The Last Girls

  But she’s not, damn it! She’s not. Though the sad truth is that she has never loved Hawk in the way a woman should love a man, a way she didn’t even know existed until she met Gene Minor again after so many wasted years. And now she’s headed to New Orleans for a stolen weekend with him, a weekend she deserves, damn it, because she has put in her time. She’s furious with Hawk for getting sick right now; it’s like he’s done this on purpose to thwart her. But that’s not true, or fair. None of this is fair, Courtney thinks, remembering back suddenly to her days on the Honor Court at Mary Scott, meting out justice every Wednesday night. She was so proud of her impartiality, her fairness. She had actually believed then that justice existed and that she was dispensing it.

  “Courtney?” It’s Harriet’s voice, and Harriet’s light tap outside her door. Courtney freezes, but in a minute she can tell that Harriet has moved on. Poor Harriet. And poor Courtney who came so close to being just like her, to never knowing real love either. The steam whistle sounds for breakfast as sun streams in the little window and Courtney runs her hands over her own body, her breasts, her flat stomach, her thighs, down between her legs the way Gene does. Will. The way Gene will touch her only five days from now.

  Mile 664

  Prairie Point Towhead

  Sunday 5/9/99

  0800 hours

  THE RIVERLORIAN CHAT turns out to be so popular that Harriet puts her notebook down on a chair in the Grand Saloon, to save herself a seat while she goes to the breakfast buffet.

  “Hey, wait up!” Catherine tosses her sweater across the chair next to Harriet’s, and hurries to catch her. “Good morning,” she says. “How’d you sleep?”

  “Like the proverbial rock.” Harriet joins the buffet line, takes a plate. “I thought maybe the engine sound would bother me, but it didn’t at all. In fact I sort of liked it. Like white noise. What about you?”

  “I had a little trouble at first. Or maybe that was just because Russell snores. He’s always asleep before his head even hits the pillow. But once I got to sleep, I was fine.”

  “Where’s Russell now?”

  “Oh, he’s walking his laps around the deck. He’s already got it figured out, exactly how many laps it takes for three miles. At home he does three miles every day. He’d die if he missed his exercise. He’s obsessed with it.” Catherine laughs. “Men!” She puts two sausage biscuits on her plate. “Is that all you’re having?” indicating Harriet’s bagel.

  “Why, yes, I—”

  “Do you remember my mother? Mary Bernice?” Catherine spoons scrambled eggs onto her plate.

  Harriet nods. Who could ever forget Mary Bernice? Or that grand Tudor house up on top of Shades Mountain in Birmingham, where she presided?

  “Well, one time I took her out to a deli for breakfast and ordered bagels for both of us. Mary Bernice took one bite of her bagel, then put it down and said, ‘Catherine, my dear, anybody who thinks this is good has clearly never tasted a biscuit!’” Catherine leads the way back to their chairs. Mile after mile of densely wooded shoreline slides past the boat; here the trees grow right down to the water’s muddy edge. Periodically, Russell rushes past outside the windows, wearing a headband and old gray gym shorts and a Doc Watson T-shirt and sweating profusely. He flashes them a peace sign as he goes.

  “Gosh, he’s got good legs, hasn’t he?” Harriet didn’t mean to say this.

  Catherine turns to look at her husband’s retreating form. “Well, yes, he does,” she answers, as if noticing them for the first time, which can’t be true, as Russell’s legs really are exceptional.

  The crowd settles down as Pete Jones enters, looking very nautical this morning in a long-billed navy cap and navy shorts with high white socks and clunky black lace-up shoes. The shoes are all wrong. It’s entirely possible that he was a nerd in youth, Harriet realizes, before becoming a Riverlorian.

  “Okay, folks,” he says into the hand mike. “On behalf of Captain John Dulaney and the entire crew of the Belle of Natchez, I want to welcome you on board. We’re going to relax you, we’re going to entertain you, we’re going to take you back and slow you down. Currently we are traveling south down what is called ‘the Big River,’ which extends from Cairo to the Gulf of Mexico. For those of you who like to keep up with such things, the length of the lower Mississippi—the Big River—is exactly 953.8 miles. We’re making about ten miles per hour right now.

  “You’ll be seeing a lot of shipping as we go down the river—this is America’s biggest highway, after all. It’s not uncommon—as I’m sure you’ve already noticed—to see a tow pushing three barges of fifteen tons each. That makes a floating island, folks, 195 feet long. That one there, for instance”—with a jerk of his head, he indicates the river side of the Belle—“that one’s carrying coal for power plants, and just think what it would be like without it. Why, on Monday nights, we’d have to sit around watching football in the dark!” Everybody laughs except for Harriet, who doesn’t get the reference. The Riverlorian continues, “Later in the summer, you’ll see the Midwest’s grain harvest heading down the river. The barges also carry sand, gravel, salt, and chemicals, especially below Baton Rouge. And incidentally, folks, you won’t be seeing any freighters until we get to Baton Rouge. They can only come upriver as far as the upper Baton Rouge bridge, because they require a deep draft of 45 feet. People say that Huey Long built that bridge low on purpose, so Louisiana could keep all the freighter trade.”

  “What’s this bridge we’re coming up to right now?” an old man’s voice rasps from the back of the Grand Saloon.

  “That’s Tunica,” the Riverlorian answers. “And if you folks will keep an eye out toward starboard—that’s right, for you landlubbers—you’ll see all the gambling casinos in a minute.”

  The Grand Saloon erupts in exclamation: “Oh, look! Oh, I read about this! Aren’t we going to stop?”

  “Don’t worry, folks, there’ll be a casino every place we dock, all the way down the river. Just hang on to those quarters, you’ll have plenty of chances to use them,” says the Riverlorian.

  The casinos are ornate, fanciful, and improbable, like photographs Harriet has seen of Las Vegas, like illustrations from a fairy-tale book. Silken banners fly from the pink towers of one castle; another features turrets and a moat. And that one’s Moorish, with onion domes.

  “Oh, look, there’s a hotel, too, right here—or is it part of the casino?” Catherine points. “Twenty-five dollars a night! That can’t be right.”

  “Yep, that’s it, miss.” A heavyset old man in a Budweiser shorts set leans forward to tell her. “See, what they figure is, they make it all back at the casino. Oh, they’ve got it down to a science, they have.”

  “Why, that’s horrible,” Harriet says.

  “Honey, that ain’t nothing.” Now the man’s wife leans forward, her breath hot in Harriet’s ear. “Listen here, my sister lives down in Natchez, where we’ll be day after tomorrow, and her own next-door neighbor got so hooked on gambling, she left her two perfectly darling children and a marriage of ten years for it. She won’t come home, they say she’s stripping to get more money. Her husband is a state trooper, so he can’t stay home with the kids, so everybody in the neighborhood has pitched in to help with the babysitting. It’s just pitiful.”

  But the Riverlorian has already gone on to the Battle of Vicksburg, in which a total of nineteen thousand men were killed, wounded, or missing. When the siege ended on July 4, 1863, putting the river into Union hands all the way down, President Lincoln said, “The Father of Waters again goes unvexed to the sea.” You can tell the Riverlorian likes this phrase, the way he rolls it off his tongue with a flourish. Harriet writes all these facts down in her notebook. She’s horrified when Catherine takes some cross-stitching out of her bag and starts to whip her needle briskly in and out of the tiny squares. Russell charges past again, waving. Catherine’s mouth moves as she counts stitches: “One, two, three.” Everyone else is getting restless, too, they get up f
or more coffee, look out the windows, rustle around in their chairs. Undaunted, the Riverlorian keeps right on, discussing the history of the river and the Louisiana Purchase. How would a person become a Riverlorian anyway? You wouldn’t just decide as a boy, What I really want to be is a Riverlorian, surely . . .

  “The two most momentous events that ever happened on the river happened in the same year, 1811. One was the great earthquake, folks, centered at New Madrid, the most powerful earthquake that ever took place in North America.” Sometimes the Riverlorian sounds like a preacher, Harriet thinks. “The river ran backwards for three days, folks”—can this be true?—“leaving a vast sunken lake in western Tennessee, Reelfoot Lake, and changing the course of the river forever. Now this was happening just at the very same time the first steamboat, the New Orleans, constructed by Robert Fulton at a cost of thirty thousand dollars and owned by Nicholas and Lydia Roosevelt, sailed down the Mississippi River for the first time, with its owners on board. And Lydia Roosevelt, that brave young woman, was pregnant! Well, here they came, folks, headed downriver on their historic voyage just days after the earthquake. All along the river, everybody ran down to the bank to cheer and gape. They had never seen anything like it in all their lives. And the Indians? Well, the Indians thought it was a sign from their gods. They blamed the steamboat for the earthquake. They got so scared, they fell down in fits all along the river. And when the steamboat New Orleans reached the city of New Orleans in late January, Mississippi steamboating was born.”

  The Riverlorian consults his watch. “That’s all, folks, have a lovely day, and don’t forget it’s a special Mother’s Day supper tonight, so if you’ve got a mother, why, think about her! Write her a letter! If your mother is here with you, give her a kiss for me. Or, better yet, bring her up here, and I’ll do the job myself! And if you are a mother, do something nice for yourself. How many mothers have we got here in our group today?” Almost all the women’s hands go up. “Well, then, ladies, Happy Mother’s Day! from all of us to all of you.”

  Harriet puts her plate on the stack as they leave the Grand Saloon. She looks back over her shoulder to see the Riverlorian kissing three old women, one of them in a wheelchair. “What about your mother?” she asks Catherine. “Mary Bernice. Is she still alive?”

  “No, she died last year,” Catherine says, “at ninety. Oh, she was something, she was amazing, right up until the end. She wore high heels every day of her life. After she broke her hip, I took her shopping because the doctor insisted that she had to buy some of what he called “sensible shoes,” and come to find out, she couldn’t even wear them. She had worn high heels for so long that her ankle was permanently fixed at that angle, the high heel angle. Even her bedroom shoes had heels.”

  “I remember her out gardening in a linen dress and spectator heels.” In her mind’s eye, Harriet sees Mary Bernice poised against bougainvillea.

  “She called it gardening, but it was really more like directing the help. I remember I got so tickled one time when I came home from school and found her stretched out on a sofa, all dressed up, with a wet cloth across her forehead. ‘Why, Mama, what’s the matter?’ I asked. I thought she’d had a heatstroke. ‘Oh, Catherine,’ she said, ‘I’m just so exhausted. I’ve had three men in the yard all day long.’” Catherine smiles wryly. “I just drove her crazy, when I started building things and working outside myself. I was a big embarrassment to her. She never had a clue about what I was up to. I stopped expecting her to after a while.”

  They pause on the shady side of the deck to look out at the river. You can barely see across it here; you can barely tell the water from the sky, with only the faint shimmering horizon line floating between the two.

  “But what about you, Harriet?” Catherine asks suddenly. “Your mother was a widow, wasn’t she? Wasn’t your father already dead when we were at Mary Scott?”

  Harriet looks out at the dreamy, slow-flowing water.

  “Not exactly,” she says.

  HARRIET’S MOTHER, ALICE, had harbored a guilty wish that her lover’s wife, Mrs. Dabney Carr, would “just up and die” in the hospital on the hill. And since she immediately spoke whatever came into her mind, she’d said so, many times. Then, “Why, Alice, I’m ashamed of you!” she’d chide herself immediately, leaping up in mock horror, her pretty face suffused with a deep, becoming blush. “You bad thing!” she’d cry, slapping her own face. This performance never failed to delight Mr. Carr, whose delight in Alice knew no bounds anyway. He grabbed her hands and gave her a kiss on each flaming cheek to calm her down. “It’s not that I wish her ill,” Alice sighed dramatically, “it’s just that I want you all to myself, all the time.” And then how he had beamed: that plain, stoic, no-nonsense businessman Dabney Carr. He never flinched as he drove his wife’s family’s cigarette business farther and farther into the black, amassing a legendary fortune; yet he was putty in the tiny, delicate hands of Alice Holding.

  Harriet had thought of Mr. Carr as very old in those days, yet he was not really old at all, merely formal, in the mold of a Virginia gentleman of an earlier age. Once, near Christmastime, he gave Harriet a candied orange slice; her pleasure had so impressed him that he never appeared thereafter without a candied orange slice wrapped in wax paper in his pocket just for her, Lord knows where he got them all. Finally Harriet got sick of candied orange slices though she was too polite to say so, and he was too polite to stop bringing them. To Jill he brought those paperweights with snow in them, one for each holiday and one for each business trip he made, until her collection took up the entire windowsill in the front room of their apartment, overflowing into a special bookcase with glass shelves which he brought for her, too. Jill loved to pull her chair right up to her bookcase and lift the paperweights one by one, turning them upside down, until the whole shelf was snowing.

  Mr. Carr was generous and kind and not really old at all, so when the intercom crackled in the middle of Harriet’s French class that January of her junior year in high school, followed by the nasal voice of the assistant principal summoning Harriet Holding to the office, please, and Mrs. LeRoux came over to her desk and whispered that she might as well take all her books and her coat “as it’s likely to be bad news, dear,” Harriet thought first, hopefully, of Mrs. Carr, then mentally slapped her own face.

  Alice was waiting in the office, a sure indication that something terrible was wrong, as she never came to school for anything. Her hair was wild. She was wrapped in a stained trenchcoat Harriet had never seen before; she couldn’t imagine where it had come from. Alice thrust her car keys at Harriet, who had just gotten her learner’s permit the week before. “You drive,” she said, “and step on it.” Then she started crying.

  They did not go home.

  Instead they drove the snowy road straight to Richmond, where Dabney Carr lay hooked up to tubes and monitors in a private hospital in the Fan District. Swept along by Alice’s firm grip on her elbow, Harriet did not even get a good look at the distraught family and friends gathered in the waiting room, nor at the nurses in their official station, though they leapt up as Harriet and Alice raced by. “Just a minute there!” one of them called. But Harriet and Alice did not pause before pushing through the large steel double doors marked INTENSIVE CARE, NO ADMITTANCE and then into Room 2 where he lay perfectly flat on a high white bed under a bright white light. Blips and lines flashed across the screen. Little pale oxygen tubes ran out of his nostrils. A bag of fluid hung at the side of the bed, its tubes looping down, then taped to his arm. Another tube was taped into his other arm. His eyes were closed, his cheeks sunken in a way that Harriet had never seen. She realized that they must have taken his dentures out, though she hadn’t actually known that Mr. Carr had dentures, and she didn’t know how she knew this. But Mr. Carr’s mouth was wide open in the most undignified way; his breath rattled in and out of his chest. Harriet knew instantly that he was dying.

  “Oh, honey,” Alice said almost to herself, letting go of Harriet’s
arm finally to cross to the bed and kiss his parchment cheek. His eyelids fluttered, he made a sound. “I’m here, baby,” Alice said. “I’m here now.” She kissed him again and sank down in the chair by the bed with her arm thrown across his neck, her curly hair covering half his face. The door flew open. Alarms went off. Two nurses and a doctor entered, followed by a thin woman in an emerald green wool pantsuit who pointed at Alice and said, “Don’t you think you can come in here like this, you whore! We know who you are.” The bigger nurse took the woman’s arm, as if to restrain her. The doctor came forward and tapped Alice on the shoulder. “Ma’am?” he said politely. “Ma’am?” until she raised her streaming face.

  But Mr. Carr opened his deepset dark eyes. He struggled to sit up though the other nurse tried to hold him down. “Please, sir!” she said. Mr. Carr’s breath came and went in awful gasps. “Let—her—stay,” he said. Then his head rolled back on the pillow. His chest seemed to collapse. The moving blips on the screen changed, and the doctor pushed Alice aside as he leaned forward to listen to Mr. Carr’s chest.

  The woman in the green pantsuit threw up her hands. “All right! I give up!” she shrieked. “I just give up!” She pushed past Harriet as though she were invisible, leaving the room.

  The nurse smiled at Harriet. “You okay?” she asked, and Harriet nodded, her lips dry.

  “Suction!” The doctor snapped his fingers.

  “You need to go now,” the nurse told Harriet.

  “Mama, I’ll be right outside in case you want me,” Harriet said clearly over the hubbub even though Alice did not appear to hear her.

  “You sweet thing,” Alice said into Mr. Carr’s ear.

  Though Harriet had dreaded going into the waiting room, she had to; it was the only place to sit, and she couldn’t desert her mother. But luckily she was still invisible, in the way her mother had always been invisible until that very day. All afternoon Harriet sat in the corner of the waiting room drinking Tabs and doing her homework—thank God she’d brought her books along—also Tess of the d’Urbervilles, which she was reading for AP English. She did her algebra, then her French (the pluperfect), then read the assigned chapter on Andrew Jackson in the American history book and answered all the stupid questions at the end.