Part 19 (1/2)

After punching out at three o'clock, Martha and Darcy frequently stopped in at La Ptisserie, the hotel's coffee shop. On rare occasions they went into Le Cinq, the little pocket bar just off the lobby, for something a little stronger, and this day was a Le Cinq occasion if there had ever been one. Darcy got her friend comfortably situated in one of the booths, and left her there with a bowl of Goldfish crackers while she spoke briefly to Ray, who was tending bar that afternoon. Martha saw him grin at Darcy, nod, and make a circle with the thumb and forefinger of his right hand. Darcy came back to the booth with a look of satisfaction on her face. Martha regarded her with some suspicion.

'What was that about?'

'You'll see.'

Five minutes later Ray came over with a silver ice-bucket on a stand and placed it beside them. In it was a bottle of Perrier-Jouet champagne and two chilled gla.s.ses.

'Here, now!' Martha said in a voice that was half-alarmed, half-laughing. She looked at Darcy, startled.

'Hush,' Darcy said, and to her credit, Martha did.

Ray uncorked the bottle, placed the cork beside Darcy, and poured a little into her gla.s.s. Darcy waved at it and winked at Ray.

'Enjoy, ladies,' Ray said, and then blew a little kiss at Martha. 'And congratulate your boy for me, sweetie.' He walked away before Martha, who was still stunned, could say anything.

Darcy poured both gla.s.ses full and raised hers. After a moment Martha did the same. The gla.s.ses clinked gently. 'Here's to the start of your son's career,' Darcy said, and they drank. Darcy tipped the rim of her gla.s.s against Martha's a second time. 'And to the boy himself,' she said. They drank again, and Darcy touched their gla.s.ses together yet a third time before Martha could set hers down. 'And to a mother's love.'

'Amen, honey,' Martha said, and although her mouth smiled, her eyes did not. On each of the first two toasts she had taken a discreet sip of champagne. This time she drained the gla.s.s.

Darcy had gotten the bottle of champagne so that she and her best friend could celebrate Peter Rosewall's breakthrough in the style it seemed to deserve, but that was not the only reason. She was curious about what Martha had said - It's more than sweet, ifs true. And she was curious about that expression of triumph.

She waited until Martha had gotten through her third gla.s.s of champagne and then she said, 'What did you mean about the dedication, Martha?'

'What?'

'You said it wasn't just sweet, it was true.'

Martha looked at her so long without speaking that Darcy thought she was not going to answer at all. Then she uttered a laugh so bitter it was shocking - at least to Darcy it was. She'd had no idea that cheerful little Martha Rosewall could be so bitter, in spite of the hard life she had led. But that note of triumph was still there, too, an unsettling counterpoint.

'His book is going to be a best-seller and the critics are going to eat it up like ice cream,' Martha said. 'I believe that, but not because Pete says so . . . although he does, of course. I believe it because that's what happened with him.'

'Who?'

'Pete's father,' Martha said. She folded her hands on the table and looked at Darcy calmly.

'But - ' Darcy began, then stopped. Johnny Rosewall had never written a book in his life, of course. IOUs and the occasional I f.u.c.ked yo momma in spray-paint on brick walls were more Johnny's style. It seemed as if Martha was saying . . .

Never mind the fancy stuff, Darcy thought. You know perfectly well what she's saying; She might have been married to Johnny when she got pregnant with Pete, but someone a little more intellectual was responsible for the kid.

Except it didn't fit. Darcy had never met Johnny, but she had seen half a dozen photos of him in Martha's alb.u.ms, and she'd gotten to know Pete well - so well, in fact, that during his last two years of high school and first two years of college she'd come to think of him as partly her own. And the physical resemblance between the boy who'd spent so much time in her kitchen and the man in the photo alb.u.ms . . .

'Well, Johnny was Pete's biological father,' Martha said, as if reading her mind. 'Only have to look at his nose and eyes to see that. Just wasn't his natural one . . . any more of that bubbly? It goes down so smooth.' Now that she was tiddly, the South had begun to resurface in Martha's voice like a child creeping out of its hiding place.

Darcy poured most of the remaining champagne into Martha's gla.s.s. Martha held it up by the stem, looking through the liquid, enjoying the way it turned the subdued afternoon light in Le Cinq to gold. Then she drank a little, set the gla.s.s down, and laughed that bitter, jagged laugh again.

'You don't have the slightes' idea what I'm talking about, do you?'

'No, honey, I don't.'

'Well, I'm going to tell you,' Martha said. 'After all these years I have to tell someone - now more'n ever, now that he's published his book and broken through after all those years of gettin ready for it to happen. G.o.d knows I can't tell him - him least of all. But then, lucky sons never know how much their mothers love them, or the sacrifices they make, do they?'

'I guess not,' Darcy said. 'Martha, hon, maybe you ought to think about if you really want to tell me whatever it is you - '

'No, they don't have a clue,' Martha said, and Darcy realized her friend hadn't heard a single word she'd said. Martha Rosewall was off in some world of her own. When her eyes came back to Darcy, a peculiar little smile - one Darcy didn't like much - touched the corners of her mouth. 'Not a clue,' she repeated. 'If you want to know what that word dedication really means, I think you have to ask a mother. What do you think, Darcy?'

But Darcy could only shake her head, unsure what to say. Martha nodded, however, as if Darcy had agreed completely, and then she began to speak.

There was no need for her to go over the basic facts. The two women had worked together at Le Palais for eleven years and had been close friends for most of that time.

The most basic of those basic facts, Darcy would have said (at least until that day in Le Cinq she would have said it), was that Marty had married a man who wasn't much good, one who was a lot more interested in his booze and his dope - not to mention just about any woman who happened to flip a hip in his direction - than he was in the woman he had married.

Martha had been in New York only a few months when she met him, just a babe in the woods, and she had been two months pregnant when she said I do. Pregnant or not, she had told Darcy more than once, she had thought carefully before agreeing to marry Johnny. She was grateful he wanted to stick by her (she was wise enough, even then, to know that many men would have been down the road and gone five minutes after the words 'I'm pregnant' were out of the little lady's mouth), but she was not entirely blind to his shortcomings. She had a good idea what her mother and father - especially her father - would make of Johnny Rosewall with his black T-Bird and his tu-tone airtip shoes, bought because Johnny had seen Memphis Slim wearing a pair exactly like them when Slim played the Apollo.

That first child Martha had lost in the third month. After another five months or so, she had decided to chalk the marriage up to profit and loss - mostly loss. There had been too many late nights, too many weak excuses, too many black eyes. Johnny, she said, fell in love with his fists when he was drunk.

'He always looked good,' she told Darcy once, 'but a good-lookin s.h.i.+theel is still a s.h.i.+theel.'

Before she could pack her bags, Martha discovered she was pregnant again. Johnny's reaction this time was immediate and hostile: he socked her in the belly with the handle of a broom in an effort to make her miscarry. Two nights later he and a couple of his friends - men who shared Johnny's affection for bright clothes and tu-tone shoes - tried to stick up a liquor store on East n6th Street. The proprietor had a shotgun under the counter. He brought it out. Johnny Rosewall was packing a nickel-plated .32 he'd gotten G.o.d knew where. He pointed it at the proprietor, pulled the trigger, and the pistol blew up. One of the fragments of the barrel entered his brain by way of his right eye, killing him instantly.

Martha had worked on at Le Palais until her seventh month (this was long before Darcy Sagamore's time, of course), and then Mrs Proulx told her to go home before she dropped the kid in the tenth-floor corridor or maybe the laundry elevator. You're a good little worker and you can have your job back later on if you want it, Roberta Proulx told her, but for right now you get yourself gone, girl.

Martha did, and two months later she had borne a seven-pound boy whom she had named Peter, and Peter had, in the fullness of time, written a novel called Blaze of Glory, which everyone - including the Book-of-the-Month Club and Universal Pictures - thought destined for fame and fortune.

All this Darcy had heard before. The rest of it - the unbelievable rest of it - she heard about that afternoon and evening, beginning in Le Cinq, with champagne gla.s.ses before them and the advance copy of Pete's novel in the canvas tote by Martha Rosewall's feet.

'We were living uptown, of course,' Martha said, looking down at her champagne gla.s.s and twirling it between her fingers. 'On Stanton Street, up by Station Park. I've been back since. It's worse than it was - a lot worse - but it was no beauty spot even back then.

'There was a spooky old woman who lived at the Station Park end of Stanton Street back then - folks called her Mama Delorme and lots of them swore she was a bruja woman. I didn't believe in anything like that myself, and once I asked Octavia Kinsolving, who lived in the same building as me and Johnny, how people could go on believing such trash in a day when s.p.a.ce satellites went whizzing around the earth and there was a cure for just about every disease under the sun. 'Tavia was an educated woman - had been to Juilliard - and was only living on the fatback side of 110th because she had her mother and three younger brothers to support. I thought she would agree with me but she only laughed and shook her head.

' ”Are you telling me you believe in bruja?” I asked her.

' ”No,” she said, ”but I believe in her. She is different. Maybe for every thousand - or ten thousand - or million - women who claim to be witchy, there's one who really is. If so, Mama Delorme's the one.”

'I just laughed. People who don't need bruja can afford to laugh at it, the same way that people who don't need prayer can afford to laugh at that. I'm talkin 'bout when I was first married, you know, and in those days I still thought I could straighten Johnny out. Can you dig it?'

Darcy nodded.

Then I had the miscarriage. Johnny was the main reason I had it, I guess, although I didn't like to admit that even to myself back then. He was beating on me most the time, and drinking all the time. He'd take the money I gave him and then he'd take more out of my purse. When I told him I wanted him to quit hooking from my bag he'd get all woundy-faced and claim he hadn't done any such thing. That was if he was sober. If he was drunk he'd just laugh.

'I wrote my momma down home - it hurt me to write that letter, and it shamed me, and I cried while I was writing it, but I had to know what she thought. She wrote back and told me to get out of it, to go right away before he put me in the hospital or even worse. My older sister, Ca.s.sandra (we always called her Kissy), went that one better. She sent me a Greyhound bus ticket with two words written on the envelope in pink lipstick - GO NOW, it said.'

Martha took another small sip of her champagne. 'Well, I didn't. I liked to think I had too much dignity. I suppose it was nothing but stupid pride. Either way, it turned out the same. I stayed. Then, after I lost the baby, I went and got pregnant again - only I didn't know at first. I didn't have any morning sickness, you see . . . but then, I never did with the first one, either.'

'You didn't go to this Mama Delorme because you were pregnant?' Darcy asked. Her immediate a.s.sumption had been that Martha had thought maybe the witch-woman would give her something that would make her miscarry . . . or that she'd decided on an out-and-out abortion.

'No,' Martha said. 'I went because Tavia said Mama Delorme could tell me for sure what the stuff was I found in Johnny's coat pocket. White powder in a little gla.s.s bottle.'

'Oh-oh,' Darcy said.

Martha smiled without humor. 'You want to know how bad things can get?' she asked. 'Probably you don't but I'll tell you anyway. Bad is when your man drinks and don't have no steady job. Really bad is when he drinks, don't have no job, and beats on you. Even worse is when you reach into his coat pocket, hoping to find a dollar to buy toilet paper with down at the Sunland Market, and find a little gla.s.s bottle with a spoon on it instead. And do you know what's worst of all? Looking at that little bottle and just hoping the stuff inside it is cocaine and not horse.'