Bodies and Souls (8 page)

But Carlos removed his hand before she could speak, and studied her for a moment in silence. Then he took her right hand in both of his.

Oh, no, not more of the same, Judy thought, and said aloud, “What courses are you teaching this semester, Carlos?”

But he did not answer her question. He spoke as if he hadn’t heard. “I am going to read your palm,” he said.

“Well!” Judy exclaimed, startled. “Can you actually do it? I didn’t know you were so talented. Oh, yes, of course, now I remember—you did it last spring at the fair for the hospital. But I thought it was all a joke.”

“Not at all,” Carlos said. “You would be amazed at all the talents I possess.” He paused to let the innuendo settle, then went on. “But it is true, I can read palms. I have been trained, I have studied, and it is in my blood from Gypsy ancestors.”

“That’s so interesting, Carlos, but you know I’d really rather not—” Judy tried subtly to withdraw her hand from his.

“What’s the matter?” he asked, smiling, not releasing her hand. “Are you afraid that I’ll reveal some secret?”

“Of course not!” Judy declared. She was trapped. She could not bear to let him think she had anything to hide, and she didn’t really believe in what he was doing.

“Good,” Carlos said. “Then I will read your palm. The question is—how honest shall I be?”

Judy smiled. “Be perfectly honest, Carlos, of course.”

Carlos turned her hand slowly in his, studying it all around. Then, with a little flourish, he took the four fingers and laid them back flat in his right hand, exposing her palm with an air so triumphant that Judy quickly glanced at her hand as if expecting to see something amazing there. But it was only her familiar palm, crosshatched with two sets of parallel lines that ran like avenues, one horizontally, one diagonally, across it. Between one avenue and her thumb a smaller and more intricate network of lines lay; it all made her think of the map of a very small suburb.

“Ah, yes,” Carlos said. “I see. You have a strong, good life line, and you are excellent at handling money. But—this is very interesting. You have an astonishing private life. You have secrets, hidden deep within you. There are obvious things here, too—you are generous, kind, loving, immensely capable—”

“Is Carlos reading your hand?” It was Nina Sloan, calling to Judy from the other side of the fireplace. Without waiting for Judy’s reply she turned to the couple sitting near her and said, laughing, “That Carlos. He can find more ways to compliment a woman than there are stars in the sky!”

Nina’s comment distracted Judy, and for the next few minutes she listened with impatience as Carlos peered into what she suddenly felt to be an embarrassingly ordinary hand. He was saying pleasant enough things—but then he had known her for
years
now, and there was nothing he was telling her that he hadn’t already discovered by simply living in the same town with her. She almost snatched her hand back, but then he spoke with sudden authority, almost sharply.

“Judy. Listen to me. You think I am a charlatan, I know. But I see something here I want to tell you. Something you should know.”

Judy glanced around quickly to be certain that no one else was listening. “Well, what?” she asked, hoping by her smile to let Carlos know just what a joke she thought all this was.

“I am only an amateur at this, and yet the lines are so clear. They show that something happened to you when you were a child. I can’t see what. Perhaps a death, an accident, a siege of misery. But something happened to you before you were eighteen, and nothing that bad will ever happen to you again in your life.”

“Carlos, are you sure?” Judy cried. She was completely entranced. She stared in surprise at her hand, feeling gratitude. “Please tell me all that again.”

Carlos repeated it: something terrible had happened to her when she was young; nothing that bad would ever happen to her again.

“God, how I wish you had told me this years ago!” she whispered, then sat back quietly for a moment, stunned. All the nights she had spent worrying about her children—their illnesses when they were small, their lateness when they were teenagers riding in other teenagers’ cars—and yet, here they both were, safe and sound. If only she had known! When she thought about it, she supposed it was not too much to expect from Fate, because something terrible
had
happened to her as a child.

“You look rattled, Judy,” said another guest, a woman. “Has Carlos struck a nerve?”

“No, no,” Judy said, moving from the internal to the social with only a slight shiver at the change. “It’s just that Carlos really seems to know what he’s doing.”

“Oh, how exciting! Carlos, come share your talents—come read
my
palm.”

And Carlos left Judy’s side. But Judy didn’t mind, she had suddenly become very tired. She made the effort to talk politely with the other guests, but over and over in her mind she was thinking: Oh, dear Lord, what if Carlos is right? What a relief it would be to live out her life, knowing that the worst had already happened!

After that night, Judy had seen Carlos read other people’s hands at parties, but she had avoided him. She was aware that he was more entertainer than seer, and she did not want to be disillusioned by having him read her hand again only to give her a completely different interpretation of what he had seen, or claimed to have seen.

Judy knew that very few people have perfectly happy childhoods, but there are degrees of happiness and misery, so that looking back, a person can say: Well, after all, I was fortunate.

When Judy summed up her childhood, she thought: Well, after all, I did not die of misery, and it did test my mettle and strengthen my character and show me what is important in life.

Money
was what was important in life. Money was the most important thing. If she could have changed anything, she would have chosen to lose her father or her mother or her brother rather than to lose what her family had so stupidly,
stupidly
lost—their money.

When she had been a little girl, there had been plenty of money, and all the nice things that it could buy: a canopy bed for her room, candy after school for her and her brother, bikes and roller skates, trips to the ocean, Easter outfits complete with white gloves and white patent-leather shoes. All of Judy’s friends and Judy’s parents’ friends had more or less the same amount of money, and it seemed in fact that everyone in their small New England town had the same amount of money, so for Judy as a child, life spread around her like the prosperous green fields which surrounded the town: as far as her eye could see, abundance was the rule.

When she was ten, Judy had her first epiphany. She sat in church, not listening to the minister (he droned; he was boring). Instead, she moved her wrist in and out of the block of sunshine that fell across her lap so she could see the way her silver (real sterling silver) charm bracelet caught the light. And she realized why people came to church. It couldn’t be because they wanted to hear the minister’s sermon—he really was often boring! It was to see other people, to show off new clothes, to say thank you to God. She
was not an especially spiritual child, but she did always remember to say thank you to God.

So it seemed a personal slap in the face by God when Judy’s family lost their money. It was even worse because they lost their money because they followed their Christian beliefs. What fools they had been, Judy thought, what
fools
! And she could never forgive them for their stupidity or God for His treachery.

After her thirteenth birthday, life began to unravel with the determined rhythm of a pavané. Each step her parents took moved them further along the ritual of their undoing. They went bankrupt with unswerving grace.

“Did you have a chance to ask Rupert about that bill?” Judy’s mother would ask Judy’s father as they drove home from church.

“I saw him, but I didn’t mention the money,” Judy’s father would reply. “I don’t suppose church is the proper place to discuss business.”

“No, you’re right,” Judy’s mother would agree, and then there would be a silence between the two grown-ups that was so powerful and sad that Judy and her brother, sitting in the backseat of the car, felt it chill their skins like rain.

Later that year, Judy became aware that her parents spent less and less time entertaining people and going out with friends and more and more time sitting together in the living room, talking in low voices. The grown-ups did not like the children to hear their conversations, but of course Judy eavesdropped, as did her older brother; and they realized that a mysterious sorrow was taking over their family and they needed to know the cause.

The cause was simple and crass. Their father owned a large wallpaper and paint store, the only one in their small town. Individuals came to the store to buy three rolls of this or a quart of that, but most of the business was with contractors doing major jobs for building developers. These men were her father’s friends; some even attended the same church. So when they asked for credit on their purchases, it seemed only right to give it to them, and then long-term credit, because of extenuating circumstances.… Judy was too young to understand it all, and her parents did not think to call the children into the living room to explain it to them. But what developed over the course of the year was that Judy’s father continued to give the men their wallpaper and paint in spite of the fact that these men did not pay him; and he continued to pay the conglomerates from which he ordered the paint and wallpaper, in spite of the fact that he had to take it out of his own
pocket, because he believed that his friends would pay him back when they could. But they did not pay him back. Some eventually took bankruptcy, some left town, and Judy’s father finally had to declare bankruptcy, too.

Bankruptcy
. The ugliest of words. Judy heard the word over and over again as she listened at the living-room door, which by this time was always closed when her parents were in there, as if they wanted to protect the rest of the house from a growing, pervasive contamination. Judy heard this ugly word, bankruptcy, and could envision it exactly: the rupturing of their lives, a mortal wound, a horrid tear that let all the money that made their lives beautiful spill out into the void, leaving them empty and desolate. Judy thought she would rather be dead than so suddenly poor.

And the worst of it was that her parents had been such fools about it, such saps! She would never, ever, forgive them for their irresponsible set of values. They actually tried to live a life that conformed to the teachings of the Bible!

Hiding at the crack in the living-room door, Judy would hear her mother speak: “Listen, Will, I’ve found the passage the minister read in church this morning.

“ ‘Jesus said unto him, if thou wilt be perfect, go and sell what thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven: and come and follow me. But when the young man heard that saying, he went away sorrowful: for he had great possessions.

“ ‘Then said Jesus unto his disciples, Verily I say unto you, that a rich man shall hardly enter into the kingdom of heaven.

“ ‘And again I say unto you, It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of the needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God.’ ”

“But Mr. Watson is not POOR!” Judy would want to scream through the door. “Why can’t you see that? You’re not helping a poor man, you’re helping a rich man, and you’re hurting your own family!”

But there was nothing she could do. She was only thirteen, and it was all so complicated, and it all happened so fast. In one year she witnessed a regular flowing away of all she loved, while her parents cried gently and reread the parable of the Eye of the Needle. Then, with a fluid continuity, things began to disappear from their lives: the silver, antiques, and finally the house were all sold. The vacations disappeared—and then so did the work.

Judy’s father started off optimistically enough each day of that long bruised time. As she dressed for school, she would hear him whistling, and see him, clean and shaved
and dapper, going out the front door. But when she returned from school in the afternoons, she would find her father lying on the living-room sofa, dressed in old slacks and a sweater, a newspaper hiding his face; he had sagged into the sofa with all the heavy passivity of a bum on a park bench.

Judy could no longer bring friends home. And she was no longer invited to the homes of former friends. She had moved, away from the gracious section of town where her life had begun, and she was learning with cruel sharpness that life was not a stretch of prosperous pastures for everyone. Her friends were not mean to her. They did not taunt her. They just forgot her. They would swish by her in the halls at school, in their full skirts with cancan petticoats trimmed in matching material, and they would hardly take time to flash a quick smile and say hello. Judy felt stranded, estranged, diseased. She did not like the people her age in her new neighborhood; she had nothing in common with them, coming from such dissimilar backgrounds. Generally the kids in her new neighborhood were the dummies, the wise guys in her class. As the years went by, those kids grew tough and insolent and bold, fortified by their own company;
they
were the ones who taunted Judy. As the months passed and she showed no sign of wanting to become one of them, the taunts changed in tone. At first they only called her “snob” and “creep,” but she quickly gained the labels “bitch” and “whore.” She was smart enough to know that these taunts did not mean they thought she was actually a whore, but simply that they hated her, and were discomfited by having her intrude into their lives. Still, that her own superiority was the only refuge she had in life was a cold knowledge.

In the beginning, when the drastic changes in her family’s life had just begun, Judy had been naïve enough to assume that God would reach down an invisible remunerative hand and reward her parents for living a truly Christian life. But this did not happen. In fact, it seemed that almost the reverse happened, for at church the people who had greeted Judy’s family with such warmth now greeted them with condescension. Judy learned that even in church there was one cardinal rule: A rich man is loved more than a poor man. A church, after all, is a business, too. Not one person in the church thought that Judy’s father had been virtuous and kind; they all thought he had been a fool, or so it seemed from their treatment of him. Friends flowed away from the family’s life as if they were being carried away on the current of rapidly vanishing money.