The Four Corners of the Sky_ A Novel - Michael Malone [118]
Annie asked, “He was the man at the motel, at the Royal Coach in St. Louis? The guy with the gun? He’d been chasing you for seven years?”
“No…that was years before. You did great that day.” But, he said, what had happened at Royal Coach had decided him to take her home to Pilgrim’s Rest. Clearly, word was out that threatening her was the way to get to him.
“You mean I was a liability?”
“They knew I loved you.” He looked directly at her. “Believe this one thing. I didn’t want you in danger. And I was coming back. I always meant to.”
“That’s two things.” Annie waited but his story seemed to be over; his eyes closed again and he breathed quietly. “Well, you didn’t come back.”
His eyes fluttered but stayed closed. “Kids like an ordinary life. House, dog, school. Was I wrong?”
She looked away. “Just tell me my mother’s name.”
Pulling himself up, he lit a cigarette with a sort of rakish defiance. “I don’t want to tell you her name and I won’t,” he said finally. The resolution in his voice surprised her. “Whooooo…” He puffed smoke at the ceiling. “Whoooo was she? Who was she to us? She left us. Didn’t I do okay by you for a while?” He made a small shrug with his shoulders. “Didn’t Sam do okay?”
“Sam did great.”
“So who…cares?”
Annie was trying to imagine the teenaged girl who’d given away her baby then fled from a Barbados hospital into a new life. “You’re saying my mother was just some nameless girl who had your baby and all of a sudden walked out of your life.”
He sighed. “That’s it. That’s what I’m saying.”
Why, she asked, had he named Claudette Colbert on the birth certificate as her mother?
He flicked ash on the bed tray. “I always thought you wouldn’t be here if it hadn’t been for what Claudette Colbert said on the beach that day to your mom. She said, ‘What a beautiful, interesting child you two will have.’ That’s what she said.”
Annie responded with her skeptical look. “I guess I don’t believe you ever met Claudette Colbert either.”
“Why not?” he challenged. “Movie stars are real people too.”
She walked around the small room, sat back down. “And you never heard from my mother?”
Fumbling at the bedside tray, he retrieved an old postcard lying there beside the green gems. The card was a photo of Claudette Colbert on the cover of Life magazine, in 1939; she was standing in billowing white pants on a stone balcony in some Mediterranean or Caribbean garden. Her raised arm held a cigarette.
Jack gave Annie the postcard. “This card came to Emerald…Sam sent it on to me, figuring, well, I don’t know…” He fell silent again.
Turning the card over, Annie saw a postmark dated New York City. She’d been a student at Annapolis when it was sent.
Jack Peregrine
c/o Pilgrim’s Rest
100 River Hill Road
Emerald, N.C.
And it had the right zip code. There was no salutation, no signature, no return address, just a tight scribble:
Claudette died today. Here’s to a great lady.
I’m fine. Hope you’re ditto. Better this way.
Reach for the sky…
Annie tried to imagine a woman’s hand holding the ballpoint pen, forming the letters—the e’s in Greek style, the capital letters with loops that lay under whole words like bowls—to write these words. She tried to see the surface (a table, a desk?) on which the woman had proposed that giving up her baby was “better this way.” She tried to see the room, the town, the life the woman had lived.
In the hospital room, light unhurriedly dimmed. Her father reached across the shadows and touched her hand. “‘Sorry, no silver cup.’”
Annie thought, Yes, he’s right. The cup of this story is not silver, not romance, just a sad ordinary tale of a very young woman who’d gotten pregnant and rejected the responsibility. This story was far more likely the truth than her father’s old fables about how her mother was the last of a foreign dynasty or how Bob Dylan had written “Lay Lady Lay” for her. Annie moved her fingers over her mouth’s twist. “Nope, no silver cup.”
“You’ll be luckier.