A Book of Common Prayer. Joan Didion
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I know about Marin’s disappearance comes from the “pages” Charlotte apparently wrote during her first weeks in Boca Grande, the pages she was heard typing at night in her room at the Caribe, the pages given to me with her other personal effects by the manager of the Caribe. On those pages she had tried only to rid herself of her dreams, and these dreams seemed to deal only with sexual surrender and infant death, commonplaces of the female obsessional life. We all have the same dreams.
2
THE MORNING THE FBI MEN FIRST CAME TO THE HOUSE on California Street Charlotte did not understand why. She had read newspaper accounts of the events they recited, she listened attentively to everything they said, but she could make no connection between the pitiless revolutionist they described and Marin, who at seven had stood on a chair to make her own breakfast and wept helplessly when asked to clean her closet.
Sweet Marin.
Who at sixteen had been photographed with her two best friends wearing the pink-and-white candy-striped pinafores of Children’s Hospital volunteers, and had later abandoned her Saturdays at the hospital as “too sad.”
Soft Marin.
Who at eighteen had been observed with her four best friends detonating a crude pipe bomb in the lobby of the Transamerica Building at 6:30 A.M., hijacking a P.S.A. L-1011 at San Francisco Airport and landing it at Wendover, Utah, where they burned it in time for the story to interrupt the network news and disappeared.
Marin.
Or so the two FBI men tried to tell Charlotte.
Marin who had eaten coconut ice beneath the Great Banyan at Calcutta.
Marin who had been flown to Copenhagen to see the lights at Tivoli.
Marin who was at that moment, even as the two FBI men occupied Leonard’s Barcelona chairs, even as the fat FBI man toyed with one of Leonard’s porcelain roses and even as the thin FBI man gazed over Charlotte’s head at the 10’ by 16’ silk screen of Mao Tse-tung given to Leonard by one of the Alameda Three, skiing at Squaw Valley.
Or so Charlotte tried to tell the fat FBI man.
The thin one did not seem to be listening.
I am talking here about a day in November one year before the day in November when Charlotte Douglas first appeared in Boca Grande.
One amplification. Some of what Charlotte said about the months which followed Marin’s disappearance she did not even say to me. She said it to Gerardo.
I would call that the least reliable part of what I know.
Three or four things I do know about Charlotte.
As a child of comfortable family in the temperate zone she had been as a matter of course provided with clean sheets, orthodontia, lamb chops, living grandparents, attentive godparents, one brother named Dickie, ballet lessons, and casual timely information about menstruation and the care of flat silver, as well as with a small wooden angel, carved in Austria, to sit on her bed table and listen to her prayers. In these prayers the child Charlotte routinely asked that “it” turn out all right, “it” being unspecified and all-inclusive, and she had been an adult for some years before the possibility occurred to her that “it” might not. She had put this doubt from her mind. As a child of the western United States she had been provided as well with faith in the value of certain frontiers on which her family had lived, in the virtues of cleared and irrigated land, of high-yield crops, of thrift, industry and the judicial system, of progress and education, and in the generally upward spiral of history. She was a norteamericana.
She was immaculate of history, innocent of politics. There were startling vacuums in her store of common knowledge. During the two years she spent at Berkeley before she ran away to New York with an untenured instructor named Warren Bogart, she had read mainly the Brontës and Vogue, bought a loom, gone home to Hollister on weekends and slept a great deal during the week. In those two years she had entered the main library once, during a traveling exhibition of the glass flowers from Harvard. She recalled having liked the glass flowers. From books Warren Bogart gave her to read when she was twenty Charlotte learned for the first time about the Spanish Civil War, memorized the ideological distinctions among the various PSUC brigades and POUM militia, but until she was twenty-two and Warren Bogart divined and corrected her misapprehension she believed that World War II had begun at Pearl Harbor. From Leonard Douglas she had absorbed a passing fluency in Third World power, had learned what the initials meant in Algeria and Indochina and the Caribbean, but on a blank map of the world she could not actually place the countries where the initials were in conflict. She considered the conflict dubious in any case. She understood that something was always going on in the world but believed that it would turn out all right. She believed the world to be peopled with others like herself. She associated the word “revolution” with the Boston Tea Party, one of the few events in the history of the United States prior to the westward expansion to have come to her attention. She also associated it with events in France and Russia that had probably turned out all right, otherwise why had they happened.
A not atypical norteamericana.
Of her time and place.
It occurs to me tonight that give or take twenty years and a thousand miles Charlotte Douglas’s time and place and my time and place were not too different.
Some things about Charlotte I never understood. She was a woman who grew faint when she noticed the blue arterial veins in her wrists, could not swim in clouded water, and once suffered an attack of acute terror while wading in water where an artesian well churned up the sand. Yet during the time she was in Boca Grande I saw her perform a number of tasks with the same instinctive lack of squeamishness I had seen that day at Millonario. I once saw her skin an iguana for stew. I once saw her make the necessary incision in the trachea of an OAS field worker who was choking on a piece of steak at the Jockey Club. A doctor had been called but the OAS man was turning blue. Charlotte did it with a boning knife plunged first in a vat of boiling rice. A few nights later the OAS man caused a scene because Charlotte refused to fellate him on the Caribe terrace, but that, although suggestive of the ambiguous signals Charlotte tended to transmit, is neither here nor there. Similarly, during the cholera outbreak that year Charlotte volunteered to give inoculations, and she did, for thirty-four hours without sleeping, until the remaining Lederle vaccine was appropriated by one of Victor’s colonels. When the colonel suggested that as a norteamericana she might be in a position to buy back some of the vaccine Charlotte only smiled, took off the white smock she had borrowed from the clinic, and dropped it at the colonel’s feet. For the rest of that day Charlotte sat on the edge of the Caribe pool with her feet in the water and stared at the birds circling in the white sky. She did not wear dark glasses and by five o’clock the pale skin around her eyes was burned and puffy. For a few days Charlotte spoke to Gerardo about leaving Boca Grande, but within a week she had revised the incident to coincide with her own view of human behavior and assured me that the vaccine had been taken only so that the army could lend its resources to the inoculation program. I used to think that the only event in Charlotte Douglas’s life to resist her revisions and erasures was Marin’s disappearance.
“Interesting portrait there,” the thin FBI man said, his eyes still on the 10’ by 16’ silk screen given to Leonard by one of the Alameda Three.
“Warhol,” Charlotte said.
“I would have guessed Mao.”
“Mao. Of course.” Charlotte had no idea how one of the Alameda Three had happened to come by a Warhol silk screen. Or maybe it had not been one of the Alameda Three at all, maybe it had been one of the Tacoma Eleven or some Indian or Panther or heir to a motion-picture studio, Charlotte could never keep Leonard’s clients straight. They came in packs and they ate and they asked for odd drinks and they went through her medicine cabinet and they borrowed and did not return her sweaters and they never addressed her directly and she could never remember their names. She wished that she could. She also wished that Marin would walk through the door of the house on California Street with a tow ticket tied to her windbreaker.
“You