Tarnished Gold

  "I have told you the truth and I don't care what you believe about me, monsieur."

  He smiled as if to humor me and then he looked around, remaining on the floor at my feet. "It has to have been very lonely for you here, n'est-ce pas?"

  "Oui, monsieur."

  "You miss your friends, I'm sure."

  "I miss my mother and my freedom to go where I want when I want."

  "I'm sorry. Really, there must be something else I can do for you," he insisted. Then he rose and sat beside me. "I know. I could visit you more often," he suggested. "Amuse you, comfort you. You're a lovely girl. You shouldn't be so alone. It's not fair."

  "I'll endure it. As you said, it's not for much longer." I shifted on the bed so I wouldn't be sitting so close to him.

  "Yes, but as you said, every day is like a week, every week a month, a month a year, when you're so locked up and without company. We can play checkers or just talk, and I can comfort you with my shower of affection whenever you need it. Pregnant women need affection, even more than women who aren't pregnant, no?"

  He reached across my lap and took my hand into his. I started to pull back, but he held on to me.

  "You needn't worry now. The damage, as they say, has already been done. You can't get any more pregnant. You won't have twins," he added with a laugh.

  "Please, monsieur." I pulled my hand from his, but he took it again, pressing firmer, more

  desperately.

  "Gabriel, I'm lonely, too. It's not just for you that I make the suggestion."

  "Monsieur Tate . . ."

  "Pregnancy does make a woman even more beautiful," he said. "Here you are locked away in this closet, shut away from the sunlight you love so, and yet you still bloom with a freshness and a radiance that makes my heart skip beats."

  "I don't feel fresh and radiant."

  "But you are," he insisted. "These past months I've lain in my bed and stared up at the ceiling thinking about you closed up in this room. I go into Gladys's bedroom to hear every movement, every squeak, and a few times," he confessed, "I've watched you from a distance or from the shadows and admired you for what you are doing for your parents and for the baby."

  "I do what must be done," I said, my voice weak because of the way my heart thumped with fear and anxiety, imagining him hovering below listening for a squeak in the ceiling.

  "Your courage takes away my breath and in my eyes makes you more beautiful. If you will only let me give you real comfort," he said, and leaned toward me to kiss my cheek, his hands moving up the sides of my body toward my breasts.

  Surprised and terrified, I put my hand on his chest and held him away. "Get out, monsieur. Now!" He hesitated. "I will scream. I warn you." My throat tightened, but he saw the determination in my eyes.

  "All right," he said, standing and pumping his palms against the air between us. "Stay calm. Relax. I'll go. I just thought you needed some comfort and . . ."

  "I don't want you here," I said, tears burning beneath my eyelids. "I don't want this kind of comfort."

  "Okay. Fine. But what I'll do is look in on you from time to time to see if you are all right."

  "No, don't bother."

  "It's not a bother."

  "Monsieur," I said firmly, swallowing back my tears to make my words sharp and firm, "if you set foot in this room again, I will complain to Madam Tate and I will leave this house. I swear I will."

  He shook his head. "Where do you get your strength?" "From my sense of what is right," I replied pointedly. He was silent and then he retreated to the doorway where he paused once more to look back at me. He sighed deeply and shook his head. "I'm sorry," he said, and descended the stairs quietly.

  I waited until I heard the downstairs door close. Then I let out a breath and felt my tears pour hotly over my lids and down my cheeks. Now that he was gone, I was filled with amazement. How could he come up here and, pretending to be remorseful, try to seduce me again? Madame Tate was right, I thought, men must have raging hormones that turn them into monsters. Had he no shame?

  I went to the window to take deep breaths. My heart was still pounding.

  If Mama knew what had happened, she would rip me from the place in an instant, I thought. Maybe what I was doing was not so wise. Maybe I shouldn't leave my baby in this house, rich people or no.

  Oh, I didn't know what was right and what was wrong anymore. I couldn't throw myself on Mama for the answers. I knew she was so selfless she would choose what would make life easier for me, no matter what the consequences to her. If only there were someone else to speak to, someone else I trusted and loved and someone who loved me.

  I gazed up at the stars, hot tears still streaking down my cheeks; and then my heron appeared out of nowhere, it seemed, and landed on the railing. He lifted his wings and did a small jump as if to amuse me. I laughed.

  "What are you up to tonight, Mr. Heron?" I asked. He bobbed his head.

  Then he turned and soared off into the night.

  My animals had no false faces. They were exactly who they appeared to be. They broke no promises. They lived in a world without any false hope. Maybe I should have been born a heron. Right now it seemed a better thing to be.

  I sighed and sat back, and then I felt the strange twinge in my stomach. I felt it again and my eyes brightened, my tears fell back.

  It's the baby, I thought. It was the first time I had felt it move within me.

  And suddenly all the dark clouds lifted and a ray of sunshine brightened the dark corridors in my heart, causing it to beat with a joy I never felt before. The pain I felt now was the pain that came from having no one with whom I could share this new excitement.

  Loneliness was just as difficult to withstand when you had happiness as it was when you had sadness, I thought, for you needed to share it. I began to understand what loving someone really meant. It meant sharing every discovery, every realization, every tear, every laugh, every dream, and even every nightmare.

  It meant having someone to trust with your fears and your hopes.

  It meant so much more than the people in this house thought it did. Maybe the birth of the baby would bring them the understanding they lacked. The Tates might stop doting on themselves and their problems and dote on the child. It could bring them together in a good way. They would share the baby's development, laugh at its smile, be in awe of its growth, its first steps, first words. And then maybe Octavious would prove to be right: Gladys would want more children, children truly of her own.

  When something bad happened, Mama, quoting Scripture, often said, "To everything there is a season and a time to every purpose under heaven . . . a time to rend and a time to sew."

  The baby kicked again.

  I had passed through the season of rending. Now I was about to begin the season of sewing.

  7

  A Friend Appears

  .

  Now that I had felt the life stirring within me,

  what remained of my pregnancy seemed less terrible to endure. Starting my eighth month, I felt as if I had rounded a long, windy bend la the road and could see my destination looming just ahead. Despite her unhappiness over my being kept secretly in the Tates' house for months and months, Mama seemed pleased with the progress of my pregnancy and the baby's development. Now, during most of the time Mama visited with me, I would ramble on about how the baby had kicked and jumped, how it felt to have a living thing turning and twisting, anticipating its own birth, forgetting for the moment that Mama knew all this better than I did. After all, she had been pregnant with me!

  "The baby kicked so hard last night, I nearly fell out of the bed, Mama! I had to sit up and then I spent most of the night rubbing my stomach and talking soothingly to him or her. I wish I knew whether it was a boy or a girl."

  "It sounds like a boy to me," she said. "That's what I thought," I whispered. "I just feel it's a boy and I've been talking to the baby assuming it's a boy. It doesn't feel like I'm being kicked with a dainty foot," I said, and la
ughed.

  Mama listened with her face frozen in a wise smile that gradually turned into a look of concern and worry. I was so wrapped up in my excitement and fancy that I didn't notice for a while, and then I felt my heart skip a beat when I saw how her eyes had darkened.

  "What's wrong, Mama?" I asked. "Has Daddy done something?"

  "Your daddy always does something to curl the hairs at the back of my head, but no, it's not him I'm thinking of right now."

  "Then who? What?"

  "It's time we talked about what it's going to be like afterward, honey."

  "Afterward?"

  "Something magical happens when a woman gives birth, Gabriel," she explained. "There's all those months of discomfort, labor pain and the birthing pain, of course; but once the baby emerges and the mother sets eyes on this wonderful creation that took shape inside her, all the agony slips from her memory and she is filled with a joy beyond description. I seen it hundreds of times, honey. Especially with first births, the mother can't believe her eyes. I couldn't believe mine when you were born." She sighed so deeply when she paused, I had to hold my breath until she continued.

  "That's going to happen to you, Gabriel, and then, in the same instant, the baby's going to be ripped away from you. You got to prepare yourself for it, although, to be honest, I don't know what to tell you, what to do for you to make that ordeal any easier."

  Mama held my hand while she told me these things, and I could see from the grimness in her face that she had already seen my future misery and was feeling sad for me.

  "First you were raped and then you had to go through all this with what follows. I'm not going to sugarcoat it, honey. It's a wrenching the likes of which you'll never know again," she said. "I've seen the horror when a baby's born dead. For you, it will be just like that, I'm afraid," she concluded.

  I tried to swallow, but my throat wouldn't work. Tears clouded my eyes as my heart drummed the fear Mama had stirred in my chest. Suddenly she smiled with a new thought.

  "You remember once when you were a little girl you came to me with a dead baby bird and I told you the mother bird had probably thrown it out of the nest?"

  "Yes, Mama. I remember. We buried the bird under the pecan tree."

  She laughed. "Yes, we did. Anyway, honey, that mama bird did what she thought was best for the other babies. You couldn't accept that then. What I was trying to explain was the mama bird had to think more of her babies than she thought of herself, of her own sadness.

  "That's something you're going to have to do, too. I'm just telling you this now because I want to prepare you for it, prepare you for what you have already decided to do."

  I nodded, deep sadness continuing to cloud over the sunshine that had been in my heart. "You told me I had to give up ray innocence, Mama." I nodded. "Now I understand."

  "I'm sorry, honey. I should have talked to you more about this before you made your decision, but you were so determined this was the right decision."

  "I still believe it's the right decision, Mama," I said softly.

  She closed her eyes and sighed again. "Okay," she said, patting my hand. "If you really still believe that, you'll be fine then. And be with you every moment."

  She left me some of her herbal medicines and told me she would be coming around more often now that I was in what she called the downhill slide. She remarked that the baby had dropped more than she anticipated it would during the past few days. I did feel like a duck waddling around my small room and pulling myself up the short stairway. Lately I had to stop in the middle and catch my breath. I thought I looked pretty comical and burst out laughing at myself a few times.

  But our conversation did leave me in gloom, and despite the prohibitions against it, after Mama left I decided I had to look out on sunlight and nature. I lifted the shade on the window to permit the sunshine to warm my face.

  Suddenly, out of nowhere, it seemed, I saw a boy about fifteen come walking on his hands over the lawn on my right. He paused and did a flip, landing on his bare feet; and when he did, he set eyes on my window. I backed away quickly, but when I sat forward to peer out again, he was still there, standing fixed in the same spot, gazing up at my window. I feared he had spotted me. My heart pounded, anticipating trouble. If Gladys Tate found out, there was no telling what she would do in the state of mind she was in these days. The closer I was getting to delivery, the more nervous and irritable she became.

  I moved to the side and stared down at the boy, while he studied the window, trying to decide if he really had seen anything, I imagine.

  Then he smiled and did a back flip. He went down on all fours and kicked his feet up to start walking over the grass on his hands again. He turned, folded into a somersault, and then jumped to his feet, spinning like a ballet dancer. He had such grace and smoothness to his gymnastics, I couldn't help but watch. He smiled, stopped, and magically turned into a puppet right before my eyes.

  His shoulders rose as if strings were attached and his arms lifted, his hands limp. His hands snapped up and he jerked his head to the right and then to the left. Before I could shake my head with amazement, he folded his body, imitating a puppet when the strings were released. As soon as his knees touched the grass, however, he snapped back up, his arms floating higher, his hands flapping. I couldn't help but laugh. It came out of my mouth before I could subdue it, but if he heard me, he didn't acknowledge. Instead, like the puppet he was pretending to be, he started to walk to his right, his legs lifting and falling with that jerky movement reminiscent of a doll on a string. He went around in a circle and then, once more, as if the strings broke, he folded to the ground and just lay there, frozen, his eyes like glass.

  Finally he widened his eyes, smiled, and stood up. He gazed at me, but he didn't speak; at least, not with his tongue. Instead, he began a series of hand movements I recognized as sign language. I watched him for a while and saw the frustration when I didn't respond. Even if I could, I didn't know how to respond, what to say. Was he asking questions?

  I had seen only one deaf-mute before, Tyler Joans, who was eight when I met him. I had accompanied Mama on a traiteur mission to help Tyler's mother cure some warts on the back of her hands. The Joans family had moved away years ago and I never really got to know Tyler.

  The boy below stopped and put his hands on his hips. He was a tall, slim boy with dark brown hair that fell over his forehead and covered his eyes. He wore a pair of khaki pants and a faded white T-shirt torn at the collar.

  I pulled back when a tall, stout man appeared carrying a rake. I heard him call, "Henry!" and then I saw him gesture angrily for the boy to follow. "Finish your chores, boy, before I tan that hide of yours." He signed quickly with his big hands and shook the rake in the air.

  The boy put his right forefinger on the top of his head, spun like a top, and shot off to the left, leaving me laughing quietly and wondering who he was

  That night I was drawn back to my window when I thought I heard my heron strutting, about on the balcony railing. But instead of the nocturnal bird, I found a bouquet of hyacinth tied with a string. Their lavender blossoms were pale with a dab of yellow on the center petals, surrounded by some green leaves. Surely my heron hadn't brought them, I thought, and gazed into the darkness, looking for my benefactor. How could he have known how much I missed the sight of hyacinths stretching from bank to bank on the bayou surface? I was always fascinated by the way their color changed with the changing skies, shimmering from lavender to dark purple with a passing cloud. To me it was as if a divine artist were continually repainting the world in which I lived. It was never boring, never without surprise. And that was something I craved dearly these past, dark months, shut away from the world I loved.

  "Thank you," I called into the night, and waited for a response. All I heard was a mournful owl and the monotonous symphony of cicadas.

  I hid the flowers under my bed before I went to sleep. I would have to cast them out the window when they faded and dried so Gladys Ta
te wouldn't find them. She lingered in my room the next morning after she had brought my breakfast, and I was afraid she knew that the strange but fascinating boy had seen me.

  She sniffed and gazed about suspiciously as I ate. "Smells like spring in here suddenly," she said.

  "The breeze is bringing in the scent of flowers," I replied, but she stood there, still looking suspicious.

  "Octavious hasn't been here, has he?" she suddenly demanded. Terrified of what would happen if I said yes, I shook my head quickly. "That cologne he wears turns my stomach now."

  "No, madame."

  "Stand up," she commanded. I put down my fork and did so. She stood beside me, her hands on her stomach, and gazed at mine. "You're lower down than me," She molded her padding a bit. "Any other pains?"

  "No, madame."

  She sniffed the air again and then, just before leaving the room, paused, her eyes focusing on something on my floor. She knelt down and picked up a tiny piece of the hyacinth stem.

  "What's this? How did it get here?" she demanded.

  "What? Oh. There's a heron that lands here every night," I said, pointing to the window. "She dropped some leaves and sticks."

  Gladys screwed her eyes on me for a moment and then smirked. "I'll have my gardener check on that. We don't want a bird attracting attention to the window. Just stay away during daylight."

  "Yes, madame," I replied, and went back to eating my breakfast. She paused for a moment, but I didn't look at her and she finally left.

  Later that morning, I heard a tapping sound on the small balcony and against the window. I approached it slowly and observed that someone was throwing tiny pebbles. Peering between the curtain and the window frame, I saw my young gymnast again. This time he was juggling apples and got up to five. He stopped and offered me one.

  I smiled and nodded. "I'd love one," I said, expecting he would throw one up, but in a flash he disappeared beneath the balcony. Moments later, I heard him scaling the wall and saw his hand on the railing. He pulled himself up and over as quickly as a cat. It surprised and frightened me.