The Shirt On His Back (39 page)

How could I have
left her? How could I have done this to her
—?

The money belt
around his waist felt like a penitential cincture of spikes. Pictures flashed
through his mind as if he hadn't seen them, dreamed them, for months: the house
shut up and dark, the horrible race to Olympe's house for news of her . . . if
Olympe was even alive, after the fever seasons of the summer . . . (She had
been in August, Rose had written, and her daughter Zizi-Marie was being courted
by a tailor . . .)

In the worst of
his dreams, Olympe's house, too, was closed up, or already sold to strangers .
. .

Quiet as the
town was, in the brazen heat, it felt strange to see so many people. Crowded.
The houses seemed close together after the wind-combed distances of the Plains.
They seemed small, too, as if like Gulliver he could knock them over accidentally
with a careless elbow. After the mountains, all the world seemed achingly flat,
and the reek of mildew, sewage and smoke felt new and harsh in his nostrils.
Lights glowed in French windows through the blue twilight. Behind shut
jalousies, shadows moved, and he heard friends' laughter and someone playing
the piano, music he had not heard in half a year. He was aware of Shaw and
Hannibal talking behind him, and it was as if they spoke Chinese; not a word
they said penetrated his mind through the pain of anxiety, of hope, of fear.

Lights in the
big Spanish house, golden striped rectangles in the indigo dark.

To hell with
them,
January thought and broke into a run.

'I'm sorry,'
said Olympe, who was standing on the porch to catch the night breeze, 'Rose decided
you weren't coming back and has married a plumber.'

'Olympe—!'
Dominique - January's youngest sister, beautiful as ever in lacy white -
tapped Olympe's arm sharply with her fan.

The world remade
itself, fell back into place with a sense of almost physical jolt. Then from
inside the house, January heard the cry of a child. And his heart turned to
light within him, like the exploding of a star.

He thrust his
way past his sisters, through the French doors into Rose's bedroom. She was
propped on the bed in the lamplight with her silky walnut-brown braids spread
around her and the most perfect, the most beautiful, the strongest and rosiest
and most magical baby ever born at her breast.

January's mother
sat in the chair at her bedside. Dominique's maid Therese was preparing a
little bed in a basket. The room still held the faint echoes of birth smells,
of blood and sweat, and as January dropped to his knees beside the bed Rose
smiled at him, with a kind of sleepy acceptance that
of course
he would walk
through the door at this hour. His mother said, 'Hmnph. It's about time you
showed up, Benjamin.'

January put his
arms around Rose and the infant and laid his face beside hers on the pillow.
Thank you, God; thank you God thank you God
thankyouthankyouGodthankyouGod . . .
He felt both as
if he couldn't breathe, and as if all he could do was breathe the scent of
them, the peace of this room, forever.
I didn 't die and they didn 't die and I have two hundred
dollars here around my waist . . .

He felt her
stroke his hair. 'Journeys end in lover's meetings,' she said and kissed his
forehead. And then, as her fingers touched the new-healing scar above his
hairline, 'Benjamin, did you get scalped?'

'Yes,' he said.
'Well, almost.'

'Show-off. You
came back just in time.' She smiled at him as he brought his head up to kiss
her hand, her lips, the baby's downy head. 'I was going to name him Polycrates
Ishbosheth, but now you're here, you can think of something.'

'You were going
to call him nothing of the kind!' protested Dominique, coming through the
French door. The room was suddenly filled with people: Hannibal and Therese and
Rose's friend Cora and Olympe - astounding to see Olympe in the same room with
their mother - and Olympe's husband Paul, all beaming, as if the world had been
suddenly healed and made well. Even Shaw, standing with one bony shoulder
leaned on the French door out on to the gallery, seemed for the first time in
half a year to relax, looking on this gathering of family and friends not his
own, this quiet place of lamplight and new life and love. Rose drew her shawl
over her breast and the baby's tiny face. January had seen, and had in fact
delivered, hundreds of babies, but this child was different.

My child. Rose's
child.

My son
.

He wanted to
shout or laugh or burst into tears. The world would be different from now on.

'I thought
Tiberius sounded strong,' went on Dominique, 'but Olympe says it's too fancy;
Maman says it should be Denis, for M'sieu Janvier—' Dominique's father, who for
many years had been their mother's protector.

'Of course it
should be Denis,' snapped their mother, as if the matter were self-evident.

Olympe rolled
her eyes. Unusually for Olympe, she didn't
make her usual
sarcastic comment. So great was the joy of the hour that it would mellow even
her.

'What's wrong
with calling him Benjamin?' asked Olympe's husband Paul.

'If you don't
mind -' through the gathering of friends and family, of the people who'd made
it possible for him to live again after Ayasha's death, January looked across at
Shaw, alone between lamplight and darkness - 'and with your permission, sir,
I'd like to name him John.'

'Maestro,' said
Shaw, after a moment's startled silence, 'thank you. I - an' my brother - would
be most honored.'