Mercy Page 9

  Bernadine swung her legs over the side of the chaise and stood. She ran her red-nailed fingers around the inside of the elastic on the legs of her panties, adjusting them, and then went to the cabinet herself. Her stomach was not flat anymore. He listened to her behind him: the ice into the glass, the chink of the stopper in the lead crystal decanter, the sloshing of liquor. She came back by him and lay on the chaise again in the same position she had been in before she got up. When he looked he recognized the amber scotch. Bernadine was an alcoholic.

  “Probably not,” she said. She put the cold glass against the hollow place of her inner thigh near her groin. She held it there a moment before she lifted the drink to her mouth and sipped.

  Broussard waited. Probably not. He bet himself Bernadine was getting ready to double her net worth again.

  There was a long silence while they sipped their drinks, and he listened to the soft muffled sound of the ice in their glasses.

  “Why didn’t you offer me a drink?” she asked. She was very still when she asked it, and Broussard could tell she had had to work up the nerve to do it. They had been together so many years that her sessions were now pretty matter-of-fact. He no longer pretended at seduction and she no longer pretended at being coy. He no longer even pretended it was therapy, a travesty that he had stoutly maintained for a few years, referring now and again to their “therapeutic alliance” or her “transference resistance” or the necessity of her achieving “insight into the nature of her unconscious forces.” All of that was gone now, and they had long ago settled into a conjugal familiarity that made her analytic sessions more like a bored married couple’s quiet evening at home. She still wanted to be “nurtured” and continued to cling to the idea that he somehow was going to make her life better. It was something that he, too, had once believed, but Bernadine had been one of his few clients whose personality had continued to baffle, continued to refuse to be broken down and dissected. She was as much a mystery to him now as when she had first walked through his doors. His file on her was enormous, for he had continued to compile notes on her even after they had become lovers. She was that kind of woman: she invited exploration, with a smile, almost as if she dared you to try to figure her out. Sometimes he thought he loved her.

  “I really didn’t think you should have one,” he said at last.

  She fixed her gray eyes on him, looking at him over the rim of her glass from which she had just taken a drink, looking at him as if he had insulted her. Bernadine was easily offended. Batting her eyes, she looked away through the plate-glass wall, through the green haze to the bayou. She let the glass rest on her stomach, directly over her navel.

  After a moment she said, “You don’t believe my story about my aunt.”

  He didn’t say anything. Being a psychoanalyst had spoiled him. He never wanted to talk, and half the time lately he didn’t even want to listen. It was amazing how powerful silence was. There were certain kinds of people who simply couldn’t tolerate it. They would talk as an antidote, even when they didn’t have anything to say.

  “You know what?” she said, and a small, ironic smile crossed briefly over her lips. “It’s true. It happened exactly as I told you.” She raised her glass and sipped the scotch. “It’s true, and you didn’t know it. And it’s significant, and you didn’t realize it.”

  Broussard was interested now. “Bernadine, I don’t believe you.”

  “Dom, what if I stopped seeing you?” she asked.

  Now she had his full attention, but he was careful. He didn’t say anything. Nor did she. He waited, sipping his gin. What the hell was she trying to do? Was this a prelude to something? Was she actually going to stop seeing him? Surprised by his own feelings, he was disconcerted to realize that he was actually hurt by her question. Had he grown…fond of her, this truly disturbed woman whose complexity, whose disarrayed personality was so exceptional that he could count her among the two or three most intriguing cases he had ever had?

  “Would you miss me?” she repeated.

  “Of course I would,” he heard himself say, and he even heard, to his surprise, an edge of anxiety in his intonation. He was immediately embarrassed by it and was afraid he was going to blush. He frowned at her, tried to put on the face of a scolder in case she should look around.

  But she didn’t say anything, and she didn’t look around. She stared out the window and rolled the bottom of her sweating glass around her navel, forming a wet parameter.

  “Haven’t we been a lot to each other?” he asked, wanting to hear more of her thoughts, the thinking that lay behind her question. He felt oddly defensive, something he hadn’t experienced in a long time. It made him nervous. “It’s not everyone I can relax with like this.”

  She looked at him. “Really?” Her quartz eyes, the very symbol of her personality, indefinable, difficult to be understood, capable of being lost in, fell on him. “You don’t do this with others?”

  “No,” he said. “I don’t.” And then he suddenly feared he had said the wrong thing, though he was unsure why it should have been wrong. She studied him, and he had the unusual experience of seeing in her eyes that she was reading the lie. He didn’t think he had ever seen that in her before, and he was taken aback. What was happening with her anyway?

  “You don’t sleep with any of your other clients?”

  “Bernadine, no, but you don’t have the right to ask me about such things.”

  “About what you do with your other clients?”

  He nodded.

  “Doctor-client confidentiality,” she said.

  “Of course.”

  “If I didn’t see you any more, would someone else take my place…humping against the glass?” She tilted her head toward the window.

  “What kind of a question is that, Bernadine?” It was a vulgar allusion, but Bernadine was earthy, everything about her was elemental. She had the most natural, the most culturally unaffected attitude toward sexuality of any woman—or man—he had ever known.

  “It’s a question to find out,” she said. She had been watching him, and now she turned her head and drained the rest of the scotch from her glass. She let her right arm drop to the floor, and set down the glass. She cocked her right leg outward and placed her right hand, cold from the glass, on the indention of her inner thigh where she had held the cold glass before. “Tell me,” she prodded.

  “Bernadine,” he said. “I don’t expect ever to meet anyone like you again.” It was a response which, if it did not directly answer her question, definitely was not a lie. She made him wait a minute or two, her leg cocked to the side, her hand still in place.

  “Dom,” she said, “come here.”

  He hesitated, his wrists dangling off the arms of the chair as he studied her leveled gaze. Then he got up and went over to the chaise. She reached out and he knelt beside her and she put her fingers in his hair and pulled him down and kissed him. With her right hand, she guided his head, his face, his lips to the cool spot on the inside of her thigh.

  9

  Andrew Moser was surprised to hear from her, and he was guarded when she said she wanted to talk to him but wouldn’t be specific as to why over the telephone. He didn’t want her to come to his home, didn’t want to meet her nearby, and didn’t want to leave the house until after the children had gone to bed. Since his wife’s death, he didn’t like to leave the house at nights. They agreed on the 59 Diner on Farnham at Shepherd Drive, just off the Southwest Freeway, at eleven o’clock.

  She gathered up the forms she would have to fill out for the FBI and left the office. Even though the Audi had been in the shade of the motor pool parking garage, it was like an oven inside, and she rolled down the windows while she descended the garage ramp and exited out into the compound. She circled the headquarters buildings back to Washington Street and then turned right on Preston, which took her across the northern end of downtown, past the courthouse and the criminal court building and under the West Freeway 59 where Preston Street sud
denly became Navigation Boulevard and ran an oblique course into the East End, following the general angle of Buffalo Bayou a few blocks away as it headed toward the Port of Houston Ship Channel.

  Palma’s mother still lived in the same barrio where Palma had grown up, in a neighborhood where all the streets had Scottish and Irish names and all the residents were Latin. The barrio had been a neighborhood where extended families often encompassed entire blocks of relatives or near relatives, and the grapevine was so rich that rebellious offspring were kept in check by the sheer fact that they couldn’t find any privacy to work their mischief. But the barrio had acquired a more sullen air with the changing times, and misfortune of one kind or another had become a way of life for most of the population, rather than an occasional grief for only a few. The drug wars were threatening everything, and the flood of refugees from Central America was introducing an ominous element of uncertainty, as if these thousands of war-weary emigres were only the first ripples of an impending human flood tide.

  But Florencia Palma had raised two daughters and a son in this neighborhood, and she had buried a husband there. That was enough living to have given her title to the place. It was as much hers as the large stucco house that sat square in the middle of two lots that Palma’s father, Vicente, had purchased in 1941 from a cousin who was moving his family to California. It was as much hers as the catalpas and oaks and mimosas she had planted, as much as the garden and the lush plantains that cooled the walks in the dead heat of summer. Age, Palma had decided as she watched her mother grow old, carried a great entitlement. If you lived long enough, the things most familiar to you became yours by virtue of the worry you had invested in them. They were yours as surely as memories.

  She parked underneath the row of Mexican plums that grew the length of the two lots and shaded the front of the dun-colored house from the afternoon sun. The trees still had a few of their white blossoms scattered among their new green leaves, and they reminded Palma of the numbers of springs she and her brother and sister dutifully had stood beneath the rich flourish of creamy flowers while their mother had taken pictures. How many photographs? How many springs? The children were gone now, Palma’s brother to San Antonio, her sister to Victoria, but the trees were still there, and Florencia still took pictures of them every spring. And Carmen still came by to stand obligingly under their white efflorescence to be photographed.

  Palma found her mother in the courtyard on the south side of the house, the afternoon sun low enough to cast long, ashy shadows from the massive pecan trees that towered over the opposite side of the house. Smaller than her daughter—Carmen had gotten her height from her father—Florencia was a trim woman with small bones and a face that clearly demonstrated the strain of Tarascan blood in her background, a genetic inheritance that had been dying out for generations and made its last appearance in her handsome sharp features. None of her children carried the distinct characteristics of their mother’s Indian heritage. She wore her gray hair long, past her shoulders, and when she was younger she had tended to it with elaborate care, brushing it, braiding it, washing it, grooming it with a diligence that was almost feline. She had done it partly because she was a naturally fastidious woman and partly, perhaps mostly, because Palma’s father had a special affection for his wife’s thick, dark mane. Now she simply had it pulled back loosely and clasped behind her neck with an ebony wood clasp. It was the only clasp the old woman ever wore now. It had been carved by Palma’s father, a little bit at a time in the evenings during the course of one July when Palma was a little girl.

  “Look at these,” she said, holding up two clay pots, a hot-pink verbena and a sanchezia, as Palma came through the gate. “Daughters of daughters of daughters,” she said. “I planted their great-grandmothers.”

  She was standing barefooted on a wet rock walk where she had been watering her flowers, her baggy gardening dress hanging almost to her dusky ankles, her smile as beautiful now as it had been when, as a child, Palma first had become aware that it was something of a gift. Her mother smiled easily, the sort of smile that made strangers instantly comfortable with her, a disarming smile that told you she was not a complicated woman, a misconception you soon would learn to revise. Palma took a deep breath of the heavy air, the familiar earthy odors of damp plants and stones. She kissed her mother’s cheek and smelled the faint waft of cheap lilac perfume the old woman bought in a neighborhood store.

  “I got a new letter from Celeste,” her mother said immediately, setting down the clay pots along the path and pushing back the wisps of gray hair from her temples with the backs of her wet hands as she preceded Palma to a long slatted wood swing that hung from an aging water oak just off the path near the back patio. Stopping at the swing, Florencia bent down a little stiffly and took the hem of her dress and dried her hands. Then she reached into the torn front pocket of her dress and produced the letter, its well-worn envelope torn ragged on one corner, exposing an equally well-worn letter. She handed it to Palma.

  “She’s in Huehuetenango now. In the mountains. She says she has volunteered to go up there, tired of the coast, tired of the lowlands. She’s much happier in the high country. She says she had to deliver a baby, up—way up—in the mountains where everything is mist like rain. This delivery was a very delicate matter because this baby was turned. A kind of long story.” Palma’s mother nodded at the letter. “She tells it there, you’ll see. Anyway,” a sparkle of amusement began to pluck at her eyes, “after a long and tiresome night the baby is delivered. So. Everything is okay. The child is saved and the mother is saved—gracias a Dios. In celebration, and to honor the good nun, the parents named the boy…Celeste.”

  Florencia burst out laughing. “Un muchacho llamado Celeste!” She shook her head, delighted by the whimsical ways of gratitude, and sat carefully in the tree swing which Palma held for her. Then, joining her, Palma dutifully took the letter out of its envelope, unfolded it, and held it in her lap as if she were reading it while the swing drifted calmly back and forth, the chain groaning softly on its leather guides above them.

  She came by to see her mother three or four times a week and tried to get over to take her to Sunday mass at least every other Sunday. Even though Palma was the only member of her immediate family still living in Houston, the old woman did not lack for companionship. A large and faithful group of older women, many of them widows, who had raised their families in the neighborhood, looked after one another, old friends that Palma had known all her life and who knew how to get in touch with her if it was necessary. Even so, as her mother’s mind began to show the inevitable signs of quirkiness, Palma found herself wanting to keep in closer touch. It was almost as if she could feel that the departure had begun, and as her mother began to slip away from her Palma herself felt the need to move with her, if not to prevent the inevitable then at least to defer it. She knew that this kind of slow separation was a part of the human condition, but to acknowledge that didn’t make it any less frightening, any less painful.

  After Palma had listened to the groaning swing for a minute or two, now and then turning the pages of the letter, which was written on both sides of three sheets, after she somehow had shifted the weight of sadness in her heart so she could carry it and fought back the tears that almost instantaneously sprang to her eyes when she took the letter from her mother, she folded the sheets, slipped them back into the envelope, and handed them back. It was the third time within a week that her mother had shown her this “new” letter; the third time Palma had “read” it and listened to the story of the baby boy named Celeste.

  “That’s a good letter, Mama,” Palma said. “I know you enjoy getting them.” Florencia smiled and tucked the letter back into her dress pocket and thought a moment.

  “I’d like to ask her if she has ever regretted becoming a nun,” she said.

  Palma looked at her. The question surprised her.

  “I’ve always been curious,” the old woman mused, shrugging. “She was so beauti
ful.”

  “You don’t think the Sisters of Charity need a pretty nun in Guatemala?” Palma asked, watching her mother.

  “She was the prettiest of all your cousins,” her mother said, ignoring Palma’s remark. “She could have been a movie star. A model.”

  “You would have preferred that?”

  “Oh, no. It’s best that she’s a nun.” She widened her eyes. “But I don’t understand it.” She waited a moment. “I’m sure it’s hard for the priests, too.”

  Palma smiled. Her mother was one of the Almighty’s more straightforward creatures. Her faith that God’s will would ultimately prevail was firmly grounded in a belief in miracles. It was her conviction that only the miraculous could save man from his considerably flawed nature. Man’s only hope was in something greater than himself, something he didn’t fully understand, but in which he had an unabashedly explicit faith.

  “How do you think Celeste would answer your question, Mama?” Palma asked. A Spanish dove had settled in one of the catalpa trees and had started its languorous, two-noted cooing.

  Her mother didn’t respond immediately, but stuck out one foot and let her big toe drag back and forth over the stones beneath the swing. Then she looked up toward the dove.

  “She would say, I think, that she was sorry that being a Sister of Charity was the only thing she had ever wanted or would ever want.”

  “Ah, you’re cheating. You’re trying to have it both ways,” Palma chided.

  “Oh, no. That’s an absolutely honest answer,” her mother said earnestly, as if she were defending Celeste’s actual words. “Maybe she feels something is missing, or that something might have been, but she doesn’t know what it is. But she’s curious about it, and sorry she doesn’t understand. I’ll tell you,” she added, glancing casually toward the catalpa, pretending a casual interest in the dove. “There isn’t a woman alive who doesn’t wonder sooner or later if maybe she didn’t take a wrong turn at some crucial moment in her past. It’s in her nature to wonder about such things. We all do it. Maybe especially pretty little nuns in the jungles of Huehuetenango.”