Callahan's Crosstime Saloon (16 page)

It was nearly four months before she finally opened up, a Thursday I believe it was. She’d been abstracted lately, still taking part in convivial banter but strangely distant too, and I was half-expecting what happened.

Doc Webster had come bustling in about nine, later than usual for him on a Thursday since he has no hospital duties that night. So he bought a round for the house and explained. If asked, the Doc will assist at home birthings, a practice he’s been at some pains to keep from the attention of both the AMA and the Suffolk County Police Department ever since the great Midwife Busts at the Santa Cruz Birth Center a few years back. Doc says that pregnant women aren’t sick, that a lady ought to call the tune at her own birthing, all other things being equal-he has oxygen and other useful things in his car, and he hasn’t lost one yet.

“She was a primipara,” he said with satisfaction, “but her pelvic clearance was adequate, presentation was classic, she did a modified Lamaze, and damned well too. Fine healthy boy, eight pounds and some, sucking like a bilge pump the last I saw him. Lord, I’m thirsty myself.”

Somehow news of new life makes you feel just plain good, and the Doc’s own joy was contagious. When the last glass had been filled, we all stood up and faced the fireplace. “TO MOTHERHOOD!” we bellowed together, and it rained glasses for a while.

And when the racket had stopped, we heard a sound from inside the joint’s single rest room, a literally unmistakable sound.

Rachel. Weeping.

Absurd situation. Over two dozen alarmed and anxious men, accustomed to dropping everything and running to anyone in pain. All of us clustered around the bathroom door (labeled “Folks”) like winos outside a soup kitchen, and not one of us with the guts to open up the damned door because there’s a lady in there. Fast Eddie’s ferocious glare would have stopped us if scruples hadn’t. Confused and mortally embarrassed, we shuffled our feet and looked for something tactful to say. Inside, the sobbing persisted, muted now.

Callahan coughed. “Rachel?”

She broke off crying. “Y … yes?”

“You gonna be long? My back teeth are floatin’.”

Pause.

“Not long, Mike. I’ll hurry.”

“Take your time,” he rumbled.

She did, but eventually the door opened and she came out, no tear tracks evident, obviously in control again. Callahan mumbled thanks, glared around at us furiously and went in.

We came to our senses and began bustling aimlessly around the room, looking at anything but Rachel, talking spiritedly. Callahan flushed it almost at once and came back out, looking as innocent as a face like that will let him. He went back behind the bar, dusting his meaty hands.

Rachel was sitting at the bar, staring at where a mirror would be if Callahan believed in encouraging narcissism: plain bare well, criss-crossed with all the epigrams, proverbs and puns Callahan’s found worth recording over the past I-don’t-know-how-many years of … ahem … flashing wit. The one she was looking at was attributed to a guy named Robinson. It said: “A man should live forever or die trying.”

“Women too, I suppose?” she asked it.

Callahan looked puzzled, and she pointed to the quote. He studied it a minute, then turned back to her.

“You got a better idea?”

She shrugged, held out her hand. The big barkeep filled it with a glass of I. W . Harper and poured one for himself. The sparkling conversation going on around the-room seemed to sort of run down. She sipped daintily … then said a word I’d never heard her use before and gulped the rest.

Then she rose from her chair and walked to the chalkline before the fire. The silence was total now.

“To Motherhood,” she said distinctly, and deep-sixed the glass. It sounded like a shattering heart.

She turned then and looked at us speculatively, trying to decide whether to cut loose of it.

“I’ve been here over three months,” she said, “and in that time I’ve had a lot of laughs. But I’ve seen some real pain, too, and I’ve seen you boys help the ones that hurt. That man with one leg; the one whose fiancee entered a nunnery, and was too devout to let himself be sad; the ski instructor who’d gone blind; poor Tom Flannery. I’ve heard much stranger stories, too, and I think if anyone can help me, you can.”

I calculate that by now I must have heard at least a hundred people ask for help of one kind or another in Callahan’s-it’s that kind of a place. I only remember one getting turned down, and he was a special case. We indicated our willingness to help any way we could, and Fast Eddie fetched her a chair and a fresh drink. She had enough composure back to thank him gently; and then she began talking. During her entire narrative, her voice remained flat, impersonal. As though she were giving a history lesson. Her first words explained why.

“It’s a long story,” she said wearily, “at least it has been for me. An uncommonly long story. It begins on the day of my birth, which is October 25,

1741.”

“Huh?” said Doc and LongDrink and I and-loudest of all-Fast Eddie. “You mean 1941,” Eddie corrected.

“Who’s telling this story? I mean 1741. And if you boys aren’t prepared to believe that, maybe I should stop right now.”

We thought about it. Compared to some of the things I’ve heard-and believed-in Callahan’s, this was nothing. Come to think, it explained a few things. Those eyes of hers, for instance.

“Sorry, Rachel,” Callahan said for all of us. “So you’re 232 years old. Go on.”

Eddie looked like he’d been hit by a truck. “Sure t’ing,” he said bravely. “Sorry I innarupted,”

And in the six or seven hours that ensued, Rachel told us the most incredible tale I have ever heard, before or since. I couldn’t repeat that tale if I tried; that uncharacteristically impersonal voice seemed to go on forever with its catalog of sorrows, outlining for us the happinesses and heartbreaks of more than two hundred years of active womanhood. You could probably drag it out of me word for word with deep hypnosis, for I never stopped listening, but the sheer length and weight of the narrative seemed to numb my forebrain for indeterminate periods of time; the aggregate memory is largely gone. But different bits and pieces stuck in the minds of each of us, and I compared notes later. Me, for instance, I recall how, when she was describing what it was like to be crammed in a root cellar while a roaring fire overhead ate her first husband-and her first six children. She kept saying over and over again how cramped it was and how frustrating not to be able to straighten up; it struck me that even after all the intervening years her mind continued to dwell on merely physical hurts. Tom Hauptman now, he remembered in detail the business of her second husband, the minister, going mad and killing her next five kids and himself because anyone who refused to age like God intended must be sent by Satan. Tom said what struck him was how little progress churches have made in two hundred years toward convincing people that the unknown is not by definition evil. LongDrink is a war games nut-he retained the part about the Battle of Lake Champlain in 1814, which claimed her third husband and two more children. Fast Eddie remembers the story of her first days as a whaler’s whore in Nantucket because she stopped in the middle and asked him solicitously if she was shocking him. (“Not me,” he said defiantly, “I’ll bet you wuz a terrific whore!” and she smiled and thanked him and continued, clinically, dispassionately.) Spud Montgomery recalls the three children that resulted from Rachel’s whoring years, because Spud’s from Alabama and never stopped fighting the Civil War and that’s what they died in. Tommy Janssen remembers her last child, the imbecile, who never did learn to feed himself and took thirty-five long years to die, because Tommy grew up with a retarded sister. Doc Webster’s strongest memory is of the final birthing, her first in a hospital, the still-born-after which the OB performed the hysterectomy. Doc identified strongly with the astonishment of a doctor faced with a patient in her late twenties whose uterus had delivered eighteen kids. Callahan characteristically recalls the man she was married to at the time, the first man since her psychotic minister to whom she felt she could tell the truth, with whom she did not have to cosmetically “age” herself, with whom she could share her lonely, terrible secret; the gentle and strangely understanding man who cured her of her self-loathing and self-fear and accepted her for what she inexplicably was; the good and loving man who had been killed, mugged for the dollar and a half in his pocket, a month or two before Rachel found Callahan’s Place.

But not one of us retains anything like the complete text of Rachel’s story. We wouldn’t want to if we could, for condensing it into a comprehensibility would turn it into a soap opera. And, probably, we couldn’t if we tried. If somebody gave me a guaranteed-accurate rundown of my own future in that kind of depth, I don’t think I’d remember much more. It was one king hell mountain of a tale, and it displaced its own weight in alcohol as the hours of its telling dragged by.

Me, I’m thirty-five years old, and I have been there and back again, and when Rachel finished her virtually uninterrupted narration I felt like a five-year- old whose greatgrandmother has just recited the Story of Her Life in horrific detail.

In the dead silence that grew from Rachel’s last words there just didn’t seem to be anything to say to her, no words in all my experience that wouldn’t sound banal -like telling a leper that it’s always darkest before the dawn. Not that there had been agony in her voice at any time during her recital, nor any on her face when she finished. That was the most ghastly thing about her tale; it was delivered with the impersonal detachment of an historian, recited like the biography of one long dead. You Are There At The Battle of Lake Champlain.

Oh, there was pain aplenty in her story, sure-but so buried, under two centuries of scars, that it could only be inferred. And yet the pain had been there earlier, had broken through to the surface for a moment at least, when Rachel had cried. How? Why?

I became peripherally aware of the men of Callahan’s Place, arrayed around me with their mouths open. Even Callahan looked pole-axed-and that almost scared me. I glanced around, looking for even one face that held some kind of answer, some kind of consolation, some word for Rachel.

And found one. Fast Eddie’s mouth was trembling, but there were words in it struggling to get out. He couldn’t seem to bring himself to speak, but he looked like he sure and hell wanted to.

Callahan saw it too. “You look like you got something to say, Eddie,” he said gently.

Eddie seemed to reach a decision all at once. Whirling to face Callahan, he jammed his hands in his hip pockets and snarled-snarled!-” Who ast you? I got nuttin’ to say.”

Callahan started, and if I’d had any capacity for shock left I’d have been shocked. Eddie barking at Callahan? It was like watching Lassie sink her fangs into Tommy’s leg.

“Eddie, ” Doc Webster began reasonably, “if you have any words that might help Rachel here I think you ought to

“SHADDAP!” Eddie blared. “I tell ya I got nuttin’ to say, see?”

The silence returned, and stayed a while. We could only surmise that Rachel’s tale of sorrow had unhinged the banty little piano player. Creeping Jesus, it had near unhinged me-and I wasn’t in love with her. The central issue, then, was still Rachel. Well … if Eddie had nothing to say, who did?

Who else?

“So all you have left is immortality, eh Rachel?” Callahan rumbled. “Tough break.”

That did seem to put a little perspective on it. Surely Rachel’s run of bad luck was due to change soon. It was only logical. “Sure, Rachel,” I said, beginning to cheer up. “You’re bound to start getting the breaks anytime now.”

But it was no good. There was a smile on her face, but not a happy one.

“It figures,” LongDrink said hurriedly. “You can have a run of bad cards that seems to last forever, but sooner or later you pick up your hand and find four aces. It’s just the Law of Averages, Rachel. Things always even out in the end.”

“Sorry boys,” Rachel said, still smiling sadly. “Nice try. I understand what you’re saying-but there are a couple of holes in the logic. Two incorrect assumptions, one of them your mistake and one of them mine.”

“What mistakes?” Callahan asked, his rugged face wrinkled in thought.

“Your mistake first, Mike. It’s a natural one, I suppose, but it’s a mistake just the same. What makes you think I’m immortal?”

“Eh?”

“I’m older than any four of you put together, yes. But longevity is not immortality. Mike, nothing is immortal: ask Dorian Gray. My clock runs as slow as his did-but it runs.”

“But you …”

“… look a lot younger than 232 years old,” she finished. “Right. I look like I’m maybe crowding thirty. But Mike: what’s my natural lifespan?”

He started to answer, than shut up, looking thoughtful. Who the hell knew?

“Someday I will die,” Rachel went on, “just like you, like Tom Flannery. Like all humans; like all living things. I know that, I feel it in my bones. And there isn’t a geriatrics expert in the world who can say when. There is no data to work with; as far as I know I am unique.”

“I reckon you’re right,” Callahan conceded, “but so what? Anyone in this room could die tomorrow-we’re all under sentence of death, like you said. But to stay sane a body just has to live as though they’ll go on forever, assume there’s a lot of years left. Hellfire, Tom Flannery lived that way, and he knew better. Maybe there ain’t no way to figure the odds for you-but if I was an insurance salesman, I’d love to have your business. Jake and LongDrink are right: there’s good times around the corner, always, and I bet you live to see ‘em.

“I may not be as old as you, Rachel, but there’s one thing I’ve learned in the time I have been around: joy always equals pain in the long run.”

She shook her head impatiently and sighed. “The second mistake, Mike. The one that’s my fault, in a way. You see, the most spectacular points of the story I’ve told you all tonight are the bad times, and so it must seem like I’ve just always been a hard-luck kid. But that’s not so at all. I’ve known happiness too, in full measure, with Jacob and Isaiah and even with Benjamin, and most of all with my second and most beloved Jacob. There were good times in Nantucket if it comes to that, and throughout the whoring years; the profession is vastly underrated. And my joys have been greater, I think, than any of you could know - because you are correct, Mike: joy is the product of the pain that has gone before it, and vice versa. I know I could never have appreciated Jacob’s quiet acceptance as much if I hadn’t been looking for it for two centuries.