Ancient of Days (13 page)

“Contemporary racial variations.”

“Negroes, Caucasians, Orientals?”

“I’ve already done paintings for those and some others—Oceanics, aboriginals, American Indians. The final four are up in the air because there’s unavoidable overlap. I’ll probably do Eskimos, Arabs, pygmies, and Nordics, but I could substitute Bushmen or Montagnards or Ainu somewhere in there. It’s arbitrary, of course, a way to get the number of plates up to eighteen. AmeriCred’s hollering for the last four so they can put the plates into production. Me, I’m sick of the whole rotten thing.”

“Really? You don’t enjoy doing them?”

“It’s donkeywork. I liked doing the prehistoric numbers, Adam’s portrait and all that. But these last ten are sheer commercial excess. AmeriCred wants their subscribers to pay through the nose for gewgaws. I’m a hack writing otherwise worthless potboilers.”

“Enjoy your popularity. No one’s twisting their arms.”

“It’s not that I’m doing a lousy job, but these latest plates aren’t contributing anything to the development of my art. It’s safe representational stuff. My audience consists of well-to-do old ladies and fat-cat corporate executives looking for a ‘classy’ cultural investment.” She stuck out her tongue, as if to see if there was a piece of lint or tobacco on its tip. “That’s why I’ve been so slow to finish this assignment, Paul.”

“Blame it on your pregnancy.”

“I’ve done that. It’s a lie.”

“People who regret making money are nincompoops.”

“The regret—the guilt—comes from what you do to make it. Even you know that. Right now I’m whoring.”

Adam looked up from
The Problem of Pain
. He made some signs translatable as “
Don’t talk rubbish
,” then went back to Lewis’s little piece of theodicy.

“Whoring? You didn’t feel that way about
The Celestial Hierarchy
, did you?”

“No. Those are breakthrough paintings. I avoided all the clichés—archangels with flaming swords, naked cherubs with wings on their heels, Jesus dragging his old rugged hanging tree. I did something new. It was a small miracle the series was successful. A bigger miracle it ever got commissioned.”

“It made you popular. You hadn’t bargained for that.”

“
‘How public,’
” RuthClaire quoted, “
‘like a frog.’
”

“That’s smug elitism,” I said. “It’s probably insincere, too. You pretend to despise success because there’s an old art-school attitude that figures nothing popular can be worth a damn.”

“There’s a backlash against me in the Atlanta art community because of my success. The people who count up there see my work on these stupid plates as a sellout. I do, too. Now, especially.”

“If that opinion takes in the plates you’re proud of, to hell with them.”

“It’s more complicated than that. They don’t respect what I’m doing, and I can’t truly respect it, either—not my last ten examples of porcelain calendar art, anyway.”

“They’re jealous.”

“That enters into it. But I’ve always thought myself something of a visionary. My work for AmeriCred has undermined all that. The worst thing about the backlash is that I know I’ve brought it on myself.”

The studio’s fluorescents flickered palely as the wind gusted and moaned. The yew outside the twin-paned plate glass creaked its tall shadow across our imaginations. Even Adam looked up.

“Is that another reason you came down here? To escape the disapproval of the art-scene cognoscenti?”

RuthClaire frowned. “I don’t know.” Her spirits mysteriously revived. “They
like
what Adam does. In February, Paul, the folks at Abraxas will give an entire third-floor gallery room over to an exhibition of Adam’s paintings. It’ll be in place for two weeks. Promise me you’ll come see it.”

“The West Bank,” I reminded her. “It’s hard to get away.”

“You got away in February when you visited Brian Nollinger at that primate field station north of Atlanta. Well, Abraxas is twenty miles closer to Beulah Fork than that concentration camp for our furry cousins.” A grimace of unfeigned revulsion twisted her mouth, but then her eyes were facetiously pleading. “Listen, Mr. Loyd, I’ve just made you an offer you can’t refuse. Understand?”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said. “Yes, ma’am.”

And so Adam and RuthClaire stayed with me, and Livia George drove home with me from the West Bank every evening in case my ex-wife went into labor. At the restaurant itself, we had a prearranged telephone signal. Adam, out at Paradise Farm, would dial and let the phone ring once. Then he’d hang up, wait thirty seconds, and repeat the procedure. After the second ring, no matter how busy we were, Livia George and I would sprint up the Tocqueville Road in my Mercedes to answer his call.

Atlanta’s news media finally realized that the Montarazes had left the city. They phoned the West Bank looking for a lead. Sometimes they tried to induce Edna Twiggs to give them my unlisted number at Paradise Farm. She resisted. One day at lunch, in fact, she told me how she’d turned down a bribe of money for that information. Edna Twiggs, an ally! Even so, I took the added precaution of connecting all the telephones in my house to an answering machine so that, in my absence, RuthClaire and Adam could monitor incoming calls. Fortunately, no one but me ever tried to ring them up.

I was still concerned that someone in a TV van or a newspaper company car might try to gatecrash. The Atlanta papers had recently featured headlines about Adam and RuthClaire. In the morning
Constitution
, this:

LOCAL ARTIST AND HER HABILINE HUSBAND

DISAPPEAR LATE IN HER HISTORIC PREGNANCY

In the afternoon paper, the
Journal
, this:

FOUL PLAY NOT SUSPECTED IN ABSENCE OF LOCAL ARTISTS

BUT ABRAXAS CHIEF ANXIOUS ABOUT FAMOUS PAIR

The story under this last headline reported an interview with David Blau, director of the Abraxas Gallery. Blau thought that the Montarazes were okay, but still believed they should contact him or one of his associates to confirm the fact.

“Is this guy one of the avant-garde bigwigs who think you’ve sold out?” I asked RuthClaire.

“David’s more charitable than most. He credits me with practicing a deliberate serious-commercial split.”

“Sounds like a decent enough Joe.”

“He is. That’s why I’ve got to give him a call.”

“Don’t,” I blurted. My newfound, but still tepid, regard for Edna Twiggs did not permit me to trust her totally. “Write a note. Put no return address on the envelope. I’ll mail it from Tocqueville tomorrow morning. He’ll have it the day after.”

That’s what we did. While I was in Tocqueville to mail the note, I hired a trio of private guards from a security agency in the Tocqueville Commons Mall. The first man came on duty that same afternoon.

Once the guards began their shifts, my taut nerves loosened. The likelihood of anyone’s circling the farm and coming at us by way of White Cow Creek seemed remote. It must have seemed remote to RuthClaire, too. She made up her mind to have her baby in a peaked canvas tent that she and Adam pitched beneath a pecan tree. The tent was lavender, reminiscent of the floppy conical hoods worn by Teavers, Puddicombe, and their anonymous Klan-mates on the night they came to kill Adam. I told RuthClaire so the morning after their tent first went up, its lavender surfaces sparkling with frost.

“You’re right,” she said, startled. “We bought it at a sporting-goods store in Atlanta and I never once thought of that. Maybe Adam did, though. Teavers’s robe may have kept him from coming down with pneumonia.”

“This tent won’t keep you warm. The temp today is in the twenties, RuthClaire.”

“I’ll be fine.”

“What about the baby?”

“The kid’s half habiline. Habilines are traditionally, and altogether naturally, born out of doors. The tent’s a compromise.”

“Out of doors in Africa or Haiti!”

“If it’s cold, Livia George can wrap the baby in a blanket and take it inside.”

“Then what’s the point of the stupid purple tent?”

“I’ve already told you. Don’t you listen?” She turned on her heel and stalked toward the plate-glass doors glittering above my patio deck. I followed her, shaking my head and mumbling.

Adam continued to read
The Problem of Pain
. Too, from the library in Tocqueville—a side trip I made on the same day I hired the security guards and mailed my ex’s note—he had me check out some other basic books on religious or spiritual topics:
The Screwtape Letters
by Lewis, Bunyan’s
Pilgrim’s Progress
, a young person’s guide to understanding the great world religions, an English translation of the Koran, a biography of Gandhi, Thomas Merton’s
The Seven Storey Mountain
, something called
The Alphabet of Grace
by Frederick Buechner,
The Way of the Sufi
by Idries Shah, a primer on the Talmud, and Mortimer Adler’s
How to Think About God
. Heady stuff for a habiline. I had to carry the whole lot home in a Gilman No-Tare grocery bag from our local A&P.

Adam painted during the days, read in the evenings. Ruthie Cee, on the other hand, neither painted nor read. She usually slept while Adam worked. Sometimes she watched him. (He was putting the finishing touches on a huge, semiabstract landscape featuring a tangerine-red tree that reminded me of an African baobab.) She may have occasionally prepared a meal, but if she did, she wasn’t regular about it. She had no need to be. Livia George and I scrupulously brought them at least one hot gourmet meal a day.

Saturday night at the West Bank: six or seven people standing cheerful but also mildly impatient just inside the door, waiting to be seated. Fur jackets or chic leather car coats on the ladies. The men bundled in herringbone or expensive brushed sheepskin. Cold air swirling around the newcomers like the vapor in a frozen-food bin. The phone next to the cash register rang. I looked over at the flocked divider concealing the phone. A second ring was not forthcoming.

Oh no, I thought, not
tonight
!

I smiled at a woman with a magazine-cover death mask for a face and put one hand reassuringly on the shoulder of her escort. Mentally, though, I counted to thirty. The telephone rang again.

“That’s it!” I cried. “That’s it!”

Livia George scurried in from the kitchen wiping her hands on her apron. Her heavy upper arms were bare, but she made no move to find her coat. “Gotta get goin’, Mistah Paul.” She pushed through the astonished people at the door. “Gotta he’p Miss RuthClaire birth that beautiful baby.” She hustled out the door, down the sidewalk, and into the front seat of my Mercedes, driver’s side. Helplessly, I followed, already resigned to the role of passenger.

The trip took maybe nine minutes.

Our security guard automatically passed us through the gate, and my car’s steel-belted radials flung gravel back at him as Livia George fishtailed us up the drive to the house. I was taking two steps at a time toward the front door when Livvy, at the corner of the house, shouted,

“Not that way, Mistah Paul! She in that purple pup tent out back!”

“Go on!” I urged her. “I’ve got to grab a coat!”

The warmth of the house hit me like a Gulf Coast wind. I took a jacket from the shoulders of the baby-satyr statue on which I’d draped it several days ago, pulled it on, and strode into the living room looking for a shawl or sweater for Livia George. From the back of a chair, I grabbed a peach-toned afghan. But on the way to the sliding doors I hesitated. Did I really want to see the woman I loved in the throes of childbirth? Sure. Of course I did. Wasn’t that what every sensitive with-it male wanted nowadays? Men attended classes to learn how to provide support at the Moment of Truth. Some even scrubbed and put on surgical gowns to participate in the event. If their partners were back-to-nature advocates, they might build birthing stools or prepare for underwater delivery by buying scuba-diving gear. All I had to do was slide open a plate-glass door and trip across my deck to a tent in a pecan grove.

I was no longer RuthClaire’s husband. The child in her womb owed me no genetic debt. It instead owed this paternal debt to a mute, sinewy creature right out of the early Paleolithic. Was the arrival of this squalling relic really an event I wanted to witness? My concern should have been for RuthClaire’s safety, for the health and well-being of her child—but baser impulses had me in their grip and I hesitated.

Taking a breath, I went out onto my deck. The cold hit me like an Arctic hammer stroke, but I staggered through the pillars of my silhouetted pecan trees to RuthClaire’s lavender tent. Inside the translucent smudge of the sailcloth, shadowy shapes stooped, straightened, gesticulated. Adam, I was glad to see, had taken my PowerLite into the tent. He’d even thought to tote one of the studio’s sun lamps out there, an extension cord from the deck down into the pecan grove giving me a trail to follow.

A hundred yards or so beyond the tent, a quick flash of light. I halted, blinked, looked again—but now the corridor of sentinel pecans was empty of any intruder but the keening wind.

“Mistah Paul, you better move your fanny fas’ if you wanna see this!” I moved my fanny fast. After skidding in the frost-rimed mulch, I whipped aside the tent flap, edged inside, and found RuthClaire flat on her back on a mound of blankets and ancient bed sheets spread out on a plastic drop cloth. Adam knelt to one side of his wife, but Livvy squatted between her legs—legs bundled in a pair of those ugly knit calf-warmers worn by women in aerobic-dancing classes—guiding from her womb the mocha-cream-colored product of her pregnancy.

“I told you it’d be easy!” RuthClaire cried, letting her head fall back and laughing.

Livvy did something sure-handed to the umbilical cord, then lifted the minuscule infant by its ankles, bracing its back with one hand and showing it first to Adam and then me. It was a boy, but a wizened and fragile-looking one. When Livvy slapped him on his angular buttocks, he sucked in air and wailed. Surprisingly, the sound lasted only a few brief seconds. Evolution on the Serengeti grasslands, I later came to realize, had selected for habilines whose newborns shut up in a hurry.