Faith and the Good Thing Page 21

  Maxwell rushed to her bedside, his left arm trapping her, his right squeezing a clump of her hair as he, then she, cried.

  “. . . and you still want to play me for a fool, a chump, a pathetic little clown.” He brought his right palm against her face. Once. Twice—a third time. Hard. “You can go live with your barefoot boy for all care. It’s his, isn’t it?” He waited. Faith could not answer. He slapped her. “Isn’t it?”

  “Yes!” She felt relieved. It was all out now; it was all over.

  Maxwell pointed at her, lost his thought, frowned, and stood momentarily confused. Then he recaptured it. “Get out of here!” His hands dropped to his side. “I don’t want to see you here in the morning—”

  Blood running from her nose slipped through Faith’s fingers, flowed to her dress and onto the bed. There was no stopping it, and she breathed huskily through her mouth. Maxwell crossed to her closet and ripped clothes from their wire hangers. He held her ermine cloak high in the air and muttered, “God!” then flung it to the center of the floor. He perfectly enunciated, “Go on!” carefully, slowly, like a voice on an English-language recording. All was stillness in the room. They were manikins behind a store’s smooth glass window, he standing with his right foot forward, his left knee locked, and his hand in his pocket, she covering her face. Their lips were parted as though to say more, but neither moved, nor did breath break the perfection of their outlines and those of the bed, chairs, and dresser covered with cosmetics.

  Click.

  “You just lost your good thing,” Maxwell sobbed, and he hurried out the open door.

  Faith gave herself completely to her misery. Her face was wet and felt twice its normal size. She lifted her hands to her eyes and saw blood. As she stumbled to the bathroom she could hear him in the kitchen, tearing open the top of a beer can and talking to himself. More than ever she felt dirty, coated with the weight of her actions; but beneath that encrustation was a strange vacuum, an emptiness into which her thoughts plummeted. She gathered up her clothes and shoved them into a traveling bag. On the way out she passed the kitchen, where Maxwell, his head bent low over a beer can, sat at the table, smoking his asthma cigarettes and coughing, his mind shut up tight. He looked up at her, his eyes blurred and searching her face. Who is this?

  And I? she thought. Faith wiped at her face with a tissue, and said, “I’m sorry—”

  Maxwell’s throat tore with a horrible sound. He threw back his head and stood up. She could bear it no longer.

  “Good-bye.”

  Chicago seemed darker than she could ever recall having seen it. The sky was deep purple and clotted with black clouds whirling west over a craggy skyline. On the El, Faith checked her purse and found close to three hundred dollars there. Instinct sent her to the South Side, to Sixty-third Street, where she returned to Hotel Sinclair. At the desk she rang the bell on the counter, and Mrs. Beasley appeared from a back room, her hair in yellow curlers.

  “Child,” she said, “you look like you were in a stick fight, and everybody had a stick but you!”

  There was some truth in that. “It was more like a football game,” she said. She set her bag on the floor and opened the register on the desk. Room 4-D was empty.

  “I haven’t been able to rent that room since you left,” Mrs. Beasley said. “Folks complained all the time about ghost cats as big as Guernsey cows walking ’cross the floor all night.”

  “That’s all right,” Faith said. She knew she could sleep in a rat-infested sewer and not miss a wink tonight. “Can I have it back?”

  “Sure, if you ain’t afraid one of them spirits will take over that child.”

  Faith looked down at herself and smoothed her dress over the curvature of her stomach. “You can tell?”

  Mrs. Beasley laughed. “You kidding? It looks like you’ve got a battleship and half the Russian army in there.”

  Faith could not laugh, not now; or in the days, the months that followed when Mrs. Beasley, who supported Faith in exchange for help around the hotel, tried to cheer her. Until the eighth month she was miserable, barely eating enough to keep herself, let alone the baby, alive. Being alone was unbearable. Could she, if another man came along, start again? For Faith the answer was obvious: there was nothing to live for but the baby who would rise phoenix like from her wreckage. Often, Mrs. Beasley caught her held by the spell of her round belly in the bathroom mirror on the hotel’s fourth floor. Faith, naked to her waist, would look at the old woman’s reflection without turning and say, “I’m ugly. . . .”

  Mrs. Beasley slapped her behind and upbraided her. “There ain’t nothing as beautiful as a woman about to give birth!”

  That was comforting, but hard to believe. She saw herself with the detachment a stranger might have—the stretch marks extending from her sides to her navel, her swollen breasts too delicate to touch. “Will I look like I did before when it’s all over?”

  “Come away from that mirror,” Mrs. Beasley said. “There’ll be marks on your belly, ’course, and for a while you’ll feel like a whole mountain passed through you. But that ain’t nothin’. I raised seven kids and I was okay. It happens to everybody that way—”

  Faith waited, marking her days. And as the time grew near she grew afraid, most afraid. Her breasts swelled even more, felt even more sensitive beneath her fingertips—from her neck down she felt clogged and clotted with life. It alarmed her. The thing was possessing her entirely, inhabiting her body like the vengeful spirits of the dead. It would come bursting from her as a chicken does from its egg, destroying its shell, stealing the last of her life to feed its own. Fine. Whether she died for it or somehow survived, whether it tore her apart or gave her new strength, or if—later, when it was grown—it came to turn on her, to deny her as Richard Barrett’s children had done to him, then that, too, was all right. Just fine. She would love it—yes—even if it choked her dead in childbirth.

  On the first day of snowfall in November, she lay across the moist mattress in 4-D, doubled over with labor pains quick enough to kill, she thought, a cow. They followed one another only minutes apart: it was coming—kicking itself free from her like a full-grown god bursting from the sea. She could see its brown face blurred under water, rising up with barnacles and slime to break the surface of her skin.

  She screamed, her tongue caught in her throat. “Momma!”

  “I’m right here,” Mrs. Beasley said softly. “You lay back and fight it, y’hear. I’m right here. I’ve done this before. I had a pregnant woman without no husband down in room five-C once and—”

  The room whirled around her head, bright like the eye of the sun at its center, dull at its dark edges. She was certain she could hear the child murmuring inside her, but she could barely make out its words. It was, she thought, calling her name. Mrs. Beasley brought pans of hot water beside her bed, spread towels beneath her, and talked in a cooing voice, the content of which was lost to Faith forever.

  “Press your muscles down,” she said.

  There was no pain like this pain. Hadn’t Lavidia said that again and again? There was no suffering like the suffering of creation. She could feel the strange pressure caused within her by the child’s thoughts, its pulse; she could hear its tiny heart throbbing as loud as a gong. Life floated between feces and urine: what was it about?

  “Bite on this.” Mrs. Beasley shoved the wooden handle of a rusty kitchen knife between Faith’s teeth, which sank in, clear to the metal beneath. She heard all sorts of breathing in an eerie concert—her own, quick and labored; the child’s, soft and like that of a sleeping dog; Mrs. Beasley’s, deep and as heavy as the wind.

  The woman was exuding sweat, talking to herself in some crazy, sanctified, secret language of storefront churches until she shouted, “I see its head!”

  Deep, silent screams rolled off Faith’s tongue: a bolt of white lightning cut jagged paths before her eyes. Then there was darkness.

  “The lights went out!” Mrs. Beasley shouted.

&
nbsp; She was caught somewhere between life and death, this girl, the baby not yet born, but breathing in the air of the darkened room.

  “Don’t move,” she heard the woman say. “I’ll get us a candle from downstairs.”

  She could not move. She imagined herself dead, or at the bottom of the sea. The child was not completely free from her, and the image flashed across her mind of a huge momma cockroach dragging her egg behind her on the floor. The smell of blood and birth was everywhere. Faith was barely conscious when Mrs. Beasley bounded back into the room with a thick homemade candle stuck in the neck of a wine flask. She placed it on the floor, then tugged at the baby’s head; the rest slipped out into her hands.

  “It’s a girl,” she sighed. There came then a slapping sound, and a burst of breath. “You hear that?” Mrs. Beasley laughed.

  Faith smiled. She closed her eyes, and Mrs. Beasley finished her work. That done, she placed the baby in a dry towel, then into Faith’s left arm. She held the candle close.

  “I can hardly believe it”—Faith.

  “Every birth,” laughed Mrs. Beasley, “is a miracle, ain’t it the truth?”

  The child was as wrinkled as a head of lettuce, bluish in the flickering candlelight. Bald, its eyes were pinched together, and it fidgeted and wailed. Warmth rushed over Faith. It had her curious eyes—two brown dots set slightly asymmetrically on both sides of a small nose. There were a few indentations from Mrs. Beasley’s hand on its head. Faith watched it cry, hugged it closer, and sniffled.

  Mrs. Beasley rubbed her hands together like a craftsman after a chore, and stepped backward toward the door. “You hang on to her while I check the fuse box in the basement. I can hear the roomers bitchin’ through the walls right now!” She left, closing the door with a slam that knocked the candle over.

  Her eyes still shut, Faith pressed the child’s soft cheek against her own, dreaming briefly of the life they might lead together. Then she felt a film of heat pressing against her eyelids, and opened her eyes slowly. The corner of the room where the candle lay was brilliant and crawling with iridescent tendrils of flame that licked along the dry wallpaper, the bare floor. A thick cloud of smoke rolled like a wave over Faith and choked the baby. She tried to rise, only to fall back, weak, watching the fire snake across the floor like a serpent to the bundle of dry rags and towels Mrs. Beasley had left behind; they burst—fooom!—sparkling like precious jewels. Flames of green, blue, and crimson fire surrounded the bed, each glowing like gems in the sand, in the dark, in the loneliness at the bottom of the sea.

  Some unknown strength came to Faith. She scrambled to her feet, wrapped the baby in her blanket, and stood swaying in the hot film of heat. Where was the door? Her eyes were blind with water; the child was limp in her right arm. She stretched out her hand and stumbled, hoping to touch the door by chance. Her palm fell on the hot glass of the window. Her palm blistered; the glass was spreading red with flames, darkening at its corners with smoke. It shattered, showering hot shrapnels of glass across her face.

  She shouted.

  In the hallway someone cried, “Fire! Fire!”

  “Is there anybody in there?” Another voice.

  “Some woman,” a third voice cried.

  For an instant Faith stood wide-legged, wild-eyed, clutching the blanket. The bed to her left was as red as a drop of new blood. Fire blackened the blanket in her arms. She reeled forward, sucking in breath and holding a wail as old, as ancient as the swamps before it could hit her lips. She went mad for an instant, screaming and clawing at the door. A wall of flame seven feet high rippled across its surface, glowing, sputtering, and spewing like a senile old man, changing its outlines before her eyes and assuming a shape—tall, slender, eternal: Big Todd. She called to the trembling figure, reached for it through the heaving black smoke, and felt, without pain, her fingers dissolving along his fiery face. Flames crawled along her outstretched arm, slithered up her shoulder and face and into her dark hair, igniting it like the dry head of a match. . . .

  “Want to be a maple tree?” Todd said.

  “UHH HUNH!”

  She dropped into the darkness closing around her like a stone down a well.

  Sleep.

  • • •

  This, and for a long time:

  She saw herself boiling in West Hell for her trespasses and troubled faith, whirling from burning cavern to cavern and finally falling headlong into a sea of fire. Reverend Brown had warned her, “You’ll be annihilated,” and the spirit man had prophesied her fall—“Flames from the pit will lick your bowels, your heart will explode!”

  It was happening.

  Demons, not philosopher-kings, swung from the stalactites, giggled and jeered as her flesh popped like grease in the fires; “You are nothing!” Her head was a crackling match, her blood shot out in a stream through her nose. Minotaurs and harpies danced around her and the other sinners who were immersed in filth and flowing seas of blood; serpents devoured men whole—the most fortunate there merely burst into flame. She opened her mouth, and from it shot a jet of steam: Hisssss.

  “I don’t think she’ll need that oxygen any longer,” a voice said.

  “But,” another voice replied, “she’ll die before daybreak with that collapsed left lung. . . .”

  “And after tomorrow?” a third voice said sadly.

  Silence.

  Faith opened her eye—her left one, because the right felt pasted shut. She was on her back, lying on something soft and yielding. She tried to arch her back and raise her right arm, but they stuck to the white bed clothing, their surface wrinkled and black as tar. She pulled her arm up again; it rose, but the skin remained.

  “Try to be still,” the third voice said.

  The room looked warped through her single eye, blurred and distorted. As her eye began to focus, she made out a man’s features—a thin nose, two eyes floating behind thick wire-rim glasses.

  “It’s me—Arnold. . . .”

  “Arnnn—?” Faith caught her breath—flashing into the reflection of Tippis’s glasses was a demon; a burned hairless head half destroyed but, through some act of ultimate evil, allowed to persist, its left eye a discolored globe, its right eye closed forever. The nose was gone; in its place were two empty holes. It had no ears, only gaps along the side of its head. And the mouth—a gaping, lipless maw in which swam a bright red tongue. To her horror, the movements of that mouth exactly followed her own. She tried, but could not cry out, or move her gaze from that face so hideous it would have to sneak up on a glass of water. Horrible, children, horrible! A single dark tear fell from the demon’s enormous eye. . . .

  Tippis was dressed in white, his sleeves short and ending at the elbow. He lifted Faith’s shoulders a few inches, adjusted her pillow, and took a seat by her bedside. One of the doctors opened the door to what Faith realized was a hospital room, and nodded at Tippis.

  “You’ll call if she needs anything?”

  “Yes,” Tippis said sadly. The doctors left. Tippis hunched forward in his seat, his head bowed, his hands held together between his knees. He looked at her from the corner of his left eye. “You’re in Michael Reese,” he said. “I’m a male nurse now—”

  Once again the flames leaped across her vision. She saw the wallpaper in the hotel crimpling, the ceiling raining hot plaster. “Put it out . . . please . . . the baa . . . bee—”

  Tippis looked away from her and took off his glasses. He pinched the bridge of his nose until it grew a dark color, then placed his hand on her arm, shuddering when strips of her skin stuck like soft warm plastic to his own. “Do you want to hear the worst right away?” he said.

  Faith did not answer. Her eye seemed transfixed on the sparkling acoustically sealed tiles of the ceiling. She thought of how Lavidia had looked in her casket, how she’d tasted when she kissed her, like an old wax candle. Would anyone, she wondered, kiss Faith Cross? Would the casket even be open?

  Tippis exhaled and cleared his throat loudly. It sounded like
an engine turning over. “They couldn’t even find the baby,” he said. “Mrs. Beasley’s hotel is a complete ruin. The damn thing went up like a tinderbox. She’s behind on her insurance. Won’t collect a cent. . . .” He stopped, startled by a low primeval moaning from Faith’s mouth, some primitive sound of sheer animal sorrow. Tippis leaned back, exhaled, and gripped the arms of his chair. He pressed the heels of his shoes on the floor for strength. “The doctors said your right leg is just about burned to the bone. The report—I read it—it says you suffered first-degree burns on three-fourths of your body—you’ll probably have to learn to walk with special therapeutic shoes and—” Sobbing ripped through Tippis’s throat. His hands flew to his face. “They don’t think you’ll live. . . .” When he drew his hands away his face was wet. He put his glasses on, but in minutes they were steamed. He jerked suddenly to pull himself together. The glasses slipped crooked on his bulbous nose. He didn’t seem to notice. “Faith, they’re wrong! I’ll help you climb back again!” He shook her hand, demanding a response. None came.