left her.
"Sheriff Dooley, he called me on the radio, him."
"But the shrimp."
"Hainh! The shrimp, they can wait, them. Throw you some dry clothes in a bag. We leaving, us. Going out on the boat. You don't need no tranquilizer. You need some fresh air."
Pliable, confused, she complied. But at the door he hesitated. He hugged her around the shoulders.
"Take a deep breath, yeah," he said. She did. She let it out in a sigh. He nodded, opened the door. It was shocking. There must have been a thousand people standing in the early morning light in attitudes ranging from alacrity to Pentecostal ravings. The sight of her emerging sent an electric quiver through the crowd, and the line of deputies and police had to struggle against the almost visceral push of the crowd.
Mary could not stand the sound, much less the sight. She looked down and covered her ears with her hands. The police had put up little rope barriers but her flowers had already been trampled. The grass of the lawn up to and beneath the window was pressed like it had been steam-rolled.
Dooley muttered an apology about the flowers, but she waved him away. One glance at the woman in the window told her all she needed to know. The face was nearly complete.
Only a couple of blocks, but it was a tortuous trip. The crowd pursued them. Acquaintances who had all but shunned her for her foreign-ness now shouted to her their support. Strangers asked her blessing. Hands reached out to touch her clothes. It was hideous. It was revolting.
Father Labbé reached them just as she stepped aboard the Mary J. He wanted permission to remove the window pane for chemical analysis in Lafayette.
"No!" Mary shouted from the deck of the Mary J. "Don't touch her. Nobody is to touch her!"
And then she went into the cabin and lay upon the bunk and did not emerge for an hour. By that time, they were in a totally different environment. Julien smiled at her from the wheel. He had opened the forward ports and the wind from the bay across the marshes fanned her. She breathed deeply. Fresh air, as he had said.
During that whole day, he never mentioned the woman in the window. It seemed impossible to her, but he did not. It was as though she had met Jim, as though she had been unfaithful and he had discovered it and was understanding and forgiving. But it was none of that.
He had suspected her of infidelity before and made her life miserable for his own suspicions. This was what she would have wanted from a husband if she had been unfaithful and had been discovered. She put Jim out of her mind. She enjoyed it.
As the day wore on, she began to relax. She watched West Cote Blanche Bay emerge from behind the green belt of marsh and she marveled at the size of Weeks Island and the salt mine buildings bright in the sunlight as they crossed the bay headed for the pass. Julien was different on the boat. She had been out with him before but felt rather uselessly feminine and so quit going. On the boat Julien was peaceful and happy.
Mary watched his face as he stood at the wheel. She reveled in his smile when she brought him coffee from the galley. He was relaxed and almost childlike, but she was impressed at his efficiency with the boat.
Going through the pass she spied some small, gray-brown birds flocked on the muddy beach of the Gulf. Julien put the prow of the boat into the shore of the marsh a discreet distance away. Leaving the diesels in forward to hold the boat against the bank, he took a light net and crept up on the feeding birds. He came back with enough for a fine meal.
"Papabotte," he said. "Kind of like a sandpiper. Me, I never see him before on the beach, no. First time for me. Usually see him in the fresh-plow field, him. Talk about good, yes."
But first he took the boat into blue water. They swam naked and dried in the sun on deck. She fell asleep and woke up in the shade making love. For a long time, she had not enjoyed making love with him, but now upon the hard boards of the deck, she enjoyed it to her core.
In the afterglow, she tried to remember if she had ever made love outside before, decided she hadn't, resolved to do it again. She had always wanted tight little dark places to make love, considering the darkness and the confinement to be intimate. Now she felt that the intimacy was best in an expansion of experience, not a restriction of it. Intimacy had always seemed tiny to her. Now it seemed huge.
Her appetite, also, was huge. He cleaned and plucked the papabotte and she cooked them in a roux, with rice for the gravy. And they had a salad on the side and some cold beer which, to her, tasted wonderful.
"You know what they say about papabotte, ainh, the old people, them?" he asked.
"No, what?"
He flexed his arm in a show of strength.
"Make you strong in bed," he said smiling lustily across the tiny table.
"Pass the papabotte," she said. Then, for his amusement, she fell into Cajun English usage. "An' you eat up, you." Pushing the platter toward him. "They got plenty, yeah, them. Mange, mange, mange."
Both of them laughed. It seemed like a joke, then, at the table. But, later on in the bunk, it seemed more vital. She awoke just before dawn, satisfied but serious. She roused her husband.
"Let's go back," she said. "Let's go home. Let's face it."
His only answer was that quick little nod not only of assent but also of approval. So much of the Cajun expression was non-verbal. They communicated such intricate messages with eyes and chins and the set of their mouths, with hands waving and body language.
It was chilly in the half-light. He gave her a pullover sweatshirt with a hood. She went about the boat busying herself with the little chores she had observed him doing the day before. She coiled lines, tidied up, swabbed the deck, removed and folded and stowed the tarp.
Then, on the shadowed western side of the boat just as the sun rose, on her way to the cabin to make coffee and something for nibbling, she saw the sun on her face reflected in the clear smooth glass of the porthole. Her face was framed by a border of her thick, auburn hair and by the dark hood of the sweatshirt. She stared at her reflection in the virgin light of morning. It was exactly what she had seen in her own window. She could have stared at it for hours, but in that one glance she learned all there was to learn from it.
Inside the cabin, Julien put his arm around her and pulled her to him warmly.
She watched the mouth of the canal grow larger, open to accept them. She stayed that way, standing with him at the wheel, looking at the lush marshes with the furry and feathered and slick-skinned life. Peaceful. Peaceful and powerful with a balanced, undeniable pulse.
"What if we lose the boat?" she asked.
"Don' worry, no, you," he said. "What you think? Shrimper never lost a boat before? You don' think some bank going to tell me if I'm a shrimper, ainh?"
It was more welcome than hope. It was easier than determination. It was conviction.
Julien and his people, for all their human faults, were convinced. They were convinced of survival. It was a kind of religion. They would continue.
"I can deckhand for you," she said hopefully. He beamed.
"Mais, shore you can, you," he said. "My mother, she deckhand for my papa mos' forty year, off and on. Raise kids, too, yeah. Talk about a crowd, us kids, yeah, on the boat."
In the town, the crowd and hubbub continued. There was a television news crew which started to hassle her, but Junior Dooley stood between them with his quiet authority of a racehorse muscle-bunched but calmly waiting for the bell to ring and the gate to open, ready for it when it should come. So they left her alone. The image of the woman in the window was decomposing, fading like a watercolor in the mist.
"They of course call it the Virgin Mary," Father Labbé said, when they were inside the house.
"Mais, that's something, a redheaded Virgin Mary."
"Well, there has always been speculation on that, since redheads were often produced from the lineage of King David, and since both Joseph and Mary were of the House of David, it is possible that not only the Holy Mother but her son as well were redheads … like you, Mary," the priest said. She said nothing. Through the window, she saw Jim in the middle of the crowd. She answered the telephone when he called in the evening.
"I'm sorry," she began.
"Think nothing of it," he said. "It has been a trip I would not have missed for anything in this world. Did they discover what it was?"
"Uh … no," she said.
"Well, listen, I know you can't talk. I saw him, your husband. I'll stay here until you ...."
"No. No, that's what I meant to say. I'm sorry … I'm sorry I called you … put you to the trouble. I … I can't do it. I … I'm going to have a baby."
Now nothing said, she could almost feel the stirring within her. Nothing left to say. Now they both knew their place. Everyone knew the proper place. Julien had known it all along.