A Moment in the Sun

by John Sayles

  The colored girl follows them down, careful not to spill on the stairs. The idea is to go from top to bottom, cleaning backward out of every room, so as never to foul their own handiwork.

  Mrs. Coldcroft is in the kitchen, slumped over the baking table, sleeping with her head resting on her arms.

  “They probably run her ragged when they’re here, poor thing,” whispers Molly as they pass through. “I’d crave a drop or two meself.”

  They lift stools into the butler’s pantry to eat at the shelf where the meals are arranged before going up to table in the dumbwaiter. Molly crosses herself, bows her head over her bulging ham sandwich.

  “May the good Lord and all the saints above bestow their blessing upon us,” she says, “and kape our poor Mr. McKinley on the road to recovery.”

  “Did ye vote for him then?” asks Brigid, who knows that Molly has family, mostly coppers, in the Tammany machine.

  “I did not,” she snorts, indignant. “But I’d sooner have him at the top than that little Roosevelt. He tossed me cousin Hughie off the force, fer nothin more than a little tit-fer-tat.”

  “He’s a reformer—”

  “Let him reform the bankers and the coal barons as rubs elbows with him in his fancy clubs, then,” says Molly, attacking her sandwich, “and lave our byes in blue alone.”

  The colored girl has only a poppyseed roll without butter.

  “And where d’ye hail from, darlin?” asks Molly, who has not a mean bone in her body nor a sharp thought in her head, as she attacks her sandwich. “Somewheres in the South, is it?”

  “North Carolina,” says Jessie.

  “And what brung ye up here to the cold and the crowd?”

  The girl thinks for a long moment before answering. “It was time to leave,” she says.

  Molly accepts it for an answer. “Can ye imagine this lot here,” she sniffs, nodding her head toward the upstairs as she eats, “houses scattered all over Creation, luggin their entire mob of servin people, except poor Mrs. Coldcroft, from pillar to post every time they want a change of scenery? A dozen staff for only the two of em and a set of wee twins. There’s a photograph of em in the gentleman’s library.”

  “It’s a lot to manage,” Brigid agrees.

  “And d’ye have children yerself?” Molly asks the colored girl.

  “I have a baby daughter,” says the girl. “Her name is Minnie.”

  “Well, it’s a start,” Molly approves. “I’ve got five meself, and I believe they’ll be the death of me. They say there’s war in this Philippines—ye should see the slaughter I’ve got to face every night when I come into our rooms. A mob of heathen savages, that’s what they’ve become, with me out workin every day.”

  “Who looks after them?”

  “Fiona is the oldest, but she’s only ten and no match for her brothers when they join hands against her. They say she’s threatened to brain em with a sashweight.”

  The girl only picks at her roll and has the good manners not to inquire about Molly’s husband, who is a lout and a tippler as likely to be sleeping in a cell in the Tombs as in her bed. The girl makes Brigid uneasy, though she has worked with colored many times before. The Irish boys and the colored boys are always fighting on the streets of her Hell’s Kitchen, of course, sometimes with their hands and sometimes with sticks and rocks or worse and their language is a scandal. But when there are no colored handy the Irish boys fight each other or go hunting for Italians. Harry is much more comfortable with them, able to engage a strange colored man on the street to ask a question or offer a comment, but he is from the South with all its twisted history, and she from a scrap of turf that rarely saw a Protestant, much less a black man.

  “D’ye think,” asks Molly, peering in at the stacks of gleaming chinaware in the glass-paneled cabinet before them, “that somewhere there is a gentleman and a lady livin off the fruits of our labor? I’ve heard tell of the Rail Trust and the Coal Trust and the Steel Trust and Wheat Trust—there must be a debutante somewheres who when she passes in her carriage, lookin like a gleamin pearl on an oyster shell, they all whisper ‘Here she is now, heiress to the great Scrubwoman Fortune.’ ”

  “Mr. Burke at the employment agency takes out his percentage, I know,” Brigid answers, “but he hasn’t changed that vest he wears, or washed it, in the five years I’ve worked for him.”

  “The money goes further up,” says Molly. “It rises. Like smoke.”

  If her father were alive and here, Brigid knows, he would be grumbling about how to burn the townhouse to the ground.

  There is a gas heater in the scullery just for the deep basin used to wash dishes, where they refill their buckets. When they walk into the ballroom again Brigid can see a difference, very faint, between where they’ve scrubbed and where they haven’t.

  “A pity they didn’t leave the orchestra,” says Molly, “to coax us through the afternoon.”

  The trick is to keep your weight balanced between your knees and the heels of your hands. Patsy Finnegan’s father would have her brothers kneel on marbles when they were wicked, and Brigid thinks of that often when it feels like she can’t bear another moment. She only stands to refill the bucket or when the backs of her legs begin to cramp. There are venerated saints, she thinks, whose road to glory was paved by little more than what I’m doing now. But then they were rich men’s daughters, promised a life of ease but scrubbing the floors of lepers or other unfortunates without pay.

  “Self-abnegation,” Sister Gonzaga always told them, waggling her finger with the huge Bride-of-Christ ring on it, “is the quickest way to Heaven.”

  They have worked their way almost to the tall sliding doors when Brigid realizes the colored girl is no longer with them. Then she hears the music.

  It is not religious music, exactly, but it gives her the feeling she has now and then at a High Mass, with the singing, when she thinks if God pays attention to us at all it is this he listens to. Brigid stands, wincing, and steps straight across the hall to the doorway of the music room.

  Jessie sits at the piano nearly in the dark, the late-afternoon sun slanting through the skylight to spill only on her long fingers at the keys. And the music, angry then sad then romantic then brooding—who could believe it is one small person filling the air with this war of emotions? The music seems to grow larger, to possess the entire house, and Brigid imagines it entering each of the countless, empty rooms like a warm liquid, bringing a glow of life back into them. Brigid feels Molly at her elbow and for once the woman has nothing to say, only watching and listening. They stand for a long while, till Jessie ends the piece, last note hanging in the air—

  The girl rests her elbows on the keys and puts her head in her hands.

  Brigid and Molly walk softly back to the ballroom and kneel at their buckets.

  “Would ye believe it?” says Molly, shaking her head.

  The colored girl comes back then, not a word, and puts her little bit of weight into scouring away the scuff marks just inside the sliding doors. The sun deserts the floor and Brigid has to turn on the gas lamps. They are finished with the ballroom and have done the back half of the hallway when it is time to quit.

  The colored girl says thank you, quietly, when she takes her pay and puts her coat on, a worn-looking item not nearly up to the weather outside, and leaves with a small nod of goodbye.

  “I’ll expect you to have reached the reception room by tomorrow,” says Mrs. Coldcroft, a mite bleary-eyed, face creased on one side from where she’s slept. “Which means the fireplace will have to be dealt with. And how is the—” she nods, frowning, toward the deliveries door that Jessie has just left through. “How is she making out?”

  “Oh, she’s a crackerjack, she is,” says Molly, beating Brigid to it. “Not much for conversation, but she’s a terror on the floors.”

  Jessie’s legs are aching by the time she reaches the third-story landing, and she can hear little Minnie crying inside. The heat is on again, but unbearable now,
either none at all or an inferno, and Minnie is wrapped tight in a blanket lying in the cradle Father made from a dresser drawer he found on the street, wailing her strange little cry that sounds as if it comes from a tiny spirit inside of her. Jessie wrestles the kitchen window open and props it with a can of beans, then unwraps her daughter and lifts her into her arms. She is overheated, which Father says is just as dangerous as her being too cold. Jessie is about to call angrily for her mother when she sees the opened envelope on the little kitchen table. It is stamped just the same as the letters that come from the Philippines, but it is not her brother’s writing on the front, the words squarish and thick and filling her with dread. Minnie has stopped crying.

  Mother is sitting on the bed, staring out into the air shaft, the letter lying folded beside her.

  “They’ve killed him,” she says wearily, not turning to look at Jessie. “They’ve killed my son.”

  UNDERSTUDY

  “He’s gone,” says the messenger. “We need you now.”

  Alexander must have had a similar moment, ungirded in his tent at the news of his father’s murder, or Marcus Antonius on the stabbing of Caesar, even poor hapless Andrew Johnson when word sped back from Ford’s Theatre. Some are born Great, but others—

  But there is no time for reflection when a nation has been orphaned. The coach awaits below, the steeds restless in their traces as if they sense the urgency of their mission. The jehu flicks his persuader and they are off, careening pellmell through the labyrinthine passages of Greenwich Village, citizens clustered on each corner reacting to the announcement with shock and mourning. The tidings had been so propitious at first, medical experts present at the calamity, speedy intervention, clear sailing expected for the President. Then the first grudging qualifications—the bullet left imbedded, the rise in temperature, the threat of dreaded infection. But this—this was not to be imagined, it was unthinkable that he, of all men, should be hoisted so precipitously to the summit, that his hand should rest upon the tiller of the Ship of State—

  “What will you say?” asks the messenger. The boy is pale, goose-necked, sweating, no doubt unnerved to play even a supporting role in history’s great drama.

  “Words are of minor importance in times like these,” he replies. “What is paramount now is a display of strength and continuity, a reassurance that though their beloved captain has passed, we are not without rudder in the storm.”

  The messenger looks out the window of the coach. “There’s going to be a storm?”

  They considered him a joke at first, no better than fifth business. A buck-toothed little runt, an asthmatic four-eyes with a grating voice, the sort who came on after the sword-swallower or the skating chimpanzee. A meddler and a blue-nose, an overgrown boy playing with his toy boats in the bathtub. And then Cuba and his crowded hour and the public reassessed him. There was laughter still, yes, but with a tinge of respect. What will the little man do next?

  On to the White House—but as an appendage. Second billing, a court jester employed to fill out the bill for the veterans and the crowd in the cheap seats, or worse, a “chaser,” meant to aid the ushers in clearing the auditorium. But he bore it with fortitude, as a man must, taking the national stage with the same brio that had made him a byword in New York. The campaign hat was somewhat battered, true, the uniform no longer à la mode, but they still cheered him in the hinterlands, some wag inevitably shouting “Take that blockhouse!” from the throng and the merriment that ensued was fond enough. That alone would have been career enough for some men, but to scale the heights yet never stand at the pinnacle—

  The coach jolts to a stop and the doors are thrown open. Attendants are waiting, hustling him into the building, husky bodies shielding him from solace-seeking eyes.

  There is a full house out front, he can sense it. Keith himself is waiting in the wings.

  “The uniform!” the theater magnate exclaims, panic tightening his voice. “You’re not wearing the uniform!”

  “The moment demands a statesman,” he demurs, “not a warrior.”

  “One minute!” hisses the wizened caliph of the curtain. “Get him out there!”

  As he steps out to his platform in the dark, as he has done so many times before, Goldoni is onstage massaging his tonsils. But tonight is different. Tonight is Destiny—

  God of our fathers, known of old—

  —sings Goldoni—

  Lord of our far-flung battle line—

  —singing with his hand over his heart, facing a bier with a coffin draped in the Flag upon it, a diapositive of the martyred McKinley’s profile shining on the flat behind him—

  Beneath whose awful hand we hold

  Dominion over palm and pine—

  Behind, in the dark, he pulls the spectacles, clear glass, out from his vest pocket and adjusts them on his nose. The moustache, affixed with spirit gum in the early years, has grown with the man. And now for the role of a lifetime—

  Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet

  Lest we forget—lest we forget!

  —Goldoni finishes and there is muted applause, sniffling from the stricken multitude.

  “And so,” the tenor intones to the fervent throng, their yearning almost palpable, “we bid adieu to our trusted steward, our stalwart in peace and in war. O where, where shall we find a man to replace him?”

  And then the spotlight rises on a stoic five feet and two inches of muscular Christianity, eyes fixed on glory—

  Teethadore Resplendent.

  And some, he thinks as the applause spreads like his lock-jawed grin, first one, then a dozen, then the entire house rising to their feet in thunderous ovation, some have Greatness thrust upon them.

  HOSTAGE

  They don’t have a shovel. Royal hacks and jabs at the rocky soil with a rusted bayonet, then tosses what comes loose out with his hands. The fever has passed but he is running with sweat and finally Bayani, the one who does most of the bossing, gets disgusted and jumps down with him, digging with his own knife. One of the rebels, who had been falling a lot as they climbed, didn’t wake up this morning. A couple of the other men are laid out and moaning, Royal surprised that they get just as sick as imported troops do.

  When the hole is deep enough, about the size of a small bathtub, Bayani taps him and Royal crawls out, his hands bleeding. At first he just sits out of the way as they lay the body down, but then when the leader of the rebels, who speaks English and says to call him Teniente, starts to say what sounds like religion over it he stands to be respectful. One of them, the one with the beak of a nose, is crying as he holds his hat over his heart and looks down at his dead friend. There is some praying of the men together and then most of them help Royal cover the body with dirt and rocks. Somebody has made a cross from bolo-cut branches bound with a piece of harness and it takes a while to get it to stand straight. When they buried Junior in Las Ciegas, Kid Mabley played his bugle after, but these people are afraid to make noise.

  “These mountains are full of danger,” says the Teniente, sitting beside Royal as he washes his hands clean. They’ve made a camp in a little bowl on the side of the mountain, a place where rainwater pools up and there are some trees high enough for shade. The Teniente won’t leave off him with the “colored American soldier” business, how he should be on their side against the white folks. But there’s nobody else he can understand, and the more they know you the harder you are to shoot.

  “There are the Igorot who will cut off your head and maybe eat you after, and the Negrito, who are of your color but very small and will kill you with a dart that they blow from a tube, and a group of very religious people, the Guardians of the Virgin, santones, who you cannot predict what they will do. That is if you are not stung by a viper or die of hunger before they find you.”

  Royal has no thoughts of trying to escape. The fever has passed and the rebels have very little to carry and he has no idea where he is. Nilda is still with them, helping to gather firewood and to cook when
that is possible.

  “It is dangerous even for us.”

  “So why you want to be here?”

  The Teniente waves a hand at his dozen sorry-looking insurrectos. “Most of my men were born in these mountains. And I lived here, on the other side near the sea, when I was very young.”

  “You think you can beat them?”

  He isn’t dressed any different but the way they treat him he must really be a lieutenant or maybe just rich before the war or what they have instead of white people. It is hard to tell the differences just by eye, specially with all them looking so raggedy and underfed and no coolies to truck their goods but him. They don’t joke with Teniente like they do with each other and a couple even take their hats off when they talk to him. Bayani, who they call sargento, looks at Royal the way you look at a brood hen that might be ready for the pot. If the time comes for killing the dark-skin American, he will be the one to do it.

  “Are they willing to follow us all the way up here?” asks the lieutenant. “To send men to every island, to fight the moros whose god tells them it is beautiful to die in battle and who were never broken by the Spanish army?”

  Up here, hungry, cold now, and if the Teniente is telling the truth, surrounded by all these wild people, it seems crazy to think you could ever bring it all under control. But the people who make the decisions, who send the Army to do their business, are not up here and never will be.

  “They run the flag up,” he tells the Filipino. “And once they done that they won’t leave off, no matter what. I been to where they chased old Geronimo, there aint enough in that country to keep a snake alive, and still they went and chased him down and thrown the irons on him and drug him back to the reservation. Once they run that flag up, the story is over.”

  He can tell it is not what the Teniente wants to hear. He seems to ponder something for a moment. “What do you know of Roosevelt?”