Michael Bishop - Ancient of Days

I was still concerned that someone in a TV van or a newspaper company car might try to gatecrash. The Atlanta papers had recently featured headlines about Adam and RuthClaire. In the morning Constitution , this:

In the afternoon paper, the Journal , this:

The story under this last headline reported an interview with David Blau, director of the Abraxas Gallery. Blau thought that the Montarazes were okay, but still believed they should contact him or one of his associates to confirm the fact.

“Is this guy one of the avant-garde bigwigs who think you’ve sold out?” I asked RuthClaire.

“David’s more charitable than most. He credits me with practicing a deliberate serious-commercial split.”

“Sounds like a decent enough Joe.”

“He is. That’s why I’ve got to give him a call.”

“Don’t,” I blurted. My newfound, but still tepid, regard for Edna Twiggs did not permit me to trust her totally. “Write a note. Put no return address on the envelope. I’ll mail it from Tocqueville tomorrow morning. He’ll have it the day after.”

That’s what we did. While I was in Tocqueville to mail the note, I hired a trio of private guards from a security agency in the Tocqueville Commons Mall. The first man came on duty that same afternoon.

Once the guards began their shifts, my taut nerves loosened. The likelihood of anyone’s circling the farm and coming at us by way of White Cow Creek seemed remote. It must have seemed remote to RuthClaire, too. She made up her mind to have her baby in a peaked canvas tent that she and Adam pitched beneath a pecan tree. The tent was lavender, reminiscent of the floppy conical hoods worn by Teavers, Puddicombe, and their anonymous Klan-mates on the night they came to kill Adam. I told RuthClaire so the morning after their tent first went up, its lavender surfaces sparkling with frost.

“You’re right,” she said, startled. “We bought it at a sporting-goods store in Atlanta and I never once thought of that. Maybe Adam did, though. Teavers’s robe may have kept him from coming down with pneumonia.”

“This tent won’t keep you warm. The temp today is in the twenties, RuthClaire.”

“I’ll be fine.”

“What about the baby?”

“The kid’s half habiline. Habilines are traditionally, and altogether naturally, born out of doors. The tent’s a compromise.”

“Out of doors in Africa or Haiti!”

“If it’s cold, Livia George can wrap the baby in a blanket and take it inside.”

“Then what’s the point of the stupid purple tent?”

“I’ve already told you. Don’t you listen?” She turned on her heel and stalked toward the plate-glass doors glittering above my patio deck. I followed her, shaking my head and mumbling.

Adam continued to read The Problem of Pain . Too, from the library in Tocqueville—a side trip I made on the same day I hired the security guards and mailed my ex’s note—he had me check out some other basic books on religious or spiritual topics: The Screwtape Letters by Lewis, Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress , a young person’s guide to understanding the great world religions, an English translation of the Koran, a biography of Gandhi, Thomas Merton’s The Seven Storey Mountain , something called The Alphabet of Grace by Frederick Buechner, The Way of the Sufi by Idries Shah, a primer on the Talmud, and Mortimer Adler’s How to Think About God . Heady stuff for a habiline. I had to carry the whole lot home in a Gilman No-Tare grocery bag from our local A&P.

Adam painted during the days, read in the evenings. Ruthie Cee, on the other hand, neither painted nor read. She usually slept while Adam worked. Sometimes she watched him. (He was putting the finishing touches on a huge, semiabstract landscape featuring a tangerine-red tree that reminded me of an African baobab.) She may have occasionally prepared a meal, but if she did, she wasn’t regular about it. She had no need to be. Livia George and I scrupulously brought them at least one hot gourmet meal a day.

Saturday night at the West Bank: six or seven people standing cheerful but also mildly impatient just inside the door, waiting to be seated. Fur jackets or chic leather car coats on the ladies. The men bundled in herringbone or expensive brushed sheepskin. Cold air swirling around the newcomers like the vapor in a frozen-food bin. The phone next to the cash register rang. I looked over at the flocked divider concealing the phone. A second ring was not forthcoming.

Oh no, I thought, not tonight !

I smiled at a woman with a magazine-cover death mask for a face and put one hand reassuringly on the shoulder of her escort. Mentally, though, I counted to thirty. The telephone rang again.

“That’s it!” I cried. “That’s it!”

Livia George scurried in from the kitchen wiping her hands on her apron. Her heavy upper arms were bare, but she made no move to find her coat. “Gotta get goin’, Mistah Paul.” She pushed through the astonished people at the door. “Gotta he’p Miss RuthClaire birth that beautiful baby.” She hustled out the door, down the sidewalk, and into the front seat of my Mercedes, driver’s side. Helplessly, I followed, already resigned to the role of passenger.

The trip took maybe nine minutes.

Our security guard automatically passed us through the gate, and my car’s steel-belted radials flung gravel back at him as Livia George fishtailed us up the drive to the house. I was taking two steps at a time toward the front door when Livvy, at the corner of the house, shouted,

“Not that way, Mistah Paul! She in that purple pup tent out back!”

“Go on!” I urged her. “I’ve got to grab a coat!”

The warmth of the house hit me like a Gulf Coast wind. I took a jacket from the shoulders of the baby-satyr statue on which I’d draped it several days ago, pulled it on, and strode into the living room looking for a shawl or sweater for Livia George. From the back of a chair, I grabbed a peach-toned afghan. But on the way to the sliding doors I hesitated. Did I really want to see the woman I loved in the throes of childbirth? Sure. Of course I did. Wasn’t that what every sensitive with-it male wanted nowadays? Men attended classes to learn how to provide support at the Moment of Truth. Some even scrubbed and put on surgical gowns to participate in the event. If their partners were back-to-nature advocates, they might build birthing stools or prepare for underwater delivery by buying scuba-diving gear. All I had to do was slide open a plate-glass door and trip across my deck to a tent in a pecan grove.

I was no longer RuthClaire’s husband. The child in her womb owed me no genetic debt. It instead owed this paternal debt to a mute, sinewy creature right out of the early Paleolithic. Was the arrival of this squalling relic really an event I wanted to witness? My concern should have been for RuthClaire’s safety, for the health and well-being of her child—but baser impulses had me in their grip and I hesitated.

Taking a breath, I went out onto my deck. The cold hit me like an Arctic hammer stroke, but I staggered through the pillars of my silhouetted pecan trees to RuthClaire’s lavender tent. Inside the translucent smudge of the sailcloth, shadowy shapes stooped, straightened, gesticulated. Adam, I was glad to see, had taken my PowerLite into the tent. He’d even thought to tote one of the studio’s sun lamps out there, an extension cord from the deck down into the pecan grove giving me a trail to follow.