The Sweetest Fruits

by Monique Truong

“Silk?” I asked, laughing low.

  “Henrietta cloth,” Charlotte replied. “Mrs. Haslam has a dress made of it. Wool,” she continued, “but whisper light and soft as silk, with a sheen to it.”

  “The pale gray dress?”

  “Yes, but that cloth isn’t gray, Alethea. It’s a black-and-white weave. Only from a distance does it look gray.”

  “His underthings are gray, Charlotte?”

  “White as snow, Alethea! Henrietta cloth with a white-on-white weave. I’ve never seen a man’s under vests and drawers sewn from something so fine.”

  My cheeks must have reddened even more.

  “I’d be careful, Alethea. That blackbird is a fussy one,” she warned, as the kitchen door closed behind her.

  That was how Charlotte liked to end her stories, with a question that begged to be asked. But for once, I wasn’t tempted to bribe her with a cobbler or a stack cake or anything else to see the inside of the blackbird’s bundle. I wouldn’t think again about what “fussy” could mean, until I was already the blackbird’s wife.

  The question that was on my mind that afternoon was for Pat. I wanted to know his mother’s given name.

  “Rosa,” Pat answered that evening, and then he repeated it, his voice dipping and then falling silent. When he began again, the story of his mother opened with an Irishman who was on an island very far from his own when he met Rosa. She then went very far from her island to be with the Irishman on yet another island. The Irishman passed away when Pat was ten and six. The same year he lost his eye, he said.

  “That’s a sign,” I told him. “Which went first?”

  “The eye,” Pat replied, adding that he missed it more. He lifted his head so that the eye that remained could meet mine. The ring of green was full of fireflies when he looked at me in those days.

  “Is your mother still far from her island?” I asked.

  Rosa’s story, Pat admitted, was not his to tell because he did not know it or her.

  “But you know her name,” I reminded him.

  Pat nodded his head. He lowered it again and said that Rosa returned to her island when he was four. He woke up one morning and her scent was no longer in the rooms that they shared. Lavender, he added, as if he were saying Amen. He was left in the care of an Old Lady, who smelled of camphor and whose face was as cold as her manor house. Rosa’s story ended there, as Pat had not heard from his mother since. Maybe she too has departed from this world, he said.

  “Your mother is still here,” I told him because I knew it to be true.

  When I heard the name “Rosa,” a feather had swept up my spine. Aunt Sweetie had taught me that a feather meant that the missing one was still alive. If I’d felt a cold hand on my back, then the missing one had passed. While I couldn’t put this knowledge to use, as I’d no name for my own mother, it comforted me to know that she—if she were still a feather—could. Whenever my mother said “Alethea,” I would be a feather along the length of her spine.

  “Rosa, on her island, could do the same,” I explained to Pat.

  No, Rosa is a cold hand now, Miss.

  After Pat proposed, Charlotte said that I had to learn more about That Irishman’s father. She said that men were more their father’s story than their mother’s. Charlotte was engaged to be married, so she said that she knew a thing or two about men.

  “You better not let Mr. Cleneay hear that,” I teased.

  “Alethea Foley, you know what I mean to say! Mr. Cleneay’s father butchered hogs back in Kentucky, and he taught Mr. Cleneay and his younger brothers to do the same. Those boys were the best for miles. Every one of them hired out to other plantations during hog-killing season. Since Freedom, they’ve been working and saving, and soon they’ll own their own butcher shop in Bucktown. Not a stall. A shop, Alethea. With sawdust on the floor, glass-fronted cases, and a brass bell for the front counter. No matter what happens, I know I’ll be eating well,” Charlotte said, sniffing the air. “I want the same for you, Alethea.”

  “You want me to ask Pat if his father was a butcher?” I asked, smiling.

  Charlotte stared at me hard and then declared what was in her heart all along. “That Irishman of yours—forgive me for saying—doesn’t know where he’s living. He thinks he’s above the law? And you, Alethea Foley, you think that foreigner is going to take you away from here? To an island? To the sea? Between the two of you, I don’t know who’s blinder.”

  Charlotte and I didn’t speak again until the week before Pat and I married.

  When Pat showed me the piece of paper that he said was our marriage license, I looked at it and saw it as proof that Charlotte was wrong. Pat did know where he was living, and he must know something about the laws of Ohio that she didn’t.

  I don’t know where Pat got the license, Miss. Where anyone else in Cincinnati would.

  I had proof that Charlotte was wrong, so I forgave her. I headed over to her husband’s shop to politely tell her so. Charlotte found me waiting for her by the locked front door of Cleneay Brothers, as dawn was breaking over the low roofs of Bucktown. She hugged me without saying a word. I’d missed her too. My bones had ached with the missing. It had been months since we last spoke, and her life had changed. She was Mrs. Cleneay now. I’d missed that too. Her wedding I hadn’t attended because I’d locked the kitchen door when she came to Mrs. Haslam’s to invite me. The day after their wedding dinner, Charlotte had brought over a piece of their cake and left it on the back steps. She wrapped it in butcher paper so that I would know. She was telling me, without having to say a word, that I should have been that cake’s baker, all seven layers of it. She was right.

  Charlotte was still not believing in Pat though.

  She asked me whether Mr. Cleneay could take a look at the marriage license.

  “That’s not needed,” I said. “Everything was in order.” I repeated to her what Pat had said to me. “Reverend King has seen the license, and he’ll be performing the ceremony.”

  His full name is Reverend John King, if you want to write that down, Miss.

  Yes, he’s a Negro reverend, Miss.

  “Why not Reverend Webb?” Charlotte asked. “Aren’t you having the ceremony at your church, Alethea?”

  I’d asked Pat the same questions.

  Your Reverend Webb will only perform the ceremony if it is in his church, Pat had told me. I am not stepping inside another house of worship, Mattie. I have been clear about that from the start. As soon as we find a place, the Reverend King will marry us there.

  Charlotte shook her head. Pat was odd in his ways, but he was steady in his thinking.

  Religion, Pat had said to me and then I had repeated to Charlotte, was for people who needed to believe that death was better than life. I was afraid to tell her what else Pat had said, but I did. Heaven is a good story, Mattie, and good stories get retold. Charlotte and I were silent after the words came out of my mouth. I was uncertain as to what she was thinking, but I, for one, felt lonely. Heaven was where I would see my mother, Aunt Sweetie, and even Molly again. Heaven was a good story because it was a true story, I told myself.

  Charlotte unlocked the door to the butcher shop and asked if I would watch the front while she asked Mr. Cleneay, who was already at work with his brothers in the shop’s yard, a question. I could hear their cleavers, hitting the soft flesh, the dense bones, and the hardwood of the butcher’s block. The shop’s cases were already half filled. I peered inside their glass fronts—just like Charlotte said there would be—and admired the thick pink chops, the washboard ribs, and the snowy slabs of fatback. I could see why Charlotte’s face had filled out since becoming Mrs. Cleneay. When she returned, she, sweet as a sister, offered their parlor for the wedding. I’m not one to cry, but I wept that morning, as the first customers of the day came into Cleneay Brothers. I’d wanted to marry in a church, but to marry with Charlotte by my
side would also be a blessing.

  Charlotte was one of our witnesses. The other was Mrs. Mary Field, Charlotte’s nearest neighbor. Pat’s witness hadn’t shown, so Mrs. Field was called upon at the last moment. Their Xs were on the marriage certificate, if you want to write that down, Miss.

  Mr. Anderson says the year was 1874. I can tell you that it was summertime and I wore a cornflower-blue dress, which Charlotte borrowed for me—cotton lawn, she said—and my tan button boots. Pat wore one of his black suits, freshly laundered, ironed, and scented with lavender—that was Charlotte’s gift to us.

  Mr. Cleneay’s gift was a sugar-cured ham, which I prepared for our wedding dinner at their home.

  Though I hadn’t told Charlotte, I had followed her advice. Before we married, I’d asked Pat for the story of his father, and it was almost as short as Rosa’s.

  Charles was an army officer, Pat began, and a surgeon. He must have strongly disliked Ireland, his island of birth, as he chose to live far from it for most of his life. Before Charles reached the fifth decade of life, he died of malaria in a country called India, far from his home and far from his second family, Pat said.

  “Did he have a side woman?” I whispered.

  Charlotte, I knew, wouldn’t like the sound of a second family.

  Pat repeated “side woman” slowly, as if he’d never heard of such a thing. Then he explained something to me that was far worse. He said that in his father’s religion a marriage could be made to never exist in the eyes of God.

  “Your father’s religion made Rosa disappear?”

  As a wife, yes, replied my husband-to-be.

  Charlotte would have walked away at that point and never looked back. I didn’t because I believed that Pat wasn’t Charles and I wasn’t Rosa.

  Pat’s father married anew and with his wife, who was not Rosa, he had three daughters.

  “You’ve three half sisters, Pat? You’re not alone then,” I said, echoing one of his oft-repeated complaints, which came forward, one after the other, once he had a sip or two of whiskey. The missing island, the missing mother, the missing eye, the missing father, the missing byline, and soon enough there was just Pat, alone in Cincinnati.

  No, I never took whiskey or strong drink, Miss, with Pat or without him.

  I’ve seen what drink can do to a person. It made them happier or it made them sadder. Either way, it soon made them poorer, and I didn’t need any help with that.

  Pat must have had no whiskey in his glass that night because he declared that he was not alone. He had a younger brother too, he said.

  I’d asked Pat for the story of his father, and he gave me three half sisters and a little brother. I scolded him for hiding them until now. Pat was a terrible storyteller, and I told him so.

  Pat looked up, his eye aglow. On the contrary, he said. He was a very good storyteller, as the listener clearly wanted to know more, which was the point of storytelling.

  Pat lowered his head and said that when he was young, still playing with toy soldiers, a younger boy was brought into the manor house of the Old Lady—the one who smelled of camphor—and was introduced to him as his little brother, James Daniel Hearn. The Old Lady said that James Daniel and his nanny, Elesa, had just come to Dublin.

  A return voyage for me—for us both, in a way—Mrs. Brenane, the nanny corrected the Old Lady. I was Dublin born, and Danielo came into this world at the border of the Irish and Celtic seas. He was too eager to see the world, weren’t you, Danielo? It was a long voyage back to Ireland and the seas were rougher this time, but he was such a good soldier, the nanny cooed. She gave the little boy a kiss, one on each of his ruddy cheeks.

  Pat remembered kisses on both cheeks. Pat heard “the seas” and felt envy about that as well. His father was a “good soldier,” and he went on many a “long voyage.”

  Pat regarded the little boy with new interest and saw that he had tiny gold rings in his earlobes. Pat reached up and felt the dimples in his own lobes and remembered that he had worn them too. He then turned his attention toward the nanny Elesa. Pat, for a brief blissful moment, thought it was his mother. Her large dark eyes, ripe damson plums; her hair full of waves, a night sea without a moon, Pat said. He took in a deep hopeful breath, but there was not a trace of lavender in the room, and he knew.

  The little boy began to whimper and cling to the nanny’s skirt. The nanny bent down and whispered something encouraging—possibly even loving, Pat suspected—into Danielo’s ear, and the little boy toddled over and sat down on the rug next to Pat. The little boy soon picked up one of Pat’s toy soldiers—precious to Pat, as they were the few toys that his father had given him—and ran off with it. Pat chased after the little thief.

  The nanny Elesa and the Old Lady, who were seated and conversing nearby, must have thought that the Hearn brothers were at play, and they ignored the sudden movements and the waving of limbs.

  The boys circled each other until the little thief unwisely headed toward the landing of the grand staircase, which ran through the center of the manor house, like a spine broken and twisted. Pat tried to push the little thief down the polished steps. The little thief dropped the toy soldier and clung onto a banister with both hands, while letting out the high-pitched shriek of a small animal before slaughter. The nanny came running, and the little thief let go of the banister and clung to her skirt instead. The Old Lady, unused to the din, ordered the nanny to take James Daniel away. The Boy is unfit to have company this morning, the Old Lady declared.

  The nanny Elesa had brought with her gifts for Pat, a box of sticky, odd-tasting sweetmeats made of sesame seeds and a cloth bag full of seashells of varying shapes and sizes. At the bottom of the bag of shells were a handful of sand and a thick envelope, the latter the Old Lady took from him when he, in his boyish excitement, had dumped the bag’s entire contents all over the nursery’s floor.

  Pat had not seen his little brother since. He missed not seeing the nanny Elesa more, he admitted.

  Pat’s stories were often like Aunt Sweetie’s. Both were full of ghost-people. They were there but not really there. They were seen once or twice and then gone from sight but not from mind. They appeared again with little notice. Aunt Sweetie’s people were dead, which explained their actions. Pat’s were often still alive, and yet he never had a good reason for why they acted as they did.

  When Pat was ten and six, the Old Lady informed him of his father’s passing. She began her letter Charles left you nothing. The Old Lady was his father’s aunt and Pat’s grandaunt and guardian. He always referred to her as the “Old Lady,” and she always called him “The Boy.” She must have had a heart because it stopped beating when she passed, but there was no proof of its existence when she was alive, Pat claimed. He didn’t shed a tear for his father or for her when she went to her God. Pat was in Cincinnati when he received this letter, and it began with a similar declaration, he said.

  “Was the Old Lady meant to leave you something, Pat?” I asked.

  Charlotte would have turned back at this point to hear more, I knew.

  Pat answered my question with a question.

  “Of course it matters, Pat!” I answered.

  Charlotte may be right, I remembered thinking. Pat doesn’t know where he’s living. Money matters here. Clothes matter here. The color of his skin matters here. The color of mine matters. Each of these thoughts was a finger that I wanted to jab into his chest. I didn’t, but Pat must have seen on my face the will that it took for me not to do so.

  Mattie, it was unlikely that the Old Lady had any money left when she died, Pat said. Or, perhaps, she had never intended to keep her word in the first place.

  Pat then listed for me what the Old Lady did give him. Camphor, which he said was the smell of death waiting for you; the Catholic religion, which was not the faith of his father or of his mother; and boarding schools, which taught him the language
of French and of violence.

  “Violence isn’t a language, Pat,” I objected.

  Mattie, a language requires only that you understand it and, in the case of violence, that you obey it. Which is easier to understand, Pat asked, the whip or a man’s voice?

  “It depends on the man,” I replied.

  Exactly, Mattie. But the whip is always a whip. To use it is to wound. Pain is its only purpose.

  “How do you know this?” I asked. What I meant was Who whipped you, Patrick Hearn? Charlotte and I, we’ve seen white bodies holding whips but never on the blood-raising ends of them.

  The Old Lady, Pat replied without a pause. She did not have the stomach or the strength for corporal punishment, but she sent me to a school where the teachers and the boys did it for her, all in the name of her God, all in the name of obeying His will. The whole of St. Cuthbert’s smelled of fear and on Fridays of fish, Pat said.

  St. Cuthbert’s was where Pat lost his eye, Miss. It wasn’t an accident is what he wouldn’t want you to know. Someone took it from him is what I want you to know.

  Pat’s vision was poorly from the time he was young. He could not recognize faces until they were near. He could not see a ball aimed at him. He could not see words on a page or a blackboard unless he was close enough to kiss them, he said. When he was ten and six, one morning before Mass, he heard a friendly voice calling to him from behind the college chapel, and he walked toward it. The voice punched him in the face until he could no longer see the gray wool of the English sky. Lying on his back in the grass, Pat heard the voice laughing in the dark. When he could see the wool again, it was only with his right eye.

  I can hear Pat’s voice, as if he were here with us. Maybe he is. Even as a ghost-person, I know he would sound the same.

  What would I say to him? That’s an easy question, Miss.

  Pat, you weren’t alone in Cincinnati. You had Bill and me. You should have remembered us in the end.

  I hadn’t mentioned Bill before? Is that so, Miss?

  I cared for Bill from when he was a baby until he was grown. When I’d left Maysville for Cincinnati, Aunt Sweetie had asked me to do him the kindness of raising him as a mother would. I did.