Belinda Chapter 9

It was all right with her in the attic, too.

For three nights, as I worked on the riding portrait, she was quiet, reading

French Vogue or Paris Match, dozing off, then watching me. She wore tight

jeans, cotton T-shirts, liked keeping her hair in braids, made it much easier

to care for. She had laughed when I bought the little plastic barrettes in

the dime store for the ends of her braids. But she wore them.

(Don't look at the taut wrinkles of cloth between her legs, or her nipples

showing through the sheer bra under the shirt. When she rolls over on her

stomach on the polished wooden floor and her breasts hang down, don't go

crazy. She kicks her feet a little, crosses her ankles. Crushes out a

cigarette, drains the Coke, which, thanks to my nagging, has no slug of

Scotch in it. Don't look. The brand of lipstick is Bronze Bombshell.)

With and without this inspiration, I was actually finishing before midnight

of the third night.

And it was just the way she'd suggested when she posed at the top of the

stairs. Boots, hat, hand on hip, nude, of course, with riding crop. Splendid.

I'd taken half a roll of film for it. In spite of her narrow hips there was

something about it that could only be described as voluptuous. But the face,

always the face, that was the issue. Bud mouth, upturned nose, yet so much

maturity in the eyes.

Midnight. The grandfather clock sent its chimes up through the old floors.

My right arm ached. The light glaring off the canvas was getting to me. I was

getting tired of painting the details with a tiny stiff camel's hair brush.

But I wouldn't quit. Wanted to deepen the color of the drapery behind:

essential to get the rough texture of antique velvet there. Little

prestidigitation there, and the gleam of the light on her right boot. Some

fool would stand in the gallery later-the gallery? later?-and say, why it

looks just like she's going to reach out and touch you!

Kiss you. Take you in her arms, crush your face to her breasts like she does

mine. Right. Exactly.

She lay on her back looking at the ceiling. Yawned. Said she had to go to

bed. Why didn't I come too? "Soon."

"Kiss me." She stood up, pounded on my chest with her fist. "Come on, stop

just long enough to kiss me."

"Do this for me," I said. "Sleep in the brass bed in the middle room. I want

to take pictures there... later." It had those side rails that could be

raised, like a baby bed, only lower.

OK, she said. As long as I came to bed there with her afterwards.

I went downstairs with her.

There was an old brass lamp there, an oil lamp wired now with a little bulbs

-very gentle light to photograph her by.

I put the nightgown on her myself and buttoned the tiny pearl buttons to her

throat.

I watched her undo the braids and brush out her rippling hair. Something

about the white fabric and the pearls, it was deja vu-a swoon almost-having

to do with churches, candles.

For a moment I couldn't attach it to anything-then a lot of forgotten things

came back, those long lush church ceremonies I'd witnessed a thousand times

when I was a little boy in New Orleans. Banks of white gladiolas on the

altars, the satin vestments so carefully embroidered, sometimes even painted

it seemed. Watered silk. Purple, deep green, gold. Every color had its

liturgical meaning.

I didn't know whether they even did elaborate things like that anymore in the

Catholic church, whether they'd ever done them in California. I'd passed a

Catholic church here one evening and they had been singing "God Bless

America."

What I heard now was Veni Creator Spiritus. And these were children's voices.

And it was intimately of the past, of the big moldering old houses of the

Garden District streets, of the giant Gothic and Romanesque churches built

lovingly by immigrants to the old European scale, full of imported stained

glass, marble, finely carved statues.

Miles from there to here, yet some elusive point of convergence in the light

as it fell on the tight, virginal skin of her face, her babylips.

Her hair spilled down on the white flannel. The brush lifted it, seemed to

stretch it and straighten it, then let it go, the tight rippling waves eating

up the strands immediately.

I could almost feel those moments in church-all the little girls in white

lace and linen lined up in the cloister outside waiting to go in. We had on

white suits. But it was the girls I remembered, the girls with their little

cheeks and lips rouged. Rustle of taffeta. Finger curls. Satin ribbon.

Processions, little girls strewing rose petals out of little white papier-

mâché baskets, all down the marble aisle of the church before the priest

passed under the swaying canopy. Or the ranks in the dusk as the May

Procession moved through the narrow back streets of the old parish, class

after class marching together, all dressed in white, our Hail Marys rising in

a chant, the people out on their front porches to watch, and the little

altars to the Virgin with flickering candles set in the little front windows

of the narrow railroad-flat duplexes. Women in pale shapeless flowered

dresses walking beside us on the sidewalks as they said their rosaries.

No, I think it was something else, something very distinct in the church

itself and there was this light: Holy Communion.

An idea was coming to me, another taboo. And it seemed more bizarre than

anything yet-the carousel horse, the [bad scan] . But I knew, if I could do

it, it would be extraordinary, rapturous.

And it probably wouldn't frighten her. Not her. She lay down on the pillow,

and I raised the brass sides of the bed. Thin bars on all sides. Like an old

hospital bed or a gilded cage. Like a crib truly.

She was giving me that soft dreamy pacific smile. This extraordinary

awareness of happiness came over me. This certainty of happiness and

completeness.

Her hair was all out on the pillow, pale yellow. She said she didn't mind

falling asleep with the lamp on. I wouldn't wake her when I came in to

photograph her.

"Good night, my darling dear," she said. My little girl. Her mouth, the

lipstick wiped away, was irresistibly puckered, succulent. Never would be a

woman's mouth. Promised a lifetime of felonious kisses.

She was asleep by one o'clock.

I spent an hour photographing her through the brass bars of the bed. The

awareness of happiness was still there-an acute awareness.

I don't think that happens often in life, at least it has not happened to me

very often. The awareness of happiness comes after, in memory, with the

belated appreciation of the moment.

This was close to joy, this feeling. Loving her, painting her-it made a cycle

and shut out the world beyond completely.

The world seemed even less real than the poster faces all over these walls-

her actors and actresses. Just for one moment I studied them through the

gloom. Susan Jeremiah up there now in her white cowboy hat-one of those

quickie blowups from the Newsweek picture. Susan Jeremiah squinting into a

Texas sun?

She disappeared as I looked down into the light from the lamp, adjusted the

camera.

No, I wasn't a traitor for what I'd done, trying to find out who she was.

Rather I felt a certainty that nothing I found out would separate us. I'd

discover things about her that would make me want to keep her close to me

forever.

I tiptoed around the bed, kneeling down to catch her through the bars, get

the feeling of a big brass crib. All I had to do was touch her, lean over and

kiss her lips or her eyes, and she would stir in her sleep, move, shift into

another languid and yielding position. I brushed her hair down over her face

once so that only her eyes were uncovered. I lifted it back and turned her

head and got her profile perfectly.

When the pearl buttons would catch the light, that strong positively haunting

sense of the church would return. Flowers, incense, white dresses. It was

First Communion or Confirmation, and what had they called Confirmation then?

Big Communion. We wore white suits again, probably for the last time. And the

girls looked like little brides, breathtaking. The bishop put oil on our

foreheads, spoke Latin. We were all now, boys and girls alike, soldiers of

Christ. What a mad mixture of imagery, metaphors.

I pulled up her nightgown very gently, very gently, until the soft flannel

was gathered in my hands and her breasts were uncovered. Then I kissed them,

watching the nipples get small, stiff, erect. They seemed to darken slightly.

"Jeremy," she said in her sleep. She pulled on my arm, reached up groggily

without opening her eyes and pulled my head down towards her.

I kissed her mouth very lightly, then felt her gliding back into sleep again.

I wasn't ready to sleep yet.

I went back down to the basement and opened one of my trunks from New

Orleans. It was the one in which I kept old personal things. I hadn't opened

it in years.

The smell of camphor was rather unpleasant. But I found what I wanted. My

mother's prayer book. It was the Latin missal she'd used when she was a

little girl-the cover was simulated pearl, and there was a golden crucifix on

it. Pages edged in gold. Her rosary was in a little white jewelry shop box

with it. I took it out and held it up to the light. The blue paper had kept

the silver links from tarnishing. The Hail Mary beads were pearls, the Our

Fathers rhinestones, each capped in silver.

My mother hadn't much loved these things. She'd told me once that she wished

she could throw them all out, but it seemed wicked to throw away rosaries and

prayer books. So I saved them.

My father's picture was in the trunk, too, the last one he had taken before

going overseas. Dr. Walker in uniform. He had volunteered the day Pearl

Harbor was bombed, died in the South Pacific. That was two months after I was

born, and I don't think my mother ever forgave him. We lived in Dr. Walker's

big Saint Charles Avenue house. But I never knew him.

I put him back, closed the trunk, and took the rosary and prayer book

upstairs with me. The exhilaration was there again, the sense of being alive.

Connected.