When it was time for her to get ready to go back on stage, she stood up and put her hand out and as I took it she said, A lot of college boys come in here all the time, but you’re the first one I spotted listening like that, so I just decided to come over here and say something to you and find out what you’re putting down. And I said, I sure am glad you did, but what did you find out? and she said, A whole lot. I can usually tell a lot about people from what I see from up there, and it usually don’t take me but so many more bars to check them out close up.
Then as she stepped back to head for her dressing room, she gave me a playful one-finger push on the shoulder and said, You just checked out just fine, Schoolboy. I do believe that you just might do. Then, before I could get myself together to say something cute, she winked and waved and was gone and I couldn’t believe my luck.
XVI
So when I finally let myself take time out to think about her again that next morning, I said, Hello, Miss Hortense Hightower, whichever you are. Because I was also thinking about the one and only Miss Slick McGinnis, also known as Slick to some and as Old Slick to others, so-called not because she was so notoriously devious but from the time when she used to wear her hair bobbed and plastered flapper style. The fact that she always looked at you as if she knew more than she would ever tell and as if she always meant more than she ever actually said was really a coincidence after the fact.
She had been right there all along, although not all the time because she also traveled a lot. So much so that whenever you saw her it was as if she had either just recently come back down home from New York City and sometimes elsewhere as well. Or she was only a few days away from going back off again. Or so it seemed. But even so, everybody always used to think of her as being as much of an ongoing part of whatever took place in Gasoline Point in those days as anybody else. And so did I and so did she.
Most of the time she used to be going back and forth between Gasoline Point and New York, but sometimes you also used to hear people talking about something she had brought back from Paris, France, or London, England, or Rome, Italy, or Madrid, Spain, where she, like Jack Johnson, had not only seen but had also met some of the world’s greatest bullfighters and had also heard a lot of great gypsy guitar players and had also seen a lot of flamenco dancing which I had also seen on the Spanish floats in the Mardi Gras parade which is why I already knew the difference between the sounds of castanets and the syncopated rifling of the old plantation-style bone-knockers and thigh-slappers you used to hear on street corners in those days.
At first I used to remember her as the pretty lady with the spangle-dangle ear pendants, diamond ring, and string of pearls, who sometimes also sported a cigarette holder that was said to be platinum and ivory. Then later the sound of whatever shoes she happened to be wearing as she came clip-clopping along the sidewalk always used to make me think of bunny-pink bedroom mules and boa-trimmed kimonos.
I always knew that she had been married for a while a few years ago, but didn’t have any children, and all anybody seemed to know about her ex-husband was that he was somebody who ran some kind of business up in New York, who refused to come down South even on a week’s vacation. So nobody in Gasoline Point, not even his in-laws, had ever seen him in the flesh, which probably was why nobody ever thought of him as an actual person anymore. He was only a shadowy part of a half-forgotten event that in itself was not very real to anybody in the first place. Anyway, by the time I was old enough to become just casually curious about who he was and what his line of work was, nobody could tell you or could remember what his name was (it was not McGinnis, to be sure). Or could say if anybody else in Gasoline Point other than Miss Slick McGinnis and her family ever knew what it was.
I also don’t remember having already known anything about what she herself had been doing for a living all of those years before she decided to tell me what she told me after I had answered the questions she asked me about school the day I helped her carry her parcels home from the post office. Before then I didn’t have any notion whatsoever that she had a very special job with a very rich high society woman who lived in New York and traveled all over the world. All I knew was that from time to time she traveled a lot.
Then during the next several weeks I was to find out that the high society New York woman she had been working for and who was responsible for her being up north when she went was somebody who was once her blonde blue-eyed playmate back when the McGinnis family was living in the truck-gardening area across Mobile Bay near the resort town of Daphne.
That was another story in itself one about how the blonde blue-eyed playmate, whose family was in the drydock business, grew up to be one of the most popular debutantes in the whole Gulf Coast region and about how she married into a family in the shipbuilding industry in New York, and then it was also a story about a mansion on Fifth Avenue and an estate on Long Island with stables and kennels and about a family yacht for sailing the Atlantic and cruising the Mediterranean and the Aegean, and also about how Miss Slick McGinnis had always been able to spend so much time back down in Gasoline Point.
But that was not what we really talked about that first afternoon. All she told me then was that the packages were from some people she lived with up in New York, and then from what she said from time to time later on I found out that her pay was more like an allowance for a member of the family than the wages of a household servant, and that not only could she come and go any time she chose, but that all of her travel was a household expense. The very first thing she mentioned on the way from the post office and the main thing that everything we ever said or did always came back around to was school.
She said, I’ve been hearing a lot of very nice things about how fine you’re still coming along over at the school, which was what most people who knew Mama and Papa and especially Miss Tee also used to say in one way or another. Sometimes all some of them used to do was call your name and nod and smile and give you the highball sign. I was used to that, and I also knew that you never could tell when somebody was also going to use it to try to hem you in with the same restrictions required of boys in training to become Catholic priests.
But as soon as she said what she said the way she said it, I crossed my fingers because I couldn’t help wishing what I wished any more than anybody I ever saw in the barbershop or the bench on Stranahan’s gallery could help shaking his head and sighing before straightening up and putting on his best manners whenever she came in sight.
So tell me about it, she said as we came on across that part of Buckshaw Mill Road and into the kite pasture, and I started with Miss Lexine Metcalf and by the time we opened her front gate I was talking about Mister B. Franklin Fisher, and we put the parcels down and sat on the front porch, me in the swing and her in one of the two cane-bottom rocking chairs, and that was when I told her about how when you were chosen to attend the Early Bird sessions that automatically put you in competition for a scholarship to college, and she said, Now that’s something, now that’s really something, and then she said, And aren’t you something.
She said, I can’t tell you how pleased I am about the way you’re turning out She said, I bet you didn’t know that I was keeping tabs on you, and I said, I sure didn’t and she said, See there, you never can tell, and then she said, So from now on I am also going to be expecting to get some of my report directly from you in person. And with my fingers crossed again I said, If you say so.
Then she stood up and said, When do I get to hear something about your plans for yourself and I said, Anytime you say, and she said, Come on, let’s go say hello to Mama, and I followed her around to the backyard and saw Miss Orita Bolden McGinnis who was also known as Miss Orita Bolden and Miss Reeta Mac. She was sitting on a wrought-iron bench under the scuppernong arbor, talking to Miss Sister Lucinda Wiggens and when she heard my name she looked up and held out her hand and said, Miss Melba’s little old scootabout man, come on over here boy, just look at him growing on up to be a fine-mannere
d young gentlemen, and they tell me you got yourself a good head on your shoulders too. They tell me that that Miss what’s-her-name Metcalf spotted his birthmark for learning the minute she set eyes on him. So you going give me a hug and some of that good old sugar like you used to, and I said, Oh yes, m’am.
Then Miss Sister Lucinda Wiggens opened her arms and folded me into her bosom and I had to give her some sugar on both cheeks and the lips too, and she said, Lord boy you precious, just precious. And she said, So many of our people don’t care about nothing these days. Nothing but a lot of the same old foolishness. But some of us does care just like that Professor Fisher we got over yonder and you have our prayers to go right along with his strictness and all that book learning, and we all tells him to lay it on that precious few that got to make up for the many.
Back at the front gate I said, Next Tuesday would be just fine with me too. Then I could hardly wait to get somewhere and be all by myself. So when I came to the end of Gins Alley I didn’t turn right and go directly home by way of the live oak shade cluster and the houses from which old Willie and Miss Meg Marlow moved to join Mister One Arm Will Marlow up in Detroit the year before Little Buddy Marshall came to town. I turned left into the old pushcart and wheelbarrow lane between the tank-yard fence and the skin-game thicket and came on down across the tank-car sidings and along the L & N tracks and then back up through cypress bottom to the chinaberry yard by way of Dodge Mill Road.
When you came through the front door, the parlor was on your right and the dining room was beyond the arch on your left and you saw yourself in the big gilt-framed mirror above the long, low marble-top chest of drawers against the back wall of the vestibule, and I also remember that there was a telephone beside the mirror because it was the first one I ever saw in a private home.
In the parlor there was a player piano with stacks of piano rolls lined up across the top, and there was also a big console-model Victor victrola just like the best one on display in the window of Jesse French Music Store on Dauphine Street off the southwest corner of Bienville Square. As I remember it, Jesse French was the biggest store in downtown Mobile for sheet music and band instruments in those days, but what I always used to think about whenever I heard that name was the black-spotted white dog figure sitting on the pedestal out front with his ear cocked to hear his master’s voice out of the megaphone of a windup Victor victrola.
She left me on the settee which I guessed had been turned all the way around from the fireplace because it was summertime, and you had a view out through the double window and across the swing porch fern pots and the rose bushes, and in the distance beyond the open plot between the house across the street you could also see the sky above where you knew the Tensaw River canebrakes bordered the route to Flomaton and Bay Minette and also down into Pensacola and the Florida panhandle.
You could hear her moving about in the kitchen and also the sound of spoons and ice clinking against glass, and then she was back with a pitcher of lemonade and two glasses on a silver tray. She put it on the center table and poured me a glassful and put a Chesterfield in her jeweled cigarette holder, lit it with a kitchen match, and sat cross-legged in what I took to be Miss Reeta Macs rocking chair, dangling one of the pink-bunny bedroom mules on the tip of the toes of her left foot.
So tell me some more about yourself, she said then, and what I said at first was still mostly about school because it was about all of the campus sports activities I went out for such as football, basketball, and track and field events and baseball to be sure which I also played off campus because I had decided that I wanted to be a four-letter athlete as well as be an all-round scholarship student, even though Mobile County Training School didn’t actually award MC TS sweaters because in those days the budget for interscholastic extracurricular and recreational activities was barely enough to cover the cost of basic regulation equipment and uniforms, even when it was supplemented with the fund from the benefit drives and programs that Mister B. Franklin Fisher was forever putting on to make up the difference.
I said I could also play tennis, which was also mainly a campus game in those days (as was volleyball which was only a recess time pastime at Mobile County Training School when I was there). But you didn’t have time for tennis if you were as tied up with baseball as I had always been. You didn’t have to say anything about hunting and fishing because both were just a natural part of living that close to the woods and swamps and rivers and creeks. But I did mention swimming because I was the first one in Gasoline Point to do the American crawl. Everybody else was still doing the dog paddle, the sidestroke, the back paddle, and the fancy overhand until I began showing some of them how much more speed you got when you kicked and breathed like I had learned to do from a white boy named Dudy Tolliver and also by watching the hundred-meter swimmers in the newsreels of the Olympic games in Los Angeles.
We went on talking and that was when I found out that Miss Reeta Mac was already across the bay visiting family people in Daphne and that she herself was going over to join her the next day and also go down to Point Clear and Magnolia Springs over the coming weekend, before heading back to New York the following Wednesday night on the northbound L & N Crescent Limited.
That was when she began telling me the first part of what she was to tell me about herself over the next two years between then and the end of the summer after I got my diploma and my college scholarship and she gave me my going away present.
The very first thing she wanted me to know something about was what she did when she was away in New York and elsewhere, and she also explained just enough about her childhood across the bay for me to understand why she went to New York in the first place and then she told me about some of the things she guessed I wanted to know about what she liked about living in New York.
Then I heard the whistle of the three o’clock switch engine on the way from the L & N roundhouse across Three Mile Bridge to the tank-car sidings and realized how long I had been there. But before I could decide what to say next, she said what she said, and I had to cross my fingers again.
Because as soon as she said, So now tell me something else, I was just about certain that I knew what was coming and sure enough, the very next thing she said was, What I want to find out about now is, how in the world did you manage to make it this far without getting trapped up in some of all this trouble down here in these bottoms. After all, she said, this is Gasoline Point. After all, this is jook joint junction.
She said, Unless I miss my guess, you know exactly what I am talking about and I said I did know and I did because I knew what had happened to Eddie Lee Sawyer and also to Tyner Beasley, not to mention Clarence Crawford, better known as Crawfish Crawford, all of whom were once Early Birds while I was still down in grade school. Eddie Lee Sawyer, who had dropped out of school in the tenth grade because he had to marry Mary Frances Henderson, was now the father of two girls and was driving a delivery truck for Hammels Department Store in downtown Mobile. Tyner Beasley had made it to the eleventh before he took up with Zelma Gibson and forgot all about becoming an architect and went to work as a handyman to keep enough money coming in to pay the rent with a little something left over for the honky-tonks.
As for Crawfish Crawford, who had been so brilliant in all of his mathematics and science classes, he had become so jealous of Miss Big Baby Doll Jackson who did you-know-what for a living that he had slit her throat from ear to ear and then had hidden out in the Hog Bayou for three months until they finally caught him on a tip from a moonshine runner and brought him to trial, and state solicitor Bart B. Chatterton had sent him to the penitentiary for ninety-nine years and a day.
She said, I sure do hope I’m right about you, because don’t think I don’t know what you been up to with all of them nice-boy manners and smiles and them sly twinkles in your eyes, and all I could say was that I hoped so too, and she said, I damn sure better be because after all, you’re still just a minor in the eyes of the law, and then she also said, But
God knows the truth of the matter is I just hope I didn’t hold off until its too late.
That was how we finally got to that part, and all at once it was as if you had to keep touching the brake pedal because when she said, So well then, she was already standing up and as I followed her down the hall it was suddenly as if what had happened back when Miss Evelyn Kirkwood said what she said that rime was about something else altogether, because I was still only a boy then, and now I was almost a man.
But nobody could have made anything any easier than she was to do that first afternoon. She said, Now tell me one more thing. She said, You didn’t give me any sugar the other day. You gave Mama some and you gave Miss Sister Lucinda Wiggens some. So how come you skipped me? And I said, Because they asked me and because you’re different, and she said, Well can I have mine right here, right now? And as soon as I was that close she said, Well I declare well I just do declare, so I guess I must be different all right. It’s a good thing this didn’t happen out there in front of Mama. Then as I remember it, the next thing I heard was her saying, You can uncross your fingers now. You’re doing fine, just fine.
When we said good-bye before she went back to New York at the end of that last summer before I was to leave for college, the graduation present she had saved to give me at that time was a Gladstone bag, and inside was the one-way ticket I needed to get me to the campus with my scholarship voucher. She said, So good luck, Miss Melba’s Scooter, and when I said, Miss Slick McGinnis’s Scooter, too, she said, That’s just a little secret between you and me, and so is this little going-away present. Then she winked at me and I will always remember how her diamond ring finger felt as she squeezed my hands exactly like all of the other good fairy godmothers I ever dreamed about.
The Spyglass Tree Page 12