Martha saw him grin at Darcy, nod, and make a circle with the thumb and forefinger of his right hand. Darcy came back to the booth with a look of satisfaction on her face. Martha regarded her with some suspicion.
‘What was that about?’
‘You’ll see.’
Five minutes later Ray came over with a silver ice-bucket on a stand and placed it beside them. In it was a bottle of Perrier-Jouet champagne and two chilled glasses.
‘Here, now!’ Martha said in a voice that was half-alarmed, half-laughing. She looked at Darcy, startled.
‘Hush,’ Darcy said, and to her credit, Martha did.
Ray uncorked the bottle, placed the cork beside Darcy, and poured a little into her glass. Darcy waved at it and winked at Ray.
‘Enjoy, ladies,’ Ray said, and then blew a little kiss at Martha. ‘And congratulate your boy for me, sweetie.’ He walked away before Martha, who was still stunned, could say anything.
Darcy poured both glasses full and raised hers. After a moment Martha did the same. The glasses clinked gently. ‘Here’s to the start of your son’s career,’ Darcy said, and they drank. Darcy tipped the rim of her glass against Martha’s a second time. ‘And to the boy himself,’ she said.
They drank again, and Darcy touched their glasses together yet a third time before Martha could set hers down. ‘And to a mother’s love.’
‘Amen, honey,’ Martha said, and although her mouth smiled, her eyes did not. On each of the first two toasts she had taken a discreet sip of champagne. This time she drained the glass.
Darcy had gotten the bottle of champagne so that she and her best friend could celebrate Peter Rosewall’s breakthrough in the style it seemed to deserve, but that was not the only reason. She was curious about what Martha had said — It’s more than sweet, ifs true. And she was curious about that expression of triumph.
She waited until Martha had gotten through her third glass of champagne and then she said,
‘What did you mean about the dedication, Martha?’
‘What?’
‘You said it wasn’t just sweet, it was true.’
Martha looked at her so long without speaking that Darcy thought she was not going to answer at all. Then she uttered a laugh so bitter it was shocking — at least to Darcy it was. She’d had no idea that cheerful little Martha Rosewall could be so bitter, in spite of the hard life she had led.
But that note of triumph was still there, too, an unsettling counterpoint.
‘His book is going to be a best-seller and the critics are going to eat it up like ice cream,’
Martha said. ‘I believe that, but not because Pete says so . . . although he does, of course. I believe it because that’s what happened with him. ‘
‘Who?’
‘Pete’s father,’ Martha said. She folded her hands on the table and looked at Darcy calmly.
‘But — ‘ Darcy began, then stopped. Johnny Rosewall had never written a book in his life, of course. IOUs and the occasional I fucked yo momma in spray-paint on brick walls were more Johnny’s style. It seemed as if Martha was saying . . .
Never mind the fancy stuff, Darcy thought. You know perfectly well what she’s saying; She might have been married to Johnny when she got pregnant with Pete, but someone a little more intellectual was responsible for the kid.
Except it didn’t fit. Darcy had never met Johnny, but she had seen half a dozen photos of him in Martha’s albums, and she’d gotten to know Pete well — so well, in fact, that during his last two years of high school and first two years of college she’d come to think of him as partly her own. And the physical resemblance between the boy who’d spent so much time in her kitchen and the man in the photo albums . . .
‘Well, Johnny was Pete’s biological father,’ Martha said, as if reading her mind. ‘Only have to look at his nose and eyes to see that. Just wasn’t his natural one . . . any more of that bubbly? It goes down so smooth.’ Now that she was tiddly, the South had begun to resurface in Martha’s voice like a child creeping out of its hiding place.
Darcy poured most of the remaining champagne into Martha’s glass. Martha held it up by the stem, looking through the liquid, enjoying the way it turned the subdued afternoon light in Le Cinq to gold. Then she drank a little, set the glass down, and laughed that bitter, jagged laugh again.
‘You don’t have the slightes’ idea what I’m talking about, do you?’
‘No, honey, I don’t.’
‘Well, I’m going to tell you,’ Martha said. ‘After all these years I have to tell someone — now more’n ever, now that he’s published his book and broken through after all those years of gettin
ready for it to happen. God knows I can’t tell him — him least of all. But then, lucky sons never know how much their mothers love them, or the sacrifices they make, do they?’
‘I guess not,’ Darcy said. ‘Martha, hon, maybe you ought to think about if you really want to tell me whatever it is you — ‘
‘No, they don’t have a clue,’ Martha said, and Darcy realized her friend hadn’t heard a single word she’d said. Martha Rosewall was off in some world of her own. When her eyes came back to Darcy, a peculiar little smile — one Darcy didn’t like much — touched the corners of her mouth. ‘Not a clue,’ she repeated. ‘If you want to know what that word dedication really means, I think you have to ask a mother. What do you think, Darcy?’
But Darcy could only shake her head, unsure what to say. Martha nodded, however, as if Darcy had agreed completely, and then she began to speak.
There was no need for her to go over the basic facts. The two women had worked together at Le Palais for eleven years and had been close friends for most of that time.
The most basic of those basic facts, Darcy would have said (at least until that day in Le Cinq she would have said it), was that Marty had married a man who wasn’t much good, one who was a lot more interested in his booze and his dope — not to mention just about any woman who happened to flip a hip in his direction — than he was in the woman he had married.
Martha had been in New York only a few months when she met him, just a babe in the woods, and she had been two months pregnant when she said I do. Pregnant or not, she had told Darcy more than once, she had thought carefully before agreeing to marry Johnny. She was grateful he wanted to stick by her (she was wise enough, even then, to know that many men would have been down the road and gone five minutes after the words ‘I’m pregnant’ were out of the little lady’s mouth), but she was not entirely blind to his shortcomings. She had a good idea what her mother and father — especially her father — would make of Johnny Rosewall with his black T-Bird and his tu-tone airtip shoes, bought because Johnny had seen Memphis Slim wearing a pair exactly like them when Slim played the Apollo.
That first child Martha had lost in the third month. After another five months or so, she had decided to chalk the marriage up to profit and loss — mostly loss. There had been too many late nights, too many weak excuses, too many black eyes. Johnny, she said, fell in love with his fists when he was drunk.
‘He always looked good,’ she told Darcy once, ‘but a good-lookin shitheel is still a shitheel.’
Before she could pack her bags, Martha discovered she was pregnant again. Johnny’s reaction this time was immediate and hostile: he socked her in the belly with the handle of a broom in an effort to make her miscarry. Two nights later he and a couple of his friends — men who shared Johnny’s affection for bright clothes and tu-tone shoes — tried to stick up a liquor store on East n6th Street. The proprietor had a shotgun under the counter. He brought it out. Johnny Rosewall was packing a nickel-plated .32 he’d gotten God knew where. He pointed it at the proprietor, pulled the trigger, and the pistol blew up. One of the fragments of the barrel entered his brain by way of his right eye, killing him instantly.
Martha had worked on at Le Palais until her seventh month (this was long before Darcy Sagamore’s time, of course), and then Mrs Proulx told her to go home before she dropped the kid in the tenth-floor corridor or maybe the laundry elevator. You’re a good little worker and you can have your job back later on if you want it, Roberta Proulx told her, but for right now you get yourself gone, girl.