Now it was twenty-nine days later; she knew it was twenty-nine days because the aunts had stressed that she couldn’t wash the sheets on which Finch had last slept for twenty-eight days. The smell of those sheets had brought her comfort over the past month, the way the creamy sweet of her cold cream blended perfectly with the Royal Crown Finch rubbed nightly in his scalp. But last night she hadn’t been able to fall asleep clutching Finch’s pillow and taking in the scent of his hair pomade because the aunts had come over and stripped the bed themselves the day before. They’d come over every day since Finch had been declared missing and presumed dead. The uncles concocted desserts that begged up fleeting smiles from the girls, while the aunts propped Clarise between the two of them, taking turns squeezing the nape of her neck, helping her hold her head up when the girls were in the room; they cried less when they could look on their mother’s face.
Clarise was fading in and out still, which of course everyone blamed on her grief. Her pastor from the AME church stopped by once a week and told her things like “Joy cometh in the morning”; her best friend from high school called her daily with conversations that they’d had twenty years before, trying in vain to make Clarise laugh; Finch’s florist sent her a single red rose three, sometimes four times a week; the aunts brewed her tea, chamomile, spearmint, licorice. Everyone had their own prescription to save her from her grief. All to no avail. Because it wasn’t just her grief that was taking her over. It was the medicine.
This was 1965, and Elavil was being dispensed like lemon drops. And even though the drug had been a balm during the first days after Finch turned up missing, when Clarise’s emotions were oozing and running like pus from a picked-at scab, after Finch was declared dead, her doctor increased the dosage so she wouldn’t be devoured by her grief. He didn’t realize, though, that Clarise had a sensitivity to the drug; probably the same thing in her brain that gave her such a heightened sense of smell rebelled against the chemical rockabys. Now her senses were dimming on and off like a short-circuited night-light, so much so that she could barely manage to do the one thing that calmed her, knit.
This morning she tried. She wrapped the loop of yarn around the pointed end of the knitting needle, and then that navy haze dropped over her that always fell right after she took her morning pill. It was irritating, that damned haze, especially when it bunched up between her wrists and got tangled and she could barely work her knitting needles because of it. She was determined to knit through it, though. She pushed one needle between the looped thread, wrapped the thread around, and easily slid the finished stitch to the other needle, over and over. She was working up a steady clicking to the needles that sounded like a song; it had been so many days since she’d been able to do this. She completed one row, a second, a third. She used bright purple thread, too bright maybe because her eyes were starting to sting, and now tear, and that haze was dropping, so that all she could do was sit there and hold her needles until it lifted.
It wasn’t lifting. She blinked her eyes, trying to blink the haze from her eyes. Her vision cleared enough for her to drag across the room to get her sewing box, lift out her sharpest shears, and snip away at that navy haze wrapped around her hands, tangling up her yarns. She did. Parts of the navy were especially dense, and she had to grip and bear down hard with the scissors to get through it. Until the haze played a cruel trick, retreated suddenly, and it was the skin around her wrist that she sliced.
She didn’t even feel it. Wouldn’t even have known had it not been for the expression on Shern’s face when she came into her room to kiss her good-bye on her way to school, and she stood there in the archway of her mother’s bedroom door with such a horrified expression as if a scream had frozen itself on her face. And Clarise asked her what was wrong. “Talk to Mommie and tell me what is it,” she said with a tongue so heavy that it seemed to her it took hours to get the words out.
But all Shern could do was point to Clarise’s lap. It was only then that Clarise realized how that deceitful haze had duped her as she looked down and saw her wrists lying loosely in her lap, gaping quietly, spilling their contents like red satin ribbons unfurling gently to the floor.
When Til answered the phone to Shern’s broken, barely recognizable voice and she and Ness and Blue and Show hailed a cab to Chestnut Hill and rushed in on the house already emptied by the emergency crew, and the next-door neighbor told them what hospital, and they barrelled in on the emergency room, pleading: for information, for the girls, they were told they were too late.
Not too late for Clarise. Clarise would live, the hospital told them. She was under a thirty-day court-ordered commitment on her way right now to the Pennsylvania Institute for the Mentally Ill. All attempted suicides were handled this way. But they were too late for the girls. Children’s Services had already claimed them, had someone from Family Court retreive the girls. “Hysterical,” the aunts and uncles were told. “As you can imagine, those girls were hysterical.”
So Til sent Blue and Show back to Clarise’s house, to unspill Clarise’s blood if they could, but at least to remake the house into a place where the girls could return without the images of what had just run very far awry that morning. Too far awry even for Til and Ness to fathom. They shook their heads right now and tried to still their breathing as they sat facing each other huddled in a brown-aired room at 1801 Vine Street waiting to see the case manager assigned to the girls.
“Family Court, case managers, attempted suicides, I feel like I’m stuck in a bad dream that’s not adding up to anything that looks like sense. Just doesn’t add up, Ness,” Til said, seeing and not seeing the American flag standing behind a counter and between a door to an inner office and a wall where Lydon Johnson peered down from a scalloped gold frame. “Just doesn’t fit in with everything I know about Clarise’s constitution; she’s just not the kind to try to take her own life, just not, no way, just not.”
“I agree with you, Sister,” Ness said as she reached across to help Til pull her coat off her shoulders. She let her fingers rest on the fox-foot collar. “Remember how Clarise loved this collar when she was a little thing, used to call it her pet.”
“Do tell, she surely did.” Til sighed and then laughed and said, “All the children had some kind of relationship with this collar: Shern would try to feed it; that little Victoria would run, scared it was gonna come off the coat and bite her; and little Bliss would threaten to beat the collar up for her sister.”
“What you talking about?” Ness laughed too as she undid the buttons on her own coat. “Remember when Blue grabbed the coat out of your hands and threw it on the floor and told Bliss to go ahead and beat it up, stomp it to bits, he told her.”
“He sure did with his old silly self, probably had been sipping sherry when he did it, my good coat too.”
“And you let her do it too. You remember that part?”
“I do.” Til smiled. “Some of my best times been spent at Clarise and Finch’s on Sunday nights. Lord have mercy, and now Finch is gone and Clarise—mnh, I can’t figure, Ness, I just can’t figure. I do believe she was gonna come back to herself.”
“She was, I believe it too.”
“She was gonna get over Finch. It was gonna take her time, but she was gonna do it for the daughters.”
“And still can, Sister. This is just a temporary setback, I do believe. We’ll collect the daughters and help them and Brother and Brother and ourselves too; we’ll all get through this, Sister.”
“You’re nothing but right, Ness. The disturbing thing for me right now is that we have to sit here and wait for some case manager to make a—a what did they call it, a determination? Determination of what is my question.”
“Mine too, Sister. Now I definitely agree with you on how absurd that is. I mean, after all we’re the only known living blood relatives those daughters can lay claim to.”
“So why is my stomach flopping around like a tuna caught in a net over the fact that we even have to sit here and wait
like this, like we’re applying for a job selling secondhand TVs?”
The door next to the wall propping the American flag and under the Lyndon Johnson glossy opened, and Til looked beyond Ness’s furrowed brow and felt her heart tear. “Ness, this is a bad dream, it’s very bad, don’t turn around and look behind you, just talk to me, Ness, talk to me calm, talk to me sure.”
“I’m right here with you, Sister. Now you just breathe in and out deeply a few times. Whatever it is can’t be made better if you throw a fit, and by the looks on your face you’re headed in that direction.”
“Ness, haven’t we tried to live right?”
“We have.”
“Never hurt anybody unless it was to protect ourselves or something belonging to us.”
“Say it true, Sister. Say it true.”
“Use only the purest ingredients in our soaps, even been good stewards over the land Daddy left in our charge.”
“Well, well, well, Sister, you know what you talking about now, earning enough leasing fees on that land to keep us in stead for all our natural-born days should the soap business dry up.”
“Don’t complain much either, take each day as it comes, like the Word instructs us to.”
“What you leading up to, Sister? Come on with it now.”
“We send our tithing envelopes even when we don’t make it to the service.”
“Sister, Sister, I’m trying to stay with you, but you seeing something right now that’s got your face fixed like Satan himself is standing behind my head. You might as well as go on and tell me, ’cause you getting ready to explode anyhow. Tell me right now, Sister, tell me slow and soft and easy.”
“Ness, it’s that old, spiteful woman. The case manager for the daughters. It’s that fat-assed, pipe-mouthed, venom-spewing, Line ’Em Up Larry’s spiteful sister, Vie.”
Til’s voice went higher and louder with each description of Vie. Ness reached across and put her hands on Til’s knees because now they were going up and down too.
Then Vie shouted across the room, “You can call me what you want, but you’re a convicted felon, attempted murder, remember, Til, and I’m not placing those girls with you.”
It seemed to Ness as if the room were moving; it always seemed that way when Til was about to throw a fit. She was a solidly constructed woman, and even now in her sixties she had more muscle mass than fat. Til stood, and Ness did too and grabbed her, to hold her, to talk to her, to calm her down. But Til slipped through Ness’s grasp like lard.
Now Til was at the counter, banging at it over and over. “You have no right holding a grudge against me over what happened more than thirty years ago,” she yelled. “Everybody knew your brother’s pecker was smashed so no way could he be Clarise’s father, but he kept coming around like some kind of psycho, I was forced to go upside his head. Now you better just turn those girls over to my sister and me or I’m gonna do the same thing to you I did to Larry.”
Vie pressed the security buzzer, laughed out loud in Til’s face, and started backing up toward the door under Lyndon Johnson. “I’m not holding no grudge,” she said, “but I am upholding the law. And as a convicted felon you are unfit, just unfit for those girls to be placed with.”
A crowd had formed in the room, curiosity seekers walking through the corridor. Even Lyndon Johnson leaned as if to see what the commotion was.
Ness picked up Til’s coat, which had fallen to the floor. She squeezed the fox-foot collar to her chest. This was bad, very bad. She tried to hold on to her tears and move faster than the police who had just run through the door, dispersed the crowd, and were now heading with determination toward her ranting sister, Til.
PART TWO
2
The sun was hanging way back in the sky all feisty and red over Sixtieth Street; it could have been on a different hemisphere but was really just on the other side of town from where Clarise and Finch’s heaven of a house stood. It was afternoon on a chilly Saturday, and the doings were at their height. People flitted in and out of their usual Saturday stop-bys: Baron’s Meat and Poultry, Connie’s Cards ’n’ Gifts, Luke’s Good as New Shoe Repair. They were an eclectic mix. Girlfriends called to each other through the throngs of foot traffic, “Hey now, we got to talk.” Men breezed by other men, slapped hands, said things like “My main man, what you know good?” Bow-tied Muslims waved their newspapers with urgent gestures. “Free your minds,” they called; their voices commingling with the high-pitched humming sounds of tambourine-clapping sanctified women in long skirts and little hats doing a holy dance at the bus stop. The blind man held out his tin cup and jostled with the Jehovah’s Witnesses over prime standing space at the foot of the el. And all through here, the tunes of the Impressions floated from the outturned speakers at the Imperial Skating Rink; they lent smooth cha-cha–able rhythms to the mix as they crooned that everything was all right.
Then Ramona, the saucer-eyed, butter-toned West Philly head turner, emerged from Miss D’s beauty parlor, where she’d just gotten a hard press, blond streaks, and a French roll tucked up high and neat with fifty hairpins. She caught the “yeah yeah” rhythm of the Impressions’ song, but she didn’t sway or finger pop; she carried too much pent-up anger for such outwardly fanciful shows of pleasure. She did smirk at the fireball of a sun, though, which looked to her like a hot-behind woman calling on her lover, the night, to come on and blanket her. She liked to imagine how the sun must be undressing herself for the night right now because such imaginings disrupted the predictability about her own life: her Lit Brothers paycheck down to the penny where she worked in the bargain basement as the assistant buyer; the songs her gospel choir sang every Second Sunday; the catcalls of “Hey, foxy lady,” whenever she walked by the opened door of the Swank Club; more foster children arriving from the state for her mother to raise temporarily, like the three Vie was getting ready to drop off. Three girls. Ramona especially hated the girls.
She made quick loops through the assemblages of foot traffic on this five-block commercial stretch that fringed a middling-type neighborhood of the not rich, not poor, but sometimes broke till payday; where the consistent salute of the row houses was comforting to the mostly black folks who lived there and made them feel communal and blessed that they owned these patches of property to refinance to send their children to a teachers’ college. Ramona felt neither communal nor blessed, so she avoided conversation with the men who’d want to flirt, the women who’d want to gossip, the children who were never cute to her.
She looked straight ahead as she walked. She felt as she imagined the sun did right now: itching for the night to come, needing to break the routine, be blanketed herself after her hardworking week. Except that Ramona didn’t have the expanse of the sky to put on her seductress dance, only the tiny row house on Addison Street where she lived with Mae, her mother, who had a lazy eye and who made her living by taking in foster children from the state. Nor was the one who Ramona would beckon as powerful as the night. Tyrone. Nice enough, seemed devoted to her, but lacked a city slickness she had come to expect in her men.
She walked fast, deliberately, trying to get what she needed from Sixtieth Street and make it home in time for her appointment with Vie to receive this new crop of foster children being dropped off. For once Ramona wished her mother would be there—these three girls would most likely be severely traumatized, and Ramona never knew what to do about the traumatized—but her mother, Mae, had gone to see about her ailing sister in Buffalo, so Ramona was left not only to cook and clean and otherwise care for the girls but also to be a pillow for them to cry into when their grief came down. That part she just couldn’t do, especially for the girls.
She turned into Darlene’s hosiery, where they were throwing in a garter belt with the purchase of six pair of nylons. She chose the black garter belt from among the inducements Darlene offered and managed a hurried “uh-huh” and “just fine” to Darlene’s queries about Mae.
“Hear she’s gone to Buffalo to se
e after her sister,” Darlene said. “Keeping her in prayer, you tell her that; tell her I’m holding her Playtex Eighteen Hour stretch too. Don’t forget now, Ramona. Just came in in that beige color she wanted. A month from Tuesday she’ll be back, right? You minding the foster kids, for her, huh? Better her than me taking that ride; I’d rather walk through Dead Block at twilight and deal with the ghost of Donald Booker than suffer through ten hours on a Trailways bus.”
Ramona didn’t interrupt Darlene as she went on to talk about Donald Booker, the bad seed white boy who had disappeared in the park almost twenty years ago, and to say there’d been another sighting earlier that day. Ramona hated ghost stories, and this one made her chest go tight. She rushed to get to the door as Darlene’s voice ushered her out, and she left clutching her box of smoke-colored hose. Even though her mother always told her those dark stockings on her light legs looked whorish. “Get the cinnamon-colored; that’s the shade a girl who purports to be a Christian like you should be wearing,” Mae always said. Ramona shook off her mother’s voice about the color of stockings. Least she could do was show off her legs in the shade she wanted, especially after being saddled with grief-stricken girls until Mae got back.
She passed the five-and-dime where the window was done up in an oversized box of Jean Naté toilet water. “The scent for all of his senses,” the sign read. The bright yellow box stopped Ramona, made her back up to gaze in the five-and-dime’s window. She fingered the change from her stockings, which she’d dropped into her coat pocket. “A dollar and nine cents,” the sign seemed to whisper, “splash on this, and he’ll be all over you for a well-spent dollar nine.”
Tempest Rising Page 4