by Dorothy West
“Ben — he’s my husband —” said Charity valiantly — “he ain’t the kind of man to leave alone for long.”
“She means,” said Cleo, with a hard look at her sister, “Ben’s not the kind of man to keep house for himself. It will take Charity weeks to straighten out the confusion. That’s why I tell her there’s no reason to rush. Dirt can wait.”
Miss Elliot turned a compelling eye on Cleo’s sisters. “Dear Mrs. Judson does right to persuade,” she said earnestly. “With so many of the unfortunates of our race migrating to Boston, we find ourselves becoming crusaders for our beloved city. We may soon be outnumbered by the South-Enders, or worse, diminished in the estimation of our better whites who hardly thought of us as colored before their coming. We Bostonians have been a little hidebound. But now we are eager to open our ranks to whoever will help us in our fight for survival.” She rose. Her voice was unsteady. “When we see lovely children like yours, we hate to see them leave our city while the South-End children stay. Forgive a woman no longer young for wanting to preserve her father’s world.”
Cleo gave a hasty glance around the circle of her sisters, who, she saw, had comprehended enough to look uncomfortable. Without appearing to, she sped Miss Elliot’s departure. When she returned from seeing her to the door, she said lightly, her eyes not quite meeting theirs, “Don’t ask me what that poor stuck-up soul was talking about. I wasn’t half listening. I was thinking what I’d fix for us to eat before we go out.”
“Well, I’m ready to eat,” Charity admitted. “I know that lady meant well, but what she was saying kinda left a bad taste in my mouth. She talks so big doing, I couldn’t catch everything. But it sounded to me like she ain’t got much use for poor people.”
“Why, she’s poor herself,” Cleo said, with a little laugh. “Couldn’t you tell by her old-time clothes? You must have misunderstood her. Well, what does it matter? She’ll be a long time dead while we’re alive and kicking.
“Looka here.” She contorted her limber body into bosom and bustle, pitched her voice to a falsetto elegance, and launched into an imitation of Miss Eleanor Elliot that had her sisters chuckling in reminiscence all through the many dishes of their meal.
CHAPTER 17
AFTER TWO INTOXICATING WEEKS Cleo’s sisters began their preparations for departure. She urged them to stay a little longer for the children’s sake. They were enjoying each other so much. It seemed a shame to separate them. Her sisters said sincerely that they wished they didn’t have to go, feeling a not unnatural reluctance at leaving the scenes of their wonderfully good times. But already they were living them in retrospect, and anticipating the telling of their adventures to their husbands. Though Cleo’s whole heart was behind her plea, only a lesser part of theirs was behind their regret.
Cleo fell ill. Her illness was not feigned. She, who had been so alive, lay listless in bed, her hot dry hands twitching on the sheet, the vibrant voice a thin whimper. She could neither eat nor sleep. In her will-less body was only the emptiness left by the deathblow to her heart. She was pining away.
The baffled doctor said it looked like a nervous collapse, perhaps brought on by the summer heat. Cleo had never been sick a day in her life except for Judy’s easy birth. Bart was scared out of his wits. He begged her sisters not to leave her. In his excited frame of mind he was heartbreakingly certain they might never again see Cleo alive.
Their disappointed husbands wrote with some indignation that if Mr. Judson was as rich as he was cracked up to be, he could afford to hire a raft of nurses to take care of his wife, and when were they coming home to take care of their husbands?
When her sisters gave Cleo their watered versions, she suffered a relapse. With an excess of family loyalty, seeing the wasting form of their oldest, their brightest, their beautiful sister, they notified their heartless husbands that they would return when Cleo took a change for the better, and not a second sooner. Whoever didn’t like it would have to lump it.
Lily, who stayed tearfully certain that Cleo was going to die, suggested that Vicky and Penny start school with Judy. She did not want her daughter, who was not a quiet child, to speed her sister’s end. She was far too bashful, however, to carry through her own idea. It was Charity, looking trim and pretty in her newest dress, who shepherded the three little girls off to first grade, inwardly repeating by rote the necessary falsehoods concerning her non-resident daughter and niece in which Cleo, showing her first interest in days, had coached her.
Then it was that Cleo really began to mend. She could take nourishment. Her hands could lie still. She could listen with eagerness for the children’s return from school, and be lulled to sleep by the sound of their happy chatter.
On the day that Cleo went downstairs for the first time and sat at the kitchen table, inhaling the tantalizing odors of Charity’s cooking, the postman’s ring sent Charity, who was already on her feet, to the door.
She returned with a pleased smile and a letter from Ben. She was already writing the answer in her mind: Cleo is up and about. Me and Penny will be starting for home any minute now. She would not add what was understood — as soon as Cleo gives me the money.
She sat down at the table with her sisters and opened her letter. It was short, specific, and brutal, written by a mellow, loving man with a passionate woman looking over his shoulder, her wet mouth pursed to press against his whenever his stub of pencil faltered. A postscript added that the rags she and Penny had left behind were already on their way.
Wordlessly she passed the letter to Cleo, pushed back her chair, stumbled out of the kitchen in a daze, and blindly went up the back stairs, her breath pushing hard against her chest.
Cleo digested the letter at a glance. Calling down curses on Ben’s black soul, she tore it into shreds. With a fierce protective strength flowing into her, she followed swiftly after Charity.
As she bent over her lacerated sister, a great swell of love and pity restored her heart to pulsing life. Her voice was like a ’cello, deep, rich, dramatic. “I won’t watch one of my sisters cry for any man on earth. Ben’s a bad lot. I say good riddance. You’ve always got a home with me.”
“I love him, Cleo. I can’t live without him.”
“That’s wicked talk. Think of your child. Think of your sisters. Think of me. You’ve got us to live for.”
“But Ben — I ain’t got the words to describe him. He’s a man made for women to love. There was always some woman I had to watch out for. Wasn’t his fault. Wasn’t theirs. He looks at you, and you want to melt into him. You want — no use my trying to lie about it — you want him to blow out the lamp. I been missing his loving, Cleo, no use my lying.”
“You’re a mother, Charity. A colored mother bears a child, she’s got no time for wringing and twisting in bed. She’s got to put her whole mind on raising that child right.”
“You can talk,” said Charity bitterly. “You can get in Mr. Judson’s bed whenever you’ve a mind to.”
“I haven’t been near that nigger’s room since my sisters walked into this house.”
“It ain’t easy to explain myself, Cleo. I’m no hand with words. It ain’t just the loving in the night. That part’s the heaven part, like nothing on earth. But there’s the living part that’s maybe harder to do without. It’s the sight of your man across the table, the sound of him washing his face in the basin; it’s hearing your child call him ‘Daddy,’ knowing ’twas him put her in your body; it’s watching him turn in his sleep on Sunday morning.”
Cleo sat down on the edge of the bed. Her face was cold. “Charity, I’m going to talk harsh to help you over the hurt. That dog did you so dirty it makes you think you lost the moon and the stars. All you lost was a nigger who didn’t have a dime when you married him and’s got no more now. I’ve been wanting to say this for years. You were always too good for him.”
“Ain’t nothing you can find to say can make me stop grieving. You married money. I married love. We both did our picking with
our eyes wide open. What you ain’t had, I reckon you never wanted. Was I to tell you, you wouldn’t listen.”
Cleo said hotly: “I’ve thought, and planned, and lied, and juggled Mr. Judson’s money for this sister and that, so I could always know there was no one of my kin who didn’t have food in her belly or clothes on her back. What name you give to that?”
Charity’s hand touched hers, almost compassionately. “You’ve been a good sister. Wasn’t a letter you ever wrote me since the day you got married didn’t have something inside it. Wasn’t a birthday or Christmas passed without your big box. But that ain’t the love I’m talking about.” Her breath came hard, and now her hand curled in Cleo’s for comfort. “You think if I go back to Ben, he’d put that woman out?”
“Go back for her to cut you in ribbons? Go back to hear Ben say what it came near killing you to read? How could I live with my conscience if I sent my own sister into a cage of lions?”
Charity’s hand fell away. She said dully, “I’ll get me a job soon’s I can. Mr. Judson may know some nice white people who want a good worker.”
“You think I want to see my sister slaving in somebody’s kitchen? I’ll take care of you and Penny as long as I draw breath.”
“But Mr. Judson —? Men and their in-laws don’t mix.”
“He was going to take Lily in, wasn’t he? He promised me someone to help with this house. No difference to him if it’s Lily or you.”
She stood up. Her expression was wise and tender. “I’m going down to get you a man-size breakfast. This wouldn’t have hit you so hard if you hadn’t been empty.”
She would not let Lily or Serena help her with the laden tray. She was entirely confident of her strength. She returned, settled the tray on the side of Charity’s bed, and drew up a chair.
“I’m not going to stir till you eat every scrap.”
As Charity reluctantly ate the huge breakfast, sometimes stopping for a sob, sometimes lying back to keep her stomach steady, the hot food was like a heating pad on her pain. The twisted places in her body unwound and felt like flesh again. Only her heart, that was no longer a whole heart, refused to return to an even beat.
After the storm of weeping, after the massive breakfast, she felt sleepy. She could even smile tremulously at Cleo. No use crying over spilt milk. What had happened to her happened to other women. They went on living in their twilight. If you kept your stomach full, looked like nothing seemed so bad as when your stomach was empty.
That night Cleo cooked an excellent supper of the things Bart liked best, and served him first. Afterward, at a prearranged signal, her sisters fell over their feet getting out of the kitchen, and Cleo told Bart about Charity.
“Life’s funny,” she concluded. “Lily was the one we were worried about. But Lily and Victor got patched up, I guess. I haven’t wanted to mind her business and ask her. But she was going with the others before I took sick, so she must have had a husband to go to. Now it’s poor Charity who’s got no home but mine.”
Bart said with pity: “I felt there was something. I saw how that girl was shoveling down her supper. Like a starved dog. I reckon the emptiness in her will take a long time to fill. Well, I reckon, too, it don’t make much difference which one stays, so long as the others go. I’m glad you gave them a good time. I’m glad they repaid you by seeing you through your sickness. But winter’s not too long away. We got to start cutting down. We got to start renting their rooms.”
Bart had called time. Cleo had to work fast. She went to work at once on Lily. She got Lily so stirred up that she was afraid to open Victor’s next letter. As if it were a hot coal, she handed it to Cleo to open for her.
Cleo read Victor’s abject hope that Lily would soon be heading for home without expression.
Lily began to shake all over. “What does he say?” she asked fearfully.
Cleo expelled a long sigh. “Well, he doesn’t say what Ben said. But he says enough. He’s not messed up with any woman. But he’s fixing to mess you up as soon as he sees you. I won’t tell you what he said word for word. No sense in scaring you. But I wouldn’t trust him not to beat your brains out. That’s why I was sorry when you married him. You never know when a low-class man is going to get ugly. My advice to you is to sit tight until his temper cools off.”
She made a motion of passing the letter to Lily.
Lily jumped back. “I don’t want to see it. Tear it up.”
There were two more beseeching letters from Victor which went unanswered. Then there was Victor himself. He had had the unwisdom to steel himself with a double whiskey. He was afraid of Cleo. He knew he would have to fight her for his wife. And he did not know who would win.
He sat in Cleo’s parlor with the smell of whiskey on his breath. He wasn’t drunk, but from Lily’s frightened expression he might as well have been. She crowded beside Cleo on the sofa, remembering the stories Cleo had told her about low-class men who went crazy with drink.
Victor stared at her from across the room, a brown man looking almost black with the anger in his cheeks. Lily paled and thought about Simeon and Thea, who, Cleo said, had both been beaten to a pulp in quiet Cambridge just for walking together. God alone knew what had kept her and Victor from being killed outright in the wickeder city of New York. She pressed closer to her sister.
“You see, it is useless to try to persuade her,” said Cleo. “Her mind is made up.”
But the double whiskey was potent inside Victor. “I came for my wife and my child, and I won’t leave without them.” He felt crazy talking to Cleo, with Lily sitting full-grown beside her. “Get up and go pack,” he said savagely.
She began to cry softly. Her only movement was her visible quivering.
He leaped to his feet and started toward her. He walked slowly, for he was mad enough to shake her for shrinking against her sister as if she expected him to hit her. He was trying to rid himself of the impulse before he reached her. He had never touched a woman, and he didn’t want to start now.
To Lily his slow-paced step was the sound of doom. Cleo knew from his relaxing hands that it was not. One out of ten thousand men went berserk. It wasn’t likely that Lily would ever die by violence.
“Get away from my sister,” she blazed. “Don’t come one step nearer. If you put your hand on her, I’ll call the police.”
Lily was terrifyingly aware that if Victor advanced another step, Cleo would run out of the house to scream for a policeman. She would be alone in this room with Victor. When Cleo returned, help would be too late.
Lily’s back was against the wall, and it stiffened. The meanest creature will fight for life, and Lily already felt Victor’s fist in her face.
She jumped to her feet and sprang at him. She was a wild fury. Her fingernails tore down his face. Her voice shrilled and cracked and spat out a stream of ugly, unforgivable words that she had absorbed from hearing Cleo in her caustic sessions with Bart. They were part of Cleo’s personality. They had never been part of Lily’s. And Victor was not Bart. What one man can stomach may act as poison on another. The words rushing from her throat were an avalanche of rock that pulverized Victor’s self-respect. Lily had never called him “black nigger” in all their married life.
He knew what it was with her now. The sum of it was this sister of hers had taught her to hate her dark husband. For the first time since his blind entrance, he was savagely conscious of Lily’s white skin and the golden skin of her sister. Two goddamned color-struck hussies! Heard tell yellow fever was common in Boston. God, let him get out of this house before his little honey-colored daughter came home from school and backed away from her own daddy because he was dark.
He picked up his hat, walked out of his marriage, and left Lily to her destruction. And Lily promptly had hysterics because she had just escaped it.
When Cleo graphically told Bart about Victor’s attempt to kill Lily, he said heavily: “Looks like when one blow falls, there’s a rain of them. First Charity, now Lily. There’s
some ill star hanging over your sisters. God knows what’s in store for Serena. I know you hate letting her go when her comfort’s needed. But Godamighty, Cleo, you got to put her on the train before whatever’s due to happen, happens here.”
It was mid-October, but there had been no word from Robert since the long, misspelled, chaotic letter that had been his answer to Serena’s rash declaration of devotion to Cleo. He hadn’t reproached her or begged her to relent. He had urged her to stay. Queer thing was, he had had it in mind to tell her. Their letters almost crossed. He had a real job now, a good steady job, paying good steady money. The reason he hadn’t sent her any of it was because he was paying down on a house. The house was fresh-painted inside and out, the roof was new-shingled, the porch was sound, the furniture was part of the sale and looking like it had never been used, the well was just outside the door, no more carting water from the spring. Soon as he paid a third, they could move in. She wasn’t to worry if he didn’t write again until it was time to send her the money to come. He had sat up till midnight three nights in a row to work on this letter. Writing wore him out, and with the house well-nigh his, he didn’t want to lose it sleeping on the job.
Serena had been torn between believing him and knowing he was lying. Knowing there was shame and torment in every line. But maybe God had wrought a miracle, and Robert had a real job. That wasn’t too much to make up to him for the times God had seemed to turn His back. For Robert’s sake, she would have faith.
The day his letter came — with Cleo too sick and uncaring for Serena to trouble her to listen to it, or for Bart to bother her with the rent money — that day Bart left forty-five dollars with Serena to give to Mr. Van Ryper when he called. But Mr. Van Ryper said there must be some mistake, and gave her back twenty dollars. For a terrible moment Serena didn’t want to waste time on faith, she wanted to steal that twenty dollars, grab up Tim, go as far south as she could on it, and walk to Robert the rest of the way. But she had never stolen in her life, and she could not bring herself to steal from Mr. Judson, whose bread she had eaten.