A Book of Common Prayer (6 page)

Marin.

Or so the two FBI men tried to tell Charlotte.

Marin who had eaten coconut ice beneath the Great Banyan at Calcutta.

Marin who had been flown to Copenhagen to see the lights at Tivoli.

Marin who was at that moment, even as the two FBI men occupied Leonard’s Barcelona chairs, even as the fat FBI man toyed with one of Leonard’s porcelain roses and even as the thin FBI man gazed over Charlotte’s head at the 10′ by 16′ silk screen of Mao Tse-tung given to Leonard by one of the Alameda Three, skiing at Squaw Valley.

Or so Charlotte tried to tell the fat FBI man.

The thin one did not seem to be listening.

I am talking here about a day in November one year before the day in November when Charlotte Douglas first appeared in Boca Grande.

One amplification. Some of what Charlotte said about the months which followed Marin’s disappearance she did not even say to me. She said it to Gerardo.

I would call that the least reliable part of what I know.

Three or four things I do know about Charlotte.

As a child of comfortable family in the temperate zone she had been as a matter of course provided with clean sheets, orthodontia, lamb chops, living grandparents, attentive godparents, one brother named Dickie, ballet lessons, and casual timely information about menstruation and the care of flat silver, as well as with a small wooden angel, carved in Austria, to sit on her bed table and listen to her prayers. In these prayers the child Charlotte routinely asked that “it” turn out all right, “it” being unspecified and all-inclusive, and she had been an adult for some years before the possibility occurred to her that “it” might not. She had put this doubt from her mind. As a child of the western United States she had been provided as well with faith in the value of certain frontiers on which her family had lived, in the virtues of cleared and irrigated land, of high-yield crops, of thrift, industry and the judicial system, of progress and education, and in the generally upward spiral of history. She was a
norteamericana
.

She was immaculate of history, innocent of politics. There were startling vacuums in her store of common knowledge. During the two years she spent at Berkeley before she ran away to New York with an untenured instructor named Warren Bogart, she had read mainly the Brontës and
Vogue
, bought a loom, gone home to Hollister on weekends and slept a great deal during the week. In those two years she had entered the main library once, during a traveling exhibition of the glass flowers from Harvard. She recalled having liked the glass flowers. From books Warren Bogart gave her to read when she was twenty Charlotte learned for the first time about the Spanish Civil War, memorized the ideological distinctions among the various PSUC brigades and POUM militia, but until she was twenty-two and Warren Bogart divined and corrected her misapprehension she believed that World War II had begun at Pearl Harbor. From Leonard Douglas she had absorbed a passing fluency in Third World power, had learned what the initials meant in Algeria and Indochina and the Caribbean, but on a blank map of the world she could not actually place the countries where the initials were in conflict. She considered the conflict dubious in any case. She understood that something was always going on in the world but believed that it would turn out all right. She believed the world to be peopled with others like herself. She associated the word “revolution” with the Boston Tea Party, one of the few events in the history of the United States prior to the westward expansion to have come to her attention. She also associated it with events in France and Russia that had probably turned out all right, otherwise why had they happened.

A not atypical
norteamericana
.

Of her time and place.

It occurs to me tonight that give or take twenty years and a thousand miles Charlotte Douglas’s time and place and my time and place were not too different.

Some things about Charlotte I never understood. She was a woman who grew faint when she noticed the blue arterial veins in her wrists, could not swim in clouded water, and once suffered an attack of acute terror while wading in water where an artesian well churned up the sand. Yet during the time she was in Boca Grande I saw her perform a number of tasks with the same instinctive lack of squeamishness I had seen that day at Millonario. I once saw her skin an iguana for stew. I once saw her make the necessary incision in the trachea of an OAS field worker who was choking on a piece of steak at the Jockey Club. A doctor had been called but the OAS man was turning blue. Charlotte did it with a boning knife plunged first in a vat of boiling rice. A few nights later the OAS man caused a scene because Charlotte refused to fellate him on the Caribe terrace, but that, although suggestive of the ambiguous signals Charlotte tended to transmit, is neither here nor there. Similarly, during the cholera outbreak that year Charlotte volunteered to give inoculations, and she did, for thirty-four hours without sleeping, until the remaining Lederle vaccine was appropriated by one of Victor’s colonels. When the colonel suggested that as a
norteamericana
she might be in a position to buy back some of the vaccine Charlotte only smiled, took off the white smock she had borrowed from the clinic, and dropped it at the colonel’s feet. For the rest of that day Charlotte sat on the edge of the Caribe pool with her feet in the water and stared at the birds circling in the white sky. She did not wear dark glasses and by five o’clock the pale skin around her eyes was burned and puffy. For a few days Charlotte spoke to Gerardo about leaving Boca Grande, but within a week she had revised the incident to coincide with her own view of human behavior and assured me that the vaccine had been taken only so that the army could lend its resources to the inoculation program. I used to think that the only event in Charlotte Douglas’s life to resist her revisions and erasures was Marin’s disappearance.

“Interesting portrait there,” the thin FBI man said, his eyes still on the 10′ by 16′ silk screen given to Leonard by one of the Alameda Three.

“Warhol,” Charlotte said.

“I would have guessed Mao.”

“Mao. Of course.” Charlotte had no idea how one of the Alameda Three had happened to come by a Warhol silk screen. Or maybe it had not been one of the Alameda Three at all, maybe it had been one of the Tacoma Eleven or some Indian or Panther or heir to a motion-picture studio, Charlotte could never keep Leonard’s clients straight. They came in packs and they ate and they asked for odd drinks and they went through her medicine cabinet and they borrowed and did not return her sweaters and they never addressed her directly and she could never remember their names. She wished that she could. She also wished that Marin would walk through the door of the house on California Street with a tow ticket tied to her windbreaker.

“You see you don’t know Marin,” she added finally. “I know her.”

The fat FBI man coughed. The other examined a matchbook he had picked up from a table.

“I mean I’m her mother.”

“Of course you are,” the fat FBI man said.

“I don’t quite follow what she’s saying about this Chinese couple,” one of the new FBI men said. It was almost time for lunch and Charlotte had not yet eaten breakfast and the house on California Street seemed to be filling with men who spoke to each other as if Charlotte were not there. “What Chinese couple.”

“The Chinese couple who come to the house,” Charlotte repeated. “And do the Peking duck.”

“I don’t quite follow what she’s talking about.”

“She’s talking about caterers, Eddie, it’s not a point.”

“Maybe if she could run through it again. Marin arrives from Berkeley. Start there. Day before yesterday. Approximately twenty hours prior to the bombing. Marin arrives from Berkeley to—”

“To borrow a windbreaker.” Charlotte spoke by rote. “To go skiing.”

“To borrow a windbreaker. But she doesn’t leave right away. She goes up to her room and she’s up there alone maybe three, four hours, ballpark figure, you aren’t sure which. Up in her room she—”

“You wanted her to tell it, Eddie, let her tell it.”

Charlotte raised her voice. “She went through some things in her drawers.”

“What things?”

“I don’t know what things. She’s eighteen years old, I don’t go through her drawers.”

“Mrs. Douglas mentioned a gold bracelet, Eddie, don’t forget the gold bracelet.”

“You mentioned a gold bracelet, Mrs. Douglas.”

“I said she found a gold bracelet she thought she’d lost.”

“In a drawer.”

“In a drawer, behind a drawer.” There was something about the gold bracelet Charlotte wanted not to think about. Marin had dropped the bracelet on the kitchen table and told Charlotte to keep it. Marin had called the bracelet “dead metal.” Charlotte wished suddenly that she had not mentioned the bracelet and she also wished suddenly that Leonard were not in Nicosia. Or Damascus. Or wherever he was. He had written out the cities and the hotels and the telephone numbers on a legal pad upstairs but Charlotte had not looked at it since he left. Her left temple was beginning to hurt and she resented the FBI men for remembering the gold bracelet.

“Now we get to the part where I call the Chinese couple and ask them to do the Peking duck.” She could hear the edge in her voice but could not control it. “All right?”

“We’re back to the Chinese couple, Eddie.”

“Caterers,” the man the others called Eddie said.

“Not exactly,” Charlotte said.

“They come to your house? They cook dinner?”

Charlotte nodded.

“Then they’re caterers. Wasn’t that kind of an exceptional thing to do, Mrs. Douglas, telephoning these caterers?”

“I don’t quite see the exceptional part.” Charlotte wished that the FBI man would not insist on calling the Chinese couple “caterers.” They were not caterers, they were a couple. Under certain circumstances which had not yet arisen they might come to the house on California Street not as cooks but as guests. Charlotte knew a lot of couples like the Chinese couple who did the Peking duck. She knew the Algerian couple who did the couscous, she knew the Indonesian couple who did the rijsttafel, she knew the Mexican couple who were actually second-generation Chicano but who did the authentic Mexican dinner, not common enchiladas and refried beans but exquisite recipes they had learned while vacationing at the Hotel Inglaterra in Tampico. She knew the Filipino couple, she knew the Korean couple. She had recently uncovered the Vietnamese couple. In the kitchen of the house on California Street these and other couples regularly reproduced the menus of underdeveloped countries around the world, but usually for twelve or twenty-four people. Charlotte had never before called one of these couples to cook for fewer than twelve. This time she had. That might be the exceptional part. She began to see calling the Chinese couple to do Peking duck for herself and Marin in a different light, a light not necessarily more revealing but different.

In this light the gold bracelet she had made Marin take had been too loose on Marin’s wrist.

In this light Marin had been too thin and pale for a child who skied and played tennis and was supposed to have spent the week before celebrating Thanksgiving off Cabo San Lucas.

In this light Charlotte had lit the fire and turned on the record-player and called the Chinese couple for the same reason she had insisted that Marin take the bracelet: to keep Marin from the harm outside.

“I mean a catered dinner for two must be quite an expensive proposition,” the FBI man said.

“They’re quite reasonable.” Charlotte spoke automatically. “Considering.”

“Catered dinner for
one
,” the FBI man said. “Technically. Since Marin didn’t stay.”

“Marin had a paper to finish before she went skiing, I told you.” Charlotte avoided the blank gaze of the FBI men. “She had a paper to finish for her seminar in I think
Moby Dick.
”

The fat FBI man spoke for the first time since the arrival of the others. “She’s not registered as a student, Mrs. Douglas, I suppose you know that.”

“Actually you should try this couple.” Charlotte spoke very clearly to shut out his voice. She did not know why she had said it was a seminar in
Moby Dick
. Marin had never mentioned any seminar in
Moby Dick
.

“She hasn’t been registered for two quarters, and the quarter before that she took all incompletes, but I’m sure you know this.”

“I mean if you like Cantonese food at all.”

Moby Dick
had something to do with Warren.

At nineteen Charlotte had written a paper on Melville and Warren had failed her. Warren had failed her and had rung her doorbell for the first time at midnight with the paper torn in half and a bag of cherries and a bottle of bourbon and they had not left the apartment for forty-eight hours. For the first three she called him Mr. Bogart and for the next forty-five she called him nothing at all and it was not until the third day, when he took her to his apartment and asked her to clean it up and she came across the letter from the department chairman advising him that his contract would not be renewed, that she ever called him Warren.

Still not looking at the FBI man Charlotte stood up and began placing their coffee cups on a tray.

“They also do a marvelous Szechuan beef thing.”

The fat FBI man signaled the others to leave the room.

“Marin’s father taught a seminar in
Moby Dick
once,” Charlotte said before she broke.

After the FBI men left that morning Charlotte went upstairs to Marin’s room. The Raggedy Ann Warren had sent for Marin’s twelfth birthday was on its shelf. The teddy bear Warren had sent for Marin’s fourteenth Easter was on its chair. The guitar once used by Joan Baez was on the windowseat, where it had been since the night Leonard bought it for Marin at an ACLU auction. The embroidered Swiss organdy curtains were as pristine as they had been the day Marin picked them out. The old valentines beneath the glass on the dressing table were unchanged, the tray of silver bangles and bath oil and eye shadow untouched. All that Marin had removed from the room was every picture, every snapshot, every clipping or class photograph, which contained her own image.