She feels a hand on her arm, hears a woman’s voice say, “Are you all right’?” and is aware that she has been murmuring to herself. “I am,” she hears herself say softly to the strange white face looking concernedly at her, “I am, I am, I am.” The very words she would scream over Mr Johnson’s body after she had shot him.
When she finds the gun in the park, she is sure she has been chosen. The young black man in a grey sweatsuit appearing suddenly around a bend in the path, racing past, then disappearing; the sound of an object falling in the hedge next to her; the two policemen, black and white, appearing for an instant, guns drawn, then disappearing too: everything had seemed providential. Heaven sent. She picks up the gun and puts it in her purse, next to Mr Johnson’s card. She has been chosen – by Mr Johnson himself and by the black stranger who has miraculously appeared to hand over his weapon, the instrument of her deliverance.
And when, just before she shoots Mr Johnson, she speaks to him in her Scottish accent and sees on his face, momentarily, before the first bullet hits him and he staggers back, a look of recognition, a memory that went beyond the woman he helped on the street and welcomed into his home, she feels – the smoking gun in her hand – as exultant as a soldier celebrating that she is alive and that it is the body of her enemy that lies in its blood on the elegant Persian carpet. Nor has she been just a soldier. In that large sunfilled room with its glorious view of the city, exactly like the one she has been forced by Mr Johnson to give up, surrounded by his valuable American paintings and sculptures, she has become beyond value herself. She has become a patriot. America is now a better, safer place. Her son and all the other children of America, black and white, are now forever safe from the man whom she has killed.
It is then that she hears the sound, unintelligible, but distinctly human, and turns to the invalid in her wheelchair, jerking even more frantically than usual, and shoots her without anger, but also without compassion. Then she throws away the gun in disgust, opens the door of the apartment and confidently enters the corridor.
I listened to Fiona. I had not been smart enough to think of making Mr Johnson my accomplice in bringing about his own death. He had done it himself. It was he, not I, who had outraged her as an individual; he, not I, who had conferred, in her words, his all-else-effacing whiteness upon her; he, not I, who had made her feel annihilated, stripped of her very self, of everything that had once made her who she was. I was grateful to him for that.
Fiona was saying now that as she walked the street amid the smell of garbage, she had wanted to shout over the whine and jangle of the garbage trucks, jubilantly, for all to hear, that her enemy was dead and she had killed him to prevent him from killing her. Then she had realized that walking with her on the street, keeping pace with her, and unremarked and unremarkable like her, she who had just killed, were all the other Mr Johnsons who had not revealed themselves to her, and that, therefore, she, her child and all the children of America were no safer now than they had been before she murdered Mr Johnson.
She panicked and felt vulnerable. She remembered that the gun – with her fingerprints on it – was on the floor of Mr Johnson’s apartment where she had thrown it (in disgust after shooting the invalid); that the doorman, letting her into the apartment building, had recognized and greeted her and said goodbye to her pleasantly as she left; and that the click, which had seemed so much to mark her triumphant entry, unafraid, this time, into the corridor where he had once terrified her, only meant that the door to Mr Johnson’s apartment was locked and she could not enter it again.
Walking on the street, still unremarked and unremarkable, she felt herself suddenly watched suspiciously by people to whom she could not explain why she had killed a man who had never laid a hand on her except to help her up after she had fallen. She heard cries of outrage at the murder of the invalid, and saw herself pursued, caught and hung from a tree, her hands tied behind her back, and those same people among whom she was walking, now unremarked and unremarkable, looking gleefully up at her. She decided then to give herself up. That was why, she said, she had come to me.
“I only hope Mike will be safe on that island,” she said. I didn’t answer, so she continued, “Tom couldn’t possibly want to bring him back here. He’s too busy with his job to take care of him. Besides, he wouldn’t want Mike to live here where his mother is a murderess, don’t you think?”
I didn’t understand her logic. There were more spouses and offspring of murderers living in America – because there were more murderers in America – than there were living in any other country in the world.
Fiona asked, “Did you know there are snakes on that island?”
I knew. I had been afraid of them myself. Deadly snakes, called fer-de-lance, not native to the island, had been introduced by slave owners and released into the hills to discourage their property from running away. But I told Fiona I didn’t know. I asked her about them.
When she was there, she said, on her way from Edinburgh to America, they had staged a snake and mongoose fight for her. The snake, a full grown adult, had been killed. But, a few days later, a child had been bitten by another snake, a baby, only a few days old, but whose venom was as deadly as an adult’s, and the child had died because, on that snake-infested island, the hospital had run out of serum with which to treat it.
“But Mike will be safe there,” she said. “Safer than he could ever be in this godforsaken country. Don’t you think so?”
I didn’t need to think. I knew that he would be. I kept silent.
Fiona said, “I feel so free! So very, very free!”
I felt my old anger and resentment, which I thought I had long ago laid to rest, begin to rise. She was about to be imprisoned for a very long time, perhaps even to be legally killed, and she was talking about being free. I knew what she meant. She had, finally, as I would never be able to, put down her burden of being black in America. She had rid herself of husband and son. She had made herself white again. Whiteness, after all, had not been dispensable for her.
I said enviously, viciously, “You didn’t have to kill a white man to get rid of a pair of niggers.”
I had taken her by surprise.
She said, “What did you just say?”
I repeated it.
She said, “Don’t you dare call my son that.” Her eyes were blazing.
I said, “Mr Johnson would have been proud of you. You’ve done his dirty work for him. You’ve reclaimed a nigger-lover. But no matter what you do now, you’re still a nigger-lover. You’ve got a nigger son.” Then I added, because I envied her and wanted to hurt her as much as possible, “You’re one of us.”
“Bastard!” she screamed.
I despised her. Immigrant, like me, she was the immigrant to America that I could never be. I began to call her softly, with deep satisfaction, all the insulting names for white in America that I had made it my business to learn and had been careful, before now, not openly to use. Every time she tried to speak, I raised my voice above hers. Watching with pleasure her indignant, reddened face, I repeated the demeaning names. I became transported, lost in the sudden joy of my unexpected outburst, as though, throughout my life in America, I had been building all along, unknowingly, towards this moment of liberating outpouring.
When, finally, I stopped, Fiona exploded. She stood up. She raised her voice over mine and called me nigger. She called me spook. She called me coon. She called me nap, satchel-mouth, jigaboo. She called me ape. She called me other names, many, many other names. She described me angrily in our country’s terms, using words to name me that I had learned long ago and had forgotten. I recognized a fellow scholar. I acknowledged her obsession. She, too, had felt impelled to dig out and become familiar with all the names that existed in our country for me and for her husband and for her child. I understood, more than from anything she had told me before, the depths of her anxiety. She had even, this gentile, this shiksa, called me schwartzer. She stopped screaming and sat down and pu
t her hands to her face. I watched her breathe deeply in and out a few times. I heard her say, “My God! Oh, my God!”
I felt the gooseflesh on my skin as if each pore was an outlet for Fiona’s anguish. But I refused to permit myself to feel sorry for her. I went into the reception room. I didn’t want to look upon her desperation anymore. Jennifer looked interrogatively up at me. I told her only that she could leave, that I would close up. When the police arrived, I told them where Fiona was. Without a word to her, I watched them lead her away. But, I decided, I would not send her a bill for this visit.
The telephone rang. But it wasn’t Peggy. It was Paul. He wanted to drive with me tomorrow to C.B.’s funeral. After I hung up, I closed the office and went outside where Franz was waiting to drive me home for the last time.
PART THREE
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
That night, for the first time in years, I dreamt of Beatrice. I was sleeping on a bed next to her and birds, singing in the mango tree in the yard, laden with ripe fruit, had awakened me. In the dream, I lay contentedly next to her and listened to the birds. The smell of ripe mangoes and of Beatrice was as comforting as a childhood memory. But I had never slept in a house with a mango tree in its backyard and had never awakened, in a bed or anywhere else, to find Beatrice next to me. Now, I awoke in my high-rise apartment, my eyes still closed, the sounds and scents of my dream all about me. I heard myself breathing deeply, evenly. Gradually, the singing of the birds and the nostalgic smell of mangoes and of Beatrice, as I had learned to know it the last time I was on her island, disappeared. Now I heard only the steady, quietly efficient, mechanical throbbing – louder now than the beating of my heart – of the apartment building. I reluctantly opened my eyes. I thought of calling Peggy, but it was nine o’clock, only six in California, and I didn’t want to wake her. Besides, it was time to get ready for Red’s funeral.
But as I stood under the jet of water and adjusted it, I found myself thinking of Craig, the fellow student Peggy had been in love with at Berkeley, who was now a professor of music at Stanford. I saw his white face, which Peggy’s parents had objected to, lying on a pillow next to hers, his arm thrown, as I had sometimes awakened to find my own, across her naked body. My eyes were closed. The water was deliciously warm on my body. There was no steam in the room. The efficient fan made it as comfortable as though I were bathing outside on a Caribbean island. But I felt threatened by that recumbent and proprietary arm I had imagined. It lay beyond the capacity of my wealth and my professional reputation to protect me from my jealousy.
I chided myself. Peggy had postponed our marriage until after her parents were dead, because she didn’t want to hurt them, but she never ceased to tell me how handsome I was. But, the next moment, I had replaced Craig with someone else, this time wholly of my imagination – a Japanese-American like herself, a man, that is, of her own kind, whom her parents knew instinctively was more suitable than I as a lover and husband. His black moustache stood out, well-trimmed, against his skin. He was lithe, small-boned, muscular. His strong fingers, karate-trained, caressed Peggy’s straight oriental pubic hair authoritatively, without racial diffidence, until she began to move in the way I knew so well…
The doorbell rang. I opened my eyes. I turned off the shower and stood before the mirror. I looked at my reflection as I dried myself – my flared nose, thick lips, short curly hair encroaching low on my narrow forehead. Peggy, playfully refusing me, often sent me off to find Masai maidens and long-legged Caucasian models. She would ask, laughing, “What do you see in a short little Jap like me?”
I put on my robe and went to open the door for Paul. He was carrying a large cardboard box in both hands and, under an arm, in its case, was his flute. I remembered. It was Halloween. There were costumes in that box, fifteen small, satiny colourful costumes with wire-stiff tails, depicting rats and a large one for the Pied Piper of Hamelin. But, as he entered the apartment and set the box down on the floor, Paul, in his black mourning suit, looked a very sad Piper-to-be.
We shook hands. He wanted coffee and went into the kitchen to make some for us. I could see he was in no mood to talk. Selwyn had told me of Paul’s attempts to meet with Red. During every one of his first few years in America, he had given a free concert in the ghetto. He put up huge posters bearing his picture and his name. The posters were intended to work like magnets. They were to draw Red out from his hiding place in the ghetto. But the posters, Selwyn said, had not worked. Red had never once shown up. So, after three or four years, Paul had given up his concerts and had substituted his annual Halloween excursions for them.
A little later, from my bedroom, I heard him playing his flute. But the mournful tune sounded more like a farewell to Red, about to depart permanently from the ghetto, than like the attractive melody that could tempt fifteen costumed youngsters out of it, for one night, to follow Paul from luxurious apartment to luxurious apartment, in the prestigious neighbourhood where he and I lived.
The music stopped. Paul entered the bedroom with two cups of coffee and placed one on the dresser before which I was standing, putting on my tie. I watched him in the mirror, sitting on the edge of the bed, looking at the cup of coffee on the floor at his feet and hitting the open palm of one hand listlessly with the white gloves he held in the other.
I said, “Franz and I split. He’s not going to be my chauffeur anymore.” And I told him about Franz’s offer of a replacement.
Paul stopped hitting his palm with the gloves, became serious, watched my reflection looking in the mirror at him and said, “So what’re you going to do about the man you couldn’t do without?”
“Franz has very good judgement,” I said. I trust him. If he says the man is good, I’m sure he’ll be.”
Paul said, “You know, of course, what that man will be.”
“Very good. I’m sure of it.”
“And black.”
One Sunday, a couple of years before, Franz had driven me to Paul’s for brunch and we had seen Paul, carrying two full grocery bags, about to enter his building.
Franz must have read the review of Paul’s concert performance the night before. He said to him, “Mr Paul, you and the Doc here are a real credit to your race. Your people must be really proud of you.”
Paul smiled and did not answer him. But when he and I were waiting in the lobby for the elevator, he said, “The next time I’ll ask your man to tell me what my race is. He seems to know.”
Now, putting on my coat, I said to Paul, “It doesn’t matter, does it? So long as the man is courteous, respectful and a good driver. Does it?”
Paul said, “That’s not the point…”
But he didn’t say any more. The buzzer sounded. The doorman announced that the driver was in the lobby.
“Ready?” I asked Paul.
He nodded. We descended to the lobby. And Paul was right. The man Franz had replaced himself with was a black man.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
His name was Roscoe. Sitting with Paul in the back of the car, it was strange, after the years of looking at Franz’s thick mane, to be looking at the short, spring-coiled, grey and white hair above Roscoe’s broad neck. I remembered my father.
On Saturdays, I used to drive with him along the unfamiliarly steep, curving roads on Beatrice’s island where he was the new magistrate. My father, concentrating, driving his new car inexpertly, made me sit in the back seat and hardly spoke to me. I looked at the lush, precipitous drops below the winding road, so different from the bare, limestone features of my native island, and, every now and then, at the short black-and-white hair coiled like miniature springs at the back of my father’s head.
We had been living on the island barely a year. The small Protestant community, eager for recruits, especially prominent recruits such as someone in my father’s official position, had embraced us. There had been parties, announcements, introductions and presentations at church. There was the large government-owned house on the peninsula overlooking the harbou
r. And there was the new car, my father’s first. The long years of study by correspondence courses – while he worked his way up from elementary school teacher, himself just out of elementary school, to headmaster and village elderman, then to university graduate and, finally, holder of a law degree – that long journey – had paid off. But my father wasn’t satisfied. He had already started work, through more correspondence courses, on a master’s degree in Law.
I was sick in bed with chicken pox on the Saturday during the rainy season when they found him with a broken neck in his car, in one of the deep ravines below the road. I turned away from Roscoe’s neck and, through the window, saw the garbage piled high on either side of the street. Soon, we were in front of the funeral home. There was garbage on the pavement on both sides of it, but the pavement in front of it was clean. Selwyn and a white man were standing and talking to each other on the pavement.
Paul and I greeted Selwyn and nodded to the stranger. Selwyn was chuckling and watching Paul and me closely. He made no attempt to introduce the stranger. The stranger smiled, held out his hand to Paul and me in turn, and greeted us by name. His accent was American. I was surprised how comfortable he looked, standing with us on the ghetto pavement. Selwyn began to laugh.
Prisnms Page 9