celebrate and perhaps hear a secret. She didn’t know exactly what secret she had expected to hear, but the
disclosure that Martha’s beloved Pete wasn’t Johnny Rosewall’s son hadn’t been it. Not that Johnny Rosewall
had been much of a catch from what Martha said, but all the same…
She cleared her throat and said, “If Johnny wasn’t Pete’s father, hon-”
Martha’s face twisted with a short of fastidious disgust at the mention of her late husband’s name.
“He was Pete’s biological father,” she said. “Only have to look at his nose and the shape of his eyes to see that.
just wasn’t his natural father. Any more of that, honey? It do go down smooth.” Now that she was tiddly – just
this side of being drunk, in fact – the South had begun to resurface in Martha’s voice like a child creeping out
of its hiding place.
Delores poured what bubbly was left into Martha’s glass. Martha held it up by the stem, looking at the way
the champagne 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 know what I’m talking about, do you?”
Delores admitted she did not, but didn’t add that she was no longer sure she wanted to hear – and in truth there
was a part of her that still did want to hear.
“Well, I’m going to tell you,” Martha said. “You probably won’t believe me, and you probably won’t want to know me anymore if you do, but after all these years I have to tell someone – now more’n ever – now that he’s
broken through. God knows I can’t tell him – him least of all. But then – lucky sons never knew how much
mothers love them, or the sacrifices they make, or the dedication they show, do they?”
Delores only shook her head, afraid to say anything, and Martha began to speak.
4
There was no need for Martha 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.
Martha knew about the drinking problem Delores’ husband had had, and how Delores had finally laid down
the law: take the cure or I’m leaving you. Harvey Williams had fallen off the wagon more than once after that
but Delores had been able to recognize honest effort when she saw it. She had stuck with him and her man
had finally made it back to sobriety.
Martha knew the great sorrow of Delores’s life – the first child who had fallen from a stair – landing in the
apartment building where they had lived, the child who had lingered four days in intensive care and who had
finally died. There had been other children, four of them, the eldest now the head pediatrics nurse in a
Cleveland hospital, but no child could take the place of the one who had been lost.
By the same token, Delores knew about Johnny Rosewall and all the problems he had not been able to
surmount – had not wanted to surmount. The drink, the drugs, the outside women. Martha had been new in
New York, naive, and had married him two months pregnant. Even then, Martha had told her, she had had an
idea of what Johnny Rosewall was – Johnny with his black Trans-Am (financed at 24%) and his tu-tone airtip
shoes.
That first child she had lost in the third month. Another five months or so and she had about decided to leave
Johnny – 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 Delores once, “but a shitheel in J. Press slacks is still a shitheel.”
Then she discovered she was pregnant again. When she told Johnny, he hit her in the stomach with the
handle of a broom to try and make her miscarry. His explanation was that they just couldn’t afford a rug-rat
and they would fire her at Le Palais, where she had a job as a housemaid, as soon as they found out she was