Without Prejudice

by Unknown

  From the kitchen’s lair – cosy in winter, airy with just the screen door during summer – they would sometimes set out on what Vanetta called ‘expeditions’. Lily and Mike were occupied with extra-curricular activities, which as far as Bobby could tell meant organised sports for his brother and bossing people on the student council for Lily, and his father was always busy now. So Vanetta took over many parental errands. She took Bobby to buy new shoes at Kiddie Kicks on 53rd Street – he noticed how she whistled in wonder at the price on the box of school shoes the man helped him pick out, saying, ‘Seems mighty high to me,’ and she took him once a week to swimming lessons at the Hyde Park ‘Y’, where she waited on her own amidst a crowd of middle-class mothers. She even took him down to Jeffrey and 72nd Street when he needed a tetanus shot from Dr Rosenfeld.

  And if Vanetta needed to run an errand, she brought him with her now, since most afternoons he was the only child in the family she had to watch over. He’d even seen where Vanetta lived, when she’d forgotten to leave a note for the gas man, explaining something about the meter in the basement. They’d driven over on Garfield, past the Wonder Bread Company where her brother Alvin worked. This was definitely ‘Bip your bips’ country, since the street corners seemed inhabited by black men standing around with nothing to do, a beer can or a port bottle in their hand. When they stopped at one light a man waved at Vanetta, and seeing Bobby next to her, his head barely visible above the dashboard, he shouted out something – Bobby could tell it wasn’t nice. The man began walking towards them, and to Bobby’s astonishment Vanetta drove forward, even though the light was still red. Bobby looked at her with his eyes as big as moons, but she just laughed, shaking her head. ‘I ain’t waiting for that fool to bother us, Bobby.’

  Indiana ran north–south and was lined by brick and grey stone apartment buildings. Vanetta parked on the side of the street. ‘Now when I get out you get out on the kerb side and you come quick. We don’t want to be hanging around outside, okay?’

  Her apartment was on the third floor where the only light on the landing came from a dim candle-shaped bulb. There were a lot of locks on her door; it took Vanetta three keys to open up. Inside was a little hallway, smaller than at Blackstone Avenue, and a living room with a TV in one corner. There was a low yellow sofa and a big stuffed armchair, which had plastic sheets draped over them. No books, Bobby noticed; his daddy had books on almost every wall. But he liked the room, and Vanetta had put some marigolds in a copper vase on the coffee table in front of the sofa.

  He followed her into the kitchen. Another spick-and-span room, with a small Formica table and three kitchen chairs with metal legs. Vanetta went to the sink and made Kool-Aid in a plastic jug, getting ice from the fridge’s freezer top. ‘You drink this, Bobby,’ she said, handing him a cup. ‘You must be thirsty. We won’t stay long. I’ll write a note for the gas man and then we can leave.’

  While she did this he sat and looked around. There was a cabinet on one wall with a glass front; inside it he could see plates stacked and some glasses. Above the sink on two shelves sat saucepans, and hanging from the wall on big iron hooks was a series of cast-iron skillets.

  ‘I like those,’ said Bobby, pointing at the wall. ‘They look like giant fish hooks.’

  ‘Ain’t they neat? Alvin put them up for me.’ She sounded proud of her brother.

  He finished his drink and wiped his wet lips with his arm when Vanetta wasn’t looking. ‘Can I see your bedroom, Vanetta?’

  ‘I don’t see why not.’ He stood up and she walked with him down a dark hallway – like his own apartment’s, but shorter – and stopped at an open door.

  It was a nice-sized room with two tall windows facing the back, though the view was blocked by another apartment building. The bed was mahogany, and made up neatly, with an old-fashioned quilted spread and two big pillows stacked up against the headboard. On the bedside table lay an illustrated bible, next to a small lamp. A small chest of drawers sat across from the foot of the bed; on top of it a brass picture frame held a photograph of a handsome man. He was dressed up in a fancy frock coat and a high-collared shirt. His head tilted slightly, almost rakishly, and a dazzling smile was bursting across his face.

  ‘Is that Mr Simms?’ Bobby asked. He knew Simms was Vanetta’s last name.

  ‘No. I don’t keep no pictures of that rat.’ This time ‘rat’ was not meant nicely.

  ‘Was he a rat?’ Bobby asked, pointing at the picture.

  ‘Earl? No.’ Her voice softened in recollection. ‘He was my first husband. My first boyfriend too. Handsomest man I ever saw. And a gentle man.’

  ‘He sure looks young.’

  ‘Too young for me, you mean?’ Vanetta laughed. ‘He must have been thirty-five years old when he had the picture took, but I wasn’t more than sixteen or so. I was only fourteen when we got married.’

  ‘Fourteen?’ Bobby was nonplussed. ‘Where is he now, Vanetta?’

  ‘In heaven, baby. Leastways he deserves to be.’

  ‘Did he get sick?’ He knew about that after all.

  Vanetta hesitated. ‘No. He got killed in an argument on a river boat.’

  He thought at first she’d said ‘accident’ – that seemed to kill people too. But no, she hadn’t said that. ‘An argument? What was he arguing about?’

  ‘It was about cards. It happened in a card game.’

  ‘A game?’ asked Bobby, bewildered.

  ‘Yes, but it wasn’t no game really. That’s how Earl made a living. Playing cards.’ She shook her head and looked sorrowfully at the photograph. ‘He was good to me, Bobby.’ She made it sound a rare occurrence in her life.

  What had made Vanetta, he often wondered in an un-articulated way. Was it Mississippi and a childhood that sounded magical? Certainly most of her stories were set there, including a few he made her repeat over and over. The black widow spider that bit her in the outhouse when she was about Bobby’s age – she wouldn’t say where it had bit her, laughing each time Bobby pressed the point. He winced as he imagined it crawling up from the privy pit below. She’d got so sick, she said, that she almost died.

  And the rascal preacher (he was a rat too, Bobby figured) with an eye for the girls in the congregation. Once when Vanetta had been twelve years old, she had shaken his hand in the line after service and the minister had tickled her palm with his forefinger. When she’d told her daddy, he’d threatened to shoot the minister if he did it again.

  They made other expeditions on the South Side, deep into the ghetto where Bobby’s father would never have taken him. Bobby felt safe with Vanetta, and she never communicated any apprehension to him. Once on 63rd Street, they stopped at a barbecue takeaway, and while they waited for their order of batter-coated shrimp (‘srimps’ said Vanetta, and he had learned by then that it wasn’t his business to tell her how to talk), a younger woman with straightened hair and a scab on her face shouted at Vanetta, ‘What you doin’ wit that white boy in here? He ain’t yours, now is he?’

  Bobby had been astonished; it never occurred to him his presence might be unwanted. Vanetta stared long and hard at the woman before she spoke. ‘If you say one more word about some little boy, standin’ in line, waiting his turn for his srimps, polite and quiet like everybody else, I will put your scrawny ass in that hot fryer there.’

  A big man at the front of the line laughed out loud at this, and the younger woman did not reply. What struck Bobby was the sheer intensity of Vanetta’s anger – he had never seen that before.

  That night Bobby told his father what had happened, certain he would share his pride in how Vanetta had protected him. But his father looked unhappy, and after that Bobby noticed Vanetta didn’t take him to 63rd Street any more.

  ‘Life is about change,’ Mike had taken to declaring, and Bobby felt old enough to feel his brother didn’t know what he was talking about. Bobby would have said life was about avoiding change if you could, at least when you were happy with the way things were. And he was, if
waking up each morning looking forward to the day was the evidence. In his case, he looked forward to seeing Vanetta.

  Early in spring, as he left school one day, he was still wearing his winter coat, a heavy quilted jacket his father had bought for him in Michigan at a dry goods store’s sale. It was too big for him, and the way the weather was warming he decided to ask Vanetta if he could wear his nylon baseball jacket the following day. Funny how he was thinking about Vanetta as he approached the corner of Steinways, for he saw Vanetta standing next to Abe, waiting for him.

  ‘Why did you come all the way down, Vanetta?’

  ‘We got some company today. I want you to meet someone.’

  Bobby waited with as much suspicion as curiosity. Slowly from behind Vanetta emerged a tall, bony, bespectacled boy. His cheeks were high mounds the colour of mocha, and when he opened his mouth – though right now he didn’t say a word – two front teeth protruded, rabbit-like. He was a little goofy-looking, awkward, with elbows that stuck out like chicken wings. His eyes, magnified by his thick lenses, seemed unnaturally round, as if the world were a source of continuous astonishment. Bobby was in no mood to feel charitable. Why was this boy here? He knew Vanetta had family – even children of her own. But they were grown children, no threat to Bobby, who was entirely happy to be just a little boy, if that meant he had Vanetta to himself.

  The three of them walked home along 57th Street, with Bobby in a sulk. Vanetta ignored this, and talked animatedly to this boy Duval. Bobby thought he didn’t look very tough, this ungainly boy, taller than Bobby but weak-looking. Bobby was confident he could out-wrestle him – even Mike admitted Bobby was strong for his age.

  When they got to the apartment Duval came in with them, and Bobby hoped he wouldn’t stay for long. But Vanetta said, ‘Why don’t you two go play outside in the back?’

  ‘I want to stay in the kitchen,’ he said, noticing that Duval hadn’t said a word.

  Vanetta looked at him sternly. ‘You got company, Bobby. You can’t just sit here.’

  ‘Why not?’ he asked.

  ‘Come here a minute, baby,’ said Vanetta, but instead of holding out her arms, she took his hand, and led him out into the hallway. There she said, ‘We need to have a talk.’

  ‘Okay,’ he said, but not brightly.

  ‘Duval’s mother ain’t well. You know what that’s like.’ He nodded dumbly. ‘She’s my daughter and he’s my grandson. So I got to help, now don’t I?’ He nodded again; he could see the logic of this. ‘That means some days I got to look after Duval. But I got work to do. There’s laundry, and supper to fix, and the house to clean. I can’t do all that and look after another little boy, now can I?’

  He could see the problem all right, though he didn’t know what he was supposed to do about it. He looked up at Vanetta, puzzled. She said, ‘So this means I need some help. Some days you need help; I try to give it to you. You’re a big boy now, so if there’s some days it’s me needing the help, well then, I’m asking you to provide it. That make sense?’

  ‘What do you want me to do, Vanetta?’ he asked, feeling he was being led down a road where he could not reverse.

  ‘I want you to be good to Duval. Show him your toys – you got wonderful toys. Play your marbles games with him. Go in the back when it’s nice out – the sun’s shining today – and play ball in the yard.’

  Where was Vanetta in all of this? She seemed to read his mind. ‘I’ll be here,’ she assured him, ‘and Duval ain’t going to be around every day. But when he is, be his friend.’ She put an arm gently on his shoulder. ‘You growin’ up, Bobby, or I wouldn’t be asking. So will you do this for me?’

  He didn’t answer directly, but she must have understood his assent, for he was already on his way back to the kitchen.

  V

  1

  WITH THE SUN sunk and only the faintest moonlight shining on the tall beech in their front yard, Anna and Robert sat side by side on the deep soft sofa in the living room, each with a glass of red wine from the bottle they’d opened at dinner. Even after sundown, the air was moist and warm, and Anna wore shorts and Robert the blue jeans Sophie always teased him about – Dad, you’re too old for jeans. Upstairs the little girl lay asleep at last, after two visits by Robert, each precipitating a hurried click of her bedside lamp switch to disguise her furtive reading.

  Constrained by Sophie’s presence at dinner, he had given Anna only a short account of his meeting with Duval. Now she asked, ‘So what was he like?’

  ‘I think we were both nervous. To tell you the truth, I was a little apprehensive about meeting him again.’

  ‘Was he anything like you remembered him?’

  ‘Yes, that was the strangest thing about it. I expected someone harder – after so many years in prison. But there was the same innocence I remember.’

  ‘Innocence?’

  ‘I’m not sure how to explain it. He seemed like a little child – a kid – who’s got lost and doesn’t know where to go. It reminded me of Dr Wembley.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘He was my father’s closest friend in Michigan. He was very commanding: we were all a little in awe of him. In a small Midwestern town the GP is next to God – even when I was grown up I still called him Dr Wembley.

  ‘Once when I was little, he visited Chicago – there was a medical conference at the Palmer House. My dad said Wembley hated cities, so I don’t know why he went. He was going to spend a night with us in Hyde Park, and I went along with my father to pick him up. We drove down to the Loop. I remember seeing him standing in front of the Palmer House hotel, almost right under the El tracks. He was holding an old pigskin bag and looking around for us, and suddenly I realised that instead of the formidable figure I knew, he looked incredibly anxious. Like he’d entered a time warp and come out into a nightmare.

  ‘Then my dad honked and Wembley saw us and came over. And by the time he got into the car all his usual authority was back. I said, “Hi, Dr Wembley,” dutifully, just as I always would. But for a minute I’d seen a completely different man, one who looked utterly lost. And it was that expression I saw on Duval.’

  Anna sighed. ‘It can’t be easy after so many years in prison. Doesn’t he have a parole officer?’

  ‘I assume so, but the guy’s probably more concerned that Duval stays out of trouble than with actually helping him.’

  ‘I don’t understand why he wanted to see you.’

  ‘He said Vanetta asked him to, to thank me for all my family had done for her.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Not a lot. I sent her money sometimes – not very much. And I flew back for her funeral. Big deal.’

  ‘Did he want anything else from you?’

  He shook his head. ‘I offered him a loan, but he wouldn’t take it. He did say he was looking for work. They trained him as a TV repairman, but how many TVs get repaired these days? He said he’s good at carpentry, but he can’t get a union job and can’t seem to get a start with word-of-mouth jobs.’

  ‘Is he broke?’

  ‘Not yet. I figure he will be soon enough. Benefit isn’t enough to live on.’

  ‘Can’t you help him?’

  ‘He wouldn’t take any money from me. He was adamant.’

  ‘I don’t mean that. There must be some job you could send his way.’

  He was interested that she seemed so concerned, but then, she had always had the ability to empathise, even with those clients of hers that were manifestly undeserving.

  ‘Not really. We’ve got maintenance people in the building. If there’s ever a carpentry job, they just call down somebody from the main campus. That’s all unionised too.’

  ‘Did he talk about his life in prison?’

  ‘He made only the slightest reference to it – you’d never have thought he’d spent practically his entire adult life there. He made it sound like some brief hiatus.’

  ‘How peculiar,’ said Anna. She looked pensive, as if torn in two minds.
<
br />   ‘It was. But there was nothing unpleasant about him. It was just,’ he hesitated, trying to convey the sense he’d had of slight dislocation, ‘a little spooky.’

  ‘Will you see him again?’

  ‘I’m not planning to. But I have the feeling he’ll want to see me. He kept talking about the past – all his relatives I can’t even remember, and about Hyde Park and the apartment building. He was disappointed I hadn’t been back.’

  ‘You should, you know. Sophie keeps saying she wants to see where you grew up.’

  ‘Yeah, well,’ he said neutrally. It was a small point of contention; when he and Anna had first become involved she had told him all about her life, while he had baulked at her requests to hear about his past. I’m too old even to start, he’d said. If we start going backwards we’ll never have a future.

  Moving to Chicago had brought up this same point again. Anna had expected him to embrace his old haunts, show them to her and Sophie, expose his past at last to her curious eyes. He had come to realise she had expected him to show the way. But to Anna’s annoyance, he had acted as if the city were as new to him as to her – which was how he felt, and how he liked it.

  As he got up to find the bottle of wine, he realised he hadn’t told her the most important thing. ‘Oh, Duval also said he didn’t do it.’

  ‘What?’ Anna demanded. He realised his announcement must have sounded bizarre, but he hadn’t been able to think of any better, undramatic way to say it.

  ‘I know. I couldn’t believe it at first.’ He went and got the bottle from the kitchen, and as he poured them each a refill said, ‘I wish he hadn’t.’

  ‘What, said it?’ Anna was sitting up now, no longer relaxed.

  He nodded. ‘Yes. What’s the point? No one can give him all those years back.’