'I'm very bored,' Alice said. It was no longer a fresh observation, but it was more than ever true.
Tell you what, Dinah,' said Bessy, 'why don't you and me make some rice pudding? You know how to do that?'
'My mother doesn't let me cook. She says it's beneath my station.'
'Lord! Eleven years old and can't cook.' Bessy shook her head.
'I'd love to learn,' Alice insisted, 'if you'll teach me.'
By two o'clock that night all the visitor's had gone away, and while Bessy and Clara 'killed a pint', Fay and Alice ate the whole pot of rice pudding. Fay kept complaining that Alice had taken all the raisins for herself.
'I have not. I've had fewer raisins than you.'
'You have,' Fay insisted, on the verge of tears.
'Oh, for heaven's sake!' said Alice.
'You're a greedy old pig!'
'No I ain't! You're...' Alice caught her breath. She had said ain't, a word that she had never used in her life. But no one seemed to have noticed. Bessy was glassy-eyed from the liquor, and Clara had learned not to listen when Fay started to whine, as, after a night's work, she usually did.
'Yes you are,' Fay whined now. 'You're a pig, pig, pig!'
'No I ain't,' said the little black girl. 'I ain't a pig.'
'Come on, Dinah,' Bessy said. 'It's your bedtime.'
Bessy rocked back and forth in her rocker, humming a hymn. It was early—eleven o'clock on Monday morning, and things seemed to have settled into a comfortable routine. Little Dinah, now that she was over the shock of being turned black, had straightened herself out, and the only fuss she made now was the one fuss kids will make anywhere, any time—she fussed that she was bored. You'd think just being kidnapped would be enough for a child, but no, she had to do something.
Bessy did what she could. Yesterday she'd dug up a stack of Clara's old movie magazines that she'd tied up and stored in a spare bedroom to keep till the Boy Scouts came around on one of their paper drives. Wasn't a girl in the world that didn't like to read movie magazines. Not Dinah though. And Fay's comics, the same way—just turned up her nose at them. And then she'd holler because she didn't have anything to read! Well, try and reason with a child!
'There must be something,' Alice said. 'Don't you have any books?'
'Read that book you brought here.' 'I've read it. Twice.'
'I don't think all that reading's healthy for you. You'll ruin your eyes.'
'All right—then let me listen to the radio.'
'I told you—you can't turn the radio on when Clara's asleep. She don't sleep so good, and when she gets waked by noise she can make a real scene. Why don't you draw some pictures, like you did last night?' Bessy had been no little bit disturbed by Alice's scribbly, slashy drawings the evening before. She wondered if the girl might not be getting mentally. People that think and read too much, she was convinced, were in danger of getting mentally.
'Oh, I know I'm not any good at drawing. Don't you have any books?'
'You go look in my bedroom closet. There may be some books there that I never found to give to the Boy Scouts. But be quiet on those stairs!'
An hour later Bessy began to wonder what was keeping the girl so quiet, quietness being unnatural in a child, and went up to investigate. Even before she was in the room she could hear Alice giggling to herself. Trust a child to find mischief.
But when she opened the door, she was just sitting on the bed reading a big thick red book, which Bessy didn't remember having around the house.
'What you reading that's so amusing, child?'
Giggling, Alice lifted the book up so that Bessy could read the faded gilt letters on the cover: Feminine Hygiene, by L. T. Woodward, M.D.
'Lord, that ain't no fit book for young girls.' Bessy grabbed it and carried it downstairs to the kitchen, where she placed it on the top shelf of the cupboard, well out of Alice's reach. 'Books
like that are for when you get my age,' she admonished. 'You mean I can't read anything I want to?' At home I can.'
'This ain't your home, and I don't want to send you back to Baltimore with no funny ideas. So while I'm at it I'd better check what other trash I got in that closet up there.' Bessy laboured back up the stairs, fumbling for the gold-rimmed glasses she kept in her purse. It mattered little that she couldn't find them, for their chief purpose had been ornamental and ritualistic rather than optical. She rummaged in the mouldy carton of books on the floor of her closet. Out came Passion Fruit, Forever Amber, Mimi, Harlot of Babylon, and a dozen other paperback novels, their spines split with many readings, their soiled covers depicting more or less the same full-bosomed redhead or blonde or brunette in a torn blouse with a gun in her hand, or a sword, or a whip. In the end Bessy had to carry the whole carton down to the kitchen, leaving Alice only a Gideon Bible, a copy of The Little Engine That Could (Fay's?), and Prescott's The Conquest of Mexico. After further deliberation Bessy returned and removed the last-named book as well.
'Well gee, what am I going to read?' Alice demanded.
There's worse reading than the Bible. When I was a little girl, my Daddy read to us children every night from the Bible. Whatever else I may have to regret in my life, I ain't never regretted that.'
'Don't you ever read anything, Bessy? Even my mother read something.'
'No, I've never been much of a reader. 'Bout the only thing I ever look at any more is Sunrise, and a few magazines like that.'
'Could I look at those, then? Before you put them up on that shelf.'
'Oh, you can look at those all right. Ain't nothing in them to harm a young mind.'
'Bessy?' Alice asked a short time later, when they were both sitting in the living-room. 'Why do you read undertaking magazines?'
'Oh, I'm going to have me a nice big funeral one of these days, and I read through those magazines so I'll know what I'm putting my money into. There's more kinds of coffins and fancy trimmings these days than you'd believe possible, and each kind has got different advantages. Some coffins is got silk inside, and others is brocade, and I even read about one of Brussels lace. Wouldn't I like that! Costs a couple of hundred dollars more though. I didn't have any idea how complicated it all was till I moved in to this place. You see, I bought Green Pastures at auction, after the man who owned it, old Mr. Washburn, went and died, and after I moved in these magazines just kept right on coming to the address. I don't suppose they really belong to me, but the post office won't take them back, 'cause they're not first-class mail, so I always had 'em around the house. Then one day I got to looking at one. Well, you know how it says in Scripture—Vanity of vanities, the Preacher says, all is vanity. It's all just vanity and vexation, everything a person tries to do, and the wise man dieth even as the fool. And a bit farther on it says—there's a time to be born and a time to die. Well child, it's clear as day that this ain't my time to be born.'
It was Monday night, and Alice, sitting atop the kitchen table, was playing a game of chess with Dinah, who was winning. Since the chess pieces were only checkers and bottlecaps and medicine bottles, it sometimes was hard to remember just which pieces were which. Bessy, Clara, and Fay were sitting out in the living-room, waiting for a friend called John.
She was so tired of them, tired of Green Pastures and the unreasonable hours one had to keep here, tired of the Top Forty songs on the radio, and tired, especially, of her black skin. She vowed to herself, that when she got home, when the medicine wore off, she would never, never again wish for a suntan. Her skin would always be just as white as her mother's —a beautiful translucent sick-bed white.
'You're in check,' Dinah said. 'Why can't you keep your mind on the game?' She adjusted the position of the pink plastic doll (decently clad now in a handkerchief) so that it could concentrate better on the game.
Alice made a move.
'If you move there, I'll take your queen, stupid.' Alice took back the move.
'You should have castled on your last turn. Now it's too late.'
'If you
won't be quiet and let me concentrate...'
'Do you know what I think?' Dinah said meditatively—for her mind was not really on the game either. '... then I shall have to concede!' Alice concluded loftily. 'I think they must have had help, that's what I think.' 'Who?'
The kidnappers. Bessy and Harry and the one who said he was the chauffeur. They had help from someone who knew you. How else would they know Miss Godwin's car was broken down? How else would they know about me?'
'You don't exist,' said Alice.
'I could say the same of you if I wanted,' Dinah pointed out to the pink plastic doll. 'I was only trying to help.'
'Who do you think helped them? Uncle Jason? Miss Godwin? Don't be silly!'
'What about... Mrs. Buckler?'
A rather frightened look came into Alice's eyes. 1 told you never to mention Mrs. Buckler! You don't suppose that she... ?'
This conversation was interrupted by the ringing of the front door. Bessy peeked through the blinds in front of the picture window and announced, with some relief, that it was John. Alice pushed open the swinging door between the kitchen and the living-room just a crack to see him. He was a white man, and nearly as skinny as Clara, with a thin beak of a nose and pale, Wary eyes.
'Well, if it ain't Farron Stroud!' said Bessy heavily. 'What a pleasure to see you, Farron, after all this time.'
Farron Stroud moistened his lips and cleared his throat but still found himself without a voice.
'We ain't seen you for so long we thought you must be spending every night making election speeches. Can't read a newspaper these days, without seeing your face in it.'
'Um, as a matter of fact, I was just this evening... Um, where is... Um, I hope she isn't already ...'
'I'm right here, lover,' said Clara. 'If you'd look up from the floor a minute, you'd see me.'
Clara and Farron went upstairs together. Clara, who was wearing her usual levis, had removed the wide leather belt from them, and was thwacking it on her thigh energetically.
Bessy came into the kitchen and found Alice peeking out through the door, but she didn't seem put out by it. She turned on the radio, and for half an hour they listened to the Top Forty with the volume turned all the way up. That was how Alice liked best to listen, but Bessy hadn't allowed it because of the neighbours. The neighbours—and here it was after midnight!
Try and reason with an adult!
Chapter 10
'Don't you have any children of your own, Bessy?' Alice asked, early next morning, the morning of Tuesday the 3rd of July.
Bessy, who was still in bed, called upon the Lord in a tone of general, unspecific dissatisfaction.
'Because you said you did, and then, you know, you said you didn't.'
'Lord, child, ain't you starting off awful early in the day?' 'It's ten-thirty. I've been up for twenty minutes already, and I'm hungry.'
T swear, that mother of yours must not have fed you nuthin'. If you lived with me a while, I'd fatten you up sure enough. Skin-and-bones!'
'You didn't answer my question.'
'Look here, child—I don't have to answer your questions!'
'But this is your husband in the picture, isn't it? You said so last night.' Alice held up a gilt-framed snapshot of Bessy (though it was hard to see many points of correspondence between the woman in the photo, just pleasantly buxom, and the so-much-larger woman in the bed) and of a Negro sailor in dress whites with an arm around her waist.
'I guess he'll have to pass for a husband: I'm not going to find anything better now.'
'Is he dead? Or what?'
'Yes, he's dead. Though it ain't no business of yours, and I'll thank you kindly to keep your little brown nose out of my business. Lord!' She was out of bed and had wrapped herself in a cotton housedress. She took the snapshot out of Alice's hands and put it back on the dresser. Then, with the key that had been pinned to her nightgown, she unlocked the door, and she and Alice went downstairs for a breakfast of fried mush, Alice having learned, as her latest lesson in cooking, how to prepare the mush itself in advance.
It seemed to Alice that she had seldom eaten a breakfast quite so good.
Upstairs there was a great clamour and a clattering, after which a door slammed and Fay came running down the stairs, half undressed, and giggling furiously. Inexplicable vapours
followed in her wake. The door slammed again and Clara, in her nightgown, came to the head of the stairs where she screamed terrible things at Fay who had by now locked herself into the downstairs bathroom.
'God damn it, Fay, who told you you could use my cologne? Birdbrain! Idiot! Moron!' And other epithets too, more terrible but less strictly relevant.
'What's the .matter, Clara?' Bessy asked lazily, putting away the last dry dish into the cupboard and coming into the living-room.
'What's the matter! That idiot Fay spilled a whole bottle of my cologne, that's what's the matter! And woke me up when I've had about two hours of sleep, that's what's the matter! I can't keep a-thing around here, without that-----idiot breaking it in-pieces, that's what's the matter!'
'Tell you what, Clara—we'll get you a new bottle of that expensive cologne right the next time we're down by Woolworth's. And for the time being, you better get yourself a long hot bath, and Fay too, 'cause the two of you don't exactly smell kissin'-sweet, if you know what I mean.'
Clara tried to make her receding chin jut forward aggressively but only managed to convey what she might have looked like without this defect. 'I've had just about enough out of you, Bessy McKay! You and your crazy kidnapping schemes. If I didn't know that...
'Hush up about what you don't know, girl,' Bessy said, no longer lazily, 'Little pitchers got big ears.'
Clara's scrawny fist clenched about the cracked cologne bottle. For a moment Alice thought she would throw it at Bessy. Instead she stormed back to her bedroom.
Bessy settled down for a long day's rock (she could sit hours in that rocking chair, not doing a thing except rocking and humming), and Alice wandered over to the picture window to regard the weedy lawns and empty lots of North Tidewater Road. She imagined, rather listlessly, herself as a prisoner in a prison camp, where a beastly German officer threatened to torture her without ever quite getting around to it. She had to get back to her own lines with the secret off the German High Command, the secret that would win the war...
'Bessy,' she asked, 'do you want to buy some Spengler's Beer?'
'No thank you, child.'
A beer truck had stopped right in front of Green Pastures,
and a brawny, black-haired young man in a uniform with SPENGLER'S BEER embroidered on it in red was coming up the walk to the house. He stopped in his tracks and looked directly at Alice standing in the window.
'Because,' she went on, 'there's a man coming up to the house who's selling Splengler's Beer.'
'At this hour?' Bessy rocked forward, tilted herself to her feet, and joined Alice at the window. The Splengler's Beer man ground out the butt of a cigarette on Bessy's front steps, then came forward to knock on the door.
'You remember what you promised me, Dinah?'
'I'll go in the kitchen,' Alice promised meekly.
'It's too late for that now, he's seen you. Just put on your sunglasses and sit on the couch and no matter what happens you don't say a word. Just do whatever I say. Promise?'
'I promise.'
'If you don't, you may get me in a pile of trouble. You wouldn't want to do that, now would you? Aren't we good friends?'
Alice nodded. And it was true: she had come to like Bessy. Bessy might have, if she'd had a mind to, keep her asleep all the time with pills, but instead she'd been nice. She'd even been teaching her to cook.
Besides, a promise is a promise.
The man banged on the door impatiently: Bessy went into the foyer, where she was out of sight from the couch, and unlocked the door. 'The girls is both asleep, and you should know better 'n to come knocking at this hour. Come back around six o'clock—even that
's early—and ..
'You're Mrs. Elizabeth McKay?' the man asked, in the mumbly, uneducated accent of a poor white, an accent more offensive to Alice's ears that Bessy's own.
'That's who I is, but it ain't more than five minutes after eleven, and...'
'My name is Owen Gann,' he said. Then he said, 'Mumble, mumble, my credentials. Mumble, mumble, questions I'd like to mumble—inside, if I may.'
'Sure 'nough,' Bessy said, following him into the living-room. Her tone and manner had changed. Her shoulders were hunched up and she was bent forward at the waist, an attitude that made her look inches shorter. Beside the tall white man she seemed scarcely adult. Her face wore a wide, toothy grin, which was dismaying in its fixity and not like Bessy at all, not at all. The place ain't none too clean,' she complained in a whining tone. 'I try to make it look nice, the Lord knows, but what with one thing and another, one thing and another She ended with a sigh and a rolling of her eyes.
The man looked at Alice, incuriously, and looked away.
'Dinah honey, you run out to the kitchen and have yo'self a glass of milk, This gennulman and me's got a little business to discuss.'
As Alice was walking reluctantly into the kitchen, Bessy added: 'Dinah there is my sister's child. She only staying with me until Fanny can find herself a job.'
Before letting the door swing closed behind her, Alice took a last look at the Spengler's Beer man (who was, she was fairly sure, a policeman in disguise), but his attention was already directed back to Bessy.
After dutifully pouring out a glass of milk and taking one sip, Alice crept back to the door and pushed it open a crack, just enough to peek through. All she could see was the man's broad, muscly backside, and behind him the broader mass of Bessy. They spoke almost in whispers, and Alice could hear only a word now and then. One of those words was Dorman.
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