The Sweetest Fruits

by Monique Truong

  You could say that Bill and Aunt Sweetie are kin, Miss. We’re all God’s children, like I said.

  Pat met Bill at Mrs. Haslam’s. It must have been in the late fall or wintertime because Pat was seated by the kitchen’s work table and smoking his pipe, while I did the washing up. Before Pat left that evening, he bent down and asked for “the young gentleman’s name.”

  Bill’s voice piped up from underneath the table, “I’m not a gentleman, and my name is Bill.”

  Pat chuckled and said, “I stand corrected, Not a Gentleman Bill.”

  “But you’re sitting!” Bill objected, his freckled face peeping out and up at Pat’s.

  Pat got up from his chair and said again, “I stand corrected, Not a Gentleman Bill.”

  “Now you sure are!” Bill agreed.

  Pat shook Bill’s little hand, sticky with the fried apple pies that I’d made for him from that day’s scraps of dough.

  The gal, who looked after Bill along with her brood of four, was in bed with a fever in the hours before dawn, and I knew that Charlotte was planning to spend a rare day off with Mr. Cleneay, her husband-to-be. So I’d no other choice but to bring Bill with me to Mrs. Haslam’s.

  I handed Pat a clean dish towel to wipe off his hand, now sticky as well.

  Yes, Bill was underneath that table for a reason, Miss.

  Mrs. Haslam would have fainted. A Negro child and Mr. Hearn! She would have grabbed her waist and raised her voice, as if I wouldn’t have seen for myself whom I had gathered in her kitchen. My saving grace—that evening and every evening there—was that Mrs. Haslam hated the sight of the kitchen, especially after the supper service. The slop and the mess of cooking, she’d told me when she hired me, didn’t interest her. She talked about the kitchen as if it were a pigsty. The slop and the mess? Molly’s kitchen, Aunt Sweetie’s, and none of mine have ever suffered from slop or mess. What Mrs. Haslam meant was that if I did my job ably, she wouldn’t surprise or shadow me like other employers would.

  I gave Bill another fried pie, and Pat eyed the golden half-moon as it traveled from my hand to Bill’s. So I gave Pat one too, and he sat down again. Bill settled cross-legged by Pat’s chair, his little body half under the work table and half out.

  I returned to the last of the dishes. At the sink, with my back to them, I could hear them enjoying their treats. Bill with his mouse-like nibbles because he was trying to make the sweetness last, and Pat with his wide-jawed bites—two and the fried pie would be gone—so that no one could come along and take it from him. There was hunger in both of their bodies. One I could feed, and the other I couldn’t.

  When Pat didn’t see Bill in the kitchen the next evening, he asked after him, and then he asked for his story.

  I told Pat the same one I’ve told you, Miss.

  Yes, he believed me.

  Pat asked how old Bill was, and I replied that he was almost five. Pat blinked and blinked. He didn’t mention Bill’s name again in the days that followed, and I thought that he’d forgotten about the boy, as men often forget about children, even when they are their own. Then, one evening, Pat placed a toy soldier with a brightly painted red coat and white britches on the kitchen’s work table and said that it was for Not a Gentleman Bill. Over the course of that next week, the soldiers and then their horses kept on appearing, in twos and threes, until Bill had a full set.

  I didn’t know right then that Pat and I would be man and wife, but I knew that if he asked I would say yes. Charlotte had told me that she knew that she and Mr. Cleneay were meant for each other when she got a lump in her throat and she couldn’t stop singing. When Pat gave me the sea, my heart was in my throat, and now that he had made Bill’s hazel eyes shine, my throat was full of songs. To this day, Bill still has those little men, chipped and faded, in a cigar box tucked among his books.

  No, Miss, Pat was never a father to Bill. Pat couldn’t be what he had never known.

  I suppose you’re right, Miss. I couldn’t have been a mother to Bill either then.

  But for three years, we were a family in the ways that we knew how. We shared a roof and the walls of a tidy house. We ate our meals around the same table with three matching chairs with a fourth should there be a guest. After a good night’s sleep, we woke to find one another still there. Until one day, we didn’t.

  No, Miss, Pat didn’t leave me for another Negress.

  Is that what you’ve been sitting here thinking? That Pat had a—What do white people call it?—a civility toward my kind—

  A proclivity. Yes, that’s the word, Miss.

  Truth be told, I thought it too, at first.

  When Pat and I were first trading stories, I’d found it strange that he knew the names of the streets in Bucktown—even the one where Bill and I were rooming at the time. Pat also knew his way around the Levee and its alleys where the stevedores and longshoremen drank away their wages. Pat said that his work had brought him to these colored neighborhoods, but I wasn’t sure how. A secretary to a librarian and a printing-house proofreader, neither had any business being in those neighborhoods. The white men whom we do see there, day or night, had a taste for strong drink and for the lowest of women.

  I was too ashamed to tell Charlotte. I didn’t want her to think poorly of Pat. I didn’t want to either, but I did. I stopped talking to him altogether. I would acknowledge his greetings same as before but then continue with my evening chores. He continued to smoke his pipe on the back steps, despite seeing nothing but my back.

  Penniless and friendless was how Pat decided to explain himself to me. When he first came to Cincinnati, he only had the name and address of one man, he said.

  “The man was a kin of yours, Pat?” I asked.

  He was someone’s kin but not mine, Mattie. He took one look at my face, read the letter that I had brought to him, looked me over once more, and then sent me on my way. He shooed me out of his house as if I were a cur. I stood outside his front door, my hat still in my hand, because I had nowhere else to go and no idea what to do next. In my travel case, I had books and no clean clothing left, and in my suit pocket a single coin.

  Pat must have been a pitiful sight, because the man’s wife, probably defying her husband’s orders, opened their front door—Pat remembered the aroma of a meaty dinner wafting out—and handed him two crumpled bills from her apron pocket. He said her gesture of kindness woke him from his stupor, but it also made him understand that he was a mere beggar to this woman and man.

  Pat, the beggar, slept on a park bench his first night in Cincinnati and many nights thereafter. When the air turned cold, he traded a day’s work at a stable for a night’s sleep with the horses and the hay. If the stablemen were Irish, they might share with Pat a corner of bread, a bit of cheese, an apple, and whatever else someone, who was their kin, had wrapped in a clean cloth for them that morning. When Pat couldn’t find work—he shoveled coal, he shoveled horse dung, he shoveled salt, he shoveled sand—he would walk the city’s streets with his travel case in hand, as if he were just arrived or headed elsewhere soon.

  Bucktown and the Levee were the neighborhoods where it was easiest to be without, especially at nightfall, Pat said. Food was cheapest there, and so was drink. For the price of a glass, he could come out of the cold. Those whiskey-shops never closed, and if they did, few of them cared if you stayed. They would lock you in with the bottles and charge you in the morning for what you had drunk overnight.

  I stared hard at Pat when he told me about his early days here, not because I didn’t believe him but because I did. You don’t live with the streets as your home and not leave a part of yourself there. The soft parts were what you left behind, or sold, or lost like a rotted-out tooth—in its place, a gap, a soreness, and the taste of blood.

  The Patrick Hearn who came to Mrs. Haslam’s didn’t look to me as if he had parts of him missing except for the sight in one eye. He w
as a young white man of books, papers, and ink. His hands showed no sign of hard labor. His fingernails were trimmed and had no careless lines of grime. He was gentle of voice and of body. His hair was neatly cut, but the barber always missed a tuft above the right ear. Pat must have not noticed or, if he did, he kept returning to the barber out of habit or out of loyalty. I hoped that it was loyalty, which was a good trait in a man, but I couldn’t decide.

  It was Aunt Sweetie who made up my mind. As Pat blew his pipe smoke into the kitchen doorway to let me know that he was again there, I heard her voice. Aunt Sweetie had told me, back when I was preparing to leave her kitchen for another, that I needed to listen to a white man’s footfall in order to judge his character. If his steps were taken with care, that’s a good sign. If he walks with heavy steps, announcing himself even before he enters a room, you best find yourself a new kitchen, Alethea.

  Pat’s footfalls were almost silent. It was rare that I would hear him. It was the smell of his pipe tobacco that told me that he was near.

  Aunt Sweetie said that she was wiser than most, so I decided, then and there, that I would trade stories with Pat again.

  I’m glad that I did because he also knew the Cincinnati that I didn’t, and he shared that city with me. The West End, Over-the-Rhine, Downtown, the neighborhoods on the Seven Hills.

  I had few days to myself when I worked at Mrs. Haslam’s, so our “Cincinnati journeys,” as Pat called them, had to wait until we married. For our first, Pat and I took the streetcar to Walnut Hills, where he showed me the white-columned house where Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe had lived when she was young.

  Yes, I knew who Mrs. Stowe was, Miss.

  If you don’t mind me saying, you must think I’m the one who’s not from here. You’re right. I couldn’t have read Mrs. Stowe’s book, but I knew of it. I’ve never seen the sea either, but I knew of it, Miss.

  For our next journey, Pat and I took the incline from Main Street up to Mount Auburn—when white people live on a hill, they’ll call it a mountain, was what I learned that day—where the grand houses belonged to the leading families of Cincinnati, Pat told me. Their houses were like roosters with their chest feathers puffed, I told him. In Mount Auburn, I enjoyed the animals in the zoo more. There were elks, buffaloes, elephants, monkeys, hungry-looking dogs that Pat called hyenas—

  You’re not writing this down either, Miss?

  Truth be told, Pat never fancied the zoo either. He said that if he wanted to see caged animals, he could take the incline right back down to Main Street.

  “These animals don’t have to work for their keep and cage, Pat,” I said, stopping in midstride. I could have added that the zoo’s brick buildings were sturdier than any in Bucktown or the Levee, but I didn’t.

  Pat blinked and blinked, and he ceased his complaining about the zoo and its ticket price.

  No, he wasn’t a stingy man, Miss.

  Pat didn’t like feeling duped, and the zoo, he said, was not about the animals but about the humans who flocked there to be on display. He thought it foolish to have to pay money for such a common sight.

  Pat spent the bulk of what he earned freely, on books mostly. After rent and food that is.

  Yes, Miss, also on his underthings.

  A few months after we married, Pat asked if I ever dusted his books. I hadn’t. I’d never lived surrounded by so many books. Some were new but most were secondhand, he said. I didn’t think of them as things—a vase or a table—that I would sweep a feather duster or a soft rag over. I didn’t think that they were alive—a house cat or a pet bird—but maybe they were something in between. I’d never seen anyone carry a vase from room to room, onto the streetcars, or take it to bed with them the way that Pat did with a book. He even talked to some of them. He cursed at them too, slamming their covers shut.

  Pat also spent his money on pipes, fountain pens, and whiskey. He spent on clothes for me and for Bill, whenever I would ask. He never begrudged me a single item, but my shoes and boots had to be griddle-cake flat. He gladly spent on school fees for Bill and foolishly on his playthings.

  Pat couldn’t understand why we could never take Bill with us on our Cincinnati journeys. Pat asked if we could make an exception for the zoo. I told him no.

  The white people of this city, I told Pat, were far too busy to see a colored person, particularly if we were light-complected enough—Bill is lighter than I am. His father is a Scotsman; I don’t know much about his mother’s people, Miss—but if there were two or more of us, they would spot us without fail. Then, without fail, there would be trouble, if we weren’t working for them or on our way to work for someone like them.

  Pat didn’t believe me.

  I don’t need you to believe me was what I thought. I might have also said it aloud because Pat stayed at the Enquirer that night and the nights that followed, coming back home only for a change of clothing and not saying a word to me.

  I’d never been good with drawing pictures, so I asked Charlotte to do it for me. I left the note unfolded on the entryway table so that Pat would see the raven and the dove sitting on a tree branch, side by side. He must have seen it because he came home for supper that evening and brought with him a new hoop and stick for Bill.

  No, the note wasn’t an apology, Miss.

  I wasn’t wrong about needing to leave Bill at home. I wasn’t wrong not to trot that boy through the streets of Mount Auburn or Mount Adams. If the three of us were questioned, I could claim to be his mother, but what good would that do him? No one in those neighborhoods would take Pat to be his father. The three of us were far from a family in those people’s eyes. Here stands Patrick Hearn, a white man. Here stands a Negress and her fatherless child. Between us, there was no marriage, no house, no bond except for labor or something sordid. There was no need to have white strangers saying things to Bill’s face that he would hear soon enough. I knew what could come out of their mouths. Pat didn’t.

  That note was a reminder. Pat and I were on the same branch now was what I wanted him to know.

  I know you’ve been wanting to ask, and the answer is no, Miss.

  White passersby didn’t take notice of Pat and me when we were together in your parts of the city. My hair was pinned up, and I would wear my best dress and hat. You would be surprised what a well-trimmed hat can do for a face like mine. If accosted, Pat was prepared to say that I was a Spaniard. I’d told him that we had to have a story. You can’t be too careful, I insisted. He scoffed, but then he couldn’t pass up the chance to spin a tale. He renamed me “Adelina” and said that I was an opera singer touring the Midwest. He had me memorize “coloratura soprano.” He practiced as well, for he would say that he was my husband and manager. On the streets of Cincinnati, Pat was of the mind that we could be anyone we wanted to be. To Pat’s disappointment, we were never called upon to play our parts.

  Pat playacted in other ways. He could flatten his Irish lilt at will or he could take on a heavier brogue. In Mount Adams, where the policemen and firemen had their own tidy houses, Pat sounded like them. These men, out of uniform and in their day-to-day, would stop to greet him. They would tip their hats to me. I would nod back. Pat couldn’t see their faces until they were right in front of him, but if they called out “Paddy” or “O’Hearn,” he would answer them with an open smile because he said that they, like him, were the sons and grandsons of Ireland. If they called out “Herr Hearn” or “Hearnmann,” he would know that they were the sons and grandsons of Germany. They would all laugh at his ready quips and slap him on the back. Often they would pull him aside and say something into his ear, and he would pump their hand by way of thanks.

  These men have the best stories in Cincinnati, Pat boasted.

  “You mean the lowest stories,” I objected.

  I mean the stories that sell the most newspapers, Pat objected right back.

  He was right. Their stories
fed us. Charlotte had pork. I had the city’s muck and crime. Pat was doing very well at the Enquirer by the time we married, and these men were the reasons why. He said that they were his eyes and ears.

  That’s right, Miss. Pat began working at your paper while he was still a boarder at Mrs. Haslam’s.

  Proofreading at a printing house, for a man with his poor eyesight, wasn’t going to benefit him or his employer. Pat’s heart also wasn’t in it. He wanted to write the stories, not rid them of their mistakes, he complained to me. Pat kept long hours at the Enquirer because he said that the best stories in Cincinnati happened in the dark, right before dawn. He told them to me first.

  The news stories, Miss.

  Yes, I said the news stories.

  I heard about the doctors who kept stillborn babies like pickles in jars; the roustabouts who fought each other in Thurber Alley because it staved their boredom; the girls from the countryside who were maltreated by the men of the city; the unclaimed bodies of the poor that were bound for Potter’s Field but ended up at the city’s medical schools, butchered like hogs instead. Pat told them all to me first.

  I made certain that Bill was in his bed and sleeping soundly before we would begin. Pat would light his pipe, and instead of Mrs. Haslam’s kitchen we were now in our own. Instead of washing up for eight, there were the wares for three. Instead of stories of Rosa, Charles, and the sea, Pat now told me stories of Cincinnati. I didn’t know that so many people in this city murdered and maimed, their floorboards dark with dried blood, their flocked wallpaper marred with bullets and bits of brain, their breath rotten with gin and sin—

  No, I didn’t enjoy those stories, Miss. The readers of the Enquirer did.

  I had to listen to them twice. The first telling was Pat’s way of hearing the whole story again, before he wrote it down. He would sometimes miss the heart of the story, which I could hear.