Lazaretto

by Diane McKinney-Whetstone

  After he was banned from the piano, Linc would find Meda; his preference was to be with Meda, anyhow. He would sit at the foot of her chair and scribble on scraps of paper she’d hand him and listen to her hum as she inked Mrs. Benin’s notes. He’d run back and forth through the Benin bedroom as Meda arranged the clothes in their closets. He’d sit at the kitchen table as she prepared the afternoon snack. His favorite times were when she’d read aloud to him, whatever it was she happened to be reading, even something as mundane as a letter to Mrs. Benin inviting her to an event for which Meda was tasked with drafting a reply. They’d take seats on the back porch, and he’d lean his head on her arm, and it was as if he could feel her voice vibrating through her arm. It was the best feeling in the world to him, the sound of her voice even better than the sounds Bram made with the piano keys, which would filter through the house and were growing more and more accomplished.

  Tom Benin stepped out onto the porch on one afternoon while they were out there and Linc instantly jumped up. “Sir,” he said. Benin nodded in his direction, then stood there, waiting for Meda to look up. She did not. He cleared his throat, and Meda continued reading aloud, though she’d taken her volume down to a whisper, and Linc was confused. Meda had taught them that they had to give Tom Benin the highest respect, even greater than the respect they gave to his wife because it was Mr. Benin who allowed them time away from the orphanage to be with Meda. He thought that Meda must not be aware that Mr. Benin was standing there. So he leaned down and nudged her, “Meda,” he said in a loud whisper, and she looked up at him and smiled the softest of smiles.

  “What is it, my dear Linc?” she said.

  He made his eyes go big and moved them in the direction of Tom Benin, trying to tell her that the man of the house was there, that she was being disrespectful. She still didn’t acknowledge Tom Benin. She pulled Linc to her instead and smooched his cheek and told him that he was a most handsome boy. Tom Benin left without a word. And Linc asked Meda why did she not give her hello to him.

  “I have my reasons,” she said. “Mine alone—you are still obligated to mind your manners when he is about.”

  On another afternoon, not long after, it happened again. Again Linc stood and said, “Sir,” as soon as Tom Benin appeared on the porch. Tom Benin nodded as Meda continued her reading, and then Tom Benin called her name. She looked up then. “Evening?” she said, making it a question rather than a salutation. He reached into his vest pocket. “My watch needs to be cleaned, will you see to it, please?”

  She opened her hand and he placed the watch there, and Linc moved in to get a closer look at it, and said, “Ooh, what’s that, bridges?”

  Tom Benin picked the watch up. “Be careful,” he said, “it’s irreplaceable. Let me show you.” He sat down on the chair that faced Meda, and Linc stood in front of him and Tom Benin told him those were in fact bridges on the watch. “Go ahead, you can touch it,” he said. And then he explained to Linc how valuable the watch was, that it was one of the first of its kind to be made, that it had been shown at the exposition in Paris, though he’d actually owned his for several years before that, because the watchmaker was a family friend. Linc squeezed into the chair next to Tom Benin and asked how many bridges were there, and Tom Benin said, “Let’s count,” and they counted the three bridges.

  “He can count higher than that,” Meda said, without looking up from the paper she read. Then Tom Benin asked Linc to count for him.

  Linc counted to twenty, then applauded himself the same way Meda would clap when he and Bram showed off what they could do. A smile broke on Tom Benin’s face, and Linc nestled in closer to him on the chair and pulled on Tom Benin’s hand to show him the hand game that Meda had taught him. Tom Benin laughed as Linc chattered away, and then Benin’s laughter hung unfinished in the air. Mrs. Benin stood in the doorway. Said that she would like a word with him. He cleared his throat and stood and handed his watch to Linc and asked him if he would deliver it to Meda. As he walked from the porch, Linc gave the watch to Meda and she slipped it in the pocket of her frock. Linc sat next to her again as she resumed reading out loud.

  The following weekend, as Bram sat on the piano bench, waiting for Mrs. Benin to come down to start with his lesson, Linc wandered into the room and Bram motioned him to the piano and said listen to this, and proceeded to play the piece he was learning, Bach’s minuet in G Major. He told Linc to sit next to him and he would teach him, and then Mrs. Benin would see that Linc also had talent and would once again be willing to give him lessons. Linc tried to follow Bram’s example but ended up hitting all the wrong keys, and then he made a game of it, pretending to be a concert pianist, and Bram laughed, and then he froze because there was Mrs. Benin.

  “Get up from there this instant,” she said, and both boys scrambled to get up. “Not you, Bram, you remain seated,” she said as she grabbed the pointing stick from the piano and told Linc to spread out his hands. When he did, she struck his hands with the stick, over and over, until Bram started to cry on Linc’s behalf. She hit his hands and called him names—urchin, undisciplined, uncultured, with his rat teeth and eyes so dark and sneaky they looked to have been visited by Satan. Said he had the ugliest hands she’d ever seen, hands that had been spawned by an ape. She seemed to lose all control as she berated him and smacked at his hands till his knuckles began to bleed and Bram, hysterical now, ran to find Meda.

  Meda rushed into the room and then stopped at the threshold as she saw the bloody stick going up and down through the air, and Linc standing there, stoic, streaming tears but otherwise not making a sound. “Lord Father God,” Meda said under her breath, though her faith had always been wobbly at best. Maybe there was a God, maybe not, was her stance on religion, even as she’d call on the Lord just in case. But she got some confirmation as to his existence when she grabbed for the marble bust of Caesar—or maybe it was Marcus Aurelius, she’d get the two confused—and before she could lift it in her hands, she felt something wide and deep and powerful surround her and pin her arms to her sides, preventing her from picking up the bust and ramming it into Mrs. Benin’s head equal to the number of times she’d hard-landed that wooden stick against Linc’s hands. Her voice at least still worked, and she screamed, “You evil, wretched cow! Hit him again and I will kill you.” At least that’s what she’d tried to put forth. But it was as if the same force that had paralyzed her arms snatched at her words as they were passing from her lips, re-forming them. “I need to retrieve Mr. Benin’s riding boots that have been resoled. I would like for Lincoln to accompany me” was the reconfigured version of her words.

  She pulled Linc into the kitchen with her. She hugged him and kissed his hands and held herself back from crying. She cleaned away the blood as gently as she could. She coated his battered fingers with a thick layer of honey and overspread that with lard. She loosely wrapped his hands in cotton and they left the house and took a streetcar into town.

  Linc considered his battererd hands a small price to pay for a streetcar ride with Meda, his only regret being that Bram wasn’t with them, too. She asked him every other minute how his hands were. “Better,” he said, though all of his fingers still throbbed with a burning sensation. And they were better as he felt the honey oozing into the rawness, setting up a barrier. Plus the motion of the trolley, and the sound of the horses’ clop-clops was a comfort as he allowed his head to fall against her arm. The nubby wool of her shawl was scratchy against his cheek, but he could feel a pulsing through the shawl that he thought was her heart beating, so he nestled his head closer in and tried to get his heart to beat in time with hers.

  They walked along Market Street, busy with shoppers and peddlers alike, and Meda stopped at a stall and bought a ladle of pepper pot soup that she blew on to cool and then offered to Linc. The flavor exploded in Linc’s head, and he asked if next time he could share with Bram. Meda said, “Surely, when all is said and done, you and Bram have only each other to lean on.” Linc nodded, though th
e memory of her heart beating against the side of his face was too recent for him not to consider always having her to lean on, too.

  They headed south and ended up at Fitzwater Street where the people were all dark like Meda was dark, and though Linc thought them mostly pleasant-looking, none were as pretty to him as Meda, with the way that her face opened up when she smiled, the way her big droopy eyes crinkled at the corners, the way her cheekbones fell away leaving soft brown blossoms; and even when she wasn’t smiling, even when he’d catch her staring off into space with a sadness so heavy hanging in her eyes that he’d want to reach up and pluck it away, even then was she the prettiest to him.

  Meda said “How-do” to the people as they moved up the street, and Linc was entranced by a woman sitting on her steps making a loud sound that was a mix of a ship’s steam whistle and a wolf’s howl. The sound matched her appearance: her hair was uncovered, wild and spikey; her feet were bare; her shoulders moved up and down almost convulsively. It was Miss Ma, Nevada’s grandmother.

  “What’s wrong with her?” Linc asked.

  “Near as anyone can tell, not a speck of anything,” Meda said. “Miss Ma just breaks out into laughter for no good cause. How are your hands feeling?”

  “She is laughing?” Linc asked.

  “Yes, and only she knows what about. How are your hands?”

  “Better,” he said. The surprising sight of Miss Ma had trumped the throbbing in his fingers, and he kept turning to look back at her, mesmerized; mesmerized, too, by the fact that everyone they’d passed on this street seemed to know Meda, though they all called her Sister, and Linc asked her why.

  “That is just how I am known here. My brother has always called me Sister and I suppose the name just attached itself to me. Linc had never thought of Meda’s existence outside of Benin’s, or the orphanage, where she still came to help out on Fridays, before she packed them up to spend weekends with her.

  They stopped in front of a house where the door was cracked and the air jumped with the fast talk and laughter of men with deep voices. They stepped into that raucous setting, which was her brother’s living room, though converted into a gambling parlor on a Saturday afternoon where the card table was the centerpiece and food and spirits and the sounds of a banjo and a harmonica spilled out from the dining room.

  Meda walked Linc to the table crowded with ferocious-looking men. “Tell me, Buddy, have you ever seen a more beautiful pair of hands,” she asked, her voice finding an interstice between the high and low notes of the harmonica and the booming voices that laughed and cursed.

  The one she called Buddy was the color of the hens the cook roasted on Sundays, part red, part brown, part black where the seasoning clumped and burned. One of his eyes hung lower than the other and only opened halfway; the other was a full circle that seemed amused by whatever it saw. He fixed his good eye on Linc, then raised a finger to halt the play of cards. “Commere, liddle white boy, lemme see what you got.” Buddy’s hands were thick and calloused and surprisingly tender as he unwrapped the rag from around Linc’s hands. He let go a long whistle when he saw Linc’s scarred, swollen knuckles. “Whose ass I need to kick for fucking up the liddle white boy?”

  Meda slapped him in the back. “Just answer me, please, Buddy. Tell him how beautiful are his hands.”

  “Well, hain’t never seen nothin’ of beauty in another man, truth be spoke, and y’all must forgive me about Sister’s diction, but she been taught by the Quakers, and they say strange things like is a boy’s hands beautiful. But I must say”—he turned Linc’s hands over and looked at his palms, and then closed his oversized hands over both of Linc’s and gently squeezed—“you got ’bout the finest hands I ever seen on a liddle white boy. Colored, too, for that matter.” He winked at Linc with his good eye and the harmonica did a double note as if to punctuate Buddy’s pronouncement, and Linc felt the sound resonate deep in his chest as if something essential had been moved around to accommodate the sound, to lock it in place.

  “You always hold on to this, you hear me?” Meda said, as she thumped Linc’s forearm. “The ugly is in her, not you. Never let another make you feel shame when the shame is their own for judging you with no eye trained on justice.”

  THE TRIPS TO Buddy’s house became a Saturday-afternoon ritual for Meda and Linc after that. Bram would remain at the Germantown mansion and take piano instruction from Tom Benin’s wife, and Meda and Linc would ride the trolley into town and eat hot roasted peanuts as they walked to Fitzwater Street, to her brother’s house.

  Linc imbibed the atmosphere at Buddy’s house. He couldn’t decide which he favored more, the tempo of their talk, which was like a creek rushing in a storm, or the way the blend of the banjo and mouth harp would sift inside of him and nestle, or the richness of their skin colorings, the varieties; he would study his own skin after he left there, hoping that if he looked at the inside of his arm long enough, a brown-tint would show through. Everything about being at Buddy’s was a thrill to him, even when the air rippled with danger.

  And it was dangerous. Men filled with rye swore that they’d been dealt marked cards. The youngest of the regulars, called Splotch owing to a birthmark across one entire side of his face that looked like a massive ink spill, would glare at Linc whenever he was in the room. Meda was watchful over Linc when Splotch was around. And this day she pulled Linc into the dining room and positioned his chair under one of the sketches she’d traced of Abraham Lincoln that Buddy had affixed to his wall. “You would think old Abe Lincoln was Jesus,” Buddy’s wife, Nola, teased Meda. “His likeness hanging there ’sposed to protect the boy?”

  “The boy already white, how much protection he need?” said Miss Ma. “Furthermore, you got ole Abe looking like a colored man on that picture of him you drew. You saying Jesus was a colored man, too, Sister?”

  “I say Jesus is the color of everyman and no man,” Meda said, as she grabbed her hooded shawl from the hook. “And Jesus just reminded me I failed to order my biscuits from Lorraine for that Benin woman to have with her fried apples tonight. And even Jesus wants no part of her wretchedness when she is denied her requests.”

  “You still got that Benin woman thinking you bake her bread by your own hands!” Nola laughed.

  “Well, my hands arrange it on the plate, so I aver that I am responsible for her enjoying them,” Meda said, as she tied her hood under her neck and then told Linc that she was going around the corner to pick up biscuits, and to sit there with Mr. Lincoln and the fine ladies until she returned.

  She hurried out the door. The February air had teeth and her hood was pulled low on her face and tied so tightly under her chin that she could barely move her head. She thought that she had the appearance of the grim reaper as she tried to look up and say how-do to the woman hurrying past her, but a blast of cold air made her lower her head, though she did stop and turn around after the woman returned her greeting with a quick good afternoon. The sound of the woman’s voice went right to Meda’s core and shook her, momentarily rearranging her so that she was no longer standing on her brother’s block as the cold gnawed through her winter garb but instead was back in that room where everything had been painted white and Abraham Lincoln spoke to her from his picture on the wall. She turned now and called out to the woman who had hurried past her. “Sylvia? Is that you, Sylvia?” But the wind swallowed up her voice as she watched the woman’s back float farther and farther away, and she started to chase after her, but then she did not. What purpose would it serve, she asked herself, to barrage Sylvia with questions that she could not answer back then and surely could not answer now? Questions such as what had caused her baby to succumb? Did she suffer at all? She stopped herself. Sylvia’s responses—or lack thereof—about her baby could not bring her child back to life. She started walking again. She wrestled with the terrible sadness that the sound of Sylvia’s voice had unleashed in her, the twin tragedies of losing her baby and the president on the same night. She consoled herself tha
t she now had Linc and Bram in her life. She had Ann; she cherished her time with Ann, limited though it was, and soon likely to be curtailed altogether because Ann had received an unpromising report about her mother’s health: she had developed palsy, and, depending on how it progressed, Ann might need to return to Connecticut. But she had Ann at least for now, and although Linc and Bram and Ann could never completely repair the jagged rip in her heart from the death of her baby girl, their presence did soothe and soften the edges of it and allowed a seam to grow so that it was no longer a gaping hole.

  She turned the corner, focused again on getting to Lorraine’s house and procuring the biscuits. Told herself that likely it had not been Sylvia anyhow, as she couldn’t imagine the situation that would have the likes of a refined one such as Sylvia down here unescorted in this neighborhood so close to sunset.

  IT WAS SYLVIA. And she couldn’t believe herself that she was down here so close to nightfall. Her mother would be livid if she knew—her mother, her entire family still reeling from the brutal assassination of Negroes in the fall elections, Octavius Catto among them, whom her father knew well. But it was Nevada’s birthday, and Sylvia’s mother had made a multilayered coconut cake for Nevada, and Sylvia had left the house intending to deliver the cake hours ago because she knew that Nevada was expecting a gentleman to call late afternoon to favor her with an evening recital at First African, and a dinner down in their fellowship hall. Sylvia planned to surprise Nevada with the cake, along with the hand-drawn card Vergie had made, which amounted to an arrangement of ink spills because Vergie had not yet mastered letters. The streetcar, though, had been late owing to the extreme cold temperatures, and then she’d stopped in Strawbridge and Clothier to warm up and had noticed a silk scarf swirling with color and she imagined the scarf draped around Nevada’s shoulders, so she decided to purchase it. But it had taken her the better part of an hour to pay for the scarf because once the clerk learned that Sylvia was not buying the scarf at the behest of some lady-of-the-house for whom she worked, he claimed to be holding it for another customer, which provoked Sylvia’s defiant nature, and she insisted she would wait and see if the customer returned and if not, then he would have no option but to sell it to her. He looked at the space she occupied as if she had become invisible. A rage brewed in her chest, and she walked away in a huff. She planted herself at the Market Street door. She placed the handled bag that contained the getting-heavier-by-the-moment cake on the floor next to where she stood. She called on her innate sense about people as she watched the mostly white people coming and going. They glanced at her as if they were glancing at a barrel, a cart, a post, some inanimate thing that did not breathe or think or feel. She waited; she would not be thwarted; the situation had expanded beyond the scarf as she felt bits and pieces of her rebuked self coalesce and strengthen. The times she’d been mistaken for the maid when she’d accompanied her parents on catering jobs; the job she’d quit at Pennsylvania Hospital after she’d been relegated to cleaning spittoons, though she’d been more than qualified to assist the nurses when they dressed wounds, or prepared soaks, or even coaxed the indolent to swallow; the being made to wait while a white person was serviced first at the vegetable stall, or the fabric shop, or the cobbler to have her shoes resoled. She waited, trying not to allow their sudden blindness to her presence join forces with the rioting bits of her past kicking up dust in her chest. She waited a full half an hour before she saw him, or, more importantly, before he saw her, saw her for what she was—just a person, just a normal living human being. He was, paradoxically, half-blind. He was tall and walked with the slightest limp and had one glass eye that stared straight ahead, while the corners of the other crinkled as she nodded, and he nodded in return and touched the tip of his hat.