Martha did, and two months later she had borne a seven-pound boy whom she had named Peter, and Peter had, in the fullness of time, written a novel called Blaze of Glory, which everyone — including the Book-of-the-Month Club and Universal Pictures — thought destined for fame and fortune.
All this Darcy had heard before. The rest of it — the unbelievable rest of it — she heard about that afternoon and evening, beginning in Le Cinq, with champagne glasses before them and the advance copy of Pete’s novel in the canvas tote by Martha Rosewall’s feet.
‘We were living uptown, of course,’ Martha said, looking down at her champagne glass and twirling it between her fingers. ‘On Stanton Street, up by Station Park. I’ve been back since. It’s worse than it was — a lot worse — but it was no beauty spot even back then.
‘There was a spooky old woman who lived at the Station Park end of Stanton Street back then
— folks called her Mama Delorme and lots of them swore she was a bruja woman. I didn’t believe in anything like that myself, and once I asked Octavia Kinsolving, who lived in the same building as me and Johnny, how people could go on believing such trash in a day when space satellites went whizzing around the earth and there was a cure for just about every disease under the sun. ‘Tavia was an educated woman — had been to Juilliard — and was only living on the fatback side of 110th because she had her mother and three younger brothers to support. I thought she would agree with me but she only laughed and shook her head.
‘ “Are you telling me you believe in bruja? ” I asked her.
‘ “No,” she said, “but I believe in her. She is different. Maybe for every thousand — or ten thousand — or million — women who claim to be witchy, there’s one who really is. If so, Mama Delorme’s the one.”
‘I just laughed. People who don’t need bruja can afford to laugh at it, the same way that people who don’t need prayer can afford to laugh at that. I’m talkin ’bout when I was first married, you know, and in those days I still thought I could straighten Johnny out. Can you dig it?’
Darcy nodded.
Then I had the miscarriage. Johnny was the main reason I had it, I guess, although I didn’t like to admit that even to myself back then. He was beating on me most the time, and drinking all the time. He’d take the money I gave him and then he’d take more out of my purse. When I told him I wanted him to quit hooking from my bag he’d get all woundy-faced and claim he hadn’t done any such thing. That was if he was sober. If he was drunk he’d just laugh.
‘I wrote my momma down home — it hurt me to write that letter, and it shamed me, and I cried while I was writing it, but I had to know what she thought. She wrote back and told me to get out of it, to go right away before he put me in the hospital or even worse. My older sister, Cassandra (we always called her Kissy), went that one better. She sent me a Greyhound bus ticket with two words written on the envelope in pink lipstick — GO NOW, it said.’
Martha took another small sip of her champagne. ‘Well, I didn’t. I liked to think I had too much dignity. I suppose it was nothing but stupid pride. Either way, it turned out the same. I stayed. Then, after I lost the baby, I went and got pregnant again — only I didn’t know at first. I didn’t have any morning sickness, you see . . . but then, I never did with the first one, either.’
‘You didn’t go to this Mama Delorme because you were pregnant?’ Darcy asked. Her immediate assumption had been that Martha had thought maybe the witch-woman would give her something that would make her miscarry . . . or that she’d decided on an out-and-out abortion.
‘No,’ Martha said. ‘I went because Tavia said Mama Delorme could tell me for sure what the stuff was I found in Johnny’s coat pocket. White powder in a little glass bottle.’
‘Oh-oh,’ Darcy said.
Martha smiled without humor. ‘You want to know how bad things can get?’ she asked.
‘Probably you don’t but I’ll tell you anyway. Bad is when your man drinks and don’t have no steady job. Really bad is when he drinks, don’t have no job, and beats on you. Even worse is when you reach into his coat pocket, hoping to find a dollar to buy toilet paper with down at the Sunland Market, and find a little glass bottle with a spoon on it instead. And do you know what’s worst of all? Looking at that little bottle and just hoping the stuff inside it is cocaine and not horse.’
‘You took it to Mama Delorme?’ Martha laughed pityingly.
‘The whole bottle’? No ma’am. I wasn’t getting much fun out of life, but I didn’t want to die. If he’d come home from wherever he was at and found that two-gram bottle gone, he would have plowed me like a pea-field. What I did was take a little and put it in the cellophane from off a cigarette pack. Then I went to Tavia and ‘Tavia told me to go to Mama Delorme and I went.’
‘What was she like?’
Martha shook her head, unable to tell her friend exactly what Mama Delorme had been like, or how strange that half-hour in the woman’s third-floor apartment had been, or how she’d nearly run down the crazily leaning stairs to the street, afraid that the woman was following her. The apartment had been dark and smelly, full of the smell of candles and old wallpaper and cinnamon and soured sachet. There had been a picture of Jesus on one wall, Nostradamus on another.
‘She was a weird sister if there ever was one,’ Martha said finally. ‘I don’t have any idea even today how old she was; she might have been seventy, ninety, or a hundred and ten. There was a pink-white scar that went up one side of her nose and her forehead and into her hair. Looked like a burn. It had pulled her right eye down in a kind of droop that looked like a wink. She was sitting in a rocker and she had knitting in her lap. I came in and she said, “I have three things to tell you, little lady. The first is that you don’t believe in me. The second is the bottle you found in your husband’s coat is full of White Angel heroin. The third is you’re three weeks gone with a boy-child you’ll name after his natural father.” ‘
Martha looked around to make sure no one had taken a seat at one of the nearby tables, satisfied herself that they were still alone, and then leaned toward Darcy, who was looking at her with silent fascination.
‘Later, when I could think straight again, I told myself that as far as those first two things went, she hadn’t done anything that a good stage magician couldn’t do — or one of those mentalist fellows in the white turbans. If Tavia Kinsolving had called the old lady to say I was coming, she might have told her why I was coming, too. You see how simple it could have been? And to a woman like Mama Delorme, those little touches would be important, because if you want to be known as a bruja woman, you have to act like a bruja woman.’
‘I suppose that’s right,’ Darcy said.
‘As for her telling me that I was pregnant, that might have been just a lucky guess. Or . . . well
. . . some ladies just know.’
Darcy nodded. ‘I had an aunt who was damned good at knowing when a woman had caught pregnant. She’d know sometimes before the woman knew, and sometimes before the woman had any business being pregnant, if you see what I mean.’
Martha laughed and nodded.
‘She said their smell changed,’ Darcy went on, ‘and sometimes you could pick up that new smell as soon as a day after the woman in question had caught, if your nose was keen.’
‘Uh-huh,’ Martha said. ‘I’ve heard the same thing, but in my case none of that applied. She just knew, and down deep, underneath the part of me that was trying to make believe it was all just a lot of hokum, I knew she knew. To be with her was to believe in bruja — her bruja, anyway. And it didn’t go away, that feeling, the way a dream does when you wake up, or the way your belief in a good faker goes away when you’re out of his spell.’