The Sweetest Fruits

by Monique Truong

  Pat, for instance, once told me about a mob that had surrounded a young loafer who had been arrested and was being hauled through Rat Row by three policemen. The mob, Pat said, was intent on teaching the wretch a lesson with their fists and their boots. Drunk and mean, that young wretch had hit an old man bloody for no good reason—not to rob him or settle a grudge—and mob justice decided that he should be ripped apart, like an alley cat onto a mouse.

  “What were the policemen doing, Pat?” I asked.

  The officers shielded that wretch with their own bodies, Pat said.

  “Three policemen protecting a common criminal from blows? Had you ever seen such a sight, Pat?”

  Pat hadn’t. His readers, I knew, hadn’t either.

  “What was the criminal’s name, Pat?”

  Pat lifted his notebook up to his right eye and answered with a name that sounded German to my ears. Cincinnati taught that to me. Who knew that the Promised Land was full of Germans, I’d thought when I first got here.

  “Captain Eichelberger was one of the officers, Pat?”

  No, it wasn’t a blind guess, Miss. It was a name that I’d often heard coming from Pat’s mouth.

  The captain, I’d figured, was more of Pat’s eyes than any of the other policemen. If Captain Eichelberger was present, then Pat’s notebook would be chock-full. The young man that night was missing a side tooth, and the rest of them were tobacco-stained. His shirt, soaked with sweat and dirt and speckled with the other man’s blood, had been carefully mended, and someone had even embroidered the young man’s initials at a corner of the shirttail. Pat couldn’t have seen these details with his own eye, but when he was offered them, he included every last one because they made the readers feel as if they had lost the tooth or were wearing the shirt, he said.

  “The captain knew the young man’s family from Over-the-Rhine or Mount Adams, Pat?” I asked.

  Pat lifted his notebook up to his eye again.

  It was all there. He just hadn’t seen it yet.

  A loafer to the mob, a wretch to Pat, and a young man to Captain Eichelberger, the criminal had been blessed that night with three Angels in blue. That was the heart of the story, not the mob. The young man might have reminded the captain of a wayward nephew or cousin who had a mother waiting at home, a brood of sisters and brothers too. When the captain showed toward the young man the first sign of mercy—a blue arm extended, the palm of a hand like a shield—the other two police officers followed his lead. Pat had said that violence was a language. Mercy was a language too, I told him.

  For the second telling, Pat would read the story to me once it had appeared in the pages of the Enquirer. I teased him that he liked hearing the sound of his own voice. He did, but that wasn’t why he did this. I was his witness. Pat needed to know that he had worked and that he had worked well. So this wasn’t the moment for asking any more questions. Instead, I would say “What a story!” or “Such an odd turn of events!” and that’s how he knew that I’d listened. He would look up from the Enquirer and take a long puff on his pipe.

  I didn’t always understand Pat’s stories once they had reached the pages of your newspaper, Miss. As with his lilt, Pat could change his words at will. I preferred the plainer ones that he used when he told his stories to me. The readers of your newspaper preferred the ones bedecked with lace, as Charlotte would say. Maybe the readers wanted the lace because they had to pay money for the stories. I got them for free.

  Well, not free. In exchange for being Pat’s cook, maid, and washerwoman.

  “You mean for being his wife,” Charlotte had said, when I’d gone to her to air my complaints.

  I’d never been anyone’s wife before, and Molly and Aunt Sweetie weren’t anyone’s wives either. We all cooked for other women’s husbands. Cooking for your own husband turned out to be more of a chore. Pat never complained to me about the fare at Mrs. Haslam’s, except for the Cincinnati-coffee. Not that I could have done anything about it, if he had. I wasn’t to take a menu request from a boarder unless it came through Mrs. Haslam first. She called it the Michigan rule.

  When I began working at her house, there was a new boarder who wouldn’t eat animal fat or flesh. He was from the state of Michigan and belonged to a faith with a number in its name that I’d never heard of before.

  Yes, that was it, Miss. Seventh-day Adventist.

  Mrs. Haslam said that I was to serve him only vegetables and grains. I told her that the vegetables on her table were cooked with bacon or lard and so were the grains. She shrugged her shoulders and told me to use only lard from now on, as the new boarder would see the bacon pieces. If he never had lard before, how will he know what it tastes like, she reasoned. I followed her orders, and it turned out that he had grown up eating, as we all had, lard. After relishing what had been served to him for the first week or so, he ate a forkful of succotash one night and loudly complained to Mrs. Haslam, in front of her other boarders, that she hadn’t respected his wishes or his faith. She told him, her head bobbing up and down, that he was in the wrong boardinghouse and in the wrong city. “Cincinnati is Porkopolis, sir!” she declared, her voice shaking. That was the first time, since I’d started working there, that I’d seen Miss Caroline smile.

  Mrs. Haslam refused to rent rooms to Michiganders for years after that, and the Michigan rule came into being. Later, when I told this story to Pat, he began calling her “Mrs. Porkopolis,” before settling upon his other name for her.

  The point of this story, Miss? I thought it was plain.

  The point was that for two years, Pat, the boarder, had eaten my cooking and found it not to his liking. Now Pat, the husband, was set on improving what came out of my kitchen.

  First, he declared that my hot water cornbread was fine for breakfast, but not for supper.

  “You want biscuits instead?” I asked him.

  Biscuits weren’t fine either, he replied. For breakfast, yes, but for the supper table, the only proper bread is a yeasted one, Mattie.

  I’d never heard of such a thing. I ignored the yeast rule for as long as I could. Pat took to buying round loaves of bread with a hard crust—he told me that their bakers were from Germany—and adding them to our supper table to make his point.

  “Your husband didn’t grow up in Kentucky or in Ohio, so why do you want to cook for him as if he had?” Charlotte asked, when I’d gone over to Cleneay Brothers to ask for her advice. “You’re being stubborn, Alethea. Bread, like anything else, is a matter of taste, and everyone has a right to their own tastes,” she said.

  Charlotte was with child, but she wasn’t showing yet, so Mr. Cleneay thought it was still respectable to have her helping behind the counter. Some women, when they were in the family way, spoke plainly and only with an ear for the truth. Charlotte was one of them.

  I bought some baker’s yeast that morning, and the following evening we had a fresh white loaf for supper. I’d split the top of the risen dough, the way that Molly did, and poured melted butter into the gully that opened up, before placing the pan in the oven. No bakers from Germany did that, I wanted to say to Pat.

  Pat had other ideas about the supper table. I suppose I should have been grateful that he didn’t share them with me all at once.

  Days before our first Christmas as man and wife, Pat asked what would be on the table.

  “A ham,” I answered, “with a brown sugar glaze.”

  Pat didn’t say a thing.

  A baked ham was what I’d made at Mrs. Haslam’s every Christmas. It was also what I’d made for our wedding dinner. “The crab-apple jelly that Charlotte gave me back in the fall would make a nice glaze,” I added, thinking that brown sugar sounded too plain to Pat for Christmas fare.

  Pat, again, didn’t say a thing.

  I waited. I knew that the silence meant that Pat was picking and choosing his words. He had something to say, all right. H
e asked for less pork and more beef at our supper table, not only on Christmas but also on the other days of the year.

  I didn’t say it out loud, but I heard Mrs. Haslam’s Cincinnati is Porkopolis, sir! ringing in my head. I did say to Pat that pork was cheaper around these parts, and he assured me that we could afford the extra expense of beef. That was how I knew that he’d received a raise at the Enquirer.

  By the time Charlotte was about to give birth, she had a gal named Lucy who was helping her with the cooking and household chores. Cleneay Brothers, as Mr. Cleneay had promised her, was doing well, and the shop certainly wouldn’t miss my orders, but still I wanted Charlotte to know.

  “Pat likes beef better than pork,” I said.

  Charlotte rocked gently in her chair, her belly rounded and full. Now that she didn’t have to wash and iron her own or anyone else’s clothing, Charlotte only wore white, the color that had bedeviled her as a washerwoman. Shirtfronts spotted with jam or greasy gravy, sweat-yellowed underarms, blood on her husband’s aprons, these were all someone else’s troubles now. Charlotte, an angel, looked at me and said, “If he doesn’t relish what’s on your table, he’ll dine elsewhere, Alethea.”

  That was all that Charlotte had to say on the matter, and it made my blood run cold. I knew what she meant. I knew that she wasn’t warning me about someone else’s cooking.

  At the center of our first Christmas table was a roasted joint of beef. The crab-apple jelly I’d stirred into the pan drippings to give it sweetness and a pleasing gloss. Mashed turnips, sweet potatoes, a pickle plate—there were green peaches, watermelon rinds, and onions with mustard seeds—yeasted rolls, eggnog, apple custard, and gingerbread men for Bill.

  Of course I can still bring to mind what was on that table, Miss. If I cooked it, then it’s worth remembering. Any cook worth her salt will tell you that, Miss.

  More beef roasts followed, as did beef stews—Pat liked his with carrots and parsnips but not potatoes—and beefsteaks. Porterhouse and tenderloins were the cuts that he preferred.

  For a man who never went into the kitchen except to tell me a story, Pat had very particular ideas about how foodstuff should be prepared. If the stew meat wasn’t as tender as he’d like, he would remind me that I should never add raw meat to a pot of hot broth or water. Always best to start the meat in cold liquids, Mattie. This is true whether the meat is fresh or dried, smoked or salted, he added.

  I’d never heard of such a thing. Have you, Miss?

  Well, you’ve that in common with Pat then. He didn’t know much about cooking either.

  I heard Charlotte’s warning in my head whenever Pat would offer up another of his cooking remarks. They weren’t cooking advice because you can’t give advice about a skill that you don’t have.

  I disagree, Miss. I never did the same to Pat.

  My “advice,” if that’s what you want to call it, wasn’t about his writing. They were about his storytelling. I can tell stories too, Miss. Writing was what Pat did for a living, and I never presumed to tell him how to make his living.

  Pat had kept his promises to me. I was his wife. I was no longer working in someone else’s kitchen. I was taking care of Bill, as I’d promised Aunt Sweetie that I would. In exchange, I listened to Pat’s remarks.

  About soup making—I, who made a tureen of soup for a table of eight every night for over four years.

  About how I needed to garnish the dishes I served to him with lemon slices, parsley sprigs, or mint leaves—a plate of food isn’t a hat, I’d wanted to say to him.

  About when to add sugar to the eggs in a cake batter—before the eggs are beaten, he said.

  “Is that so?” I’d say. Or “Now, why didn’t Molly teach me that?” Or “I’ll do that next time, Pat.”

  I confided to Charlotte, then the mother of a baby crawling on his chubby limbs, that my spirits were low. Pat and I had been man and wife for about a year, and the southern Ohio heat arriving too early that summer was making me lose patience.

  “I don’t care if he dines elsewhere, Charlotte,” I said. “It would be a relief,” I admitted.

  “Where would you go, Alethea?” asked Charlotte. She was already in the family way again—the second one would also be a boy. She spoke plain and with an ear for the truth more than ever before. Being with her made me want to do the same. She didn’t have to ask where Bill would go because she knew that, no matter what happened, he would be with me.

  “Where would I go?” I repeated.

  The question that I heard was Where would Pat go?

  Mr. Anderson tells me that I was two tens and one that year. Pat was two tens and five. Pat’s heart still wasn’t fully grown, but it would be by that summer’s end.

  When the days were still long and the windows were opened wide to lure in the breeze, I heard a knock at the front door as I was setting the supper table. I found Pat slumped against a corner of the porch. He was snoring quietly, and I could smell whiskey on his breath. I called him by his name, tugged on his sleeves, and then I dragged him inside the house.

  No, I’d never seen him that way before, Miss.

  I couldn’t bring him up the stairs on my own, so I brought down a pillow for his head and left him in the entryway to sleep it off. When Bill came home, I told him that Mr. Pat was feeling under the weather. Best not to wake him, I said.

  Pat woke up on his own.

  Deplorable moral habits, Pat said to me. He repeated the words, the second time slower, and he explained what “deplorable” meant. Worse than terrible, Mattie.

  I knew the meaning of “moral” and “habit,” but I couldn’t understand what these words could mean when spoken together.

  “Start from the beginning, Pat,” I said, sweeping his hair, which he was wearing longer in those days, off his forehead.

  The beginning, he said, was when one Patrick Lafcadio Hearn met one Alethea “Mattie” Foley. He professed his love for her, and she agreed to be his wife.

  “Pat, please. Start from the beginning of this day.”

  The beginning of this day, he said, was when his editor marched over to his desk in the newsroom and told him to leave the premises immediately. When asked why, the editor replied that it had come to the Enquirer’s attention that young Mr. Hearn here—the editor was addressing the other reporters who were now gathered around—has been cohabitating with a woman of color. We cannot have a man of deplorable moral habits employed here, Mr. Hearn.

  Pat laughed out loud. He thought it was a queer joke being played on him by his fellow reporters. He looked around at the stance of their bodies—you and I would have looked at their faces, Miss, but Pat would have seen only smudges there—and he understood that these men, with their arms crossed and their legs planted wide, no longer meant him well. Pat claimed that at that moment his ears failed him. The editor continued with his speech, his mouth opening and closing, but Pat heard none of his words.

  “As if someone has swaddled a scarf around your head,” I said.

  Pat nodded, saying that what he did next—collecting his notebooks, his files, his half-written articles, his pipes, his pens—were all acts that were done as if by another being.

  “You saw yourself, as if you were floating above your body.”

  Pat nodded.

  “You felt small and made of something weak, weaker than flesh.”

  Pat nodded, adding that he left the newsroom without saying a word.

  “Because your mouth was full of sawdust.”

  Pat nodded.

  He headed to a whiskey-shop. The drink made him angry, he said.

  “At yourself.”

  Pat nodded.

  I should have told them to go straight to Hell, Mattie. I should have said that there is nothing about you or me that is deplorable. I should have told them your name, your precious name that means truth in the language of t
he Greek gods. I should have told them that you are a natural beauty. I should have said that you are a born storyteller, and all of them were amateurs compared to you. How dare they call you a woman of color, Mattie—

  “That’s what I am, Pat.”

  He looked up at me, his eye swollen with sleep and tears. I said nothing, Mattie. Nothing, Pat repeated.

  At the whiskey-shop, he drank until he felt emptied of anger, until he couldn’t remember how he got home, until he knocked on his own front door because he couldn’t find his key, until he tried to sit down and passed out instead.

  “Where are all your things, Pat?”

  He couldn’t remember. Then he said that he must have left his belongings at the whiskey-shop to cover his tab.

  “You’ll go get everything tomorrow, Pat. Here, take the week’s food money and use what you need. We’ll make do. We’ve lived on less before.”

  Pat then wanted to know how I knew. The muffled hearing, the view from above, the weaker than flesh, the dry mouth, he said.

  “They came with my condition, Pat. Charlotte has felt the same. So have Mr. Cleneay and his brothers. Molly, Aunt Sweetie, every colored person you’ve seen and not seen on the streets of Cincinnati, Pat.”

  He blinked and blinked.

  “The first time is hardest.”

  You become accustomed to it, Mattie?

  “No, Pat. It’s hardest because the first time happened when we were young.”

  Tell me, Mattie, he said, closing his eye.

  “When I took my first breath, my first meal from my mother’s breast, I couldn’t have known that I was a slave. I couldn’t have known what a free person was either, as I suckled and waved my tiny fists, grabbing on to air, as if it were all that I had on this earth. When I began to crawl and play with the other young ones who were born in the shacks nearby, we couldn’t have known that we didn’t belong to our mothers, that their love and their bodies couldn’t protect our own. But one day, we, every one of us, learned that we were lesser—worse, that our mothers were lesser—than the white people, lesser than their children, who lived at the edges of our lives.”