Pete Hamill - Loving Women

And I knew she was right. I was a woman now. I’d had a child within me and a child at my breast. I had a right to have a man. But there was one big problem: I had made a holy vow. That promise meant something to me. The keeping of it. And there was another thing: I was afraid. Afraid that a new man would be just another James Robinson. Sometimes I would look at men, all lathered with sweat in the hot sun fixing the streets, or delivering ice, or sawing off limbs in trees full of Spanish moss and I would imagine how they’d feel beside me, on me, in me, and then stop: seeing in my mind James Robinson in white walking up the street like a god. And not trusting myself, I closed up, sealed myself. I didn’t even cry anymore, didn’t fall into grieving. My mother saw that too .

And then the war started and the army took James Robinson and I was happy. We closed the little house and I moved back home with Nola and my mother cooked and cleaned and I started to read. I read every kind of book from the library down on Burgundy Street. I read Gone With the Wind, but that didn’t sucker me in; I knew what Rhett Butler was, I seen my Rhett Butler go into a house on Rampart Street. I read Anna Karenina by this Russian Tolstoy, and that was better. He knew something about people. I read poetry. And I read books on nature. I learned the names of all the trees and plants, the birds and the insects and the animals. Readin those books, I was suppose to be teachin Nola, but I was really teachin me. My father was workin at the Higgins Shipyard then, making torpedo boats, and the money was comin in for the first time in his life and he bought a car and taught me how to drive and then when we had paid the car he bought a house out by the Atchafalaya River, an old house and small, but with plenty of room for us because my brothers and my sister were all grown up and gone by then. So my mother and I made that sweet little house into something. We planed the wood clean, we changed the windows, we painted everything white, inside and out, and hung pictures that she bought in the old markets in the Quarter, we scraped down the wide plank floors and stained them dark and shellacked them and kept polishin them until they were nearly black. And I was glad bein there, sweatin at the work and seein Nola walk. I was happy. James Robinson was gone. I hoped he’d never come back .

Nola learned to talk in that little house beside the river, and we had a Victrola and she began to sing too, learnin all the words of some songs before she could even make full sentences. My father loved her. Probably more than he loved me. On weekends he would take her fishing in the bayou, givin her a line, and they’d come home with buckets of catfish and sometimes my sister would come out with her children and we’d eat all night and sing the old songs and Nola would sing what she learned from the phonograph, and I was happy. Sealed up, closed, manless and happy .

I expected to hear some news from James Robinson, but I sure wasn’t eatin my heart out over him. The truth be told, I dreaded hearin from him, or seein him show up. There wasn’t a letter from him, not a call, and then I started hoping that one day someone from the army would come to the door, looking sad and proper, like all the scenes in the movies, and he would tell me that James Robinson had been killed in action. The truth be told, I came to want that. The truth be told, I wanted him dead. Every day, I read The Item and The Times-Picayune, lookin at the list of casualties, hoping in a shameful way that he’d be there among them and then I’d be free. I’d be through with the holy vow. I could start another life. The real one .

But the war ground on and there was no word about James Robinson, and Nola started school, and I didn’t even think anymore about a man beside me in the night. And then the war ended. There was a big celebration in New Orleans and we drove in, and my father said, “Well, now we see if the Depression’s really over,” and my mother looked at him in a funny way and there were soldiers and sailors all drunk on Bourbon Street and brass bands and girls dancin and people makin love in public and noise like the greatest Mardi Gras in history and we cheered and shouted and then went home. I lay in bed thinkin of all those young men I’d seen in the Quarter and how I could have had all of them that night, in cars or hotels or backyards, and didn’t want even one. And I couldn’t sleep, thinkin of their young hard bodies and sad drunk eyes, and got up and went outside, where it was hot and buggy, August it was, and my father was alone out there on a white chair, just looking off toward the swamp. He couldn’t sleep either. He said, I’ll have to look for another job tomorrow. He said, They ain’t gonna need no more torpedo boats. And, of course, he was right. The war was over and both of us were sadder than we’d ever been .

I was in the garden a few weeks later, with the first cool breeze of the autumn blowin and no sun under a haze, when I heard the car and looked through the loblolly pines and saw him. James Robinson. Walkin with a limp, dressed in an army uniform. I stood up. He saw me. I waited. I wasn’t gonna run to him. I waited and waited and he came to me limping and reached out his hands and I could see that he was much older now and he was cryin. So I hugged him and he hugged me and my mother came out and saw us and then took my father’s car to school to get Nola .

James Robinson cried and cried and said he was sorry for everything, for the way he used to treat me, for not writin, for being the way he used to be before the war. But he was different now, he said. The war had changed him. He’d almost died and knew when he didn’t die that there were things in his life that meant something and now he was home, had been home for three days, had walked the streets lookin for me, askin where we’d gone, and now he’d found me and now everything was going to be okay, now everything was going to be real truly fine, now everything was goin to be the way it should have been in the first place .

My mother arrived with Nola, and the father and the daughter regarded each other like strangers. Until the girl just started bawlin and James Robinson did too, and they hugged each other and took a walk down by the water and talked for a long time and I thought, Maybe it’s true, maybe it’s gonna be real truly fine. He came back holdin Nola’s hand, and then my mother said to Nola, well, we better go spread the word, girl, so your momma and your poppa can be alone .

Alone with me, he was desperate, comin at me like a crazy man, sobbin, apologizin, tellin me not to look at his leg, not to touch it, not to let that leg bother me. I laid with him, and he started saying the names of places, all in the Pacific, the names of strange islands and old battles, all the while askin for forgiveness. Until at last I gave him what he wanted. And renewed the vow, in the back bedroom where everything had for so long been sealed .

We moved out two weeks later, to another house in the country that he bought with cash. He said he won the money gamblin while he was in the Pacific and I believed him and maybe he told the truth. But he said he didn’t want to go back to the city, that he had no more to do with that life, that he would never even look at the house on Rampart Street again. He had money from the government too, he said and that helped when we needed paint and shellac and furnishings, and he kept busy all winter cleanin and fixin the house and choppin trees to make a path to a bayou, saying here we’d be happy, here we’d be safe. He didn’t much like goin to my momma’s house. He said he didn’t like people watchin him. Not even relatives. And maybe I should’ve known then. But I wanted to believe what he was, that he’d changed, that he was this new man, that he’d been made different by the war. Made good .