Ace Atkins - New Orleans Noir - The Classics

Irma Bedlow saw it otherwise. During that first year, while the Rambler franchise was bleeding to death, while Bedlow was going half crazy, she had spent most of her time up in Alexandria, a few miles from the hospital, at her cousin’s. So that she could visit Albert Sidney every day.

She would go there, Bert told me — as Bedlow had told him — and sit in the drafty ward on a hard chair next to Albert Sidney’s chipped institutional crib, with her rosary, praying to Jesus Christ that He would send down His grace on her baby, make him whole, and let her suffer in his place. She would kneel in the twilight beside the bed stiff with urine, and stinking of such excrement as a child might produce who has never tasted food, amidst the bedlam of chattering and choking and animal sounds from bedridden idiots, cretins, declining mongoloids, microcephalics, and assorted other exiles from the great altarpiece of Hieronymus Bosch. Somehow, the chief psychologist had told Howard, her praying upset the other inmates of the ward, and at last he had to forbid Irma coming more than once a month. He told her that the praying was out altogether.

After trying to change the chief psychologist’s mind, and failing, Irma had come home. The franchise was gone by then, and they had a secondhand trailer parked in a rundown court where they got water, electricity, and gas from pipes in the ground and a sullen old man in a prewar De Soto station wagon picked up garbage once a week. She said the rosary there, and talked about Albert Sidney to her husband who, cursed now with freedom by the ruin of his affairs, doggedly looking for some kind of a job, had nothing much to do or think about but his wife’s abstracted words and the son he had almost had. Indeed, did have, but had in such a way that the having was more terrible than the lack.

It had taken no time to get into liquor, which his wife never touched, she fasting and praying, determined that no small imperfection in herself should stay His hand who could set things right with Albert Sidney in the flash of a moment’s passing.

— And in that line, Bert said, — she ain’t... they... never been man and wife since then. You know what I mean?

— Ummm.

— And she runs off on him. Couple or three times a year. They always find her at the cousin’s. At least till last year. Her cousin won’t have her around anymore. Seems Irma wanted her to fast for Albert Sidney too. Wanted the cousin’s whole family to do it, and there was words, and now she just takes a room at the tourist court by the hospital and tries to get in as often as that chief psychologist will let her. But no praying, he holds to that.

— What does Bedlow believe?

— Claims he believes she got Albert Sidney with some other man.

— No, I mean... does he believe in praying?

— Naw. Too honest, I guess. Says he don’t hold with beads and saying the same thing over and over. Says God stands on His own feet, and expects the same of us. Says we ain’t here to s... around. What’s done is done.

— Do you think he wants a divorce?

— Could he get one...?

— Yes.

— Well, how do I know?

— You brought him here. He’s not shopping for religious relics, is he?

Bert looked hurt. As if I were blaming him unfairly for some situation beyond his control or prevention.

— You want him in jail?

— No, I said. — I just don’t know what to do about him. Where’s he living?

— Got a cabin at the Bo-Peep Motel. Over off Veterans Highway. He puts in his time at the car lot and then goes to drinking and telling people his wife has done bastardized him.

— Why did he wait so long to come up with that line?

— It just come on him, what she must of done, he told me.

— That’s right, Bedlow said, his voice raspy, aggressive. — I ain’t educated or anything. I studies on it and after so long it come to me. I saw it wasn’t mine , that... thing of hers. Look, how come she can’t just get done mourning and say, well, that’s how it falls out sometimes and I’m sorry as all hell, but you got to keep going. That’s what your ordinary woman would say, ain’t it?

He had come to the kitchen where Bert and I were standing, his face still wet with tears. He came in talking, and the flow went on as if he were as compulsive with his tongue as he was with a bottle. The words tumbled out so fast that you felt he must have practiced, this country man, to speak so rapidly, to say so much.

— But no. I tell you what: she’s mourning for what she done to that... thing’s real father, that’s what she’s been doing. He likely lives in Alex, and she can’t get over what she done him when she got that... thing. And I tell you this, I said, look, honey, don’t give it no name, ’cause if you give it a name, you’re gonna think that name over and over and make like it was the name of a person and it ain’t, and it’ll ruin us just as sure as creaking hell. And she went and named it my father’s name, who got it after Albert Sidney Johnston at Shiloh... look, I ain’t laid a hand on that woman in God knows how many years, I tell you that. So you see, that’s what these trips is about. She goes up and begs his pardon for not giving him a fine boy like he wanted, and she goes to see... the thing, and mourns... and g. . . t to hell, I got to get shut of this... whole thing .

It came in a rush, as if, even talking, saying more words in the space of a moment than he had ever said before, Bedlow was enlarging, perfecting his suspicions — no, his certainty of what had been done to him.

We were silent for a moment.

— Well, it’s hard, Bert said at last.

— Hard? Bedlow glared at him as if Bert had insulted him. — You don’t even know hard...

— All right, I said. — We’ll go down to the office in the morning and draw up and file.

— Huh?

— We’ll file for legal separation. Will your wife contest it?

— Huh?

— I’m going to get you what you want. Will your wife go along?

— Well, I don’t know. She don’t... think about... things. If you was to tell her, I don’t know.

Bert looked at him, his large dark face settled and serious. — That woman’s a... Catholic, he said at last, and Bedlow stared back at him as if he had named a new name, and things needed thinking again.

A little while later they left, with Bedlow promising me and promising Bertram Bijou that he’d be in my office the next morning. For a long time after I closed the door behind them, I sat looking at the empty whiskey glasses and considered the course of living in the material world. Then I went and fixed me a shaker of martinis, and became quickly wiser. I considered that it was time to take Zeno seriously, give over the illusion of motion, of sequence. There are only a few moments in any life and when they arrive, they are fixed forever and we play through them, pretending to go on, but coming back to them over and over, again and again. If it is true that we can only approach a place but never reach it as the Philosopher claims, it must be corollary that we may almost leave a moment, but never quite. And so, as Dr. Freud so clearly saw, one moment, one vision, one thing come upon us, becomes the whole time and single theme of all we will ever do or know. We are invaded by our own one thing, and going on is a dream we have while lying still.

I thought, too, mixing one last shaker, that of the little wisdom in this failing age, Alcoholics Anonymous must possess more than its share. I am an alcoholic, they say. I have not had a drink in nine years, but I am an alcoholic, and the shadow, the motif of my living, is liquor bubbling into a glass over and over, again and again. That is all I really want, and I will never have it again because I will not take it, and I know that I will never really know why not.