It was half past four.
“I guess so,” I said, and we got up and walked into the shower. I washed his body and he washed mine and we laughed a lot, like children, and he warned me if I didn’t take my hands off him we might never get uptown and then my Daddy might jump salty and, after all, Fonny said, he had a lot to talk to my Daddy about and he had to talk to him right away.
Fonny got me home at seven. He held me in his arms in the almost empty subway all the way uptown. It was Sunday morning. We walked our streets together, hand in hand; not even the church people were up yet; and the people who were still up, the few people, didn’t have eyes for us, didn’t have eyes for anybody, or anything.
We got to my stoop and I thought Fonny would leave me there and I turned to kiss him away, but he took me by the hand and said, “Come on,” and we walked up the stairs. Fonny knocked on the door.
Sis opened it, her hair tied up, wearing an old green bathrobe. She looked as evil as she could be. She looked from me to Fonny and back again. She didn’t exactly want to, but she smiled.
“You’re just in time for coffee,” she said, and moved back from the door, to let us in.
“We——” I started to say; but Fonny said, “Good-morning, Miss Rivers”—and something in his tone made Sis look at him sharply and come full awake—“I’m sorry we coming in so late. Can I speak to Mr. Rivers, please? It’s important.”
He still held me by the hand.
“It might be easier to see him,” Sis said, “if you come inside, out of the hall.”
“We——” I started again, intending to make up God knows what excuse.
“Want to get married,” Fonny said.
“Then you’d really better have some coffee,” Sis said, and closed the door behind us.
Sharon now came into the kitchen, and she was somewhat more together than Sis—that is, she was wearing slacks, and a sweater, and she had knotted her hair in one braid and skewered it to the top of her skull.
“Now, where have you two been,” she began, “till this hour of the morning? Don’t you know better than to be behaving like that? I declare. We was just about to start calling the police.”
But I could see, too, that she was relieved that Fonny was sitting in the kitchen, beside me. That meant something very important, and she knew it. It would have been a very different scene, and she would have been in very different trouble if I had come upstairs alone.
“I’m sorry, Mrs. Rivers,” Fonny said. “It’s all my fault. I hadn’t seen Tish for a few weeks and we had a lot to talk about—I had a lot to talk about—and—” he gestured—“I kept her out.”
“Talking?” Sharon asked.
He did not quite flinch; he did not drop his eyes. “We want to get married,” he said. “That’s how come I kept her out so late.” They watched each other. “I love Tish,” he said. “That’s why I stayed away so long. I even—” he looked briefly at me—“went to see other girls—and—I did all kind of things, to kind of get it out of my mind.” He looked at me again. He looked down. “But I could see I was just fooling myself. I didn’t love nobody else but her. And then I got scared that maybe she’d go away or somebody else would come along and take her away and so I came back.” He tried to grin. “I came running back. And I don’t want to have to go away again.” Then, “She’s always been my girl, you know that. And—I am not a bad boy. You know that. And—you’re the only family I’ve ever had.”
“That,” Sharon grumbled, “is why I can’t figure out why you calling me Mrs. Rivers, all of a sudden.” She looked at me. “Yeah. I hope you realize, Miss, that you ain’t but eighteen years old.”
“That argument,” said Sis, “and a subway token, will get you from here to the corner. If that far!” She poured the coffee. “Actually, it’s the older sister who is expected to marry first. But we have never stood on ceremony in this house.”
“What do you think about all this?” Sharon asked her.
“Me? I’m delighted to be rid of the little brat. I never could stand her. I could never see what all the rest of you saw in her, I swear.” She sat down at the table and grinned. “Take some sugar, Fonny. You are going to need it, believe me, if you intend to tie yourself up with my sweet, sweet little sister.”
Sharon went to the kitchen door, and yelled, “Joe! Come on out here! Lightning’s done struck the poor-house! Come on, now, I mean it.”
Fonny took my hand.
Joseph came into the kitchen, in slippers, old corduroy pants, and a T-shirt. I began to realize that no one in this house had really been to sleep. Joseph saw me first. He really did not see anyone else. And, since he was both furious and relieved, his tone was very measured. “I’d like you to tell me exactly what you mean, young lady, by walking in here this hour of the morning. If you want to leave home, then you leave home, you hear? But, as long as you in my house, you got to respect it. You hear me?”
Then he saw Fonny, and Fonny let go my hand, and stood up.
He said, “Mr. Rivers, please don’t scold Tish. It’s all my fault, sir. I kept her out. I had to talk to her. Please. Mr. Rivers. Please. I asked her to marry me. That’s what we were doing out so long. We want to get married. That’s why I’m here. You’re her father. You love her. And so I know you know—you have to know—that I love her. I’ve loved her all my life. You know that. And if I didn’t love her, I wouldn’t be standing in this room now—would I? I could have left her on the stoop and run away again. I know you might want to beat me up. But I love her. That’s all I can tell you.”
Joseph looked at him.
“How old are you?”
“I’m twenty-one, sir.”
“You think that’s old enough to get married?”
“I don’t know, sir. But it’s old enough to know who you love.”
“You think so?”
Fonny straightened. “I know so.”
“How you going to feed her?”
“How did you?”
We, the women, were out of it now, and we knew it. Ernestine poured Joseph a cup of coffee and pushed it in his direction.
“You got a job?”
“I load moving vans in the daytime and I sculpt at night. I’m a sculptor. We know it won’t be easy. But I’m a real artist. And I’m going to be a very good artist—maybe, even, a great one.” And they stared at each other again.
Joseph picked up his coffee, without looking at it, and sipped it without tasting it.
“Now, let me get this straight. You asked my little girl to marry you, and she said——”
“Yes,” said Fonny.
“And you come here to tell me or to ask my permission?”
“Both, sir,” said Fonny.
“And you ain’t got no kind of——”
“Future,” Fonny said.
Both men, again, then measured each other. Joseph put his coffee down. Fonny had not touched his.
“What would you do in my place?” Joseph asked.
I could feel Fonny trembling. He could not help it—his hand touched my shoulder lightly, then moved away. “I’d ask my daughter. If she tells you she don’t love me, I’ll go away and I won’t never bother you no more.”
Joseph looked hard at Fonny—a long look, in which one watched skepticism surrender to a certain resigned tenderness, a self-recognition. He looked as though he wanted to knock Fonny down; he looked as though he wanted to take him in his arms.
Then Joseph looked at me.
“Do you love him? You want to marry him?”
“Yes.” I had not known my voice could sound so strange. “Yes. Yes.” Then, I said, “I’m very much your daughter, you know, and very much my mother’s daughter. So, you ought to know that I mean no when I say no and I mean yes when I say yes. And Fonny came here to ask for your permission, and I love him for that. I very much want your permission because I love you. But I am not going to marry you. I am going to marry Fonny.”
Joseph sat down.
“
When?”
“As soon as we get the bread together,” Fonny said.
Joseph said, “You and me, son, we better go into the other room.”
And so they went away. We did not say anything. There was nothing for us to say. Only, Mama said, after a moment, “You sure you love him, Tish? You’re sure?”
“Mama,” I said, “why do you ask me that?”
“Because she’s been secretly hoping that you’d marry Governor Rockefeller,” Ernestine said.
For a moment Mama looked at her, hard; then she laughed. Ernestine, without knowing it, or meaning to, had come very close to the truth—not the literal truth, but the truth: for the dream of safety dies hard. I said, “You know that dried-up cracker ass-hole is much too old for me.”
Sharon laughed again. “That is not,” she said, “the way he sees himself. But I guess I just would not be able to swallow the way he would see you. So. We can close the subject. You going to marry Fonny. All right. When I really think about it”—and now she paused, and, in a way, she was no longer Sharon, my mother, but someone else; but that someone else was, precisely, my mother, Sharon—“I guess I’m real pleased.” She leaned back, arms folded, looking away, thinking ahead. “Yeah. He’s real. He’s a man.”
“He’s not a man yet,” said Ernestine, “but he’s going to become a man—that’s why you sitting there, fighting them tears. Because that means that your youngest daughter is about to become a woman.”
“Oh, shut up,” Sharon said. “Wish to God you’d get married to somebody, then I’d be able to bug you half to death, instead of the other way around.”
“You’d miss me, too,” said Ernestine, very quietly, “but I don’t think I’m ever going to marry. Some people do, you know—Mama?—and some people don’t.” She stood up and kind of circled the room and sat down again. We could hear Fonny’s voice and Joseph’s voice, in the other room, but we couldn’t hear what they were saying—also, we were trying very hard not to hear. Men are men, and sometimes they must be left alone. Especially if you have the sense to realize that if they’re locked in a room together, where they may not especially want to be, they are locked in because of their responsibility for the women outside.
“Well I can understand that,” said Sharon—very steadily, and without moving.
“The only trouble,” Ernestine said, “is that sometimes you would like to belong to somebody.”
“But,” I said—I had not known I was going to say it—“it’s very frightening to belong to somebody.”
And perhaps until the moment I heard myself say this, I had not realized that this is true.
“Six in one,” said Ernestine, and smiled, “half dozen in the other.”
Joseph and Fonny came back from the other room.
“Both of you are crazy,” Joseph said, “but there’s nothing I can do about that.” He watched Fonny. He smiled—a smile both sweet and reluctant. Then, he looked at me. “But—Fonny’s right—somebody was bound to come along some day and take you away. I just didn’t think it would happen so soon. But—like Fonny says, and it’s true—you’ve always been together, from childhood on. And you ain’t children no more.” He took Fonny by the hand and led Fonny to me, and he took me by the hand and he pulled me to my feet. He put my hand in Fonny’s hand. “Take care of each other,” he said. “You going to find out that it’s more than a notion.”
Tears were standing in Fonny’s eyes. He kissed my father. He let go my hand. He moved to the door. “I’ve got to get home,” he said, “and tell my Daddy.” His face changed, he looked at me, he kissed me across the space dividing us. “He’ll be mighty happy,” he said. He opened the door. He said to Joseph, “We be back here around six this evening, okay?”
“Okay,” said Joseph, and now he was smiling all over his face.
Fonny went on out the door. Two or three days later, Tuesday or Wednesday, we went downtown together again and started seriously looking around for our loft.
And that was going to turn out to be a trip and a half.
Mr. Hayward was in his office on the Monday, just as he had said he would be. I got there about seven fifteen, and Mama was with me.
Mr. Hayward is about thirty-seven, I would guess, with gentle brown eyes and thinning brown hair. He’s very, very tall, and he’s big; and he’s nice enough, or he seems nice enough, but I’m just not comfortable with him. I don’t know if it’s fair to blame him for this. I’m not really comfortable with anybody these days, and I guess I certainly wouldn’t be comfortable with a lawyer.
He stood up as we came in, and put Mama in the big chair and me in the smaller one and sat down again behind his desk.
“How are you ladies today? Mrs. Rivers? And how are you, Tish? Did you see Fonny?”
“Yes. At six o’clock.”
“And how is he?”
That always seemed a foolish question to me. How is a man if he’s fighting to get out of prison? But then, too, I had to force myself to see, from another point of view, that it was an important question. For one thing, it was the question I was living with; and, for another, knowing “how” Fonny was might make a very important difference for Mr. Hayward, and help him with his case. But I also resented having to tell Mr. Hayward anything at all about Fonny. There was so much that I felt he should already have known. But maybe I’m being unfair about that, too.
“Well, let’s put it this way, Mr. Hayward. He hates being in there, but he’s trying not to let it break him.”
“When we going to get him out?” asked Mama.
Mr. Hayward looked from Mama to me, and smiled—a painful smile, as though he had just been kicked in the balls. He said, “Well, as you ladies know, this is a very difficult case.”
“That’s why my sister hired you,” I said.
“And you are beginning to feel now that her confidence was misplaced?” He was still smiling. He lit a cigar.
“No,” I said, “I wouldn’t say that.”
I wouldn’t have dared to say that—not yet, anyway—because I was afraid of having to look for another lawyer, who might easily be worse.
“We liked having Fonny around,” Mama said, “and we just kind of miss him.”
“I can certainly understand that,” he said, “and I’m doing all I can to get him back to you, just as fast as I can. But, as you ladies know, the very greatest difficulty has been caused by the refusal of Mrs. Rogers to reconsider her testimony. And now she has disappeared.”
“Disappeared?” I shouted, “how can she just disappear?”
“Tish,” he said, “this is a very big city, a very big country—even, for that matter, a very big world. People do disappear. I don’t think that she has gone very far—they certainly do not have the means for a long journey. But her family may have returned her to Puerto Rico. In any case, in order to find her, I will need special investigators, and—”
“That means money,” Mama said.
“Alas,” said Mr. Hayward. He stared at me from behind his cigar, an odd, expectant, surprisingly sorrowful look.
I had stood up; now I sat down. “That filthy bitch,” I said, “that filthy bitch.”
“How much money?” Mama asked.
“I am trying to keep it as low as possible,” said Mr. Hayward, with a shy, boyish smile, “but special investigators are—special, I’m afraid, and they know it. If we’re lucky, we’ll locate Mrs. Rogers in a matter of days, or weeks. If not”—he shrugged—“well, for the moment, let’s just assume we’ll be lucky.” And he smiled again.
“Puerto Rico,” Mama said heavily.
“We don’t know that she has returned there,” Mr. Hayward said, “but it is a very vivid possibility. Anyway, she and her husband disappeared some days ago from the apartment on Orchard Street, leaving no forwarding address. We have not been able to contact the other relatives, the aunts and uncles, who, anyway, as you know, have never been very cooperative.”
“But doesn’t it make it look bad for her story,”
I asked, “to just disappear like that? She’s the key witness in this case.”
“Yes. But she is a distraught, ignorant, Puerto Rican woman, suffering from the aftereffects of rape. So her behavior is not incomprehensible. You see what I mean?” He looked at me hard, and his voice changed. “And she is only one of the key witnesses in this case. You have forgotten the testimony of Officer Bell—his was the really authoritative identification of the rapist. It is Bell who swears that he saw Fonny running away from the scene of the crime. And I have always been of the opinion—you will remember that we discussed this—that it is his testimony which Mrs. Rogers continually repeats——”
“If he saw Fonny at the scene of the crime, then why did he have to wait and come and get him out of the house?”
“Tish,” Mama said. “Tish.” Then, “You mean—let me get you straight now—that it’s that Officer Bell who tells her what to say? You mean that?”
“Yes,” said Mr. Hayward.
I looked at Hayward. I looked around the room. We were way downtown, near Broadway, not far from Trinity Church. The office was of dark wood, very smooth and polished. The desk was wide, with two telephones, a button kept flashing. Hayward ignored it, watching me. There were trophies and diplomas on the walls, and a large photograph of Hayward, Senior. On the desk, framed, were two photographs, one of his wife, smiling, and one of his two small boys. There was no connection between this room, and me.
Yet, here I was.
“You’re saying,” I said, “that there’s no way of getting at the truth in this case?”
“No. I am not saying that.” He re-lit his cigar. “The truth of a case doesn’t matter. What matters is—who wins.”
Cigar smoke filled the room. “I don’t mean,” he said, carefully, “that I doubt the truth. If I didn’t believe in Fonny’s innocence, I would never have taken the case. I know something about Officer Bell, who is a racist and a liar—I have told him that to his face, so you can feel perfectly free to quote me, to anyone, at any time you wish—and I know something about the D.A. in charge of this case, who is worse. Now. You and Fonny insist that you were together, in the room on Bank Street, along with an old friend, Daniel Carty. Your testimony, as you can imagine, counts for nothing, and Daniel Carty has just been arrested by the D.A.’s office and is being held incommunicado. I have not been allowed to see him.” Now, he rose and paced to the window. “What they are doing is really against the law—but—Daniel has a record, as you know. They, obviously, intend to make him change his testimony. And—I do not know this, but I am willing to bet—that that is how and why Mrs. Rogers has disappeared.” He paced back to his desk, and sat down. “So. You see.” He looked up at me. “I will make it as easy as I can. But it will still be very hard.”
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