Word came again from the front: Clyde’s plane had been shot down, and he was recovering in a military hospital in an undisclosed location, but which she gathered from his thespian references was near Japan in the Pacific. (I was a dignified and potent officer, but unfortunately at the moment, Tammy, my functions aren’t particularly vital, though Doc promises me they’ll get better, a riff on The Mikado that made her laugh.) He was vague about even the details he could have shared: he’d had surgery and he’d get better, but they didn’t know if he’d be cleared to fly again. He might come home, he said. She could tell he didn’t want to, but that didn’t matter so much right then. She cried in relief and ran her fingers over his neat secretary’s hand. He’d come back. She was almost sure that he would.
There were letters from Dev in the same military mailing. A long one for Pea, and a short one for Tamara. A block of text centered neatly in the middle of the page, without salutation or farewell:
Perhaps it was unfair of me to arm Pea with that old story. Were it not for the extremity of our circumstances, I never would have breathed a word of it. Understand, I never blamed you, Tammy—I just saw what you did not wish to see. I wish I could apologize, but you would smack me for insincerity—I would do it again, and gladly, for her sake. So I was unfair to you, because I cannot force your hand.
No matter what: she has loved well, as we have loved. We live in hard times. I drown in screams by day and dreams by night, here beneath the desert’s open sky. I dream of her knives in the garden. I dream of your cards. Your stub-legged king of diamonds. You called him a suicide king, didn’t you? But I know the four of us well enough—though we all go in the end, we will none of us go willingly. Do you remember that book of poetry I lent you? I left it behind, along with the rest of me, so you will forgive imperfect memory:
“Tarry a while, till I am satisfied
Of love and grief, of earth and altering sky;
Till all my human hungers are fulfilled,
O Death, I cannot die!”
She took out the cards that afternoon. They hadn’t so much as snuffled at her since she’d let those old roots crowd her heart, but Dev’s letter had left her with a scratching unease. Pea’s hands were docile as two lapdogs. Clyde was safe. Even the mournful smudge of Victor’s ghost did not seem, in these late days, like any great burden. Dev had written before she’d made her choice. She just needed to check. But when she rousted the cards from their slumber and laid them on the yellow Formica of the kitchen table, they muttered of old wars and new battles, of crabbed hands and tender shooting hearts. Danger everywhere. A new age—
“Yes,” Tamara snapped. This pulled a long cough out of her, while Little Sammy’s ghost fiddled with a bit of fishing wire on the floor at her feet. She caught her breath. “But what about us? What about Dev? What about Pea?”
She shuffled again. The jack of diamonds slid right off the top, upside down. Jack o’ diamonds, she hummed to herself, he did rob a friend of mine. “Course he did,” she muttered, sweeping up the cards in her left hand and smothering them with the handkerchief in her right. That smug little white man, what part of the world didn’t he think was his?
* * *
Phyllis’s sister came to visit with her children. Gloria was light-skinned enough that some would call her pitch-toed, but just dark enough that she could never have followed Pea downtown. At least, not through the front doors. For a long time Tamara had thought that passing made Pea’s life easier, but now she could see how it had separated her from her family, from the world she belonged in.
Gloria had married a man who hated Phyllis for that and other reasons, who had given more than a drop of that resentment to his oldest child. Sonny sat on the farthest edge of the porch all morning, his gaze fixed on a book whose pages he turned only occasionally. The youngest was running around the yard, hunting flowers which she had declared she would weave into a wreath for her aunt. Tamara was helping Ida, though it had been fifteen years since her last spring garland. Better to run barefoot across the soft grass than sit by and endure that at once awkward and intimate conversation between Phyllis and her older sister.
“Tom will be gone for months at a time if he takes the promotion,” she heard as Ida gleefully uprooted the crocuses from the garden.
“Does he want to?”
“He says it’s for the war. He wants to do his duty.”
Pea didn’t say anything to that, which was its own response.
“Ida,” Tamara said, tugging her elbow. “Why don’t we keep walking? I don’t think your uncle will be happy if we take all his flowers.”
“Uncle Dev won’t mind,” she said, with admirable perception, “but Aunt Pea might.”
They went down to the river and a little ways along the path that the spring rains had nearly washed out. Sonny joined them five minutes later, while they were squatting in a patch of clover, looking for luck.
“I don’t know how to braid a wreath,” he said. He held his book, The Ways of White Folks by Langston Hughes, in both hands, like an offering. It was one of Phyllis’s—she must have given it to him.
“It’s okay, Sonny,” Ida said, very kindly. She took the book from him and settled it against a raised tree root. “We can teach you.”
Tamara’s first wreath broke and fell apart. Her fingers were clumsy creatures with anything but the cards. Ida laughed. “Look, Aunt Tammy, even Sonny’s got farther than you!”
Tamara laughed with her. “You want to make me one too, Sonny? It’ll be our secret.”
He smiled. “Nuh-uh. You gotta do your own work, Aunt Tammy.”
She turned her head up to the dappled light coming down through baby green leaves. She smacked her hand against her thigh. “Where’d you get that mouth on you, boy?” she cried. “Why, I have a mind to—” She tickled his stomach. He pinned her to the ground and tickled under her arms and they all fell to shrieking, there in the copse by the river.
A half hour later, they started back up the hill. Ida ran ahead, eager to show off her wreath to her mother and her aunt.
“Aunt Tammy,” Sonny said softly. “Is my aunt all right? She looks…”
Tamara stopped short. What had he seen? The lingering effects of the curse? Her bloated fingers, her wandering gaze? But they’d made the two-hour drive to the doctor the week before.
“It’s been a hard pregnancy, that’s all. She’s fine now.”
He looked down at his hands. “She used to play with those knives for me, when I was real little. My dad made her stop. He yelled at her and said it was dangerous. But it wasn’t, was it?”
“The only dangerous thing was who she played with them for, Sonny. She loves you.”
He nodded hard. “I know.”
They came up over the ridge, back into Pea and Gloria’s line of sight. Ida had already given Pea her wreath, which was wide enough to drape across her chest. Tamara’s was a meager enough offering, a single-strand dandelion chain that was all that had survived the destruction below. Pea took it with a smile and bestowed it with deliberation upon Gloria. Her sister blushed.
“Oh, for heaven’s sake, Phyllis…”
Sonny stepped between them and turned to Tamara. “Kneel down,” he said, imperious as a king among his suit. “You’re too tall for me to reach.”
“Sonny!” his mother hissed. “I know I taught you better than that!”
But they were all laughing, even Gloria, as Tamara knelt on the damp grass and bent her head for a crown.
She felt that sooty curse, even now. A weight that was not her own, a vise around her heart. But she did not feel burdened. If you can share your joys, you can share your troubles too.
* * *
Gloria and the children went back to the city. Phyllis and Tamara stayed in the garden, rationing cigarettes between them and drinking the champagne that Walter had left them straight from the bottle. They were laughing hard enough to drown out even the crickets. Pea was telling one of her rare stories about her m
other, who had died when she was just twenty-three.
“So Rob stumbles off the elevator at, oh, it had to be two in the morning. Drunk as half a bottle of whiskey can make him, real stinking tight. And I know Rob a little, but Mommy babysat him when she was fifteen so he’s always coming around to say hello to ‘Miss Judy’—never mind Mommy got married and divorced a decade before. She was always Miss Judy to Rob. So he stumbles off that elevator and heads straight to our door. I’m watching through the peephole. Mommy tells me to mind my own business and I tell her a drunk and disorderly in our building is everyone’s business.”
“She smack you?”
“She just laughed and let me stay.”
“And then?”
“Rob knocks on the door. Well, he starts just calling her name, but when she don’t open he starts knocking. Then he starts hollering again, so Mommy opens the door just to get him to shut up. Rob’s so drunk, he nearly falls over. He’s holding his arms out just like this, like he’s holding up a wall. ‘Miss Judy,’ he says, ‘how ya been doin’, Miss Judy?’ Mommy says, ‘I’ve been fine, Rob, but I think your mother won’t like you getting home so late, so how about you turn around and go back there now?’ He nods, like he thinks this is a fine idea. But then he’s holding the door again. ‘Miss Judy,’ he says, ‘can I borrow twenty-five cents? I’ll pay you back next Sunday, promise. I’ve got a new pastor that gives numbers in his sermons. I’m sure to hit and I’ll pay you back.’”
“Oh, I’ve heard that one before.”
“So had Mommy. ‘Rob,’ she said, in her schoolteacher voice, ‘turn around right now and go home. I’m not giving you a penny.’ Rob turned to go again. He even made it to the elevator. But then he came right back just as we were closing the door. ‘Miss Judy,’ he said, ‘you real nice, Miss Judy. You think I could take you to dinner sometime, Miss Judy?’ And his hands still up like this, holding that invisible wall. And now Mommy just can’t take it anymore. ‘Dinner! You just asked me to borrow twenty-five cents! Where you gonna take me to dinner? Street-corner hot dogs? Go home, Rob!’”
Tamara loved Pea’s impression of her mother. A voice warmer than Pea’s, but just as sharp.
“Did he ever take her out to dinner?”
“Nah, but would you believe, next week he hit the numbers!”
“No!”
“He did. Bought a fancy car and set himself up as a chauffeur on Sugar Hill. For all I know he’s still doing it. He’s probably getting drunk on better liquor, too.”
They laughed again and then let it fade, let the crickets have their turn.
“Tammy,” Phyllis said after a while. “Can I ask you a question?”
Tamara turned sharply. “What about?”
“That cough of yours…”
“It’s nothing.”
“And the hands. I thought they’d gone from me. I thought you’d found some way to take them away, but…” Pea picked up the bottle, drained it, and then launched it high in the air. It spun, end over end, before landing on its mouth in the dirt between them, perfectly straight.
Tamara took a deep and careful breath. Her heart hurt more than she could bear just now.
Pea put a light hand on Tammy’s shoulder. “You didn’t have to, whatever you did.”
“I know.”
“I’ll do whatever I can…” Pea’s eyes were bright, flashing green, distorted by water. “… to help you bear it.”
The air was muggy and warm, the mulch she and Gloria had laid down the day before giving off a spicy ferment that grew more agreeable the more champagne she drank. Perhaps the smell was what had lured the first fireflies of the season out of their hidden spaces to dance among the tiny green shoots on the roses’ spindly limbs and then rise stately, on a wave, into the strait between Pea’s eyes and her own.
“Don’t … don’t imagine I’m some kind of martyr. I just realized I couldn’t outrun it,” Tammy said, keeping her eyes wide until the fireflies stained her vision with the negatives of their flashing yellow song. “I couldn’t outrun who I was.”
“Was she so bad?”
“No. But she wasn’t so good, either.”
Pea lifted a hand and held it before her so the fireflies could sway around it ponderously as an old drunk.
“Oh, but when she danced!” Pea said, her voice almost as soft as the buzzing of fly wings.
Pea poured the last of the second bottle into Tamara’s glass. She pulled her old lighter from her pocket, considered, and then put it back.
“Why didn’t you get rid of it?” Tamara asked. “When you found out?”
She regretted the question immediately. It came close—too close—to their unspeakable shore. Pea blinked. She looked up at the sky. “I tried,” she said. “There’s no doctors here to do it, certainly not for a colored woman. So I went to a rootworker outside Poughkeepsie. When I came back Dev was half-mad, he’d gotten some tale from Alvin. We were desperate for each other. He was sure I’d been fucking Bobby Junior of all people. And the next morning I drank it and vomited it right back up. I think she just decided to stay.”
Phyllis smiled down at the mountain of her belly and the baby kicked in response. “I don’t regret it. She makes me remember who I was, before.”
“Before the hands?”
“Before I went back.”
Tamara wasn’t sure what this meant. She didn’t ask; in that moment Phyllis looked more angel than saint.
She drank down her glass.
Pea said, “Dev wrote, you know.”
Till all my human hungers are fulfilled … What would he say, when he learned of her choice? Or had the baby already dreamed it for him?
Tamara snorted. “I won’t steal it this time. Promise.”
She didn’t need to know what else he might have told Pea, alone on the other side of the ocean and so afraid. It was over now. They were all safe. She had made sure of it.
Pea met her eyes. Fireflies swam between them, flashing slow heartbeats. From the river came a chorus of crickets, legs pumping with invisible fury: a song, a song, a scream.
12
It was late morning when Walter’s Packard pulled in front of the house. They watched him come from the garden. He must have been driving all night.
Phyllis stood up to see him, stood up all by herself. Then she turned around. She faced the river, not Walter’s slow walk. He had blood on his cuffs.
Tamara understood, then, what Phyllis had seen immediately.
She moved to block him. “Don’t say it.” She didn’t think he heard her. “Wouldn’t they have told us?” she tried, but of course Walter would know before anyone, his back-channel sources would have contacted him the second the casualty reports came over the wires. For a terrible moment, she wanted it to be Clyde. This couldn’t be happening. She had taken the curse! She’d turned aside the fury of the hands!
“What happened?”
Walter never looked at her, but he said, with that great stillness that was equal to his anger, “From what I could piece together, he was sent on a suicide mission. A cover for the real attack. Expendable, they said.”
She choked, but the roots wouldn’t let any air pass, their rage was a mirror of her own. Walter held her up, thumped her on her back, never looked away from Pea. Tammy coughed until she could breathe again. She straightened.
There seemed to be a faint outline at Phyllis’s back, though the sun was so bright that day she could never be sure. The shape of a man, broad shoulders and long fingers that lingered at her waist. He was saying something, but Tamara couldn’t make out his words. Only the murmur of a current against a rock, a tone she had heard before, and loved.
Phyllis tipped her head back, exposed that long neck to the touch of light. She reached into her pocket, pulled out a cigarette and then her old lighter. She ran her thumb over the circle scratched into the metal. She thumbed the catch and brought the flame to her face.
A soft trickle of water dripped down the porch slats beneath her
feet and onto the earth.
“That means it’s yours,” she whispered. “It’s time, sweet Pea.”
* * *
They took her to the hospital in Hudson. The liquid falling between Phyllis’s legs turned pink as a sunset and she wandered like an ancient between the corridors of past and present, dream and reality. Walter took the turn to the emergency entrance in one smooth rush that pressed them hard against the back seat leather. A pair of nurses rushed out of the door when they saw the silver Packard but they paused when Walter climbed from the front seat.
Phyllis breathed heavy against Tamara’s collarbone. Her eyes were wide, her pupils blasted, but she blinked when Tamara called her name.
“Come on, sweetie, let’s get you inside, all right?”
Walter had come around to open the passenger-side door. He pulled it open and bent for Pea. The two nurses—joined now by a doctor and a few others with a gurney—peered around Walter’s bulk. One of them met Tamara’s eyes and gasped.
“Oh,” she said. “Oh no, I’m sorry—”
Walter turned around with Phyllis in his arms. The gathered crowd stepped back as though he were carrying a gun. Tamara climbed out behind him. She’d had vague notions, in the midst of their frantic rush to the hospital, of playing the easiest game, now that they had such extreme need of it: a pregnant white woman with her Negro maid, easy as you please, let us in, this woman needs medical attention urgently! But standing beside Walter and Phyllis before that gaping crowd, she faltered. Facing this wall of well-heeled, professional whiteness, she had a flash (so vividly that in later years she would recoil at the mere mention of the dentist’s name) of Marty’s foreshortened horse’s heads and their marching rows of commercial-white teeth.
“We don’t accept colored patients here,” the doctor said, shortly. “You’ll have to leave. Try Poughkeepsie.”
Tamara glanced at Phyllis, who had roused herself enough to look around. It was easy to see where they’d gone wrong: her hair was loose, floating around her head in thick, fuzzy curls. She was pale from pain, but unmistakably high yellow, golden from the springtime gardening. Her stained plaid housedress didn’t speak to these people’s notion of whiteness any more than her bare feet did. They’d had no time!
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