“Il est mort?” she heard. “Il est mort? Quelqu’un appelle la police!”
Mae tugged harder until Sam’s feet started moving. Then they moved fast, as though he wanted to catch up to the language he spewed throughout the cave. Mae pushed through the people coming forward to gawk at the man on the ground. Soon they were on the street. The night air hit Sam and silenced him. They moved away from the glowing neon letters and Mae looked up and down the street for a taxi.
HE REMAINED QUIET all the way back to the Hotel Gerard. Inside their room, he stripped the bloody dress off her and kissed her hard. His teeth nipped at her lower lip as though he would devour her. He pushed her onto the bed. She allowed it. He didn’t hurt her and she knew he needed to do this—mark her, reclaim her. And wasn’t this what she wanted? He was attached to her—she could feel that, deeply so. He’d gone mad for her, had shed blood for her.
Afterward she poured soap into the tub and ran a hot bath for herself. He put on one of the fluffy white hotel robes and sat on a chair near her while she soaked in the water. She leaned back, being careful not to wet her hair, and put her feet up on the side of the tub. The suds, looking like strands of clear pearls, draped around and slid down the skin of her legs. Finally she looked at him. He sat with his head bowed down, his chin to his chest—a chastened figure.
“This isn’t the first time you’ve done this.”
He slumped forward. “No.”
Mae’s eyes drifted up to the ceiling. She let her legs slide back down into the water and she waited for him to speak again. When he didn’t she prompted him.
“Who was she?”
He sat up and shook his hands out in front of him. “I didn’t know her! That’s the damn thing about it, Mae. She wasn’t even my girl.”
She nodded and closed her eyes.
“It was in St. Louis. I grew up near there, in Jefferson. I was with some friends in a bar. They were sitting in a booth across the room, but you could hear them arguing down the street they was yelling so bad. I turned around and looked at them because I didn’t know why somebody wasn’t throwing them out. They were spoiling the nice night for the rest of us. I remember she had this big red flower in her hair, kind of tucked in behind her left ear. And I got caught up in staring at the flower. It was real pretty, with these long petals with yellow streaks. Must have been some kind of lily, like something my mama had in her garden. So I was thinking about that, my mama and her garden and how she loved her flowers and that’s when he just reached out and wham! He hit her. That flower got knocked off her head and it went spinning on the floor. She fell over in that booth like a rag doll.”
Sam sat up again and shook his head. “And the thing that got me was the way people just glanced at them and turned away like nothing was going on. Like none of them ever had a mother or a sister or an aunt. Maybe they didn’t. I don’t know. I just know I dragged him out of that booth and I hurt him bad. I didn’t kill him, just hurt him real bad. Wanted him to see what it felt like to have somebody bigger whaling on him.”
Mae opened her eyes to see Sam twisting his fingers together then pulling them apart like he wanted to find the man and pummel him again. He stood up and paced the short length of the bathroom.
“The police came and grabbed me, but no one mentioned how that woman had a shiner big as the sun on her face,” he said. “We have laws where they’ll pick you up for crossing the street wrong, but no one cares if you lay hands on a woman. Guys like that dumb-ass fool aren’t punished and yet they can do more damage and get away with so much shit. Well, not in front of me they don’t. Makes me so mad I can’t see straight.”
“How do you know?”
“Know what?” Sam stopped pacing and looked at her.
“About the damage.”
“I got a mama, don’t I?” He started pacing again. “But don’t ask me about my daddy.”
“Sam.”
“What?”
“Please sit down.”
Sam looked down at himself like he didn’t know he’d gotten up in the first place. He dropped into the chair and crossed his arms. Mae closed her eyes again and made her calculations. She filed away the information about Sam for future reference. His strength and energy, not to mention his tendency to wield it with such force, could be useful. But his explosiveness had to be managed and she had to learn how to ignite it when necessary. She made plans to send money to Tabou to pay for the trumpeter’s horn. She thought about what they should do the next day. When she came to her decision she asked Sam for a towel and she climbed out of the tepid water.
THE NEXT MORNING they slept late. When they awoke Mae saw from the way the sun slipped through the blinds and drew stripes on the floor it was already high in the sky. They ordered a late breakfast from room service. When they had dressed and eaten, Mae called for a car.
“Where are we going?” Sam asked. He wore khaki pants and a short-sleeved white shirt pulled over his broad chest.
“My choice today,” she answered. She looked into the hall mirror and positioned a light blue hat on her head. She smoothed the skirt of her Dior dress and straightened the light blue belt at her waist.
The drive was a short one. Mae knew they didn’t have to leave the city limits. The walls of the Musée Rodin encircled a haven of quiet and beauty within Paris. She would dip Sam into this place as if it were a hot bath and it would help bring him back to himself. When they got out of the car and he removed his hat and looked out at the gardens as though he were about to enter a church, she knew she’d done the right thing.
She took his arm and led him down the walk. “Do you know anything about art, Sam?” she asked.
“No, not really.” He craned his neck to look back at The Thinker and Mae stopped so he could examine it better. “Damn,” he whispered. “He looks so real.”
“This is the Musée Rodin,” Mae explained. “These grounds and the mansion behind these walls used to belong to a great artist, Auguste Rodin. I thought you might enjoy being here for a while.”
She took his arm again and continued. The path opened up into a circle with a pond and a statue in the middle. When Sam saw the mansion before them with its broad façade and towered points on both ends, he sighed a breath of awe. Mae smiled but said nothing. She listened to the gravel crunch beneath their feet. They came upon a series of four statues of men, each on their own short pedestals. Three were nude but the fourth was draped in a fabric that seemed to be falling off him. The limbs of the statues floated in graceful gestures as though Rodin had captured them in mid-dance. Their dark color glistened in the sun.
Sam stood before them and stared. “Mae, they look like black people,” he said.
She thought the angular noses and deflated asses on the men made them unmistakably white, but for a novice like Sam she understood the impression. “Yes,” she responded. “I can see that.”
The trees were still trimmed into the perfect conical shapes she remembered. She and Sam passed archways festooned in leaves. “It’s like we’re in a room.” He whistled softly. “We’re outside, but we’re in a place. It’s like the Garden of Eden.”
“Yes.” She remembered when she’d first visited the mansion years ago and how it had seemed the statues challenged anyone who viewed them. She’d seen people turn their heads because they couldn’t endure the intimacy of The Kiss or the weight of a woman holding her head in grief. Or they would stand by the fountain and couldn’t stop looking at the horrifying sight of a man about to devour his children. And yet she had cherished the experience because it was like Rodin had put these terrors and delights before them so they could master them. They taught her what was possible so she could react coolly when she came upon the terrors and delights of real life. But no one else had seemed to take away the same lessons. They couldn’t get beyond their staring and their shock. She smiled and shook her head. She could tell from Sam’s bowled-over expression when he gaped at the grotesque and melded heads of The Three Shades, he would be n
o different. But that was fine. She didn’t want him any other way.
In the rose garden he stopped in front of the massive bronze doors depicting The Gates of Hell. Mae drifted to a bench and sat down. She knew the door well and knew Sam could stand there studying it for a long time. Of course the piece was fascinating. The figures teeming all over the doors belied the heaviness of the bronze. They floated, flew, loved, and writhed. Rodin had crafted a miracle. She wondered if Sam would notice The Three Shades were here too looking down at him from the top of the door. What was their message? Abandon hope. That was it. Abandon hope, all ye who enter here. She smiled. If she had been able to stomach the strange torque of the bodies she would have bought a copy of the statue and mounted it above her bedroom door.
“Look at this, Mae!” Sam waved his arm, beckoning her back to his side. He pointed to the figures he’d been studying. The man cradled the woman’s head in his hand; she tilted her face up to receive his tender kiss. The fingers of his other hand sought to grasp hers. It was passion and terror entwined. “That’s what it looks like to love,” Sam whispered. He looked up at the suffering figures above him. “Does this mean the people who love will all burn in hell?”
Mae didn’t point out to him the related figures on another part of the door that would seem to answer his question. The woman was swept away from the man into a swirl of despair. Instead she said, “I don’t believe in hell.” She strolled over to a bush and plucked a velvety red petal from a rose. She held it to her nose and enjoyed its perfume. Then she looked at Sam and smiled. “At least not in the way you think. I think it’s all right here, right now—heaven, hell. The world is whatever you decide to make it. As far as I’m concerned I get up every morning and make my own heaven. Where are we right now? You said it yourself—Eden. I’m here; you’re here. This is heaven. Why should I be worrying about hell?”
She strolled away from him and expected him to follow. But Sam remained. The bronze door, it seemed, had enchanted him. She heard him humming “Nature Boy” under his breath.
CHAPTER 45
Cecily
Harlem, September 1947
Cecily pulled the hood of the voluminous brown raincoat over her head and walked as fast as she could. She’d seen her chance the moment Mama, who’d stood in the hallway tying a pretty red-and-white scarf over her freshly pressed curls, said she would be back at two o’clock from her lunch with the ladies of the church. Cecily knew she had to leave right then and use the precious empty time to make it to Val Jackson’s apartment and get back before Mama returned. When she reached 7th Avenue a blast of warm wind swept up from the south. It pushed her dress and coat around her ankles and made her suck in her breath. She turned the corner and joined the press of bodies hurrying down the busy street. She kept her eyes low so she saw only a bustle of soaked pant legs and dress hems and below them galoshes and stained shoes rushing past her on the wet pavement. The rain fell harder, in gray sheets, and she whimpered in dismay. If she ruined her hair, which had been straightened only the day before, Mama would know she’d gone out. But Cecily hadn’t thought to bring an umbrella.
Nothing was the way she thought it would be when she got home from Mrs. Jarreau’s house. It wasn’t that she expected to see Sam grinning like a birthday boy and waiting for her on the stoop with a bouquet of pink roses or anything of the sort. But she wanted something to seem different. Maybe she wanted moss to spring up under her feet when she climbed the front steps, or to find Mama’s houseplants had grown wild in their absence, the snake plant standing in the parlor, its spikes like giant green sentinels, as tall as Cecily, and the devil’s ivy spilling over its pots and reaching out to trip them the moment they stepped over the threshold. But there was nothing so outlandish, nothing to hint there was any extra life in their home. Instead Mama closed the front door and followed Gideon, who took their bags upstairs. Cecily stood at the parlor window and listened as the house settled into silence again. She didn’t know what to do with herself. She held the white kid gloves she’d worn in the car, and chewed on her lower lip. When Mama came back downstairs and scolded her, telling her to change her clothes, Cecily sadly realized she’d only been waiting for someone to tell her what to do. She felt a shrinking inside her, like everything about her that had stretched and grown over the past few weeks was being balled up like a piece of paper full of mistakes. Would she have to throw herself away and start again?
But Cecily had done everything Mae said to do, right down to making Mama believe she’d be willing to give herself to Frank Washington. She endured his visit to Mercylands and managed to conjure a look of friendliness for him. She smiled at him the way she figured she might do for Sam, and did not pull away when he wrapped a heavy arm around her shoulders as they walked across the lawn. He smelled syrupy sweet like fake mint and she tried not to think about what it would be like to have that scent in her nose night and day, for the rest of her life. She had seen Mama watching them from the terrace and Cecily waved at her in a way she hoped would seem contented and cheerful. But Mama’s face, instead of being pleased, had looked pinched and broken. Later she said they would go home in the next day or so. Cecily felt so grown-up then, and so smart. She started packing before she went to bed that night and wondered how she would get word to Sam she was coming home.
She had drifted through three aimless days in Harlem. On the third night she was slouching up to her room, consigned to another lonely, childlike sleep, when she opened the door and found Val Jackson standing there. She nearly screamed. He held his long dark fingers up to his lips to shush her. He pulled her into the room, took a quick glance out into the hallway, and closed the door.
They sat atop the thin patchwork quilt on her iron-framed bed and spoke in whispers. Cecily shifted uncomfortably. He smelled warm like chocolate and his skin shone smooth and bright like a new penny. His presence seemed too large for her girlish room with its flowered wallpaper. And her dolls lined up on the shelf above the white vanity table suddenly seemed out of place. She hoped he wouldn’t notice them.
“Are—are you staying?” she stammered. Two horses reared up in her heart, each one kicking its hooves in an effort to overcome the other. The one was glad to see Val, and only needed him to give her the smile that seemed to light up the world to make her spread herself out on the bed for him. It would ensure that the new and very physical part of her she’d discovered at Mercylands was not a dream or a mistake. He would smooth out what had been shrunken since she returned and be her reward for fooling Mama and Frank Washington into satisfaction.
But the other horse wanted all her thoughts and all her desire to be focused on Sam. It wanted her bed to be their own; where she imagined she would share her new womanhood with Sam in hushed whispers. And Harlem would be the place where she was his and his alone, Frank Washington notwithstanding.
Val smiled as though he knew what she was thinking. Her fingers grasped at a piece of the quilt near her knees. “No, I can’t stay long. This is just a reconnaissance mission.”
Her hand relaxed and the rest of her body followed suit. “A what?”
He pointed to her windows and doors. “I’m checking out the house—had to find out how to get in, and where your room is. Now that I know I’ll pass it on to Sam.”
Her face brightened. “Sam! Have you told him I’m home?”
“No, I can’t find him.” Val shook his head. “He hasn’t sung at the Swan in nearly two weeks. No one’s seen him. But don’t worry; he just doesn’t know you’re back. He’s probably off moping somewhere. When I find him I’ll get word to you.”
She bunched up a piece of the quilt again in her fingers and sighed. “You will?”
“Oh yeah. He’ll be here before you know it.”
He kissed her and smiled. Then he went back to the door and put his ear against it. She tiptoed over to him and listened too. When he opened it she watched him slink quietly along the hallway and then down the back stairs.
But another week
had slipped away. September arrived and Cecily was still alone. It bothered her that Mae hadn’t been in touch, not even to visit or offer a few words of encouragement. She hadn’t been to church, either. Cecily did manage to sneak a call to her one day when Mama was taking a bath, but the maid who answered the phone only said Mae wasn’t available. Cecily didn’t know what that meant. Was her cousin at home? Could Mae call her back? The maid wasn’t much help and Cecily didn’t want to get Mae mad at her so she didn’t try again.
Then came the awful realization, after carefully marking a tiny pocket calendar day by day, she’d missed her period. She sat on the toilet and wiped at herself again and again, looking for the faintest sign of pink, some sign that she was wrong and her flow was about to begin. But there was nothing and Cecily felt sad and alone. For days afterward she dreaded Mama’s eyes and her touch, as though she could divine her daughter’s condition long before the baby grew enough to show. The word “trouble” took up residence in Cecily’s mind and crowded out any sense of womanhood she’d once had. She was a girl again, a girl “in trouble,” which was the phrase she used to hear whispered among Mama’s friends when they gossiped over cards and thought she was out of earshot. At night she lay in bed and tried to imagine the size of Mama’s wrath, and thought how it could only be immense, and deeper than anything Cecily had witnessed before. Most likely it would sweep her away like Noah’s flood. When she slept she dreamed the bed moved, heaving and shifting because the waters were already rising beneath her.
One night the dream changed and Val stood on a rock looking down at the water swirling around him. Cecily struggled to hold on in her rickety boat, but then she saw Val and he smiled at her like the brightest beacon. The light shone in her face and she woke up blinking, her eyes stinging. She knew she had to get to Val and tell him. Since she didn’t know if or when he could return, she had to risk meeting him during the day. She praised herself for that bit of clear thinking and for recognizing her chance when it came.
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