The Sweetest Fruits

by Monique Truong

  Bill is doing just fine these days, Miss.

  Yes, that’s right, he’s a printer by trade.

  Yes, he’s married now.

  Yes, he’s still living in Cincinnati.

  Yes, I do see him every day, Miss.

  Listen, Bill is a private man with a business and a family of his own now, and he hasn’t decided yet whether he wants his name and his story in the newspaper alongside mine. I’m sure he’ll let you know when he makes up his mind, Miss.

  About two or so years after Mr. Watkin first came into our lives, he knocked on the kitchen door at Mrs. Haslam’s as I was cleaning up after breakfast.

  Mrs. Hearn, one day I will show up unannounced with good news again, but this is not the day, he began. Lafcadio has passed away in Baton Rouge. Marsh fever was what I heard, he said, his eyes darting around the kitchen as if it were on fire. I didn’t want you to hear about it from a stranger while I’m away. The wife’s health is poorly, Mrs. Hearn, and we’re leaving the city so that she can be with her people in Virginia. I don’t know when I’ll be back, but I will be.

  I said a prayer aloud for Pat that night.

  Dear Lord, Pat was a man with a list of flaws, but he cared for Bill and me, when he was here with us and even after he left us. He cared for Mr. Watkin too, who would do anything for him.

  I’d felt a cold hand on my shoulder.

  I asked God to forgive Pat for being an unbeliever and to admit him into the Kingdom of Heaven. I prayed that in Heaven there were many books and that when Pat tired of reading them he could look through the clouds down to the blue of the Ionian Sea. May you allow Pat to rest in peace. Amen.

  It didn’t occur to me that I should have said a prayer for “Lafcadio.” If I’d said that name aloud, there would have been a feather along the length of my spine, because that man was alive and breathing.

  No, I don’t know why Mr. Watkin would tell a falsehood, Miss.

  Maybe Mr. Watkin didn’t know that it was a lie when he said it. Or, more likely, Pat had asked him to say it. Maybe Pat wanted to go on with the rest of his days freed of his thoughts of me, and he wished the same for me.

  With Pat’s passing, it was understandable that Mr. Watkin’s and my friendship would fade, I thought. Once his wife passed and he returned to Cincinnati, he saw more of Bill than me. Mr. Watkin and Bill still had books to bring them together, and soon they would have the same trade. Mr. Watkin and I, we had nothing in common but one man, whom we knew by different names, whom we’d never even seen in each other’s company.

  No, I don’t know why Pat had kept Mr. Watkin and me from meeting, Miss.

  Pat could have, with little fuss, invited Mr. Watkin home for supper. We had a chair waiting for him. We had a dish and a bowl, a matching cup and saucer too. I didn’t like the first answer that came into my head—Pat was ashamed of me—or the second—Pat was ashamed of himself. So I’ll share with you the third.

  Mr. Watkin and I, we didn’t know the same man. Pat and Lafcadio were twins who looked the same, but they told different stories, used different words, ate different foods, knew different streets, found companionship in different people, and forgot each other’s lies.

  Lafcadio had asked Mr. Watkin to fib about his death. Years later, in a moment of longing, maybe with a whiskey or two in him, he forgot and wrote me a letter.

  The letter was sent to Mrs. Haslam’s, as the letter writer knew that I couldn’t have kept up with the rent on the house on my wages alone. He was right. Mr. Cleneay had helped Bill and me out when he could, but his and Charlotte’s family continued to grow and he needed to care for them first. The butcher still set aside what he could for Bill and me from his shops—he and his brothers had two by then, and now they have three. I’d kept the yellow-and-white gingham curtains from the kitchen and sold or pawned the rest, except for Bill’s books, which had grown in numbers thanks to Mr. Watkin. By the time Bill was ten and eight, he owned more books than most men in Cincinnati have read. He has even more these days.

  When Mrs. Haslam showed me the envelope, she gave me a sideway look. I took it from her hand, and I recognized the pie wedge of the “A” and the sideway tines of the “F” of my name. Instead of running off—she still lived in fear that the odors of the kitchen would seep into the fabric of her dresses—she stood there and stared at me some more. I placed the envelope in my apron pocket and returned my attention to that day’s pot of soup.

  Don’t you want to know whom it’s from? Mrs. Haslam asked, her head a child’s balloon bouncing up and down on its string. She, assuming that I would want to know, said the letter was from Mr. Hearn, that Irishman boarder who became a newspaperman. You remember him, Alethea.

  It wasn’t a question, and the tone of her voice—as if I’d stolen sugar from her pantry—made me think that she knew more about the goings-on in her kitchen than she had ever let on.

  Mr. Hearn sent it to you from somewhere foreign. The name looks French to me, she added, sniffing the kitchen air.

  I made certain that my face gave her nothing. I’d watched Molly do it, but it was Aunt Sweetie who taught me how and why. Aunt Sweetie called it putting on your mask. When you wear one, they can’t see you or what’s in you, she told me. Hers was a smile. Molly’s was made up of straight lines, her eyebrows flat, her lips pulled thinner than they already were. Mine was a child’s wide-opened eyes, as if the whole world was new to me, as if all that was being said to me was new as well.

  Alethea, you don’t have anything to say about any of this? Mrs. Haslam asked.

  I made sure that my words gave her even less. I said not a one of them, shaking my head from side to side instead.

  After Mrs. Haslam left the kitchen, I took the envelope out of my apron to see if she’d opened it. The seal was intact. She must be regretting that decision, I thought. I put the envelope with my coat and purse and went back to my work.

  Yes, I was surprised, Miss.

  But supper for eight boarders and one Mrs. Haslam didn’t care if a Mr. Hearn, dead for how many years, had sent me a letter. Also, there wasn’t a thing that I could do about it until I gave that letter to Bill to read. It wasn’t going to say a thing to me until his eyes saw it.

  If Miss Caroline were still at Mrs. Haslam’s, I might have asked her to read the letter to me, but she, Mr. Bean, and even Mr. Wheeler were all gone. Her two rooms were now occupied by two women again, a set of second cousins, a department store clerk and a typist at one of the railroad companies. In the early mornings when the heavy curtains were still closed, I would see Miss Caroline sitting at the breakfast table, but it couldn’t have been her because she was with Miss Beryl. Ghost-people, if beloved, were conjured by the living, Aunt Sweetie had taught me. If despised, they conjured themselves to ask the living why.

  The return address says Martinique; it’s an island in the West Indies, Bill told me later that night.

  The letter writer must have been Lafcadio, as his words were nearly foreign to me. Even Bill struggled with a few, as he read the letter aloud to me.

  Mr. Pat was writing as if he were someone living in the past, Bill said.

  No, I don’t have that letter, Miss.

  When Bill saw that I was feeding its pages to the coal stove, he had the same face that you have on now. The same sound came from his throat that just came from yours, Miss.

  I’ll tell you the same thing I told Bill. I don’t know that letter writer. Why would I keep something sent from a stranger?

  Yes, I can recall some of it, Miss.

  The letter writer, I believed, was drunk. There were long descriptions of the island and its plants and flowers and its sunrises and sunsets. Bill blushed as he read what then followed about the writer’s lonesomeness and regrets. Bill’s voice rose with excitement when the writer then boasted that he had five books to his name and aimed to publish more. The writer even claime
d that one of them was a cookbook.

  Yes, that was the title, Miss.

  I couldn’t believe that the letter writer wasn’t telling a lie. Bill, worldly at ten and eight, told me that the title was French, the language spoken on the island of Martinique and in Louisiana, the state where we both had thought that Mr. Pat had lived and died. I recognized “Cuisine” as a fancy word for cooking but not “Creole.” Bill said that the word meant white people descended from the French or the Spanish or it could mean colored folks descended from the same. Down in Louisiana, if they were light-complected enough, then they called themselves “Creoles of color,” he said. The white in them had to come from France or Spain though, he repeated.

  “Not Ireland or Scotland?” I asked, and he replied no.

  Bill has tried to find that cookbook, but over the years he hasn’t been able to locate a single copy. He even wrote to some of the secondhand bookshops in New Orleans. One wrote back to say that they knew of it, but that there were very few copies in the city because few had been printed in the first place.

  No, I’m not curious to see it, Miss.

  Truth be told, I’m taken aback that someone would trust Pat or Lafcadio—or whoever he was at the time—to know enough about the kitchen to write an entire book about it. I don’t know what Creole cooking is, but if these are colored folks, then I think I know a thing or two about what’s on their tables. What I want to know is whether these were the dishes that they cooked in their own kitchens or in the kitchens of others. The two aren’t the same. The first is what they hunger for, and the second is what their hunger will make them do.

  You don’t understand the fullness of my meaning, do you, Miss?

  Listen, take pork neck bones, for instance. Long-simmered and served with pan gravy, it’s humble fare that we in the kitchen eat. I would never prepare it for Mrs. Haslam and her boarders, and they are poorer for never having tasted it. Like an oyster stew, I can make this dish in my sleep, not because my hands remember it but because my heart remembers it. I ask you how could a white man, Pat or Lafcadio, know how to cook something like that?

  Do you know that he’d owned a restaurant, Miss?

  Bill doesn’t remember reading it in the letter from Martinique, but I remember hearing it. The letter writer claimed that he’d been part owner of a restaurant that served cheap but wholesome fare.

  Yes, in New Orleans, Miss.

  He thought about calling it The 5-Cent Restaurant, the letter writer began.

  How many ways can a cook prepare a five-cent piece, I’d thought, laughing to myself. Roasted, boiled, fried, stewed, souped, pickled, jellied? What’s the proper garnish for a five-cent piece, Pat or Lafcadio, a lemon slice or a sprig of parsley?

  A nickel, the letter writer explained, was to be the price of every dish on the menu. But before the doors opened, the place was renamed The Hard Times, which to my mind was an even worse name. No one wants to be reminded of their sad lot when they’re having a meal, even if it was cheap but wholesome.

  I’m not surprised that you hadn’t heard of the place, Miss. I don’t know who came up with the scheme, but I’m guessing it was Pat, who came to Cincinnati with nothing, who shoveled dirt and dung for his suppers, and who never forgot how much he had to pay for so little on his plate.

  Yes, he did send me another letter, Miss.

  Its pages also went into the stove. I didn’t even show them to Bill first.

  When Mrs. Haslam handed me this second envelope, she said that Mr. Hearn of yours wasn’t in France anymore.

  I was tempted to correct her, but then I thought why.

  He’s somewhere called Cuba now, she said.

  Yes, I burned those letters for a reason, Miss.

  They were proof that I had married a man who was alive and well. When their pages reached my hands, I, at two tens and six, was also another man’s wife.

  I knew what needed to be done, but I needed time. I didn’t want those letters, their pages sitting in some pocket or tin, to take that time away from me. That second envelope looked as if it had been opened and resealed. If by Mrs. Haslam, then she knew me, as most people did then, as Mrs. Kleintank.

  His full name is John Kleintank, Miss, and yes, he’s a Negro. If he were living in Louisiana and if his father were not German, I suppose you could call him a Creole of color.

  Mr. Anderson says that it’s iconic that my marriage to Mr. Kleintank is the one that I’ve the license and the certificate for. No, that wasn’t his word. Mr. Anderson says that it’s ironic that the marriage, for which I’ve paper proof, was never legal in the eyes of the law.

  Because Pat and I had never divorced, Miss.

  Patrick Hearn was my lawful husband until the day that he passed, and I, Alethea Foley, was his wife.

  Let me stop so that you can write that down, Miss.

  I want the Enquirer’s readers to know that I left Mr. Kleintank. I couldn’t be his wife if I was still Pat’s. It wasn’t the law that I feared, but the Almighty. I’m not a sinner. I can’t be, though the Devil knows that he has tempted me to be. I need to get into the Kingdom of Heaven. I’ve got kin up there. When you believe in God, your path in life isn’t simple, but it’s clear. You can see the North Star in the darkest sky. You can see Freedom across the Ohio. You can see your mother waiting for you in the Hereafter. No man—John Kleintank or Lafcadio Hearn or Patrick Hearn—was going to keep me from getting There.

  The proof that I’d feared then is the proof that I need now. Mr. Anderson would call that ironic. I call it a slap in the face. I call it Pat still having a say, though his body is cold in the ground.

  As I’ve said, Miss, about a month ago I’d received a letter from a publisher. It was addressed to “Mrs. Lafcadio Patrick Hearn.” Do you know where it was sent? To Mrs. Haslam’s. I suppose Pat must have carried that address with him all the way to Japan. Mrs. Haslam’s youngest sister, a widow herself, is now in charge of the boardinghouse, and she got word to me through her cook. That Mrs. Haslam’s sister knew that the letter was meant for me, well, that told me that Mrs. Haslam, may she rest in peace, knew about Pat and me all along.

  I gave the letter to Bill to read. That was how we learned that Pat had passed, for the second time. There were tears in Bill’s eyes. I would rather that he not miss Mr. Pat, as I’d told him years ago. Miss his books, I’d told him. The books you can replace.

  I asked Bill if he had known. He said that he must have missed the death notice in the newspapers, same with the observatory—

  Yes, yes, the obituary. I know the word, Miss.

  I get the beginnings and the ends of them right, don’t I? It’s the middle that I tend to forget. So many of them are like an overstuffed chicken. Bread crumbs, chestnuts, onions, and oysters. The bird alone is enough, I always say.

  The letter might as well have said Pat left you nothing because after Mr. Anderson wrote back on my behalf—the publisher had wanted permission to include my name in a book about Lafcadio Hearn—I received a telegram, informing me that Mr. Hearn had a wife and four children in Japan. They are his rightful heirs, and no royalties or remittance of any kind would be due to me. Also, my permission is no longer required as my name will not be appearing in the forthcoming book.

  “What does ‘forthcoming’ mean?” I’d asked Mr. Anderson.

  “It means soon, and it also can mean truthful,” he’d replied. “They can’t just write you out of Mr. Pat’s life,” he’d fumed.

  There was more than one way to arrive at the truth, Mr. Anderson and I agreed.

  “There’s the court of law and the court of public opinion, and we’ll prevail in both,” vowed the optimist.

  Now, isn’t that right, Miss?

  ELIZABETH BISLAND

  (1861–1929)

  . . . .

  NEW YORK, 1906

  [E]arly in 1874 . . . [Lafcadio Hearn] w
as working as a general reporter on the Cincinnati Enquirer. His work was of a kind that gave him at first no scope for his talents and must have been peculiarly unsympathetic, consisting of daily market reports, until chance opened the eyes of his employers to his capacity for better things. A peculiarly atrocious crime, still known in Cincinnati annals as the “Tan-yard Murder,” had been communicated to the office of the Enquirer at a moment when all the members of the staff, usually detailed to cover such assignments, were absent. The editor . . . was surprised by a timid request from the shy cub-reporter who turned in daily market “stuff,” to be allowed to deal with this tragedy. . . . The “copy” submitted some hours later caused astonished eyebrows, was considered worthy of “scare-heads,” and for the nine succeeding days of the life of the wonder, Cincinnati sought ardently the Hoffmannesque story whose poignantly chosen phrases set before them a grim picture that caused the flesh to crawl upon their bones.

  * * *

  . . . .

  [I]n the latter part of [1876] . . . [Hearn] was a regular reporter for the Commercial. . . .

  One of Hearn’s associates of this period, Joseph Tunison, says of his work:— . . .

  “Had he been then on a New York daily his articles would have attracted bidding from rival managements, but in Cincinnati there was little, if any, encouragement for such brilliant powers as his. The Commercial took him on at twenty dollars a week. . . . [ellipsis in the original] Though he worked hard for a pittance he never slighted anything he had to do. . . . [ellipsis in the original] He was never known to shirk hardship or danger in filling an assignment. . . . [ellipsis in the original] His employers kept him at the most arduous work of a daily morning paper—the night stations—for in that field developed the most sensational events, and he was strongest in the unusual and the startling.”

  For two years more this was the routine of his daily life. He formed, in spite of his shyness, some ties of intimacy; especially with Joseph Tunison, a man of unusual classical learning, with H. F. Farny, the artist, and with the now well-known musical critic and lecturer, H. E. Krehbiel. Into these companionships he threw all the ardour of a very young man; an ardour increased beyond even the usual intensity of young friendships, by the natural warmth of his feelings and the loneliness of his life, bereft of all those ties of family common to happier fates. . . .