Keeping Secrets

by Sarah Shankman

  And here he was, still here, walking these same streets, in this same hick town where nothing was ever going to move or change, except to grow older, or hotter, or colder.

  Something had been different this evening, however, something that upset Jake enough to have him talking to himself now as he walked the two miles home from the Ritz.

  “Cheating,” he said aloud to himself. “Said I was cheating. I never cheated anybody in my whole life.”

  He crossed the intersection of North Fourth and Bienville without looking—which was no real danger. It was almost eleven o’clock. Most everyone in West Cypress had been sleeping for hours.

  Jake muttered to himself, “Maybe Rosalie’s right. Maybe people are jealous of you when you’re good. And I am good at dominoes. But that’s no reason for Mr. Vance to get huffy. I’ve been beating him for years.”

  Jake pulled a handkerchief out of his pocket and wiped his brow again and the top of his bald head. Walking through the August night air was like walking on the bottom of a tub of hot water.

  “Maybe the heat’s getting to him. Goddamned heat. Getting to me. Accusing me of cheating.”

  What he didn’t remember was that he’d been sitting through the game with the double five in his lap. It was when he played it that Joe Vance had snapped. He’d warned Jake five or six times in the past few months that he had to stop that. Jake remembered neither the cheating nor the warning. To his mind, none of it had ever happened.

  Now Jake cut back over to River Road, which wound by the side of the Coupitaw, a seawall and then a levee separating the two all along the way.

  It wasn’t the most direct route, this toing and froing, but though his memory of the immediate past was fading, he remembered what Emma had said to him the last time she was home. “Daddy, you miss the fun of it, always doing it the same way. I know Momma tells you there’s a right way, the only way. But that’s crazy. You’ve got to learn to meander.”

  There was some truth in that. Rosalie had patterns and rules for everything, from washing dishes to mowing the lawn. He hadn’t given in to them at first, he’d been angry all the time, but in the long run it was easier. But Emma hadn’t. She always amazed him, Emma. How had she grown up to be so smart? And not just about books.

  Emma. He smiled into the summer night, and his leapfrog memory, which was much more comfortable with decades than with yesterday, took a big jump.

  Why, it seemed like only yesterday that he was standing in the kitchen of the old apartment, the one behind the store, trying to place an order to a wholesaler on the phone.

  That black instrument was like a king snake. It didn’t matter how many times Rosalie told him that the telephone was harmless, that he ought to be able to face it unafraid. He picked it up and it turned on him. His tongue cleaved to the roof of his mouth with terror.

  “And a sack of p-p-p…”

  He couldn’t get it out. His stutter kept the word inside as tightly as if it had turned the lock and thrown away the key. His face was red. He could just imagine the face of the woman on the other end, not even having to hide her grin, waving other people in her office over to listen to the popcorn sounds on the telephone.

  The more he struggled, the more he resented Rosalie’s insisting he do this. “You could at least place the orders, Jake. Do I have to do everything?”

  He started over. “A sack of p-p-p.”

  Three-year-old Emma had been sitting in a chair at the kitchen table, playing with a bowl of cold oatmeal she’d refused to eat. “Potatoes!” she yelled suddenly in her high fluty voice. “Potatoes! Potatoes! Potatoes!”

  “Potatoes!” Jake had echoed her into the phone, as if p’s weren’t an obstacle as tall as Mount Everest.

  And when he’d hung up, she’d stood up on her chair and held her arms out to him, crowing at their triumph. He’d picked her up and hugged her to him.

  He’d never had a problem with that word again. And “potatoes” had forever after been their running joke.

  Ah, Emma. He missed her so. Why did she have to go?

  Well. He knew the answer to that. She’d have suffocated in West Cypress. But he doubted that she had ever looked back; she had inherited his roving eye.

  Not for love, no, he didn’t mean that. And he didn’t know anything about Emma’s boyfriends since Bernie. It would have embarrassed him to ask. It seemed like prying. And Emma didn’t volunteer.

  No, he’d meant his yen for places. New York. He could close his eyes, and the towers of Manhattan glowed before him in the night sky. California. Beautiful warm California. San Diego. Ah, those sweet brief Navy days; he could never forget that bay. All that blue. Even the Dodgers were in California now. They had known a good thing when they saw it.

  Though—he laughed a little to himself—Emma never saw it their way. She had never forgiven the Dodgers for deserting Brooklyn, moving to LA. Like her daddy, she’d been a diehard Brooklyn Dodgers fan.

  All those summer afternoons they’d listened together, the announcer’s voice flying high as a home run when Campanella hit one over the fence. There was no other sound in the world like that of a baseball game. “A high fly ball,” and he and Emma would groan together on afternoons as hot as this very one had been. Emma would dance in front of the radio, cheering her Dodgers on with the pennant they’d brought back from Coney Island when she was almost six years old.

  Yet when the Dodgers moved, she’d turned her back on them, switched off the radio or put her fingers over her ears. As far as she was concerned, they were dead.

  “Just like Baby Snooks,” she’d said.

  Her beloved Baby Snooks. She’d been about five then. He’d told her that the newspaper said Fanny Brice was gone.

  That was okay, Emma said, but Baby Snooks would still be on the radio.

  “Fanny Brice is Baby Snooks,” he’d explained.

  “No.” She understood about actors and characters, but she refused to accept this particular truth.

  She sat by the radio that night, waiting for her show. Her face was expectant, about to burst into a gleam of “I told you so.” She knew that Baby Snooks couldn’t die. Baby Snooks was her favorite, better than chocolate ice cream.

  When the hour arrived, there was no explanation, just a new program of recorded music played in Baby Snooks’s place as smoothly as waters closing over a spot.

  Emma had raced sobbing out of the room, had been inconsolable for days. And then suddenly it was over. She turned a cold face toward his and said, “Baby Snooks is dead.”

  “The Dodgers are dead,” she’d said with that same face, but no tears.

  It had scared him a little, the way she could close down her heart. She could just turn it off.

  In high school. “She lied about me,” she said about Linda, her until-then best girlfriend. And never mentioned her name again.

  Jake didn’t know how it had gone for her much after that. Except for whatever it was she had decided about Bernie, once it was done, it was over.

  Well, that was how life was, wasn’t it? Things were done. They were over. That was that.

  Just then Jake came to the place by the river where he and Mr. Beasley used to go fishing. Suddenly, without having thought about it, he found himself standing on top of the levee, which was covered with long grass.

  The moon was bright enough for him to see the outlines of the trees below, where the bank sloped into the water. There was the little dock down there where Mr. Beasley, a neighbor and an acquaintance of his and Rosalie’s from church, had fished before he got impatient behind a truck on Highway 80 and turned himself to mush.

  Jake always wondered about that. He remembered the man talking about the hardware business he’d retired from and about how after that the days had seemed so long. He said that each one stretched on and on for years, that he felt like he was just marking time, waiting to die. Jake wondered whether he’d just gotten tired of waiting.

  He looked down at the black water, far down beyond the t
rees.

  If Jake could have forced his tongue to talk to Mr. Beasley, to say what was on his mind, he’d have said this: If you let them, the days flow. They flow one into the other, on and on, just like the Coupitaw. Sure, there are snags. Like Rosalie fussing at him, wanting something, but you can stop that with silence. If you’re quiet, eventually, they all go away and leave you alone and the days continue flowing. When you get really good at it, you can go off into little turns in your mind, like Emma’s meanders. You can go and spend the day somewhere. You can sit on the front stoop in Baltimore and listen to the kids playing stickball up the block.

  He took a last look down at the black and moon-spangled water, raised one hand and waved to the memory of Mr. Beasley, scrambled back down the levee and across River Road, and then, instead of following it two more blocks toward home, he looked back over his shoulder and made a sudden left turn.

  It was time for another meander, though he didn’t know whether he could call this deviation from the straight and narrow path back home to Rosalie a meander, since he’d been doing it for over twenty years.

  It was more like an ox-bow lake, a pool of still water that had once been a curve in the river until the current got tired of going around the long way and cut on through the shorter distance and left the lake behind.

  That’s what Hattie was to him. A pool of still water that the rush of other people’s lives had left behind. And when he bathed in her waters, sometimes literally, because she liked to get into her tub with him and take turns scrubbing backs, he felt like there was nowhere in the world he’d rather be. But as the years had passed, that wasn’t quite as easy as it once had been.

  “We gone have to stop eating or get a bigger tub,” she’d laughed just last week.

  But then, after they’d had their bath and were done with their loving, she’d put a whole sweet-potato pie topped with whipped cream on the table in front of them anyway. And they dug right in. Finished the whole thing, along with cups of light coffee sweetened with a big tablespoonful of sugar.

  Hattie was the most wonderful cook.

  Thinking about her made his mouth water.

  Well. One more block and he’d be there.

  The blocks weren’t quite as regular here in the Quarters as they were in the rest of town. The streets still weren’t paved, and when it rained they were a mess.

  Years ago, when he first started with Hattie, she’d told him he was going to have to be careful of his shoes. If he went home full of mud, Rosalie would know he’d been walking the Quarters and want to know why on earth he’d come that way.

  So he changed into his galoshes whenever the weather was bad.

  He left them in a bread sack under a bush of pampas grass—pompous grass, Emma called it as a little girl—right at the Quarters’ edge. The pampas would cut you to ribbons if you weren’t careful. No one would go bothering with his shoes in there.

  Of course, everyone in the Quarters knew that that was where Mr. Jake left his shoes, and that he came back and got them when he and Hattie were through—but Jake didn’t know that.

  Tonight he didn’t have to worry about mud. It had been dry for almost three weeks. The clouds had been rolling in every afternoon and hovering heavy like a tease, but nothing happened. It was getting to be a drought.

  He was still thinking about the weather when he reached Hattie’s house. It looked like all the other houses in the Quarters, wood frame, four-roomed, a little front porch and a tinier one behind. No sooner had he set foot on Hattie’s front step than she opened the screen door.

  “Hi, sugar,” she said in her deep voice. It was like cane syrup pouring out into the dark.

  She always did that. He didn’t know how she knew, because he never knew himself which night he was going to make the turn and head toward her arms.

  “Come on in.” She opened the door wider.

  He ducked his head, still a little shy the first few minutes after all these years.

  Then she put her round brown arms about him and he felt the familiar pillows of her breasts. How he loved to rest his head there after their lovemaking and take a little nap.

  “Honey, I am so happy tonight. I be’s beside myself with joy.”

  “Why?” Jake asked from his usual place where he had settled himself in her tiny front room, an antimacassared easy chair.

  “’Cause I heard from Viola.”

  That was her youngest child, her only girl.

  “And she and Brownell be coming to visit from Seattle. And they bringing me my grands.”

  Jake nodded, smiled. “That’s good,” he said.

  But it always took him aback, even though he could count as well as anyone, to think that Hattie was a grandmother. Though he certainly could be a grandfather, too, if Emma had ever married and settled down. After all, he was almost sixty-six years old.

  “And look, I got letters today from both Marcus and James. And pictures too. Almost more in one day than I can stand.” She waved the colored photographs of her two sons in his face.

  He took her wrist gently and pulled Hattie to his lap. He snuggled her and rocked her like a child.

  “Get away with you,” she laughed. “We be too old for this.”

  “Since when? We’re not too old for the other.”

  “Hush,” she said and patted him on the cheek. “Leastways I be too fat.”

  But she couldn’t hide her dimples from Jake. Here she was a woman of fifty-five, and still this man made her feel that way. She had had years of praying about it on Sundays, but then, since her husband had left her so long ago, she thought the Lord understood. Viola hadn’t even been born, was still in her belly, when in the middle of the night her man, overcome by the thought of yet another mouth to feed, had pulled on his clothes, eased out of bed and slipped away out the door. She’d heard him, but what difference would it have made if she’d hollered out his name? Words were no cement when it came to men.

  So she’d done what any other colored woman in her situation would do. She left her own with her mother and went to take care of a white woman’s children, washed their diapers, ironed their ruffles, kissed their bumps and bruises, all the time pretending that she was home with Marcus, James and Viola her baby girl.

  At the end of the week, she had almost made enough money to feed them. Almost, but not quite. So she was very careful how she spent her money at the corner grocery store.

  The first time she noticed that Mr. Fine hadn’t written up everything in the charge book with her name on it, she hadn’t said a thing about it, except to give her thanks to the Lord.

  “It’s not the same as stealing, Jesus,” she’d said. “Not the same if the man just made a mistake.”

  But it happened again. And yet another time. Then there was the once she’d found, in the bottom of the bag Marcus had brought home, two candy bars.

  “You stole!” She stood waving the chocolate right in Marcus’s face.

  “No, ma’am,” he said, his face serious as death.

  Marcus was her oldest, the one she’d sent away first, as soon as he was big enough, off to her brother in San Jose. He was there still, south of San Francisco, an engineer with Lockheed. He made more money now than she’d ever thought possible for a black man on this earth, and sent her a check every month. After she bought herself a refrigerator, and then a window-unit air- conditioner, she had put the rest of it in the bank. When she was gone, he’d have it for his children’s or their children’s college. He fussed at her, but there was nothing else in the world that her heart could want.

  But that day he’d looked at her with those serious eyes and said, “No, ma’am. I never stole nothing in my whole life.”

  “You sure you didn’t take them when no one was looking? Was that little girl Emma behind the register, and you just slipped your hand by her into the candy counter?”

  “No, ma’am. Mr. Fine was what rung me up,”

  He didn’t tell his momma that she was warm. She almost had the s
tory right. Emma had been standing right beside her daddy, and it was her hand, with a little silver-and-pearl ring on one finger, that sneaked into the counter and lifted the two Hersheys just as pretty as you please.

  Then she’d climbed up on the stool beside her father, who was busy writing in the book, and dropped them into the bag, only then catching Marcus’s eye with a little smile.

  She’d whispered the words, no, not whispered, because there was no sound, just mouthed them so clearly that he could have read them even if he’d been deaf. Thank you.

  Thank you, he guessed, for having caught her a few days before, caught her and kept her from slipping on the muddy path and falling into the canal.

  But she couldn’t say it out loud. He understood. Even though they hadn’t been playing together, had just happened to be there at the same time, him and James, and Emma and that little white boy Mike.

  Emma couldn’t say it out loud, and it was too complicated for Marcus to explain to his momma now. His hand on Emma’s arm, her hand dropping chocolate into his sack, puzzled him, made him feel funny inside, good and bad at the same time. But he didn’t begin to have the words to explain it, not even to himself.

  So he just said the words again, “Mr. Fine rung me up.”

  After that, Jake’s little gifts to Hattie continued, an extra pound of hamburger meat, a loaf of bread, a couple yards of blue cotton fabric. Emma and Viola had matching dresses in that pattern that their mothers on either side of the canal had run up.

  Jake told himself that he was just being kind, but it was more than that. For there was something about Hattie, even though she was colored, that reminded him of Helen—a roundness, a softness, her smile. These things touched a place in him that he thought had died in a row house on Independence Street in Baltimore.