Pete Hamill - Loving Women

In late afternoon, I wrote a letter to my father, telling him the usual bland lies about life in the Navy. I didn’t tell him about Eden Santana; Red Cannon; Miles Rayfield and Freddie Harada; Kuniyoshi or Ben Shahn; Winnie; the Blackhawk Club; the Dirt Bar; Dixie Shafer; the Kingdom of Darkness; Captain Pritchett’s lost wife; Mercado; Sal’s grandfather; or the way to use vine charcoal. I told him the weather was nice and the food okay and the beaches beautiful. I sent him a picture of me under a palm tree with the snow coming down, taken by Becket. I asked my brothers to write me. I was sealing the letter when the telephone jangled on my desk. I picked it up and said hello.

“It’s me,” Eden Santana said. “I’m back.”

Y ou’ve never had a child, so you don’t know. But I have two girls, real pretty, one fifteen, the other ten. But just saying it that way doesn’t explain anything. I could be describing someone else’s kids, I could be talking about dogs or canaries. You see, having children’s different from anything else on this poor earth, and maybe you can’t ever explain it to people that never have had them. But those girls come from me, from my body, I held them in me, I gave them life in blood and pain, and then nursed them and watched them learn to walk and say words and ask for more than food, hear me? You ain’t ever had that, child, so you don’t know why I up and went when I got the word. Maybe you’ll never know. Maybe no man ever could .

Those girls been part of me for half my life, since when I was younger than you are now, the oldest one anyways. I never had a time after I was sixteen that I didn’t have a little girl pulling on me, followin me from room to room, callin for me scared in the night. Never. Maybe that’s part of why I’m here and not in New Orleans. To be free of that love, that need, for just a little while. That and James Robinson. Maybe you don’t want to hear about James Robinson but I better tell you, child, because if you’re talkin to me you’re talkin to someone who is part of James Robinson. As James Robinson sure is part of me. There’s no getting round it. He is there. In my life. Important as those little girl children .

I was fifteen when I met him, the summer of thirty-eight. He came walking down Burgundy Street in a white suit and white shoes and the sun was on him and he was more than six foot tall and I thought I was seein some kinda god that come rising up outta the swamps and the morning and landed in New Orleans and came walkin right at me, so close I could reach out and touch him. He walked in a rollin way, on the balls of his feet, like he knew all kinds of things and had been everywhere and he looked at me and paused and then kept on walkin, headin for Esplanade and the Faubourg Marigny. At the corner, he stopped and looked back and he had me .

I didn’t know him and neither did anyone else. He just came from nowhere and then I was pregnant and then he married me, dressed in that damned white suit, and we set up housekeepin. My daddy didn’t talk to me for three months after the wedding, cuz he didn’t like James Robinson from the startup. I was a girl and Robinson was a man and my daddy saw things I didn’t see, I guess. Robinson wouldn’t tell me what he did, he said it wasn’t women’s business, but he brought home money, lots of it, and my family helped me with the furnishing and the cooking, cause he had no family and this was the Depression still and everybody was tight, even them that had. James Robinson would bring me flowers, and fancy hats, and pretty clothes, and once even a pink silk parasol to hold off the sun. But most days he went to work in the evening and slept late in the morning and when I said to him at last that I wanted a body beside me at night, when I said I wanted him to do with me what he wanted to do, when I said I wanted to do with him some things too, that I had urgings, that I had wife need in me, James Robinson just smiled and said, Yes, my dear. That was all: Yes, my dear .

So I followed him one evening, me all swollen up with the first girl, feelin fat and watery and ugly, afraid that he had some other woman, some life that I didn’t have a part of. And he went into a club on Rampart Street, with men and women at the door, all of them nodding at him when he went in, some dark place where they all knew him and I felt a chill then in August, a cold breeze upon my heart, knowing that James Robinson must be a man who was living off women. Just like that, just watching him, I wondered too did he have something, a disease or something, that made him scared to come to me in the night. And I was terrible afraid, not of that, not catchin something, but afraid that when the baby was born, he would take me to that place on Rampart Street and make me work for him .

But knowing that, knowing where he went, I couldn’t come to askin him about it. It was his secret and it was mine, but I never told him of my knowing of it. I didn’t sleep with him for the rest of the time of the waiting. I felt the baby’s life in me, the stretching and pushing, that other heartbeat, that new need for room that the baby wanted: and that was what I had instead of James Robinson. We called the first baby Nola after New Orleans Louisiana. Nola Robinson. He thought she was the cutest thing and he held her in his arms and was sweet to her and brought her all silk and satin clothes, but he never did come to me in the night, not for months, saying to me I had to heal long after I was healed, saying it wunt a good thing to have too much of that too soon and then I got mad and asked him did he get what he needed in the house on Rampart Street and that was the first time he beat me .

He put the baby down and tore off my clothes and took a strap to me, puttin welts all over me. And when I was bent over on the floor, weeping and hurt and the baby cryin, he just dressed and went out the door and walked away. He come home that night and run his hands over the welts and heard me cryin and then he finally came to me. And finished quick, with me all achin and unfilled and everything in me all coiled up and ready to burst, but not bursting, ready to be lost but not losing, ready to die but not dying, and he said, Yes, my dear. Like that. Yes, my dear .

So I knew that was what it would always be like with him and I kept it secret. He would come to me only when he caused pain. He would beat me and hurt me and then come to me. So that I hated it, the bed part. I didn’t want it, the loving part. I erased it, the wife part. I watched movies and when people kissed I thought Yes, my dear. And waited for the beating to begin. I’d read a novel, and when it got to the point where they would sleep together, I began to tremble, afraid for the person in the book, afraid for me, thinking, Yes, my dear and Yes, my dear and Yes, my dear. I put everything into Nola, I touched her, squeezed her, kept her too long at my breast. And James Robinson, with his long body like a god, with his fine wild eyes and white suits, he just kept leaving for Rampart Street .

My mother must have picked up the grieving, knew there was an emptiness, a thing not happening. She knew just about everything about me anyway, cause I’d come from her the way Nola came from me, I’d been her extra heartbeat. And she started visiting in the afternoons, after James Robinson rose from his bed, and she would look at me and then hold the baby, then look at me and change the sheets, then look at me and go to the garden, then look at me and touch my face and say, finally, the last time, tired of looking, tired of not saying what she wanted to say, held my hand and said, You a woman now. You got to get you a man .