In the hallway while Sam was heading for the bathroom, Hubert overtook him. At the mirror, a loop of palm still stuck in back from Easter, one gas lamp chuckled faintly against the wall; and Hubert, hurrying up to lean a hand on Sam’s shoulder, said quietly, quickly: “Look, now—Corey had an emergency extraction this morning, and had to go into the office. So they didn’t get a chance to do anything special for your birthday. They feel right bad about it, too. But I just didn’t want you to be expecting anything—or say anything to make them feel worse than they do,” while his mirror image leaned away.
“Oh,” Sam said, from the chasm of his own forgetfulness. “Sure. That’s all right.”
In the bathroom, he turned the enamelled handle at the sink. From verdigrised brass the raddled stream chilled his knuckles, ran over the backs of his hands, dripped between his outsized fingers. While it warmed, he washed with the fresh bar of Jules’ soap sitting in the clamshell soap dish: knifed, unblunted edges meant Elsie must have unwrapped and set it out that afternoon.
The bathroom window held a granulated pane. Though it splayed the tile across from it with early evening sun, it let through not a shadow of the city. At its leaded edges, in blobby tesselations, however, rectangles of red, green, yellow, and blue showed—if you got down to the border panes and looked—colored fragments of the fire escapes and trees and clotheslines in the lot outside. If you didn’t, but only stepped in and out, say, it reminded Sam of the stained glass in the school chapel down at the college. (Sitting on the commode’s wooden ring, or standing, listening to his water fall while gazing at the overhead flush box, he wondered sometimes if it were right for a bathroom to look like a church.) Diagonally on the sill sat a box of kitchen matches—for the gas lamps in the hall. Lucifer. Years ago Corey had explained to him that Phosphorus was Greek and Lucifer was Latin for the same thing. Christos Pheros. Phos Pheros. John, carrier of Christ. Venus, carrier of light. Hesperus. Were John and Lewy sitting down to their Saturday dinners? Outside in the back the Negro fellow was hollering, as if his voice were the city’s plaint itself: “Hang-a-line . . . ? Hang-a-line . . . ?”—as he made his way through Harlem’s alleys, to put up new clotheslines or clothesline pulleys for a dime, in time for Monday’s washing. Somewhere in the past months Sam had learned to decipher the shrill exhortation. At some moment he’d seen the man with a coil of rope on his shoulder, a ladder under his arm, swinging his pail of metal spikes and wooden spools . . . Outside the glass, the line-man wandered away, litany fading, barely heard, “Hang-a . . . ?”
Sam dried his hands on one of Elsie’s white hand-towels, on which she’d appliquéd a spray of red and purple flowers among long leaves, that creased and uncreased about his fingers.
On the little step stool beside the commode lay a newspaper, dated back in April, whose headline he recognized from some two weeks ago:
WORLD RENOWNED ACTRESS
DIES IN PITTSBURGH
He picked it up, to see, on the newspaper beneath it, Mary Blair kissing Paul Robeson’s hand. Might a white actress die from kissing the hand of a black man? He dropped the first paper and turned to the door.
“Boy,” Hubert said, forearm on the table, when Sam came back into the living room, “you are something! This is your idea of getting here by four o’clock?”
“Sam’s here at four o’clock,” Lucius said. “It’s just four o’clock C.P.T.”—which made everybody laugh.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Sam asked, trying to smile.
They laughed again.
“What’s C.P.T.?” he asked again.
“That’s—” Clarice started. “That’s country people’s time!” Which made everybody howl.
“Well, if you’re going to joke like that,” Dr. Corey said, “you might as well tell the boy what it really means. C.P.T. is Colored People’s Time.”
“Why’s it colored people’s time?” Sam wanted to know, beginning to lose his grin at the joke he didn’t get.
“Our people,” Corey explained, with a deep and knowledgeable nod, “at least up here in the city, have a tendency to get distracted—especially if they’re on their way to see you.”
“Seven-come-eleven!” Lucius called out, and shook his fist, fingers up, over the table—pretending to shoot craps, like Negroes did in Raleigh’s back lots and doorways. Lucius opened his fingers, snapped up his hand. (Imaginary dice danced, glittering white with black pips, over the tables of Atlantis . . . ) “Distracted!” Lucius repeated, nodding emphatically.
Everyone laughed again.
“That’s why I was so late getting here from the office this morning,” Corey said.
“You got deflected?” Sam asked—only just hearing himself say the wrong word, even though, by now, he knew perfectly well that wasn’t what Corey meant.
“I didn’t get distracted!” Corey said, mocking indignation. “My patient did! He wasn’t quite as late as you were—but he was almost. Now go get those plates, before Elsie has to bring them in herself!”
In the kitchen, Elsie stood at the sink by the brown, wooden ice box, its black rubber seal pressed out around the upper door. “Now they’re going to worry you to death for coming in so late for your birthday dinner. But don’t you pay them any mind.” Out the wooden washtub in the sink, she pulled, rattling from among the utensils, a long-handled wooden spoon and took a dish-towel to it. Although she wasn’t really as tall as Hap or Lucius or Hubert, Sam always had to see her standing next to them to realize it. She was also the gentlest. “Lucius didn’t get here till four-thirty-five himself—and we weren’t ready to serve till quarter of. So, no matter what they say, you are only twenty minutes late. And we aren’t having anything that’ll be spoiled by twenty minutes! You take those soup plates in for me, like a good boy?”
But once he came back in, handed out the china, and took his place between Lucius and Clarice, it was as if Elsie’s warning, even in the other room, had turned aside all further jibes at his tardiness.
Talk was of other things.
Elsie carried in the tureen from the kitchen, set it on the peach cloth, and uncovered it. Steam puffed. Inside the tureen’s oval cover in Elsie’s hand, droplets ran over white glaze. Elsie said: “Black bean soup . . . !”—so dark it was nearly purple, red and green pepper bits throughout. She sank the porcelain ladle: it flooded. Elsie was going to teach domestic science, and her Master’s had included a nutrition course, since which Saturday meals had grown more varied, even exotic. (And nourishing, Corey reminded them: beans—now beans were very good for you. Plenty of protein. That’s why poor people all over the world—in Africa and Italy and Mexico—ate so many!) Elsie took the tureen cover back into the kitchen while Dr. Corey asked: “Sam, when are you going to start night school?”
“Soon, I guess.” Indeed, the question was a relief. Though Corey always brought it up, once she’d asked it and he’d answered, it was over. Corey said what she had to, but she didn’t harp—and she’d told the rest in no uncertain terms they shouldn’t either. Harping would do no good—not with Sam.
As Elsie, now without her apron, stepped back through the door, Dr. Corey said: “You’re the oldest here. Elsie, you want to say blessing?”
“Let Sam say it.” Elsie took her seat at the table head around the corner from Corey. “It’s going to be his birthday in three days—and we won’t see him again before he turns eighteen.”
So Sam bowed his head, folded his hands, and recited what, at home, he’d learned as a single polysyllable all but incomprehensible—but which, since he’d been in New York, coming to dinner Saturdays at his sisters’, had begun to separate into individual words with meanings:
“Bless, we beseech thee, O Lord,
This food of which we are about to partake,
That it may nourish us and strengthen us
To do thy service, for Christ our redeemer’s sake . . .”
After the soup there was fresh ham; and peas and onions; and mashed potatoes—butter blurr
ing yellow among white peaks and dells; and a gravy almost sweet that had prunes cut up in it—which Elsie said was not a gravy at all but a sauce.
“Well, then, you just pass that there gravy sauce right on over here,” Lucius said. “This is some fancy eating we’re doing today!”
They asked Sam what he’d done that afternoon.
“Sam went to see the Brooklyn Bridge,” Clarice told them.
“Well?” Dr. Corey wanted to know. “What did you think of it?”
“It’s a real nice bridge,” Sam said. “It’s big, too! But when I got over to the other side, it was all cornfields and meadows and little white houses—shoot, I thought Brooklyn was supposed to be part of New York. It’s nothin’ but country—just like down home!”—which made them all laugh again.
“Don’t say ‘shoot,’ ” Corey said. “That’s not nice.”
Clarice leaned toward him and said more quietly, “Don’t say ‘real nice’ either. It’s very nice—or really nice.”
Not paying either much mind, Sam finished up: “You could see some real good skyscrapers from it, though!” He’d already resolved not to tell them about the Italian in the boat. That kind of thing could upset people. Everybody was having too much fun.
Afterward Elsie brought in a big salad with water cress and raisins in it.
“This is all so good!” Lucius declared.
“Well, I’m glad,” Elsie said, considering. “I was just afraid it might be a bit tainted.”
“Tainted?” Lucius asked in surprise; he sat back. “Tainted? Didn’t the ice man bring ice for the weekend? What you mean, this food might be ‘tainted’?”
“I was just afraid, maybe,” Elsie said, “well, ’tain’t enough of it!” which was a joke Sam had first heard Lucius and Elsie go through back home years ago. But Clarice had never heard it, and clapped her hands now, screeching like a bird.
“Really, Elsie,” Lucius said, beaming bright-eyed about the table. “I do have to ask one thing: prunes, raisins, beans? Just what are you trying to do to us?”
Amidst more laughter, Corey’s voice cut over: “She’s just trying to keep you healthy—make sure you’re nice and regular.”
“Well, I’m going to be so regular,” Lucius declared, “nobody’ll be able to stand next to me!”
“That’s a terrible thing to say!” Corey said. But, amidst more laughter, Elsie—and Dr. Corey—were laughing too.
Was there any way to tell them about the man on the bridge, Sam wondered, without telling about the man on the boat? Should he even try? If he was a friend of Toomer’s, maybe Clarice knew him—
But here, in her enthusiasm, Clarice got to arguing with Lucius about something, and Sam was waiting for a lull into which to interject some mention of the strange fellow he’d met that afternoon, with his strange tales and talk—when Elsie, who’d slipped into the kitchen, came back in with a cake in her hands—with candles on it!
Dr. Corey and Elsie began to sing.
Hubert, leaning on his forearm again, and Clarice and Lucius—with his healthy baritone—joined them:
“. . . Happy birthday, dear Sa-am . . . !
Happy birthday to you!”
Why then, he wondered, as he stood to blow out the flames (“Make a wish!” Clarice was saying, beside him. “Don’t forget, Sam! Make a wish . . . !”), had Hubert told him there wouldn’t be any birthday for him? Was it Hubert’s notion of punishment for coming in so late? Or had Hubert wanted him to think nothing would happen to make it more of a surprise when it did? He glanced at his brother, leaning way back in his chair now. With Hubert, sometimes, you couldn’t tell.
But even as Sam looked up, Hubert brought his chair legs forward, leaned down, and reached under to come up with a grin and a big box wrapped in red paper, though there was no ribbon around it: “And this is for you—though you don’t deserve it . . . ! Coming in here an hour-and-a-half late the way you did!”
While Sam tore the paper off, Hubert explained:
“Now Mr. Horstein said to tell you that any one you already had, or didn’t want, you can bring back and he’ll exchange it for another one that’s the same price.”
It was a whole box of magic tricks!
While Sam was taking out the card deck with the shaved corners and the metal hoops—some whole, some gapped—and the picture frame with the secret compartment, other presents were coming out from behind the sofa, from the bedroom, from under the settee cushion: a sweater (from Corey), gloves (from Elsie), a book of poems, with photographs of colored people down south sitting around the woodstove playing banjos or walking to church (from Clarice)—and a fountain pen (from Lucius).
“Is Sam going to do some magic tricks for us now? Hubert’s been telling us how you’re getting all interested in magic. Are there any of ’em you know already? Come on, you’re going to put on a show for us . . . ?”
But Corey said: “Now Sam has already told us, he needs to practice his magic before he can perform it. Right now, he’s just learning it—exploring it.”
Elsie said: “He just got it tonight. You have to practice before you can perform,” and backed, with dishes, into the kitchen.
“Oh.” Lucius glanced at Hubert. “I see.”
Hubert didn’t say anything.
Just then Sam looked down into the box of paraphernalia. The one trick Mr. Horstein had inadvertently duplicated (or had Hubert duplicated it maliciously?) was the false, metal thumb.
“Oh. I have this one—already!” Sam picked it up from the box, trying to sound nonchalant and accusatory at the same time.
Hubert sucked his teeth. “Hey—I told him you had that one and to leave it out! He must have misunderstood me.”
“Oh.” Well, he felt a little better knowing it was not, then (probably), maliciousness.
Lucius sat, drumming his big, manicured fingers on the peach cloth. Sam pictured magic dice, spinning and dancing between them.
Then Elsie came out of the kitchen again carrying a silver tray, mirror bright, on which stood half a dozen little wine glasses—and a dark bottle.
“Well,” Dr. Corey said. “Isn’t this a treat! This is Elsie’s blackberry wine—that she made herself last summer. We picked the berries together, when we went out to Asbury Park.”
“We certainly did,” Elsie said. “And bottled it ourselves, too.” She put the tray down on the table. “Now who would like a glass?”
“I’ll have some,” Hubert said, laying one forearm on the table. “You want some, Clarice?”
“Oh, yes,” Clarice said. “Thank you.”
“I’ll have some,” Sam said.
“I’ll have some too,” Lucius said. “But I do have to mention—I mean as a lawyer, now. Hubert’ll back me up. You know this is—strictly speaking—completely against the law!”
“Against what law?” Dr. Corey said.
“The eighteenth amendment,” Lucius said. “We got prohibition, I hope you remember!”
“This is not against the law,” Elsie said. “This isn’t moonshine. This isn’t bathtub gin. This is homemade blackberry cordial—it’s not going to hurt anybody!”
“When the revenue officers cart you off, you better tell them that!” Lucius laughed.
“Now, if you don’t want any, Lucius, you don’t have to have any. Maybe you think we shouldn’t—?”
“Now I’m not saying that! I’m not saying that at all!” Lucius’s large hands waved above the table. “I’m just saying—”
“We are not breaking any law,” Dr. Corey said. “This here is medicinal.”
“That’s right!” Elsie said, as if the idea had just hit her. A smile replaced the moment of worry on her face. “This is medicinal wine. A glass of this after dinner will absolutely help with the digestion. You know, Papa always takes some after Sunday dinner—”
“Mama too,” Dr. Corey said.
“Well, I can just see the police now, breaking in on one of them speakeasies around on Lenox Avenue and the doctors bre
aking out their prescription pads—”
“If it will make you feel better,” Dr. Corey said, “I will write you a prescription for it—”
“No,” Lucius said. “For me? No—you don’t have to do that.” And his arm, which had been moving to the laughter like a conductor’s, dropped its pinstriped coatsleeve on the table—the original, Sam realized, of the gesture Hubert performed so frequently.
Beside the red and blue wrapping-paper-and-tissue ruins of his birthday, Sam looked at his twenty-nine-year-old brother, with whom he’d spent fewer days in his life than he had with any number of his friends. Leather gloves, magic tricks, book, pen: this birthday, because of Hubert, had been completely unexpected, and was now over—three days before it had actually occurred.
Lucius said he’d walk with them back to Hubert’s—the argument with Clarice had quieted to an intense conversation over some fine point of the Jim Crow laws. When they came downstairs, they found there’d been an unexpected shower that, because of their laughter inside, they’d missed. But the sidewalks were wet—or, at any rate, drying in patches now. Tall Lucius and diminutive Clarice strolled together under a street lamp, over glimmering, puddled pavement, her skirts swinging back and forth below her calves, the heat of their conversation enough to keep the two of them twenty paces ahead.
The box of tricks under his arm (with the other presents inside it), suddenly Sam said: “. . . I get it now!”
Hubert said: “Get what?”
“Nothing,” Sam said. “It wasn’t anything. Just something that . . . well, nothing.”
“What was it?”
“Really,” Sam said. “It wasn’t anything at all. Just something—that Corey said.”
“Come on. What was it?”
“It was just . . .” He knew Hubert wouldn’t let it rest. “I get the joke, now. About C.P.T.” Which was a bald lie—to make Hubert stop questioning.
“Oh.” Hubert said. “That.”
But what had come to Sam was the reason the man on the bridge had gotten so upset when Sam had said he was going for a policeman. He hadn’t realized Sam had meant for the man in the boat. And the fellow had just asked Sam back to his place for a drink . . . !
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