George shook his head. “No. You.”
Red unzipped his pants and let them fall down around his knees. His white drawers were dingy and the elastic band was almost too stretched out to hold them up. He pulled them down, too, and stood there facing George, his small, reddish-brown penis hardening before George’s eyes. “Now you.”
George pulled down his pants, his own erection already pressing eagerly against his zipper. For a moment they stood there, just looking at each other, then Red reached out and touched the tip of George’s penis. A breath caught in George’s throat. Red’s eyes widened. He took hold of it then, rubbing it from shaft to head, and George closed his eyes and let the pleasure melt over him. No one had ever touched him down there before and it was so much better than when he did it himself.
He heard a flurry of movement and opened his eyes, expecting to see another mouse, but instead he saw his father, standing down the corridor, staring wide-eyed at him, a look of horror and revulsion on his face.
George scrambled away from Red, who said, “No, don’t quit. It feels good, don’t it?”
His father had closed the distance between them before he knew it, and was reaching out and grabbing him by the throat, throwing him down on the hard floor. George heard Red running away, his bare feet slapping hard against the ground. His father looked enraged, his face contorted into something monstrous, and he slapped George hard across the face and head, over and over. Then he grabbed the boy by the shirt, and shook him, growling at him through clenched teeth, “I didn’t raise you to be no filthy queer. I work myself to death every day to give you a life, and this what I get?”
“No,” George cried. “I’m sorry, Daddy.”
“What did I do wrong?” his father asked. “Huh? What did I do?”
The chewed pizza in George’s mouth tasted cold and oily, and he couldn’t swallow it. The reddish boy was still staring at him, and George began to wonder if he was really there, and not some ghost come to haunt and torment him, to make him remember that day in the factory, that day when his father had stopped loving him. After that, nothing between them was the same. There was no more hitting, no more epithets hurled, no more mention at all of what had happened. But the days of watching his father turn broken things into art ended all at once.
George peered at the reddish boy and thought about all the times he had returned to that old factory, with other boys and, later, men, all the times he had recreated that awful scene, only without his father bursting in, and all the times he had recreated it in other places, in Butch’s basement, in the church with Chuck, his father’s disgust always there even if the man himself was not. He wished he could go back and undo it. He wished that about so many things, but that thing more than any other. He wished Red had never come up to him as he sat on that porch railing. “You ruined everything,” he whispered to the reddish boy, who only blinked at him. George got up from his seat and closed the distance between himself and the little boy and stared down at him, shaking his head. “You opened that door, and after that I couldn’t shut it.”
The boy looked up, wide-eyed at him.
He felt a hand on his shoulder and when he looked a man was standing there, frowning hard at him. “What you say to my son?” he asked.
George looked down at the boy, and saw now that he wasn’t Red, or a ghost of any sort, but only a kid with rust-colored hair. George swallowed, shook his head. “Nothing,” he said to the father.
“Well, get away from him, then,” the man said, putting himself between George and his son.
George turned and left the restaurant, and made his way over to Market Street, and the el that would take him home, not because he wanted to be there, but because he had nowhere else to go.
***
Ava was painting on the back porch because the house was hot, too hot. She had gone to work that morning an hour early, and had spent that time, as well as her lunch break and an hour after work, tucked away in corners of the museum, wrapping herself in paintings, in color that stretched out for hours. Into the planes and angles of Fernand Leger’s Animated Landscape, she had folded herself. Into the contours and curves of Georgia O’Keeffe’s Peach and Glass, she had balled herself up. On the edges of Paul Cezanne’s Mont Sainte-Victoire, she had perched and observed the world below. On her way out of the museum, coming down the steps, she’d seen Ben Franklin Parkway as she hadn’t seen it in seventeen years, the wide boulevard lined with trees whose green was lush and stark against the blue-white sky, and whose domed and columned edifices—the Basilica of Saints Peter and Paul, the Free Library of Philadelphia, the Franklin Institute—contrasted with the many-windowed office buildings that winked from the city skyline, out of which City Hall rose. When she’d gotten home, she’d helped Sarah and Helena with dinner, and while eating she’d planned the painting she would make, designed it in her mind from top to bottom. The skyline had inspired her and she thought to set that inspiration down on canvas. When dinner was over, she’d wanted to bolt from the kitchen, but she forced herself to be considerate and help with the dishes. When everything was clean and put away, she dragged the easel, and her case full of paints and brushes, out onto the back porch. She stayed out there for hours, as the sky darkened. She could hear her family moving around inside, but for a long time no one disturbed her. As she painted, her head throbbed. It had been throbbing on and off all day. She kept painting, determinedly, as though it would help. Hours later, Helena came outside, and when she peered at the image on the canvas she said, “It’s you again.”
“I meant it to be the city skyline,” Ava told her.
Helena tilted her head to one side and squinted at the painting. “It’s not.”
“Hmm.”
The day before, Ava had begun to draw a picture of a butterfly alight on a flower in the garden, and had ended up with a sketch of herself, watching the butterfly. Now she stood back from the canvas and examined yet another unintended depiction of herself, this time with no hint of the scene she had set out to paint, only her visage looking out from the canvas.
“Well,” Ava said. “That is interesting, isn’t it?”
Helena nodded. “Any word from Paul?” she asked, leaning back against the porch railing.
“No,” Ava said, dipping her brush in brown.
Helena frowned. “You’re not very upset about him being gone, are you?”
“I hope he’s safe,” Ava said, “and that he’s not hurting too much. But no, I’m not upset that he’s gone.”
Helena went and sat down on the steps, lit a cigarette and stared out at the garden. After a few minutes, she said, “It’s because of me. You’re angry with him for keeping that secret from you. But it’s my fault there was ever a secret to begin with.”
Ava shook her head. “That’s only part of it,” she said. “I’ve actually been thinking a lot about Paul.”
“Have you?”
Ava put down her brush and palette, and sat down beside Helena on the step. “So much has happened to me in these last few days. So much memory returning, so much emotion filling me up. Everything feels so much more…” She sighed. “So much more. You know?”
Helena nodded.
“Everything,” Ava said, “except Paul. My feelings for Paul haven’t changed. They haven’t gotten bigger, or heavier, or…more red.”
“Maybe they will,” Helena said.
“I’ve been waiting for them to. I’ve been waiting to feel something so intense that I couldn’t deny it. But I haven’t. I don’t feel any less about him than I did a few days ago, but a few days ago it was enough. It’s not anymore. I don’t love Paul.” She thought Helena would argue, would try to convince her that she did still love her brother, for his sake, but Helena was silent. In the light of the moon, Ava could see Helena’s eyes, fiercely green against the dark, watching her, half afraid of what she might say next, and half eager to hear the words. “Of all the things I have felt these last few days, of all the things I feel now, there is no
thing I feel so intensely, so thoroughly, as I feel you.”
Helena shook her head no, the way she had when Ava had kissed her a few nights ago, and Ava thought she would get up and leave, but this time Helena did not move away. She moved closer. She leaned her body into the empty dark that separated them and kissed Ava, hungrily, and put her arms around her waist and pulled her closer still. Ava met the kiss with an equal rush of passion, and her tongue tasted red and coffee and butter, and every good thing. They kissed and kissed, for many minutes, there on the back steps, kissed until their lips were raw, and long after that. It was late when they went into the house, upstairs, and in the hallway Ava said, “Sleep with me.”
Helena shook her head. “I can’t. Paul—”
“I mean sleep,” Ava said. “Just sleep.”
Paul had been gone from the Delaney house for two whole days. He was staying at Tyrone’s place in North Philly, but he’d barely seen his cousin at all. He’d requested night shifts at the cleaning company, less for the money than for the distraction, thinking that dirty windows and toilets would keep his mind off much worse things. They didn’t. In every window pane, every shiny surface, he saw the face of the girl he had killed, killed for nothing, trying to protect a sister who hadn’t wanted protecting in the first place. He wished that he had been the one who died that day, twenty years ago. He wondered if that girl would have grown up to be something. Something more than he had turned out to be.
During the few hours that he slept on his cousin’s floor each morning, his mind, his conscience, gave him a reprieve from the image of the girl, and in those moments he dreamed about Ava. He saw her the way she was before, without the emotional eruptions and fainting spells, when she was steady and easy, and they were happy.
It was all connected to Helena, this misery he felt now, though he didn’t know exactly how her presence had caused the changes in Ava. He only knew that after she came, everything had come undone. His life had crumbled in the wake of his long lost sister’s return. He hated her for what she was, for what she had let him do, but most of all he hated her for coming back, for showing up on his doorstep, for not having the decency to just stay away, to let the lie remain, for not caring that the truth would be so much harder for him to live with.
He figured that after he left, she would go on up to New York like she’d planned. He gave it a couple of days, knowing that his in-laws weren’t the kind of people who would just toss her out, that she might need a couple of days to clear out. Then, when he was sure she would be gone, he went home.
It was late, and coming up the street he saw no lights on in the house. As he got closer, a figure crossed the street in front of him, and in the glow of the streetlamp he saw Pastor Goode.
“What you doing back here, brother?” Goode asked him, standing in his path.
Paul shook his head. “I aint your brother. And if you got half a bit of sense in your head, you’ll get out of my goddamn way.”
“When I saw you leave, I thought maybe you had a chance,” the pastor said. “Maybe you wasn’t being controlled by the devil like the rest of them. But I guess I was wrong, ‘cause here you are again.”
Paul felt anger rising in him. In all the years he’d lived on this block, he’d thought of the preacher mostly as a crazy old man, a bible-thumper gone mad, seeing Satan in ordinary people trying to live their lives. But now, after the sermon in the street, he could see that Goode was more than just crazy, that he had a plan, and that plan was to push and push until somebody in that house broke. He didn’t seem to care who it was.
“Look, preacher,” Paul said, trying to keep his voice steady, trying to keep the rage from spilling over like lava and burning up everything in its path, “I been listening to your nonsense for five years. I still remember that day you told me to get out while I still could, not to get mixed up with these people. What you didn’t understand then, and what you still don’t understand, is that one of these people is the woman I love, and I aint going nowhere without her. I aint ever heard you say nothing that was gone change that, and I doubt today’s gone be any different, so I’m telling you to step aside before I lose my mind and go upside your goddamn head.”
Goode moved and Paul went by him.
“Your sister is trying to seduced your wife,” the pastor said, his words as cool as sudden autumn in the hot summer air. “Does that change it?”
Paul kept walking and the preacher followed.
“You don’t even know what’s been going on in there, do you? I don’t know if it’s because you work too much, or because you that naïve, or because you just plain stupid, but somehow she managed to do it right under your nose and you aint see it. She making a damn fool out of you.”
“I don’t need nobody to make a fool of me,” he said. “I been doing that fine by myself. You giving it a good shot, though.”
Goode caught up to him and grabbed his arm. “Look at me, boy!”
Paul turned around and peered at the old man. “What the hell you want with me?”
“I am trying to give you back your dignity,” he said. “I am trying to tell you that your sister is trying to corrupt your wife. I am telling you that so you can do something about it.”
“I’m gone kill you,” Paul said. “I swear to God, I’m gone kill you with my bare hands right here on this sidewalk if you don’t shut your filthy mouth.” He jerked hard out of Goode’s grip and the old man lost his balance and nearly fell over. He grabbed hold of a parked car and steadied himself.
“I am prepared to die doing the Lord’s work,” he said.
Paul laughed. “How come everything you say, and everything you do, is the Lord’s work? When you taking a shit—that the Lord’s work, too?”
Goode smiled. In the light pouring down from the streetlamp, he looked like a haunted man. “You ignorant, boy, but you aint dumb. I know you see it.”
Paul didn’t want to, but he thought about how close Ava and Helena had gotten over the last few days. He thought about Helena telling him that Ava was full of passion and intensity and that he just couldn’t see it. “I aint one of your sheep,” Paul told the pastor. “You can’t make me believe a bunch of nonsense just by telling me how dumb I’d be if I didn’t believe it, or how I’m going to hell if I don’t.”
“She told me herself. Your wife. She came to me and told me all about it out her own mouth. She said that woman’s been after her since the day she got here.”
“You a damn lie. I didn’t buy that story when you yelled it from the street and I aint buying it now.”
Pastor Goode watched Paul, his eyes moving over the younger man’s face. Then he glanced towards the Delaney house. “She’s still in there, you know. She aint left. Why would she? With you gone, she got your wife all to herself.”
1959
It had been several hours after the police left, on the morning they found Geo and Kenny dead, that Ava realized her brother was with her. She was sitting alone on the back porch, wondering why she was not crying. The sight of his dead body had shocked her, but not nearly as much as it should have. She had been so occupied with her mother’s pain that she had not realized at first that her own pain was so slight, so almost incidental. Sitting there alone in the smoldering hot sun of the afternoon, though, Ava had felt Geo’s presence. It was so palpable that she turned, confused, and looked behind her, half expecting to see him sitting there, before she remembered he was dead. But the feeling that he was there did not go away. She stood there, trying to understand what was happening. “Geo,” she whispered into the sticky summer air. “Are you there?”
When the answer came, it came from within her, a surge of thought and emotion that felt familiar and foreign all at once. And she knew. It was as though they were in their mother’s womb again, so close was his soul to hers. The rush of it was such that it made her knees buckle, and she dropped to the wood-planked porch, small splinters penetrating the skin of her bare knees. She closed her eyes and thought, “Geo, are you
there?” The response was the same, the same rush of confused thought and emotion, but no language occurred to her, no answer came in words.
She could not tell her family that Geo was not gone, that his body was broken, but that he, his real self, his soul, was still there. They would have thought she meant it in a sentimental way if she told them that he was with her, as if she were keeping him alive in her heart, and she couldn’t bear to have the experience of having her brother’s soul side by side with her own in her body reduced to some corny sentiment like the few people from the block who came to the funeral wrote in the cards they handed her with somber looks and hand-squeezes. She wanted to tell her mother, at least, that Geo was sharing her body now, thinking it would bring her some comfort, but Regina had ceased being someone you could hold a conversation with when she carried his body back up the street to their house. Ava didn’t even consider telling her father, or her sister. So, she was on her own to sort out what it meant that she and her brother were sharing her body. And it wasn’t easy. Sometimes, in the days following the killings, Ava felt the urge to pee, and then found herself facing the toilet with her jeans unzipped, not knowing what to do.
On top of that, she was suddenly interested in yellow cake, which she had never liked, and uninterested in coffee, which she had always liked before. Only Sarah noticed anything different about her. Ava was brushing her teeth one morning and looked into the bathroom mirror to see Sarah standing behind her, looking annoyed.
“What?” Ava asked, splattering toothpaste on the mirror.
“You’re brushing your teeth like Geo. Up and down instead of side to side. Geo brushed his teeth like that.”
“Oh.”
“You’re not going to try to be like him now, are you?”
“I was always like him. We’re twins.”
The Summer We Got Free Page 30