Joan Didion - A Book of Common Prayer

“I gather by your silence you think Warren might oppose it.”

“Oppose what,” Charlotte said.

“Oppose declaring your daughter legally dead.”

Charlotte looked at Pete Wright.

“It’s a legality. It doesn’t mean anything, but it would enable you to cash these particular dividend checks. Or sell this particular stock. Or whatever.”

Charlotte picked up the certificates.

“As well as clarify the question of the ranch. Which I feel impelled to remind you is tied up in trust for her. A loose trust, granted, but—”

Charlotte tore the certificates in half.

Pete Wright gazed at the wall behind Charlotte and made a sucking noise with his teeth. “Warren’s quite disturbed, I don’t know if you realize that. He comes by the house, he drinks too much, he jumps all over Clarice about her hatha yoga class, he acts like—”

Her mother had died.

Warren had not come home the night she got drunk at the Palm with Pete Wright.

“You don’t need to tell me what Warren acts like.”

“I gather you and Warren have had some misunderstanding, the rights and wrongs of which are outside my purview, but—”

Her father had died.

Warren had called at four A.M. the night she got drunk at the Palm with Pete Wright and she had told him not to come home.

“—I must say I don’t think you’re solving anything by pretending there aren’t certain complications to—”

People did die. People were loose in the world and left it, and she had been too busy to notice.

The morning after she got drunk at the Palm she and Warren had taken Marin to lunch at the Carlyle. Marin was cold.

“I’m trying to talk to you like a Dutch uncle,” Pete Wright said.

Warren gave her his coat.

“I think I fucked you one Easter,” Charlotte said.

For the next several days Charlotte wanted only to eat the food she had eaten in Hollister but she had lost the recipes her mother had written out and Charlotte did not know the number of any couple who would come to the house on California Street and do chicken à la king and burned biscuits. When I think of Charlotte Douglas apprehending death at the age of thirty-nine in the safe-deposit vault of a bank in San Francisco it occurs to me that there was some advantage in having a mother who died when I was eight, a father who died when I was ten, before I was busy.

CHARLOTTE DID NOT GET OUT OF BED THE DAY AFTER she met the woman named Enid Schrader.

“Mark spoke so very highly of you,” the woman had said on the telephone. There had been in Enid Schrader’s voice something Charlotte did not want to recognize: a forced gaiety, a haggard sprightliness, a separateness not unlike her own. “Of you and your beautiful home.”

Mark Schrader was said to have been on the L–1011 with Marin. Mark Schrader had on his face, in the pictures Charlotte had seen of him, a pronounced scar from a harelip operation. It did not seem plausible to Charlotte that she could have met a boy with such a scar and forgotten him, nor did it seem plausible that anyone on the L–1011 with Marin had ever spoken highly of the house on California Street, but maybe the boy’s mother was trying to tell her something. Maybe there was a code in that peculiar stilted diction. Maybe Enid Schrader knew where Marin was.

“I think we should meet,” Charlotte said guardedly. “Could you have lunch at all? Today? The St. Francis Grill?”

“Delightful. Why.”

“Why what?”

“Why the St. Francis Grill?”

“I just thought—” Charlotte did not know what she had just thought. She had rejected the house because it was watched. She had hit upon the St. Francis Grill as a place where all corners of the room could be seen. “Is there somewhere you’d rather go?”

“Not at all, I don’t keep up with where the beautiful people eat. Not to worry about my recognizing you, I’ve seen pictures of you.”

“I’ve seen pictures of you too.”

“Before,” the woman said. “I meant before. Pictures of you and your beautiful home.”

Charlotte had met the woman at one-thirty and at two-thirty the code remained impenetrable. The woman did not seem interested in talking about her son, or about Marin. The woman seemed interested instead in talking about a friend who had a decorator’s card.

“You’ll adore Ruthie.” The woman was drinking daiquiris and had refused lunch. “I’m getting you together soonest, that’s definite, a promise. Meanwhile I’ll borrow her card and we’ll do the trade-only places. How’s Tuesday?”

“How’s Tuesday for what?” Charlotte said faintly.

“Monday’s a no-no for me but if Tuesday’s bad for you, let’s say Wednesday. Earliest. Grab lunch where we find it.”

“Listen.” Charlotte glanced around the room before she spoke. “If there’s something to see I think we should — I mean could we see it now?”

“But I haven’t got Ruthie’s card. I mean unless you have a card—” The woman looked up. “What’s the matter?”

“I don’t think I know what you’re talking about.”

“ I’m talking about taking you shopping. ” The woman’s eyes reddened and filled with tears. “Unless of course you’re too busy. But of course you are. Too busy.”

Charlotte touched the woman’s hand.

The last woman Charlotte had known to talk about “shopping” was her mother.

The last time Charlotte had been asked to go “shopping” it had been by her mother.

“Your ex-husband isn’t too busy. I heard him on the radio. He was blotto but he talked to me. I called in to chat, he wasn’t too busy to chat. Although blotto. On the radio. Whatever his name is.”

“Warren.” Charlotte did not want to hear about Warren on the radio. Leonard had once said that Warren could arrive in a town where he knew no one and within twenty-four hours he would have had dinner at the country club, been offered a temporary chair in Southern politics at the nearest college, and been on the radio. Charlotte did not want to think about Warren on the radio and she did not want to think why Enid Schrader was crying and she did not want to think about her mother shopping. Her mother had been shopping the day she died, at Ransohoff’s. “His name is Warren Bogart.”

“Whatever. The little whore’s father.”

The woman gave one last cathartic sob.

Charlotte reached for the check.

“My treat,” the woman cried, her voice again sprightly. “You do it next time.”

All the next day Charlotte could not erase from her mind the first newspaper picture she had seen of Enid Schrader’s son. “They’ll ditch the harelip,” Leonard had said when she showed him the picture. “The harelip’s the fresh meat they’ll throw on the trail, they can’t afford him, Marin’s not stupid.”

“I wouldn’t rely on that,” Warren had said.

Another picture Charlotte could not erase from her mind was her mother alone at Ransohoff’s.

I knew my mother was dead when I saw them carry out her bed to be burned, my father could not tell me. I knew my father was dead when the doorman at the Brown Palace would not let me go upstairs, he sent for a maid to tell me. She brought an éclair and cocoa. I waited for her on a red plush banquette. Unlike Charlotte I learned early to keep death in my line of sight, keep it under surveillance, keep it on cleared ground and away from any brush where it might coil unnoticed. The morning Edgar died I called Victor, signed the papers, walked out to Progreso as usual and ate lunch on the sea wall.

“I HAVE A LOUSY TRIP TO PHILADELPHIA, LOUSY FLIGHT back, I watch my own plane blow a tire on closed-circuit TV, I go to my office, I find Suzy in tears because Warren’s camped in her one-room apartment, I come home and I find my wife hasn’t gotten dressed in two days. I finish this call, Charlotte, I’m going to trot your ass over to Polly Orben’s office, this isn’t healthy.” Leonard uncupped the receiver and spoke into it. “Try the other line, Suzy, see if you can keep your finger off the disconnect this time.”