Well, it was high time Emma came and helped out. She needed her now. Jake was about to drive her round the bend.
She’d known for a long time something was coming on. For ages he’d been pulling all the curtains at night, peeking around them into the backyard like there was something out there.
Rosalie herself had been a little nervous, what with their living so close to the Quarters and the niggers having gotten so uppity since integration. You just couldn’t tell what might happen. Of course, nothing ever had. But you couldn’t be too careful. It was after all of that started, mixing in the schools, that she had begun locking the door for the first time in her life. Because give them an inch, you just never knew what would be next.
But this business with Jake. This was something else.
“Is she here, is she here?” he was saying.
Rosalie knew he couldn’t see that far, but he must have felt her, for Rosalie had gotten distracted and the plane was here, the last passengers looking a bit stunned as they picked their way down the steps of the little plane onto the blazing-hot runway. Where was Emma? Rosalie was always afraid that one time she’d come down those steps and she wouldn’t even recognize her.
“Hi,” the tall blond woman suddenly beside her said. Yes, that was Emma. She’d know her anywhere.
* * *
“No, I don’t really want anything. I ate on the plane.”
“But I saved dinner for you.”
Emma looked at all the pans sitting on the stove. “Save it for supper, okay?”
“I’ve got okra mixed with squash. Some rice with tomatoes. And those nice pears I put up. Did you want some chicken? I can thaw some out.”
I have a Southern stepmother who can’t cook and a black husband who doesn’t like to dance. Isn’t it funny how the stereotypes somehow don’t work out? What if they switched roles? Jesse could cook if he wanted to; he just never did. And could Rosalie dance? Had she ever? Emma had no idea. She watched her hovering near the stove as if she were just dying to fire up something. Rosalie looked great for her age. She wore a new silvery wig from Woolworth’s, and her figure was still as trim as it had been when she was a girl. Only her wrinkles gave her away.
“No, I’m fine. Maybe just a glass of iced tea.” Emma fanned herself. “It’s awful in here. How hot do you think it is?”
“Maybe ninety-six, ninety-eight. It’s always hot in August. You’d think you’d be used to it.”
“But remember I haven’t lived here for over ten years. And where I am, near the coast, it never gets hot like this. The summers are cool.”
“I know you tell me that, but I never can believe it. I just can’t imagine.” Rosalie placed a glass of tea in front of Emma, who took a big gulp.
And then before Emma could stop herself—and she’d meant to watch her tongue, this time especially—she said, “What is this?”
Rosalie averted her eyes like a child caught doing something wrong. “It’s tea. Instant iced tea.”
“And what else?”
“Cherry Kool-Aid. Your father and I like it mixed. And it’s cheaper that way.”
Cheaper than what? Emma wondered. She put the glass down on the table and tried to rearrange her face. “It’s good. Just a little different.” And unimportant, she reminded herself. But it did matter, it all did, all the little things. They added up, one by one, and twisted in her gut. Grab it now, grab the edges of the mask of your polite face. Open your mouth, it’s not so hard, and say the proper, the kind thing. “Rosalie, I know this has been hard for you. Come sit down and tell me all about Daddy.” Jake didn’t look or act a bit differently, as far as she could see. Perhaps a little more hesitant, a little more slow. Had Rosalie made it all up?
“Just a minute.” Rosalie slipped out of the kitchen, through the plastic curtain that separated it from the hall. She was back now. “I wanted to see if he was napping. Though I don’t think he can hear, anyway. He’s getting so deaf.”
They both were. Each complained to Emma when the other was out of the room. And when they were together, it was like the Abbott and Costello routine, “Who’s on first?”
Emma fanned herself with a church program she found resting on the table. It was so hot she felt nauseous and slightly faint. “Can we turn on the air conditioner?”
Rosalie frowned at the wall unit. “I don’t think it works very well.”
“When’s the last time you used it?”
“Oh, when your Uncle George came to visit.”
“Ma, that was three years ago.”
“Well, you know I don’t need it. I’ve lived here all my life. And it didn’t work right then. I was so embarrassed. There was a wasps’ nest up in it, and the fan couldn’t turn. They stayed at a motel. Wasting all that money when your bedroom was perfectly good—and empty.” Rosalie was rising now. “I’ll go get that little fan out of your room.”
Emma tried to stop her. “Couldn’t we turn on the attic fan and cool off the whole house?”
Rosalie pretended that she didn’t hear. Emma was always like that, no sooner in the door than she wanted the lights on, the air conditioner on, or in wintertime the heat. She wanted special, expensive things to eat. Or she was talking on the phone, so after she left Rosalie would have gone over her limit for her reduced rate. Well, it was only a nickel or dime each call, but it mounted up. It was a good thing Emma had never had to live through the Depression. She never would have made it. She was so spoiled, so used to having every little thing. Rosalie didn’t like to think about what was going to happen to Emma in her old age. She bet she wasn’t laying away a dime. What was she going to do then? Rosalie thought of the money in her own savings account. All those nickels and dimes multiplying into dollars. This was what they were for—it was here now, her and Jake’s old age. Though now that they were old, she didn’t want to let any of it go. But she could see it dribbling away with Jake’s illness. Oh! She was going to leave it all to Emma, who, God knows, was going to need it. She’d probably go through it all in one year. Her whole lifetime of scrimping and saving—Emma would blow it all on who knows what? Last time she was here, she’d been talking about investing in real estate. California real estate! Why, Rosalie told her, she’d put money into a couple of lots in West Cypress and they’d never done a thing.
And Emma was talking more and more about leaving teaching. You’re just going to have to do better than that, Rosalie told her. Why, she’d have to be crazy, leaving a good job with a pension! Then Emma had gone on about how she wished she’d had some guidance when she was a girl—that all she’d ever been told she could be was a teacher, a nurse or a librarian. As if there were anything wrong with that! Good steady jobs that a person ought to be proud of. Rosalie had said to her, maybe she ought to come back to West Cypress and teach. It wouldn’t cost nearly as much to live, and she could put more by for her old age. Or if it was the students who were bothering her, and Rosalie could understand that, then why didn’t she just come on home and get a job clerking in a store? But she could tell by the expression on Emma’s face she thought she was too good for that. Emma had always had fancy tastes—like air conditioning. As if there weren’t more to life than being comfortable.
Just then she got the fan situated so that it oscillated back and forth across Emma’s face. There, that ought to cool her off.
Then she began: “He was out in the backyard with money balled up in his fist.”
“Doing what?”
“Well, that’s what I asked him the first time. I said, ‘Jake, what on earth are you doing out there in the middle of the night?’ I hadn’t heard him get up.”
“Did he have a flashlight?”
“No. He was stumbling around in the dark. He could have fallen in a hole and broken a leg. And then what would we have done with him?”
You could have shot him like a horse, thought Emma. Put him down like Skipper.
“He didn’t want to tell me at first, but when I got him in the house he said, ‘I
was looking for the people who kidnapped the baby. They won’t give the baby back if I don’t give them the money.’ ‘What baby? What money?’ I asked. And then I saw that fist and I said, ‘What do you have there, Jake?’ Well, finally he showed me. It was three hundred dollars! He was walking around with three hundred dollars wadded up!”
“Where did he get it?” Did he steal it out of the bottom of your purse, Emma wondered, a little at a time like I did when I was a kid, copping nickels for chocolate éclairs and hot dogs?
“He saved it from his Social Security.”
“It must have taken him a while.”
“Yes, but he said the voices had been asking him for it for a long time. And he could hear the baby crying—out in the yard. He knew he had to do something about it.”
Then Rosalie broke down.
Emma reached across the table and patted her hand.
“It’s been so awful,” Rosalie sobbed. “Being with him here alone. He won’t stop talking about them—the voices. He hears them all the time. And he wants me to hear them, too. He says, ‘Listen, Ro, listen, there, there, can’t you hear them?’ And I don’t hear a thing. They’re not real!”
“I know.”
“Then one night he got up, I usually stay awake as long as I can because there’s no telling what he’s going to do, but I guess I’d just drifted off, and I woke up, and he was standing there in the bedroom with a gun.”
“A gun!”
“You know, that old pistol that I keep in the bottom dresser drawer. It hasn’t been shot in probably forty years. I kept it in the store in case somebody broke in. Remember that time I told you, when that drunk nigger tried to hold me up?”
Emma nodded. She did remember the story, though it had happened before she was born.
“Anyway, your daddy was holding the pistol. It was empty, I discovered later, but it scared me to death. So I got up easy, and I said, real soft so as not to scare him, ‘Jake, what are you doing?’
“‘They’re going to kill the baby,’ he said. ‘I promised Helen nothing bad would ever happen to the baby. So now I’m going to have to kill them.’”
Helen, oh, the mysterious Helen. Emma had continued to ask her father questions about her every time she saw him, but the bare skeleton of his story never put on flesh. And now, whatever it was that had happened with her mother, whoever she was, it was all coming back to haunt Jake in his old age. Those terrors he had been carrying around, hidden like the wad of money in his hand, were out now, ordering him to stand alone and face them in the dark.
“What did you do?”
“I just talked to him. And then I got closer, and I talked him into giving me the gun. ‘There’s no one there, Jake,’ I said. Finally I think he believed me, and he started to cry. He was afraid, he said. He was afraid of the voices, and he was afraid for the baby, and he was afraid of being alone. But he’s not alone. I’m here.”
“Yes, you are,” Emma said, and she reached over and gave Rosalie an awkward hug. For they never touched each other except upon first greeting and final leave-taking. “And I’m here, too. We’ll work this out. We’ll find out what’s wrong.”
“The doctors won’t know anything.”
“Well, let’s don’t say that until we try.”
“I don’t know who you think you’re going to call. There’s no psychiatrist here. I told you on the phone, that Stewart man got run out of town because he was…funny…what do they call it now?”
“Gay.”
“I guess so. Well, anyway, he’s gone, and there’s no one else. At least not that I know of. And anyway, how can we afford it?”
“Medicare, Momma. And I can help you some.”
“They won’t pay all of it.”
“Let’s worry about that later. Right now, I want to put in a call to Marshall.”
“But he’s a medical doctor. He won’t know how to do anything about your daddy losing his mind.”
Emma always had a drink with Marshall Stokes, Bernie’s best friend in high school, and now Cypress’s most successful internist, when she came home. Marshall had the best bedside manner she’d ever known, even when he was handing her a gin and tonic by his and his wife Sally’s pool.
“Maybe Daddy’s problem is physical. Let’s have Marshall look at him first.”
Rosalie didn’t resist, though Emma knew this was hard for her. She’d asked for help, but off her very narrow path dragons lurked.
Emma returned from the phone. “He’ll see us first thing in the morning.”
Rosalie looked up at her and nodded. Then she said, “A colored woman came here.”
“What do you mean, a colored woman?”
“Hattie. She used to trade in the store when you were a little girl. She had three children, a boy about your age. She came a couple of weeks ago and knocked on the back door.”
“What did she want?”
“She said your daddy had taken to walking home through the Quarters at night, on his way home from the bar, and the colored people over there were worried about him, because he seemed lost.”
“Well, that was nice of her.”
“Yes,” Rosalie answered. “It was. It was right after that that I woke up and found him with the gun.”
* * *
“How do you feel, Daddy?” Emma asked him later that evening. The two of them were sitting on the screened-in back porch. He’d slept all afternoon. Rosalie had run out to shop.
“Okay,” he said. He looked at her with his blue eyes, owlish behind big lenses. Then he looked down at the floor. “You didn’t have to come,” he said in a voice that was apologetic. “I’m all right.”
“I think you are, too. But we need to make sure of that.”
“I wish they didn’t, didn’t talk to me about the baby,” he said. “But-but-but…” Then he looked at her very strangely. He wasn’t just stuttering. He was struggling with something he didn’t understand.
“There is no baby, Daddy,” she said. “I’m here. The baby’s grown.”
“I know.” He smiled then, as if that was the answer to everything. “You’re all grown up. B-b-but…” and then she could see him going away again, to somewhere terrible in his head, “I promised Helen, it didn’t matter, it never mattered, I would never give the baby up.”
“You didn’t, Daddy. You didn’t give the baby away. You kept her.”
“I was scared. The baby was so little, and she was hungry, and Helen was lying there…” His voice choked. “I was all alone. I was so afraid, being all alone.”
“It’s okay. You did the right thing,” she said and went to sit beside him on the chaise. She took his hand, which had become as soft and white as her own, no longer the strong hand wielding a meat cleaver when she was a child. The sound of a night baseball game wafted across the backyard from a neighbor’s television.
“Do you remember all those games we used to listen to on the radio when I was a little girl?”
“The Dodgers. The Brooklyn Dodgers. They were something.” Then he laughed the way he always did when he paid a compliment, as if in the giving of it he was receiving praise too and was a little embarrassed.
“Yes. They really were.”
“I don’t listen to them anymore.”
“They moved to LA, Daddy.”
“I know that. They moved a long time ago. I’m not crazy, Emma.”
She looked at him in the half-light of dusk and smiled gently. “No, of course you’re not.”
Then he faded out again, like the voice of the announcer saying, “A high pop fly to…” Someone changed the channel, and she couldn’t hear the game anymore. “I promised I wouldn’t tell you, but sometimes I think I ought to.”
“You already told me about Rosalie and my real momma,” she said. “A long time ago.”
Jake shook a warning finger at her. “No, no. You don’t know…” he trailed off. Then he leaned over and whispered, “The baby shouldn’t be out there in the dark alone.”
* * *
Later Emma listened to both Jake and Rosalie snoring in the next room, across the hall.
Her room, the guest room, though she’d never lived in this house to which they’d moved shortly after she left for Atlanta, was a re-creation of the one she had when they lived behind the grocery store.
She lay in a curlicued metal bed piled with the long dolls in satin dresses that Jake had won for her, pitching baseballs at targets at the parish fair. On the night table lay books she’d never gotten around to reading: The Red and the Black, Swann’s Way, The Joys of Yiddish. That last one she kept meaning to take home with her, wherever home had been over the many trips and many years, but it never found its way into her suitcase.
She wondered whether she left it here to remind Jake that he was a Jew—just as she was. After she found out about Helen, which made her, by anyone’s rules, Jewish, she’d gone for a while in Atlanta for religious instruction. When she told the rabbi about her upbringing, he’d seemed much more interested in talking about that than in teaching.
“It’s like a mystery story,” he’d said. “Where was your mother from? What was she doing in New York? Why don’t you track down her family?”
“I wanted to know about her, but I wanted my father to tell me,” is how she put it later to her Jewish roommate in New York, “just like I wanted him to tell me about what it means to be a Jew.”
Her roommate undertook the latter task, picking up where Herman had left off, took her home for the High Holy Days, for Passover, gave her a basic New York Yiddish vocabulary, so she knew a shmuck from a shmatte and wouldn’t embarrass herself. “You can’t go around with a name like Fine and not know the difference between a fool and a tacky dress. Though with your accent nobody’s going to believe you’re Jewish, anyway, even if your name was Esther Goldblatt.”
Keeping Secrets Page 26