'Just let me call my husband. Tell him I'll be late.'

'You do that,' Martha said, and while Darcy used the telephone, Martha checked in her bag one more time just to make sure the precious book was still there.

The ca.s.serole - as much of it as the two of them could use, anyway - was eaten, and they had each had a beer. Martha asked Darcy again if she was sure she wanted to hear the rest. Darcy said she did.

'Because some of it ain't very nice. I got to be up front with you about that. Some of it's worse'n the sort of magazines the single men leave behind em when they check out.'

Darcy knew the sort of magazines she meant, but could not imagine her trim, clean little friend in connection with any of the things pictured in them. She got them each a fresh beer, and Martha began to speak again.

'I was back home before I woke up all the way, and because I couldn't remember hardly any of what had gone on at Mama Delorme's, I decided the best thing - the safest thing - was to believe it had all been a dream. But the powder I'd taken from Johnny's bottle wasn't a dream; it was still in my dress pocket, wrapped up in the cellophane from the cigarette pack. All I wanted to do right then was get rid of it, and never mind all the bruja in the world. Maybe I didn't make a business of going through Johnny's pockets, but he surely made a business of going through mine, 'case I was holding back a dollar or two he might want.

'But that wasn't all I found in my pocket - there was something else, too. I took it out and looked at it and then I knew for sure I'd seen her, although I still couldn't remember much of what had pa.s.sed between us.

'It was a little square plastic box with a top you could see through and open. There wasn't nothing in it but an old dried-up mushroom - except after hearing what 'Tavia had said about that woman, I thought maybe it might be a toadstool instead of a mushroom, and probably one that would give you the night-gripes so bad you'd wish it had just killed you outright like some of em do.

'I decided to flush it down the commode along with that powder he'd been sniffing up his nose, but when it came right down to it, I couldn't. Felt like she was right there in the room with me, telling me not to. I was even scairt to look into the livin-room mirror, case I might see her standin behind me.

'In the end, I dumped the little bit of powder I'd taken down the kitchen sink, and I put the little plastic box in the cabinet over the sink. I stood on tiptoe and pushed it in as far as I could - all the way to the back, I guess. Where I forgot all about it.'

She stopped for a moment, drumming her fingers nervously on the table, and then said, 'I guess I ought to tell you a little more about Peter Jefferies. My Pete's novel is about Viet Nam and what he knew of the Army from his own hitch; Peter Jefferies's books were about what he always called Big Two, when he was drunk and partying with his friends. He wrote the first one while he was still in the service, and it was published in 1946. It was called Blaze of Heaven.'

Darcy looked at her for a long time without speaking and then said, 'Is that so?'

'Yes. Maybe you see where I'm going now. Maybe you get a little more what I mean about natural fathers. Blaze of Heaven, Blaze of Glory.'

'But if your Pete had read this Mr Jefferies's book, isn't it possible that - '

'Course it's possible,' Martha said, making that pshaw gesture herself this time, 'but that ain't what happened. I ain't going to try and convince you of that, though. You'll either be convinced when I get done or you won't. I just wanted to tell you about the man, a little.'

'Go to it,' Darcy said.

'I saw him pretty often from 1957 when I started working at Le Palais right through until 1968 or so, when he got in trouble with his heart and liver. The way the man drank and carried on, I was only surprised he didn't get in trouble with himself earlier on. He was only in half a dozen times in 1969, and I remember how bad he looked - he was never fat, but he'd lost enough weight by then so he wasn't no more than a stuffed string. Went right on drinking, though, yellow face or not. I'd hear him coughing and puking in the bathroom and sometimes crying with the pain and I'd think, Well, that's it; that's all; he's got to see what he's doing to himself; he'll quit now. But he never. In 1970 he was only in twice. He had a man with him that he leaned on and who took care of him. He was still drinking, too, although anybody who took even half a glance at him knew he had no business doing it.

The last time he came was in February of 1971. It was a different man he had with him, though; I guess the first one must have played out. Jefferies was in a wheelchair by then. When I come in to clean and looked in the bathroom, I seen what was hung up to dry on the shower-curtain rail -continence pants. He'd been a handsome man, but those days were long gone. The last few times I saw him, he just looked raddled. Do you know what I'm talking about?'

Darcy nodded. You saw such creatures creeping down the street sometimes, with their brown bags under their arms or tucked into their shabby old coats.

'He always stayed in 1163, one of those corner suites with the view that looks toward the Chrysler Building, and I always used to do for him. After awhile, it got so's he would even call me by name, but it didn't really signify - I wore a name-tag and he could read, that was all. I don't believe he ever once really saw me. Until 1960 he always left two dollars on top of the television when he checked out. Then, until '64, it was three. At the very end it was five. Those were very good tips for those days, but he wasn't really tipping me; he was following a custom. Custom's important for people like him. He tipped for the same reason he'd hold the door for a lady; for the same reason he no doubt used to put his milk-teeth under his pillow when he was a little fellow. Only difference was, I was the Cleanin Fairy instead of the Tooth Fairy.

'He'd come in to talk to his publishers or sometimes movie and TV people, and he'd call up his friends - some of them were in publishing, too, others were agents or writers like him - and there'd be a party. Always a party. Most I just knew about by the messes I had to clean up the next day - dozens of empty bottles (mostly Jack Daniel's), millions of cigarette b.u.t.ts, wet towels in the sinks and the tub, leftover room service everywhere. Once I found a whole platter of jumbo shrimp turned into the toilet bowl. There were gla.s.s-rings on everything, and people snoring on the sofa and floors, like as not.

'That was mostly, but sometimes there were parties still going on when I started to clean at ten-thirty in the morning. He'd let me in and I'd just kinda clean up around em. There weren't any women at those parties; those ones were strictly stag, and all they ever did was drink and talk about the war. How they got to the war. Who they knew in the war. Where they went in the war. Who got killed in the war. What they saw in the war they could never tell their wives about (although it was all right if a black maid happened to pick up on some of it). Sometimes - not too often - they'd play high-stakes poker as well, but they talked about the war even while they were betting and raising and bluffing and folding. Five or six men, their faces all flushed the way white men's faces get when they start really socking it down, sitting around a gla.s.s-topped table with their shirts open and their ties pulled way down, the table heaped with more money than a woman like me will make in a lifetime. And how they did talk about their war! They talked about it the way young women talk about their lovers and their boyfriends.'

Darcy said she was surprised the management hadn't kicked Jefferies out, famous writer or not - they were fairly stiff about such goings-on now and had been even worse in years gone by, or so she had heard.

'No, no, no,' Martha said, smiling a little. 'You got the wrong impression. You're thinking the man and his friends carried on like one of those rock-groups that like to tear up their suites and throw the sofas out the windows. Jefferies wasn't no ordinary grunt, like my Pete; he'd been to West Point, went in a Lieutenant and came out a Major. He was quality, from one of those old Southern families who have a big house full of old paintings where everyone's ridin hosses and looking n.o.ble. He could tie his tie four different ways and he knew how to bend over a lady's hand when he kissed it. He was quality, I tell you.'

Martha's smile took on a little twist as she spoke the word; the twist had a look both bitter and derisive.

'He and his friends sometimes got a little loud, I guess, but they rarely got rowdy - there's a difference, although it's hard to explain - and they never got out of control. If there was a complaint from the neighboring room - because it was a corner suite he stayed in, there was only the one - and someone from the front desk had to call Mr Jefferies's room and ask him and his guests to tone it down a little, why, they always did. You understand?'

'Yes.'

'And that's not all. A quality hotel can work for people like Mr Jefferies. It can protect them. They can go right on partying and having a good time with their booze and their cards or maybe their drugs.'

'Did he take drugs?'

'h.e.l.l, I don't know. He had plenty of them at the end, G.o.d knows, but they were all the kind with prescription labels on them. I'm just saying that quality - it's that white Southern gentleman's idea of quality I'm talking about now, you know - calls to quality. He'd been coming to Le Palais a long time, and you may think it was important to the management that he was a big famous author, but that's only because you haven't been at Le Palais as long as I have. Him being famous was important to them, but it was really just the icing on the cake. What was more important was that he'd been coming there a long time, and his father, who was a big landowner down around Porterville, had been a regular guest before him. The people who ran the hotel back then were people who believed in tradition. I know the ones who run it now say they believe in it, and maybe they do when it suits them, but in those days they really believed in it. When they knew Mr Jefferies was coming up to New York on the Southern Flyer from Birmingham, you'd see the room right next to that corner suite sort of empty out, unless the hotel was full right up to the scuppers. They never charged him for the empty room next door; they were just trying to spare him the embarra.s.sment of having to tell his cronies to keep it down to a dull roar.'

Darcy shook her head slowly. 'That's amazing.'

'You don't believe it, honey?'

'Oh yes - I believe it, but it's still amazing.'

That bitter, derisive smile resurfaced on Martha Rosewall's face. 'Ain't nothing too much for quality . . . for that Robert E. Lee Stars and Bars charm . . . or didn't used to be. h.e.l.l, even / recognized that he was quality, no sort of a man to go hollering Yee-haw out the window or telling Rastus P. c.o.o.n jokes to his friends.

'He hated blacks just the same, though, don't be thinking different . . . but remember what I said about him belonging to the son-of-a-b.i.t.c.h tribe? Fact was, when it came to hate, Peter Jefferies was an equal-opportunity employer. When John Kennedy died, Jefferies happened to be in the city and he threw a party. All of his friends were there, and it went on into the next day. I could barely stand to be in there, the things they were saying -about how things would be perfect if only someone would get that brother of his who wouldn't be happy until every decent white kid in the country was f.u.c.king while the Beatles played on the stereo and the colored (that's what they called black folks, mostly, "the colored", I used to hate that sissy, pantywaist way of saying so much) were running wild through the streets with a TV under each arm.

'It got so bad that I knew I was going to scream at him. I just kept telling myself to be quiet and do my job and get out as fast as I could; I kept telling myself to remember the man was my Pete's natural father if I couldn't remember anything else; I kept telling myself that Pete was only three years old and I needed my job and I would lose it if I couldn't keep my mouth shut.

'Then one of em said, "And after we get Bobby, let's go get his candy-a.s.s kid brother!" and one of the others said, "Then we'll get all the male children and really have a party!"

' "That's right!" Mr Jefferies said. "And when we've got the last head up on the last castle wall we're going to have a party so big I'm going to hire Madison Square Garden!"

'I had to leave then. I had a headache and belly-cramps from trying so hard to keep my mouth shut. I left the room half-cleaned, which is something I never did before nor have since, but sometimes being black has its advantages; he didn't know I was there, and he sure didn't know when I was gone. Wasn't none of them did.'

That bitter derisive smile was on her lips again.

'I don't see how you can call a man like that quality, even as a joke,' Darcy said, 'or call him the natural father of your unborn child, whatever the circ.u.mstances might have been. To me he sounds like a beast.'

'No!' Martha said sharply. 'He wasn't a beast. He was a man. In some ways - in most ways - he was a bad man, but a man is what he was. And he did have that something you could call 'quality' without a smirk on your face, although it only came out completely in the things he wrote.'

'Huh!' Darcy looked disdainfully at Martha from below drawn-together brows. 'You read one of his books, did you?'

'Honey, I read them all. He'd only written three by the time I went to Mama Delorme's with that white powder in late 1959, but I'd read two of them. In time I got all the way caught up, because he wrote even slower than I read.' She grinned. 'And that's pretty slow!'

Darcy looked doubtfully toward Martha's bookcase. There were books there by Alice Walker and Rita Mae Brown, Linden Hills by Gloria Naylor and Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down by Ishmael Reed, but the three shelves were pretty much dominated by paperback romances and Agatha Christie mystery stories.

'Stories about war don't hardly seem like your pick an glory, Martha, if you know what I mean.'

'Of course I know,' Martha said. She got up and brought them each a fresh beer. 'I'll tell you a funny thing, Dee: if he'd been a nice man, I probably never would have read even one of them. And I'll tell you an even funnier one: if he'd been a nice man, I don't think they would have been as good as they were.'

'What are you talking about, woman?'

'I don't know, exactly. Just listen, all right?'

'All right.'

'Well, it didn't take me until the Kennedy a.s.sa.s.sination to figure out what kind of man he was. I knew that by the summer of '58. By then I'd seen what a low opinion he had of the human race in general - not his friends, he would've died for them, but everyone else. Everyone was out looking for a buck to stroke, he used to say - stroking the buck, stroking the buck, everyone was stroking the buck. It seemed like him and his friends thought stroking the buck was a real bad thing, unless they were playing poker and had a whole mess of em spread out on the table. Seemed to me like they stroked them then, all right. Seemed to me like then they stroked them plenty, him included.

'There was a lot of big ugly under his Southern-gentleman top layer - he thought people who were trying to do good or improve the world were about the funniest things going, he hated the blacks and the Jews, and he thought we ought to H-bomb the Russians out of existence before they could do it to us. Why not? he'd say. They were part of what he called 'the subhuman strain of the race'. To him that seemed to mean Jews, blacks, Italians, Indians, and anyone whose family didn't summer on the Outer Banks.

'I listened to him spout all that ignorance and high-toned filth, and naturally I started to wonder about why he was a famous writer . . . how he could be a famous writer. I wanted to know what it was the critics saw in him, but I was a lot more interested in what ordinary folks like me saw in him -the people who made his books best-sellers as soon as they came out. Finally I decided to find out for myself. I went down to the Public Library and borrowed his first book, Blaze of Heaven.

'I was expecting it'd turn out to be something like in the story of the Emperor's new clothes, but it didn't. The book was about these five men and what happened to them in the war, and what happened to their wives and girlfriends back home at the same time. When I saw on the jacket it was about the war, I kind of rolled my eyes, thinking it would be like all those boring stories they told each other.'

'It wasn't?'

'I read the first ten or twenty pages and thought, This ain't so good. It ain't as bad as I thought it'd be, but nothing's happening. Then I read another forty pages and I kind of . . . well, I kind of lost myself. Next time I looked up it was almost midnight and I was two hundred pages into that book. I thought to myself, You got to go to bed, Martha. You got to go right now, because five-thirty comes early. But I read another thirty pages in spite of how heavy my eyes were getting, and it was quarter to one before I finally got up to brush my teeth.'

Martha stopped, looking off toward the darkened window and all the smiles of night outside it, her eyes hazed with remembering, her lips pressed together in a light frown. She shook her head a little.

'I didn't know how a man who was so boring when you had to listen to him could write so you didn't never want to close the book, nor ever see it end, either. How a nasty, cold-hearted man like him could still make up characters so real you wanted to cry over em when they died. When Noah got hit and killed by a taxi-cab near the end of Blaze of Heaven, just a month after his part of the war was over, I did cry. I didn't know how a sour, cynical man like Jefferies could make a body care so much about things that weren't real at all - about things he'd made up out of his own head. And there was something else in that book . . . a kind of sunshine. It was full of pain and bad things, but there was sweetness in it, too . . . and love . . . '

She startled Darcy by laughing out loud.

'There was a fella worked at the hotel back then named Billy Beck, a nice young man who was majoring in English at Fordham when he wasn't on the door. He and I used to talk sometimes - '

'Was he a brother?'

'G.o.d, no!' Martha laughed again. 'Wasn't no black doormen at Le Palais until 1965. Black porters and bellboys and car-park valets, but no black doormen. Wasn't considered right. Quality people like Mr Jefferies wouldn't have liked it.

'Anyway, I asked Billy how the man's books could be so wonderful when he was such a booger in person. Billy asked me if I knew the one about the fat disc jockey with the thin voice, and I said I didn't know what he was talking about. Then he said he didn't know the answer to my question, but he told me something a prof of his had said about Thomas Wolfe. This prof said that some writers - and Wolfe was one of them - were no shakes at all until they sat down to a desk and took up pens in their hands. He said that a pen to fellows like that was like a telephone booth is to Clark Kent. He said that Thomas Wolfe was like a . . . ' She hesitated, then smiled.' . . . that he was like a divine wind-chime. He said a wind-chime isn't nothing on its own, but when the wind blows through it, it makes a lovely noise.

'I think Peter Jefferies was like that. He was quality, he had been raised quality and he was, but the quality in him wasn't nothing he could take credit for. It was like G.o.d banked it for him and he just spent it. I'll tell you something you probably won't believe: after I'd read a couple of his books, I started to feel sorry for him.'

'Sorry?'

'Yes. Because the books were beautiful and the man who made em was ugly as sin. He really was like my Johnny, but in a way Johnny was luckier, because he never dreamed of a better life, and Mr Jefferies did. His books were his dreams, where he let himself believe in the world he laughed at and sneered at when he was awake.'

She asked Darcy if she wanted another beer. Darcy said she would pa.s.s.

'Well if you change your mind, just holler. And you might change it, because right about here is where the water gets murky.'

'One other thing about the man,' Martha said. 'He wasn't a s.e.xy man. At least not the way you usually think about a man being s.e.xy.' 'You mean he was a - '

'No, he wasn't a h.o.m.os.e.xual, or a gay, or whatever it is you're supposed to call them these days. He wasn't s.e.xy for men, but he wasn't what you could call s.e.xy for women, either. There were two, maybe three times in all the years I did for him when I seen cigarette b.u.t.ts with lipstick on them in the bedroom ashtrays when I cleaned up, and smelled perfume on the pillows. One of those times I also found an eyeliner pencil in the bathroom - it had rolled under the door and into the corner. I reckon they were call-girls (the pillows never smelled like the kind of perfume decent women wear), but two or three times in all those years isn't much, is it?'

'It sure isn't,' Darcy said, thinking of all the panties she had pulled out from under beds, all the condoms she had seen floating in unflushed toilets, all the false eyelashes she had found on and under pillows.

Martha sat without speaking for a few moments, lost in thought, then looked up. 'I tell you what!' she said. 'That man was s.e.xy for himself! It sounds crazy but it's true. There sure wasn't any shortage of j.i.z.z in him - I know that from all the sheets I changed.'

Darcy nodded.

'And there'd always be a little jar of cold cream in the bathroom, or sometimes on the table by his bed. I think he used it when he pulled off. To keep from getting chapped skin.'

The two women looked at each other and suddenly began giggling hysterically.

'You sure he wasn't the other way, honey?' Darcy asked finally.

'I said cold cream, not Vaseline,' Martha said, and that did it; for the next five minutes the two women laughed until they cried.

But it wasn't really funny, and Darcy knew it. And when Martha went on, she simply listened, hardly believing what she was hearing.

'It was maybe a week after that time at Mama Delorme's, or maybe it was two,' Martha said. 'I don't remember. It's been a long time since it all happened. By then I was pretty sure I was pregnant - I wasn't throwing up or nothing, but there's a feeling to it. It don't come from places you'd think. It's like your gums and your toenails and the bridge of your nose figure out what's going on before the rest of you. Or you want something like chop suey at three in the afternoon and you say, "Whoa, now! What's this?" But you know what it is. I didn't say a word to Johnny, though - I knew I'd have to, eventually, but I was scared to.'

'I don't blame you,' Darcy said.

'I was in the bedroom of Jefferies's suite one late morning, and while I did the neatening up I was thinking about Johnny and how I might break the news about the baby to him. Jefferies had gone out someplace - to one of his publishers' meetings, likely as not. The bed was a double, messed up on both sides, but that didn't mean nothing; he was just a restless sleeper. Sometimes when I came in the groundsheet would be pulled right out from underneath the mattress.

'Well, I stripped off the coverlet and the two blankets underneath - he was thin-blooded and always slept under all he could - and then I started to strip the top sheet off backward, and I seen it right away. It was his spend, mostly dried on there.

'I stood there looking at it for . . . oh, I don't know how long. It was like I was hypnotized. I saw him, lying there all by himself after his friends had gone home, lying there smelling nothing but the smoke they'd left behind and his own sweat. I saw him lying there on his back and then starting to make love to Mother Thumb and her four daughters. I saw that as clear as I see you now, Darcy; the only thing I didn't see is what he was thinking about, what sort of pictures he was making in his head . . . and considering the way he talked and how he was when he wasn't writing his books, I'm glad I didn't.'

Darcy was looking at her, frozen, saying nothing.

'Next thing I knew, this . . . this feeling came over me.' She paused, thinking, then shook her head slowly and deliberately. 'This compulsion came over me. It was like wanting chop suey at three in the afternoon, or ice cream and pickles at two in the morning, or . . . what did you want, Darcy?'

'Rind of bacon,' Darcy said through lips so numb she could hardly feel them. 'My husband went out and couldn't find me any, but he brought back a bag of those pork rinds and I just gobbled them.'

Martha nodded and began to speak again. Thirty seconds later Darcy bolted for the bathroom, where she struggled briefly with her gorge and then vomited up all the beer she'd drunk.

Look on the bright side, she thought, fumbling weakly for the flush. No hangover to worry about. And then, on the heels of that: How am I going to look her in the eyes? Just how am I supposed to do that?

It turned out not to be a problem. When she turned around, Martha was standing in the bathroom doorway and looking at her with warm concern.

'You all right?'

'Yes.' Darcy tried a smile, and to her immense relief it felt genuine on her lips. 'I . . . I just . . . '

'I know,' Martha said. 'Believe me, I do. Should I finish, or have you heard enough?'

'Finish,' Darcy said decisively, and took her friend by the arm. 'But in the living room. I don't even want to look at the refrigerator, let alone open the door.'

'Amen to that.'

A minute later they were settled on opposite ends of the shabby but comfortable living-room couch.

'You sure, honey?'

Darcy nodded.

'All right.' But Martha sat quiet a moment longer, looking down at the slim hands clasped in her lap, conning the past as a submarine commander might con hostile waters through his periscope. At last she raised her head, turned to Darcy, and resumed her story.

'I worked the rest of that day in kind of a daze. It was like I was hypnotized. People talked to me, and I answered them, but I seemed to be hearing them through a gla.s.s wall and speaking back to them the same way. I'm hypnotized, all right, I remember thinking. She hypnotized me. That old woman. Gave me one of those post-hypnotic suggestions, like when a stage hypnotist says, 'Someone says the word Chiclets to you, you're gonna get down on all fours and bark like a dog,' and the guy who was hypnotized does it even if no one says Chiclets to him for the next ten years. She put something in that tea and hypnotized me and then told me to do that. That nasty thing.

'I knew why she would, too - an old woman superst.i.tious enough to believe in stump-water cures, and how you could witch a man into love by putting a little drop of blood from your period onto the heel of his foot while he was sleeping, and cross-tie walkers, and G.o.d alone knows what else . . . if a woman like that with a bee in her bonnet about natural fathers could do hypnotism, hypnotizing a woman like me into doing what I did might be just what she would do. Because she would believe it. And I had named him to her, hadn't I? Yes indeed.