by Dorothy West
Between the two passed a little communicative look which said that this was the proper moment to reveal their decision.
“We’ll take it,” Mrs. Kennedy said. “We’re very dissatisfied in the South End. I’m really reluctant to walk in my neighborhood. There is drunkenness everywhere and vulgar talk. We’d like to move in as soon as possible.”
“The flat is quite ready whenever you are,” Cleo said graciously. “We live very quietly. My sister and I are here alone most of the day. I’m sure we’ll be as satisfied with you as I hope you’ll be with us.”
Mr. Kennedy made a motion toward his pocket. As he did so, there was a prolonged ear-piercing pull on the doorbell. Cleo recognized that ring. It was the children’s SOS. One of them or all of them could hardly wait to race upstairs to the bathroom.
The startled Kennedys stood in frozen attitudes, waiting, as they thought, with Mrs. Judson for some explanation of that outrageous clamor. And the listeners heard Charity, in the kitchen below, stumble out of her chair and knock it over, wheezing and gasping in her terrible haste, her anguished mutterings a wild accompaniment to her grunts and groans, and the ugly slap-slap of her slippers sounding more erratic in her mad scurrying.
Mrs. Kennedy shot a frightened glance at her husband. She was completely certain that the woman downstairs was crazy drunk. That furious tugging at the bell could only mean a drunken friend was demanding entrance.
When the front door opened and several young feet scampered over the threshold, and several young voices chattered at once, though Cleo could have killed the children without tears, the Kennedys felt their tension lessening. But their relief was short-lived. The woman below snapped off the children’s greeting. Then one of the children seemed to be trying to ascend the stairs. There was the sound of a hand against tender flesh, and a child’s shrill cry that was snuffed out as if that same hand had struck across a tender mouth. Then the young feet were heard in flight to the kitchen, with that woman staggering after them, as if the load of her liquor was too much to carry.
The Kennedys stole a look at Mrs. Judson. Her poise was plainly shaken. She knew that they had guessed her sister’s weakness. They would tell her, in a nice way, that this was no house for decent people.
Cleo caught the little sly look the Kennedys sent toward her. Anger rallied her spirits. Who did these half-dead buzzards think they were, to act as if they were scared of children? When was it ever a crime for a child to ring a doorbell because it had to go to the bathroom? She had lived in this house before she knew the Kennedys were on earth. She could find a way of staying here without their rotten money.
Having chosen a nice way, Mrs. Kennedy said, “We didn’t know there were children.”
“There are four,” said Cleo simply and proudly.
Childless Mrs. Kennedy, who adored children and would have been happy to live with a dozen, said carefully: “My husband and I are getting on. We’ve got set in our ways. Children would make us nervous. Thank you for showing us the flat. And now we’ll say good day.”
CHAPTER 29
I WOULD LIEFER not eat my dinner, Cleo,” said Penny politely. “I would liefer wait to see what we have for supper.” She put her fork down and folded her hands in her lap. Besides, she did not like eating in the kitchen. She did not like to be in the same room with cooking smells and soiled dishes.
“You eat up and hush up,” Charity commanded. “Cleo’s got more on her mind than catering to you.”
Penny looked surprised. She was not used to Charity telling her what to do. She rolled her velvet eyes at her mother. Cleo was the only one supposed to make her mind.
She did not respect Charity. Because of her mother’s gluttony, she had developed an extreme fastidiousness about food. Charity made her feel ashamed of the normal function of eating. When they ate in the kitchen, she hovered over them, her eyes darting nervously from plate to plate, as she waited for them to finish. The moment one of them laid down a fork, she whisked the plate away, and crossed the floor in choking haste to finish the scraps before she went through the empty motions of surrendering them to the garbage pail.
Charity herself felt no surprise that instead of removing Penny’s plate, she had ordered her child to eat what was on it. For the first time in a long time she did not feel hungry. She was worried about Cleo, and this new emotion engaged her whole mind, divorced it from her body.
If Cleo had stormed at her or the children, she could have stood it and understood it. But Cleo had not reproached them. She had just said those people wanted a flat with a gas stove instead of a two-burner plate. Charity had known she was lying. She had heard every word that was said upstairs. She had heard the lady say they would take it just the second before the children made all that racket.
She felt wholly responsible. If she’d used her common sense, she’d have been on watch for the children from the parlor window. But no, she’d been too busy sopping pot liquor behind Cleo’s back.
Cleo was thinking hard. Charity saw that. She saw it in Cleo’s quietness. Even now Cleo had let her get away with speaking to one of the children. Cleo’s mind was on the rent money. With that twenty-five dollars slipping away through her fingers, all she had to count on was Serena’s twelve, and added to forty, that wouldn’t make eighty. And Charity wished to God she could help. She wished to God she had the gumption to walk out that door and get a job.
Serena was working. Even poor Lily. Poor Lily whose fear of everything on the outside had not been as great as her morbid fear that she could never do enough to retain her protected place inside Mr. Judson’s house. She had marched out, unasked, to look for work when his business began going from bad to worse. Now she ceaselessly ran from job to job in her efforts to find one that paid more than the last. Regularly she lost a day or two sitting around in employment offices. Being far too timid to tell her madams she was planning to quit, she could never produce a reference. This lack of letters of recommendation resulted in poorer and poorer jobs, with more work and less pay, plus the growing doubts of the employment agencies concerning her ability or honesty or sanity. Still, even poor Lily brought in something.
Charity loosed her frustration on Penny. “Who are you to act so high and mighty? I ain’t paid a cent for what’s on your plate. Beggars can’t be choosers. Eat.”
Penny’s lip quivered. She picked up her fork, but she could not swallow the morsel she put in her mouth, not because it was distasteful, but because along with it she would have to swallow her pride. She was nearly eleven and exquisite. She was upset if there was a wrinkle in her stocking or the tiniest spot on her dress. Sometimes she would wake in the middle of the night in trembling horror of the rumpled sheets. She would weep softly and pitifully until Charity grumbled awake and remade the bed. When she lay down again, she would roll far away from her mother, hating the proximity of another body and the smell of sleep.
She was never going to be a scholar. She was in the fifth grade because Vicky and Judy were. They did her lessons. She was going to be a great dancer. She could dance better than anybody in dancing school. But she wanted to dance by herself. She was sick of being encircled by a boy’s arm. She wanted to go on the stage and wear wonderful costumes. And she would not have to wait until she was eighteen. She looked older than she was. By the time she was fifteen, she would look old enough to run away to New York.
Cleo was concerned because strangers thought she was in her teens. Strange men. They looked at her with something hot in their eyes. Sometimes in passing they said sickening things out of the corners of their mouths. And once in a while in the movies or on a trolley they pressed her knee or stood too close.
She was wholly revolted. Because she had no interest in school, Cleo supposed that all of her interest was in boys. She had dismaying visions of Penny eloping with some coltish youth without a dime in his pocket. But Penny had listened to Cleo’s belittling descriptions of men, and Cleo’s unconcealed contempt intensified her own feeling.
Penny dreamed about growing famous, and having fresh bedding every day and the finest foods in the finest hotels. She was going to have everything she could wish for without any old husband to give it to her. Cleo thought she wasn’t so smart. She was going to be smarter than Cleo. She was going to have everything — or almost everything. For she would not have Vicky.
Vicky would not promise to run away with her, even though Penny crossed her heart and vowed to share all her good fortune with her. Vicky had lived in New York. There was nothing there but buildings. She was going to run away and roam the whole world. Slender as a reed, agile as a monkey, wonderfully red-cheeked with radiant health, she was wild and free, and afraid of nothing. She would sleep in the woods sometimes, and in barns sometimes, she confided to her cousins. And she would write poems about everything she saw, and send them to Judy to keep for her.
Restless, fun loving Vicky could be sobered and inspired by the simple act of opening a book. She turned pages tenderly, not wanting to break the ebony thread that wove itself into a wonderful pattern of words. And the words were the explanation of life, the key to understanding.
She, the child of Cleo’s heart, was the one whose intelligence equaled Cleo’s hope. Yet Vicky, for whose stormy nature Cleo had set no example of restraint, was unable to discipline her fine mind. She and Cleo battled royally over her report cards. And on the few occasions when they were completely creditable, both of them felt oddly baffled that there was no need for a session of savagery with each other.
Only with Judy did Vicky feel impelled to the pursuit of truth. Judy had instilled the need in her, and she had gone beyond Judy’s own instinct for knowledge. Hers was a larger vision. But she needed Judy to steady the lighted lamp, to be somewhere near when she wrote. Away from Judy she could not harness her spirit. But Judy did not want to roam the world.
Innocently Judy wanted four little boys exactly like Tim. She did not want to be a concert pianist. She was tired of practicing in the cold parlor. She had to practice longer and harder than Vicky or Penny, and she thought this unfair. In the beginning her whole being had been illumined directing the black and white keys into channels of beauty. Music had meant the entry into a people-less world, where all that made the heart cry could be blotted out by the evocation of pure sound. Now music no longer sang inside her. She sat at the piano during practice hours, playing facilely without thought or emotion. Still music had served her well. It had given her the distillation of beauty. She could recognize beauty now in whatever form or shape it assumed. And for her it was most manifest in the faces of little children.
She was going to leave home and get married and never come back. She thought it would be an act of folly to return. Cleo would try to turn her against her husband. Cleo would try to take away her children.
Only Tim had not felt Cleo’s influence. She did not want a little boy tied to her apron strings. She preferred to have him out of the house as long as the hour and the weather permitted.
He slept with Papa, now that Papa had been moved upstairs, and Serena no longer slept at home. Papa went to bed almost as early as he did. At night they talked man-talk until Papa fell asleep. For a little while Tim lay awake, staring at Papa’s dark face in the darkness, his nostrils quivering like a puppy’s as he separated Papa’s different smells. Presently he was lulled to sleep by Papa’s snores, his arm across Papa’s chest.
Tim had entered the first grade at four. Cleo thought kindergarten was a foolish waste of time. She passed Tim off for five and a half, explaining, quite truthfully, that he had been born in the South and had no birth certificate. This sudden decision to start him in school had been arrived at on a morning when her patience had stretched its short length and snapped. One more tearful plea from Tim that he be allowed to follow his beloved Judy to the schoolhouse and she would have gone stark mad. She had jammed his hat on his head, jerked his arms through the sleeves of his coat, and carted him off to school with his short legs working like pistons.
At six he was a third-grader, and already had decided to be a doctor. He expected to go to Harvard. He had never heard that there was any other university. He was forever assuring Cleo of his interest in higher education. She was forever telling him firmly that there were three ahead of him, and there might not be money for a fourth. All the same, she had a disheartening expectation of Penny’s putting him in the running.
Before he was three he had made up his mind to be a doctor with the earnest intent of making Robert well. He did not want any father but Papa, but he was moved by Serena’s tears. He had never been taken to see Robert after his arrival at the hospital in Boston. Cleo was afraid that Tim would bring home a germ form the visit, and one by one the children would die of galloping consumption.
Their knowing began when Cleo returned from her sojourn into sorrow to tell her sisters about Pa and Robert, but not telling even Serena that she was arranging for Robert to go straight from the train to a hospital. Serena got her room ready, put Tim at the foot of the bed so he would get used to sleeping there, and not sulk when Robert took his place at its head. When the lawyer’s telegram came, Serena and Cleo went to the station. A long while later they came home alone. Serena found a sleep-in job the next day. Robert could not stay in Cleo’s house. She could not stay either.
The night that Cleo returned to Boston, and for many nights thereafter, the low-voiced conversations in her room, where there had once been so much gargantuan laughter, centered around Robert’s dishonor. Judy lay still and sick, wanting to tell them that Serena’s sobs had waked her, as later they would wake Tim, but unable to speak and reveal that already she had heard too much.
Reporting in whispers to Vicky and Penny next day in the playroom, she, too, was unaware that Tim, very busy with his toys, was moving them without sound, was scarcely breathing as he stored up all the incomprehensible words and phrases against that day when he would know their full meanings and their full horror.
He understood everything now, though this dark knowledge was hidden deep inside him, so that no one would ever see it.
He knew, in Cleo’s words, that Robert had been a jailbird until a criminal lawyer in Boston, who had never lost a case, went down South and won Robert’s. It had cost a lot of money. Papa almost lost his mind when the expenses were listed.
The lawyer entered a plea of Not Guilty. He said that Robert had run from the scene of the killing before the first shot was fired. Seeing himself surrounded by white men with guns, he had suddenly turned into a scared nigger. He knew that white folks were never fooled by white niggers, especially Southern white folks. He thought he was in a trap. He went crazy with fear. He flung down his own gun and started to run for his life. The gun tobogganed to the black side. A nigger picked it up. The nigger witness for the defense was standing right beside him. He saw this man fire, saw the deputy fall, saw the man get his due a second later when the other deputies let loose their guns in self-defense.
Robert was called to the stand only once, and nobody could hear his mumbled answers for his coughing. The cross-examination was very brief, for the district attorney felt very uneasy being sprayed by Robert’s germs. The burning spots in Robert’s cheeks, his bleary eyes plainly showed that he was hearing and seeing through the thick folds of fever.
It was the nigger witness’s day. That nobody had ever seen him before was no concern of the court. For a mob is nameless and faceless and attracts stray dogs.
The court set Robert free on condition that he get out of the South as punishment for the crime of crossing the color line which could lead to unimaginable horrors involving Southern womanhood.
When the bitter tale of Cleo’s telling was ended, Serena said miserably, “Why did you have to tell me my Robert committed murder? Why couldn’t you have let me believe the story you paid the lawyer to tell?” Cleo said, “I wanted you to know what kind of man you married. I wanted you to see I was right to want to separate you.”
Most of Serena’s wages paid for Rober
t’s hospitalization. She was general maid in a large house whose only occupant, besides herself, was a harsh old lady who had been blacklisted by all the reputable employment agencies. Her temper was vile, her manner despotic. She believed that servants were thieves and liars. Despite her infirmities, daily she made a microscopic inspection of her house, and her cane lashed across Serena’s knuckles whenever it suited her to show her power.
Cleo said Serena was a stubborn fool to slave for an old fool six days and seven nights a week, and then spend her one afternoon off with a crazy fool. But Serena would not have taken an easy place if one had been offered her. She wanted to share Robert’s wretched fate in spirit if not in flesh.
On her afternoons off she roamed like a restless cat in the family circle until visiting hour at the hospital. For Bart alone she felt no resentment. She saw him rarely. Unlike the others who saw him regularly, she was aware of his aging. Because she saw the beginning of his destruction, she did not have to hate him for Robert’s sake.
Robert had shut his mind to remembering. He would not look back. Only the now of his nothingness occupied him. He stayed within his wall of silence, forswearing all but the meager speech of assent or denial. Over the growing film on his mind only one image was stretched, the hated Cleo of his conjuring, she whom he had never seen, she the enemy who had ravaged him. Serena could not lead him out of the dark.
CHAPTER 30
CLEO, brooding by the window, praying Serena’s old woman wouldn’t find some excuse to keep her from taking her afternoon off, wondering how much Serena could be persuaded to part with besides the expected twelve dollars, trying to figure where she could turn for the balance if Serena refused — Cleo heard the sobbing of one of the children, and brought her mind back into the room.