Desert of the Heart: A Novel (8 page)

“Would he?” Evelyn asked. “Why?”

“Because it’s not real,” Frances said. “One thing he taught me, one thing Reno taught me is that conventions can be a kind of trap. But you see, I forget. I want Ann to be happy, so I want her to have a beautiful, white wedding in church. And why? The only aisle I ever walked down led me to the divorce courts. The happiness I’ve had is ten years of ‘living in sin,’ whatever that means. But I slip back a little more each year now into a kind of respectability. I can’t help it. And it doesn’t matter very much for me. I’ve had what I wanted. ‘I’ve had a love of my own.’ (That’s a beautiful song.) I don’t know. Thinking about a wedding is really just a way of thinking about love, isn’t it? It’s love I want for Ann. I don’t think I really care very much how she gets it.”

“Why does she work at Frank’s Club, Frances?”

“Ask her!” Frances said. “I ask her and she just shrugs. She certainly doesn’t need the money. I don’t think it’s the place for a girl like Ann—oh, for a lark for one summer. But Ann should be someplace where she meets people of her own kind. Ann’s father was a lawyer. She belongs in a world like yours, Evelyn, among intelligent, creative people. Oh, she says, too, that she can get ideas there. There’s no other place where she’d see so much of the world go by. And maybe she’s right. But it’s terrible work, taking money from people. Don’t you think so?”

“I don’t know much about it,” Evelyn said. “But the idea certainly doesn’t appeal to me. Did Ann go to college?”

“Yes, for a while. That was my fault. I talked her father into sending her down to Mills when she was sixteen.”

“Didn’t she like it?”

“I think so really, but she was too much for them. She isn’t ordinary. She never has been. Her father wasn’t either, and he understood her.”

“What happened?”

“I never really knew much about it. They wanted her to go to a psychiatrist. Anyway, she just didn’t go back. She went to the University of Nevada for a while, but she was restless. There was her sketching. She sold her first cartoons when she was nineteen. Oh, she’ll be all right. She’s fine. I sometimes wonder why I worry at her so. And why do I tell you all about it?”

“I like to hear about Ann,” Evelyn said.

“She looks enough like you to be your daughter.”

“I know. It’s odd, isn’t it?”

“You’re the sort of mother she should have had.” Frances got up and poured herself a third drink. “Come. Have another.”

“I think I’ve had plenty,” Evelyn said, covering her glass.

“One more will do just nicely.”

“I’ll finish this first.”

“What did you come down here for?” Frances demanded. “You came down to turn off your brain.”

“Did I? All right then. One more.” Evelyn helped herself. “I really feel better.”

“So do I,” Frances said. “It does me good to be able to talk like that now and then.”

Frances’ speech had begun to blur a little, as much with tiredness as with drink. Her monologue had disintegrated, and, since Evelyn could not be primed, even by alcohol, to talk about herself, the conversation grew random and halting until it dwindled into a companionable silence.

“Well,” Evelyn said, finally, “you’re right. I’m ready to sleep.”

“Yes, so am I. Sleep well,” Frances said, patting Evelyn’s shoulder absentmindedly.

“Thank you, Frances.”

“Thank you, my dear.”

In bed, Evelyn felt the effects of drinking too much too rapidly. She could not close her eyes. One cigarette and a poem or two would be enough to settle the room. She reached for the Yeats and turned the pages slowly.

And may her bridegroom bring her to a house

Where all’s accustomed, ceremonious;

For arrogance and hatred are the wares

Peddled in the thoroughfares.

How but in custom and in ceremony

Are innocence and beauty born?

Ceremony’s a name for the rich horn,

And custom for the spreading laurel tree.

Frances offered up such a prayer for Ann. This poor, guilty non-mother of a grown child burned incense in the bathroom, worshiped a great neon cross that hummed above the church door, and waited, idling among memories and wishes, to be redeemed by a dream out of
The Ladies’ Home Journal.
Not quite fair. It was a prayer that had caught Evelyn, too. She had wanted to be “rooted in some dear, perpetual place.” Why must sentimentality be culpable? It was Frances’ ex-happiness, Mr. Childs, who had prayed this world into existence for his child, where innocence was ignorance, where custom was the business of the thoroughfares. Iconoclast, petty devil, preaching anarchy and practicing law, he had uprooted the tree, preyed on his daughter, not for her. Evelyn closed her eyes and opened them again to restore her balance. She knew nothing about these people. Her rhetoric covered her own sense of guilt. All children suffered their parents’ worlds. If she had had a child of her own, would she have done any better? Where would the child be now? She was guilty, too, not of the imagined child, but of the image of herself in Ann. They were all guilty, every man and woman who came, of the world they found. It was time she stopped pretending to be victim of it.

Evelyn dreamed lines of poetry, images, woke afraid and dreamed again. She was high above the city and could see far out across the desert the great stone images as they woke and began to move. Below her the old men on the river bank looked up and cried out, cursing and laughing at the desert birds that figured the sky in pairs. The water had turned to blood. The mist that rose was rank and warm as steam. Evelyn climbed down through it, hurrying. She came to a wood of petrified trees and ran. Far off she could hear the child calling, “Evelyn! Evelyn!” She could not answer, but she ran on. “Evelyn?” She made one terrible effort to whisper, “Yes,” and woke.

“Evelyn?”

“Yes?” Evelyn sat up. “Come in.”

She watched the doorknob turn slowly and carefully. Then Ann was in the room, smiling for Evelyn but at the cup of coffee and glass of orange juice she carried. Still half caught in her dream, Evelyn could not quite take in what she saw, the quiet, familiar room, the quiet, unfamiliar Ann. She wore a dress the color of old pewter, which was the gray of her eyes. Evelyn had not seen her in anything but trousers and a long-sleeved shirt. Her slim hips and long legs boyish, she had stalked the space of a room in boots. Now, delicate stepping and unconfined, she seemed made in the image not of Evelyn’s nightmare but of Frances’ daydream.

“How very different you look,” Evelyn said.

“I suppose I do,” Ann said, “dressed in my own clothes. I hope you don’t mind waking up.”

“Not at all,” Evelyn said. “What time is it?”

“After ten. It’s cooler today. I have to go up to Virginia City, and I wondered if you’d like to come along.”

“Virginia City?”

“It’s not very far, an hour’s drive.”

“An hour’s drive,” Evelyn repeated, out on to the desert she had seen and dreamed. She could not lock herself away from it. She looked up at Ann, waiting there. “I’d like to go.”

“Good. Can you be ready in an hour?”

“Oh, twenty minutes,” Evelyn said.

She drank her juice and coffee as she dressed, feeling reluctant and yet relieved. The desert, a derelict gold-mining town, a day in the heat both bored and frightened her. Wide awake she could not be quite so resolute, but two days in the isolation of her work had made her value human company. She was through with silence and righteous indignation.

“Now you’re to have some breakfast,” Frances said, as Evelyn came down the stairs. “If you’re going with Ann, you’ll never get any lunch. She took me with her last week and didn’t feed me a single thing until I absolutely demanded tea at four o’clock.”

“We’d had a four-course breakfast,” Ann protested.

“Coffee, juice, a piece of toast, and coffee. That’s Ann’s idea of a four-course breakfast. I’ll just scramble you an egg,” Frances said, disappearing into the kitchen.

Evelyn watched her, wondering how much Frances had to do with Ann’s invitation. If Frances had suggested it, was she thinking of Ann or of Evelyn? Probably both of them. Frances was, by nature, an organizer. She wanted to believe that happiness could be arranged. Well, perhaps it could.

“Are you going to be late for anything?” Evelyn asked, turning to Ann.

“Oh, no,” Ann said. “It’s just an errand.”

“Well, I won’t need lunch if you don’t have any.”

But they had lunch three hours later in the Bucket of Blood Saloon in Virginia City. While Ann sat at the bar, drinking draft beer and waiting for their hot dogs to be cooked, Evelyn moved away to look at the rock collections at the back of the building. They had gone first to the office of the
Territorial Enterprise,
where Ann had delivered some sketches. Then they had called on an alcoholic antique dealer who seemed to specialize in growing plants in ancient and ornate chamber pots. Ann had bought one for a friend named Silver. Up the hill from the main street was the old opera house. They had been let into the main auditorium by an attendant who had obviously run a speakeasy during prohibition. There among uncertain tourists, they walked across the sprung floor to the stage, where old posters and bits of scenery recalled the great performances of eighty years ago when Virginia City had been a city instead of a ghost town in thriving disrepair as it was now. Ann knew the facts and legends and talked with articulate energy to give Evelyn a real sense of the grand exploitation that had created and destroyed a way of life in fewer years than it took to forget the names of streets and barmaids. Without Ann, Evelyn would have been repelled by the shoddy self-consciousness of the second-rate relics, the pretentious commercial respect for so much colossal poor taste. But Ann’s attitude, which both admitted and admired the crude extravagance, the ruthless energy, the sudden death, made Evelyn vulnerable to an interest in the place. Now, studying the samples of gold and silver ore and trying to imagine the honeycomb of mines that lay beneath the town, she felt a reckless pleasure at being in a saloon called the Bucket of Blood about to eat a hot dog with a change apron from Frank’s Club. She was neither bored nor afraid. She was having a lovely time. Evelyn turned back to Ann and saw again the curious resemblance. It was as if Ann, sitting at the bar chatting with the bartender, were a much younger, freer Evelyn, an Evelyn who had never existed, at home in the world. She was a young woman no one need feel guilty of. Ann turned around and smiled. “Your hot dog’s ready.”

“I am hungry,” Evelyn admitted, taking a place beside Ann. The bartender set out mustard and relish. “I said to Ann here, I thought she brought her mother in to see us. You two sure look alike.”

“Yes,” Evelyn said. “I think we do.”

After lunch, they went to the Catholic Church, which was more like a religious dime store than a place of worship. Small gold crosses and rosaries were on sale at half price. While Evelyn looked at the priests’ robes, woven of the local cloth of gold and silver, Ann told her a story of a fire in Virginia City. It had broken out in the mines first, fed by great drafts of air and the wooden timbers, until it burst through the earth and bloomed into a garden of flames. The men had to make a fire line across the city, blasting buildings to clear a path. The Catholic Church had been in the way. One of the mine owners had said to the priest, “Let us blast the church, and I’ll build you another bigger and better than anything this town has ever seen.” “Blast away,” the priest had said. And so they dynamited the House of God to save the city. But the miner was true to his word. He built a new church not only of wood but of gold and gems, and here it stood now, long after the city had disappeared, an empty monument to faith as the opera house was to culture.

“Is it ever used as a church?” Evelyn asked.

“In the summer. Now and then the grandchild of a gold miner is married here. But it has to depend on the guilty donations of the wealthy and this sort of cut-rate simony to survive. God can’t be defeated.”

Ann took Evelyn then to the Protestant graveyard, a wasteland of dry grass and gray stone on a little hill overlooking the shallow valley. They wandered among the graves, reading the names and dates, the simple epitaphs.

“This one I’ve always loved,” Ann said, stooping.

Evelyn looked down and read aloud, “Rest, Papa, Rest.”

“I would have put it on my father’s tombstone if he hadn’t insisted on a box in the crematorium. It’s just like a general post office. He had no taste about death.”

“I’m not sure I blame him,” Evelyn said. “Would you want to be buried in a place like this?” She looked about her at the barren mountains, at the weathered wooden skeleton of the town, at the desert valley with its aging heaps of yellow slag.

“Yes,” Ann said. “I like it here.”

A wind had come up, and they stood in the shadow of a mountain. Evelyn shivered.

“Come on. It’s time to go,” Ann said, and she took Evelyn’s arm to guide her back to the main path. “There’s one other place I like to stop on the way down.”

They drove down the mountain to Geiger Point, where a few picnic tables and barbecue pits frailly furnished a landscape of outcroppings of rock and stunted trees. Here they stood together, looking down on the Washoe Valley and across to the higher mountains in the west. Evelyn tried to listen to Ann, to find each important landmark, but her imagination could not people this desert with wagon trains and Indians, which belonged to TV serials in one’s own comfortable living room. It was empty, with an open emptiness that swung up at her, that dragged her down. She seemed to be falling with the drifts and falls of buzzards, toward, then away from the giant feathers of steam that rose from the hidden hot springs far below.

“Evelyn, are you all right?”

Ann’s arm was around her shoulder. “I’m a little dizzy.”