Whenever she came to town, Antoinette visited him. But Johnny was uncomfortable and embarrassed by his physical condition; sometimes he couldn't contain his anger. She had a soft gentle southern way of picking up his spirits and making him smile. But she couldn't persuade him to return for his last year of high school. Eventually she stopped trying. So did everyone else.
Three years after the accident, Johnny moved to one of those assisted living apartments for people with a disability. The government paid his rent and he received a Social Security check.
Maybe to supplement his income, maybe to keep himself busy, maybe to meet other people, he started selling clothes, purses, sunglasses, pencils, and other items on the corner of Galvez and Saint Bernard streets. He seemed to enjoy his life despite the worry it caused his mother and sisters.
LOUISA CALLED ANTOINETTE, telling her Johnny was in the hospital and it didn't look good. Antoinette took the first plane from Oakland, California, where she had moved after graduating college. She told her employer she had a family emergency and didn't know when she would be back. “If you can't hold the job, I understand.” Antoinette had money; she wasn't rich, but she was a smart investor.
At New Orleans International Airport, she took a limousine straight to Charity Hospital. The driver waited as she raced to Johnny's room. He was watching a rerun of Matlock on the television suspended from the ceiling just over the foot of his bed.
“Johnny, honey, are you okay? Are they taking care of you? What can I do for you?”
“Antoinette, don't make a fuss. Get me some red beans and rice.”
“Well, I declare,” said Louisa. “We been here for weeks.”
“Been here all day,” interrupted Alberta, also visibly annoyed by the request and by Antoinette's failure to acknowledge her and Louisa's presence, “and he didn't ask for one bean lessen on a bowl of beans.”
“Johnny trying to make it seem like we're not good sisters,” Louisa said. The pout of her mouth was even more pronounced than usual.
“Don't feel that way. How y'all doing, anyway?” Antoinette said, making matters worse, not better, with a statement that both sisters felt dismissive. “Johnny knows I like to feel needed. Anyway, I'm coming back tomorrow with those beans. If you need me before then, I'm staying at the Roosevelt Hotel. I wanna get a little rest. Here's the telephone number.” She wrote on a pad near his bed and then leaned over and kissed him solidly on the lips.
“Some things never change,” Louisa said sarcastically.
“Louisa and Alberta, why don't y'all come for dinner?”
“We're gonna stay with Johnny, Antoinette. Thanks for the invitation, though,” Alberta said, answering also for Louisa.
The next day Antoinette arrived as promised with red beans and rice. She had gone through considerable trouble to showcase her culinary skills. She persuaded one of the porters at the hotel to purchase a hot plate, two pots, some plastic storage dishes, a Styrofoam ice chest, a five-pound bag of rice and beans, along with a small slice of sausage. (Who would cook beans and rice without a little meat?) Then she sent him to borrow cooking utensils from the hotel kitchen, after they both realized they had forgotten them.
She brought the same meal day after day during that last week, although she knew Johnny would complain.
“They not like Wilhelmina's. I don't know what she used to put in hers, but something's missing. Maybe you could try a little more butter.” Antoinette would spend that evening making the adjustments.
“They still not right, Antoinette. Don't worry ‘bout it.”
“No, Johnny, I'm going to get it right. Let me try one more time. I know you really want this and, well, I want to make you happy.”
“Try putting a little more sugar. Not too sweet, though.”
“I'll try that.”
But the next day Johnny set the bowl aside, allowing his gray-green eyes to rest inside that fateful May morning.
HE WANTED to meet Wilhelmina eye to eye, embrace her without the intrusion of crutches under his arms. That morning, with indescribable deliberateness and determination, he skillfully hooked the handle of one of the two canes he kept in the bathroom onto the shower curtain rod and then hoisted himself like a weightless sail up and over the edge of the tub. He had cleared every anticipated obstacle when he slipped on the blue mat that Wilhelmina insisted gave a Home magazine elegance to their drab bathroom. He tried breaking his fall: He reached for a corner of the face bowl, the edge of the tub, and the rim of the toilet seat. But all he broke was that “damn mirror,” as it came to be called.
Wilhelmina dropped her pot of grits on the kitchen floor and almost slipped, rushing to the bathroom. Johnny was splattered across the cold linoleum. The blue mat was bunched in the corner near the toilet. Pieces of the broken mirror were scattered around. Saying nothing, she backed out of the room and reached for Johnny's crutches, which he kept in the hall on the floor just near the bathroom door. Retrieving them, she stepped inside the bathroom, once again, and placed them near Johnny. She walked back to the kitchen, without saying a word or even asking if he had been injured. Making any comment might trample his pride, which she was certain had been significantly bruised by the episode, especially since she had to provide assistance.
Johnny placed his hands at the bar of each crutch to lift himself to a sitting position. Then he pulled himself up until he was fully standing with the wooden supports under each arm. Finally, he slowly made his way to the kitchen, his upper body and crutches arriving slightly before his legs. Wilhelmina was on her knees, wiping up the grits.
“What happened, baby?” Johnny asked as he eased his bruised frame into the chair near the table where Wilhelmina had set their two plates for breakfast.
“Silly me. I dropped the pot. But I'm making some more.”
“Let's just have coffee.”
“No, Johnny. You know what they say about breakfast being so important.”
“Okay.” Johnny reached for his coffee and smiled.
Wilhelmina was right. He didn't need to prove anything— not to himself and certainly not to her.
WILHELMINA AND JOHNNY had lived together for four years. She had been impressed that first day they met at the corner of Galvez and Saint Bernard streets. His crutches buried under his armpits, he stood with a stately air near his folding table filled with sunglasses, T-shirts, and small leather wallets he made himself, along with pencils and ink pens, which were his hottest items.
“You had all this hair, all over your head, and I kept thinkin’ of those pictures of Frederick Douglass in the history books in the library,” Wilhelmina said months later after they had gotten to know each other. “Mr. Douglass was so brave and handsome … But I didn't want to say nothin’ ‘cause you might'd saw me as some fast woman, which I wasn't.”
Johnny hadn't delayed his compliments. “If I had you for my woman, I wouldn't have to sell this stuff. I'd already be rich,” he told her the day they met, exquisitely reshaping into a work of art the ordinariness that she knew had been her personal property since she learned her name.
Wilhelmina continued to pick up one pair of glasses, then another, ignoring what she later called Johnny's “freshness.”
“None of them do you justice. You're too pretty for them,” he continued. “Plus, they can't protect you against the sun like I can.
“A man couldn't help but feel he'd inherited the earth and all that was good and priceless surrounded him, if he had you.”
Finally she smiled. It took a lot of confidence for a man on crutches to flirt. She lingered longer, listening to him call people at the bus stop by name, as if he were operating a store.
Wilhelmina was striking—not New Orleans striking. Her skin wasn't red, honey gold, or near white. Her hair wasn't straight, though it did dance softly just above the top of her shoulder. Her hips were far from full. She was a plume-dark woman, thin as two rails, with a knack for fracturing verbs when she spoke excitedly.
The first time
Ruby Ann met the woman at their monthly Sunday family dinner, she followed Johnny as he went to the bathroom and begged him to leave her alone.
“You need a smart wife, son. How are you going to get anywhere with her? Just ‘cause you on crutches don't mean you have to settle for less than you deserve. Plus you a good-lookin’ man, you can get a better-looking woman. She's too skinny!”
“Mama, you gotta let me live my life. You can't tell me all the time what to do and what not to do. That's why I moved out. And if you keep acting like this, I'm not coming back no more for dinner.”
When Ruby Ann whispered at the next family dinner yet another disparaging remark about Wilhelmina, Johnny grabbed his crutches said good evening and walked out of the door. He came back two months later, only after Ruby Ann apologized to him and Wilhelmina—although Wilhelmina had never heard any of the dark comments that had been made about her. “I'm not going to say another word about that skinny black gal,” she told Louisa and Alberta. And she didn't. Ruby Ann died from a heart attack two years later.
PERSUADING WILHELMINA to live with him wasn't an easy feat. What man ever finds the direct path to a woman?
Johnny saw her every day Wilhelmina caught the bus at Galvez and Saint Bernard streets on her way home from the hotel where she made beds, cleaned toilets, changed towels, and pretended to be invisible whenever she came face-to-face with one of the White guests. He often fashioned a ring of words and hung them delicately on her ears, like diamonds, hoping to convince her to be his woman. While she agreed to join him at the Sunset Bar for Irish coffee, at the Circle Theater for a movie, and at Corpus Christi Church for ten o'clock mass, it was seven months before she went to his apartment in the Florida Avenue Project and another six months before she climbed into his bed.
It wasn't that she didn't want him. She wanted him from that night they sat in the balcony at the Circle Theater and he wrapped his arm around her shoulder. She knew, even on crutches, with legs nearly as stiff as two-by-fours, Johnny could protect her. She knew too that he wouldn't flirt in her presence with Creole girls the way Lawrence had done.
Wilhelmina had hoped to marry Lawrence, a college graduate who taught elementary school. “No, you didn't think that. I never said that. What gave you that impression?” Lawrence said the day she confronted him about his roving eyes and how she thought they were planning for a future together.
“Wilhelmina, you are a nice woman and all, but I have other plans.”
“You take yo’ other plans and get yo’ black butt out my place,” she said, standing with the door open but refusing to cry.
Things went from bad to worse when she met William, who kept her a prisoner in his apartment. He never invited his friends over to meet her and didn't take her out. She finally allowed herself to consider he might be ashamed of her; she moved in with a girlfriend from the hotel.
With Michael, Wilhelmina swore it would be different. It wasn't. She bought him shoes and shirts, cooked dinner, and did everything she could, but he took what she offered and left nothing on the table. “Didn't even leave me a decent tip,” she told her girlfriend when she arrived home one day to find all of his things missing from the closet and a note that said simply, “Thanks for being such a good woman. I know you gonna meet the right man one day.”
When Wilhelmina met Johnny, she actually had sworn off the male species. “Too much trouble, child. Too much trouble.” But she knew Johnny wasn't like the others. Her only worry was whether he would be able to satisfy her in the bed. “Not that I'm trying to sleep with him right away. But you know, I wonder if he can do it with his legs messed up and all,” she said to her friend Freda from the hotel.
“Girl. That's what you worried about. Me, I be thinking if he can take care of me. You know, pay my rent, and buy food and stuff like that, so I can quit this hotel and don't have to spend another day picking up dirty towels and cleaning dirty tubs behind people.”
“Freda, I ain't like you. I dream of love. Why you don't dream of it?”
“ ‘Cause it ain't nothing but a dream, that's why.” They laughed; there was nothing in either of their experiences that would dispute that conclusion—except Johnny, maybe.
Wilhelmina wondered if she and Johnny could spend a long rainy weekend together without any possibility of escape, not even through the dull, dated movies on television. She learned how silly she had been.
A week after she climbed into bed with Johnny, she moved into his apartment. She agreed to quit her job, after he asserted that it was a man's pleasure and duty to care for his woman. If she needed to go someplace, she could. If she needed to work, Johnny told her, they could work together. And they did.
THEY WERE AN ODD PAIR: He, short and ruddy-faced. She, tall and plum-dark. He, serious, bordering on melancholy. She, gay and smiling. Wilhelmina's magnetism pulled people to their weather-beaten table and prompted them to leave money in the couple's worn cigar box, even when they didn't buy anything.
Johnny's family took offense at them standing on the corner selling red, green, and blue pencils at twenty-five cents each, and sunglasses at five dollars apiece.
“It's begging. Lord, I'm glad Daddy not around to see you on the street like that,” Louisa said during one of the family dinners.
“We ain't beggin', Louisa. We're independent business-people. They got people like that all over New Orleans,” Wil-helmina shot back in defense of Johnny.
“I know that, but Johnny's better than they are. Maybe you don't know that.”
“I know it all right. I think you mad ‘cause he's with me. That's why you sayin’ this stuff.”
Then Louisa stopped talking, turning her attention to someone else or some other part of the room, which hurt Wil-helmina even more.
“Don't pay her no mind. She jealous that's all,” Johnny whispered in Wilhelmina's ear. “She doesn't have what we have.”
“What, Johnny?” Louisa asked, half angry because she couldn't hear what he was saying. He pulled the same trick on her, though: He looked around the room, never answering her question.
Wilhelmina and Johnny were at Galvez and Saint Bernard streets nearly every day During the week they watched young girls in plaid skirts, knee-high socks, and white blouses march into Corpus Christi School. At lunch, those same girls, loud and laughing, spilled onto the playground. Sundays, after mass, Wilhelmina and Johnny walked the two blocks to the Circle Theater. At the window, Johnny paid the three dollars for their admission, stopped at the concession stand for popcorn, sodas, and the Junior Mint candy Wilhelmina loved. She carried the refreshments, walking behind him as he placed his crutches on the step ahead of him and then swung his legs up to repeat the same action. It was a ritual: Sunday at the Circle.
Their whole life was a series of rituals: grits and cheese with scrambled eggs for breakfast during the week; fancy banana fritters on Sundays. Wilhelmina chose Johnny's clothes each morning. He brushed her hair at night—one hundred strokes.
FOR THREE DAYS BEFORE that fatal May day when Johnny fell in the bathroom, he had insomnia. He tried watching television, reading and even talking to himself. Nothing worked.
On the third night, as he sat at the kitchen table, looking out the window as if searching for the thief that stole his sleep, he felt something was about to happen to him. He always had insomnia before some major event, even when he didn't know a major event was about to occur.
“Ruby Ann said it was my guardian angel telling me to pay attention,” Johnny confided in Wilhelmina, who sat at the kitchen table, drinking coffee with chicory, so she could stay awake with him.
“Just before the accident, I couldn't sleep for a whole week. I mean, I'd go to bed and just lie there, my eyes wide open.
Sometimes I hummed a song in my head. Mostly I just looked up at the ceiling. I did that for a whole week.
“Something bad's going to happen, honey. Something real bad. I can feel it.”
“Johnny, stop that! This ain't no omen. You just got things on
yo’ mind keepin’ you up, that's all.”
Johnny sat in his wooden straight-back chair, his legs out in front, his crutches on the floor nearby like an obedient dog. An image of himself splitting in three flashed before him. He jumped, almost falling from his seat were it not for Wilhelmina reaching for him. He grabbed his crutches, tucked them under his arms, and stood before the full-length mirror, assuring himself he had not actually divided.
The next morning he tried the stunt in the bathroom, breaking the mirror Wilhelmina always kept on the floor near the bathroom tub. Johnny's reflection could be seen inside the shattered glass, just as he had seen it the night before.
After he collected himself and sat down at the kitchen table, he pleaded with Wilhelmina to stay home. Breaking a mirror was a bad omen, in anybody's book.
“It's not like we need the money. We get a good check from the government; it pays our bills. We're not going to hurt if we miss one day.”
“But, Johnny, people depend on us. Those children at Corpus Christi when they forget their pencils, they know they can get another one from us. And people used to seein’ us. Sometimes the day ain't right when we not there. Miss Thompson told me that one day. She say she came by on Thursday and we had gone. She say she was worried, won-derin’ where we was.”
Wilhelmina placed Johnny's plaid shirt on the bed along with his black pants. Then she put on her favorite lime green knit suit.
“I feel like a flower, Johnny. Do I look like one?” She hugged him, hoping to ease his fears.
“Yeah, you do. That's why we oughta stay home and get right back in bed.”
Wilhelmina smiled. She picked up the two shopping bags filled with sunglasses, shirts, a few purses, pens and pencils, and placed them near the front door. Then she cleared away the dishes from the kitchen table and went back to wait for Johnny as he dressed.
“You ready?” she called from the front door. The two walked out together, leaving behind the bathroom fall, the broken mirror, and the days of insomnia.
It's All Love Page 16