Now as she sat at the window, waiting to see the aunts and uncles walk through the courtyard, she wondered why he’d left the note upstairs on her bureau. Why not in the breakfast room on the tack board or in his office, where he listed the schedule of halls she’d need to check out, even in the dining room on the fancy notepad next to the phone?
Then there was the passbook for the savings account. He’d always kept it in the top drawer of his chest right next to the thin nylon socks he wore to church. Suddenly it was in the bureau drawer where Clarise stored her lacy French-cut bras, the ones she’d wear when the girls were at their Scout meetings on Friday nights and she’d primp into his studio, where Finch was preparing the food for some lavish Saturday event, and she’d have her top unbuttoned, two, three buttons down, and just the hint of her flesh pushing itself up through the lace did as much for Finch as if she’d paraded in there butt naked. He’d work the dials on the stove then, like a pilot putting his craft on automatic, and turn his attention to Clarise, who’d unwrap her nature all over him and whine and hiss and coo so until Finch was singing opera by the time he got back to his stove.
Now she thought about the passbook too, couldn’t figure why he’d moved it from his sock drawer and placed it with her good bras instead. It had taken her almost a week to find it; with Finch missing and presumed dead, she had no reason to dress her breasts so. But on the day of his memorial service—they couldn’t call it a funeral because there was no body to lower into the ground—she needed a black bra since she was in mourning and would be dressed in black from the netting around her hat to the supersheer nylon hose, and her only black bras were lacy and in her good bra drawer. That’s when she’d found the bankbook. That’s also when the haze started to darken her world. As if it weren’t already dark enough because of her grief, which was so tight around her she couldn’t poke a hole in it with her sharpest nail. Finch after all had been her only love since she was sweet sixteen. They’d even breathed in sync, as her aunt Til reminded her when she’d tell her it was okay to grieve. Even when Finch interrupted his breaths to snort occasionally, Clarise would anticipate, would hold her own breath for the count of three; then both their chests would rise again and fall to their own syncopated beat. Now the air around her moaned in grief for this sad solo of a breath that should be a duet.
Her grief, though, had a naturalness about it; it was smoky and foggy and still let in light. But the haze that began to fall right about the same time that she’d found the bankbook was dripping navy, slowly at first, as her doctor increased the prescription for her nerves in small degrees, until there was just the blue. So by the time the insurance policy surfaced, the one that was above and beyond the substantial whole life policy Finch had left, the one that the aunts had found between the mattress and box spring after they’d stripped down the bed on the twenty-eighth day, the haze was falling and lifting so often that Clarise couldn’t tell if she was blinking erratically, or if the blinds in her room were opening and shutting on their own, or if the daylight was obliterated behind the night only to return again a few minutes later.
She pulled her mind from the haze and her Finch because the aunts and uncles had just emerged into the courtyard under her window. They walked four across, her uncle Blue tall and graceful in his black and tweed chesterfield, and next to him Til with the perfectly straight back, then Ness tipping along in her high-heel boots holding on to Show’s arm, and Show in a ten-gallon top hat to give himself some height. She pressed her fingers to her lips when she saw them and blew a kiss through the chain-link screen covering the window. How blessed she felt to have them in her life. She was about to close her eyes and whisper a prayer of gratitude, but right then she let out a small scream instead. Suddenly she remembered what revelation had tried to come to her earlier as the aunts massaged her hands. It did come to her now, tiptoed into her head, sat in a facing chair, tapped on her knee, said, “Here I am.” She screamed louder now. It had nothing to do with the flickering haze or her Finch, but everything to do with her girls. They weren’t with the aunts and uncles. My God, my God, why hadn’t she seen it before? They’d never been with them, the whole month she’d been locked away in this crazy house. Wouldn’t the aunts have made sure she talked to the girls on the phone had they been tucked away safely in their Queen Street row house? And if she knew her Uncle Blue, he surely would have snuck Shern in, told the guard she was a young-looking sixteen. At the very least they would have stood the girls in the courtyard under her window so they could blow one another kisses through the chain-link screen. Where were her girls? “My God!” She was hollering out loud now. “My girls, my girls, where are my girls?” She banged against the chain-link screen to try to get the aunts and uncles to hear her, to turn around, to explain to her what had happened to Shern and Victoria and Bliss. She jumped up from the chair, lifted the chair and threw it against the window, picked it up and threw it again. She felt helpless, hopeless, she had to know about her girls.
The nurse was in the room now; she could smell the White-All shoe polish. A whole host of people were in the room; she didn’t even need to turn around to confirm it, their various scents were so crowding the air at her back. And now she was in their clutches, two, four, six, eight sets of hands had her, all talking fast, demanding so many milligrams of this, liters of that, and then the puncture in her buttock, and she could feel it streaming all around her, except now it was tighter than a haze and darker than navy; it was thick like gumbo and black as pitch tar and completely surrounded her. She couldn’t see through it, or hear through it, or even smell through it, except for the tiniest pinhole that let in a ray of ether that went straight to her nose and kept her hanging on. And of course she couldn’t have known that her status in this mental hospital came up for review that following day. It had been a month. They couldn’t hold her longer than this without her permission. Unless of course she demonstrated that she would pose a danger to herself or others if she were released. Then they could hold her, could even restrict her visitors in fourteen-day allotments. Which of course now they were going to do.
10
That Addison Street row house was calm for a change. More than quiet, it was actually absent of the bitterness that usually kept the air there unsettled. The air had a snug feel now, like a contented child falling off to sleep, like Victoria, all cried out and napping on Ramona’s bed.
Ramona hadn’t been able to summon the right words to apologize to Victoria for slapping her, didn’t know how to explain to the child that for fifteen years she’d seen fosters come and go, she’d washed their clothes, cleaned their dirt rings from the tub, combed their hair, sometimes even wiped the remnants from their diarrhea-stricken behinds; never ever had even one of them offered to move even a plate from the table; Mae spoiled them that way. And it was actually easier for Ramona because she never had to worry about getting too close or feeling too sorry watching their childhoods wrinkle and sag as they were shuttled in and out of the temporary, tenuous haven of Mae’s, Mae’s house often just a stop-off between the hell they were leaving and the one they would return to. She could douse them all with her hatred while Mae forced her to wait on them hand and foot. But now this one had dared to step out of the mold and offer to help, even poked around in the bitterness and stirred up other than the hate that Ramona felt for every child who’d come through there. She didn’t know how to explain any of it to Victoria or how to say she was sorry. But everything she did from that moment on said, “I’m sorry.” When she held Victoria to her like she thought a mother would, even though Ramona really couldn’t know what a mother’s hold felt like, she was saying, “I’m sorry.” And when she gently dabbed Victoria’s lips with ice, she was saying, “I’m sorry.” And when she let Victoria in her room while she did her nails—she never let the fosters in her room—she was saying, “I’m sorry.” And when Victoria fell asleep propped up in the bed and Ramona slid her shoes from her feet and covered her over with her good woolen satin-tri
mmed blanket, she was saying, “I’m sorry.” Now, as Victoria slept, as Ramona crept about, gingerly removing her navy and gold choir robe from the plastic bag, deciding if she needed to give it a steam iron, the air in the house this Sunday almost had a redemptive feel.
Even though Mae couldn’t feel it as she stumbled through the front door.
Mae was back from Buffalo like gangbusters, two days early, Sunday instead of Tuesday. She had traveled back to Philadelphia with Addison, the eighteen-year-old delinquent son of her ailing sister slung over her arm like he was a good leather purse. She’d had to sneak him out of Buffalo under the cover of night so the daddy of the poor teen he’d gotten pregnant wouldn’t shoot him. “He’s gonna kill me,” Addison had cried in his aunt Mae’s arms. “It ain’t even been proven that it’s mine, and her old man is sitting in his car right in front of this door with his pistol cocked, and I know he’s gonna try to shoot me dead.”
Mae told him to throw some things in a paper bag; they would leave through the kitchen and down the alleyway, bound for Philly that very night to the street whose name he bore.
This nephew, Addison, was Mae’s favorite child in all the world, partly because he was born in her living room back in 1947. She’d just had a major win at a high-stakes poker game, and that, plus what she got from the sale of her tiny ace, deuce, tre on Mole Street, allowed her to buy her dream house on Addison Street: three bedrooms, a porch, a yard, and a concrete basement. She was the first black person to claim that block of Addison Street as home. With her five-year-old cupid doll daughter, Ramona, to help, she kept her mortgage current by taking care of the children of her white neighbors, until the day she unwrinkled the piece of paper one of her charges was using as a toy ball, and she read the bold-lettered flyer that said, “Have you seen your new neighbor? Now is the time to act. Because once the influx has taken hold, the value of your house will plummet. With 25 years in the real estate business, we can sell your home at an attractive price in under 60 days. We urge you to act—Now!”
Mae was so incensed that she was being used to bust the block in that way that she told each mother she could no longer take care of her bad-assed children, and don’t even be thinking about asking her to clean their houses. So she cleaned her own house and loved her little dream house all the more. She taught Ramona how to clean, even how to shine the windows with newspaper and vinegar. She’d show them who the unclean were and how to raise a child. So she took to spanking Ramona too, whenever she misstepped, and even when she didn’t; just as a preventive, she’d smack her soundly around the meaty part of her legs with the ironing cord until she saw the welts that let her know she had gotten her good.
But even with her immaculate little dream house, and well-behaved cupid doll daughter, Mae needed income to keep her mortgage current. So she sought out something half days with the city so she wouldn’t have to pay a baby-sitter to watch Ramona when she got in from school. When the city job didn’t materialize, she waited tables at night after she put Ramona to bed, but she couldn’t tolerate all those hours on her feet. So she settled on just parlaying what scrapings together she had left from the sale of her Mole Street house into future earnings at the card table. She’d always been lucky when she sat down to spread her cards; looked like her father, and as the old folks said, “Girl look like her father always have luck with money, when she look like her mother, money slide between her fingers like a clump of melting lard, but that Mae, Lord have mercy, look just like her daddy even down to that lazy eye she got. Can’t nobody whip her at cards when she lay that lazy eye on them.”
So she played cards to pay her bills: bid whisk, pinochle, spades, poker, five hundred gin rummy, tunk; she’d play anything that had a wager attached. And though she was winning handsomely, card playing too had its drawbacks. She had to go all the way downtown to Clara Jane’s to play, and sometimes people paid her her winnings in ways that were not immediately negotiable: a handmade lace tablecloth; a bond that couldn’t be redeemed for two more years; a free hack for a month to take her to and from grocery shopping. Then one night, perched at the card table downtown in Clara Jane’s basement, tired and low, her lazy eye drooping so much that she couldn’t hold on to her good poker face, the game so intense people had even stopped talking stuff about each other’s mommas, a child came up on Mae from behind and wiped her sticky fingers on her neck. It shocked Mae because she knew Clara Jane was childless. “Lord have mercy, Clara Jane, where in the hell this child come from, scaring the mess outta me like this, got me almost ready to expose my hand?” Then Clara Jane told Mae that was her foster; child had been turned over to the state because her mother couldn’t do for her. She got monthly upkeep money for the child, plus a little extra payment for her own time and bother. “Just go on down to City Hall and put your name on the list,” Clara Jane told Mae. “And it will sure help if you know someone who’ll skip over the names in front of yours in order to get to your name first.”
So Mae went down to City Hall the first thing Monday morning, getting her name put on the list. And last thing Monday night she was up at the ward headquarters, in the back office, rocking back and forth on the lap of the ward leader, making sure some worker would get the directive to skip over all the names in front of hers even though she was a single head of household, in order to get to her name first.
Near the end of her first year in that house, after a half dozen foster children had come and gone and helped her keep her mortgage up-to-date, and she gave out pamphlets and sample ballots for her ward leader on election day to make sure her name stayed on the top of that list, her pregnant sister, Martha, came to stay, just until Martha’s husband was done his stint in the army. And then Martha’s husband, Albert, came. And he stayed, just until he could get his work situation together. Then the baby came, right on the living-room floor before the yellow cab could get there, or even the red car. The baby came, and Mae helped birth him, and she named him Addison for the street.
And Addison was always her favorite child because whenever she looked at him and his sly little grin, she’d think about his father, Albert, and his sly grin, and the way Albert’s sly grin would come up at night, after a couple of beers, after Martha was asleep, after Mae would come down in the shed kitchen, where Albert had taken to sleeping after Martha had gotten so outrageously large with that baby in her womb. “Oops,” Mae would say, and blush through her cheeks and quickly cup her hands over the sheerest part of her negligee, even though the hand cupping exposed more than the negligee did. “I’d forgotten you’d taken to sleeping down here in this old cramped little shed. I had the taste for some cling peaches, and I believe I have a can of split ripe ones in heavy syrup right thereabouts on that shelf, right above that nail where you done hung your pants.”
And Albert would look at her with her hands cupped, pushing up her womanhood like she was offering it up to nurse a newborn, and the sly grin would come up, and he’d figure since there was no newborn to oblige, he might as well, and later they’d share split cling peaches in heavy syrup from the can.
So Mae had to bring Addison back to Philly to save his life, her favorite child in all the world, born to her sister in the living room of Mae’s dream house, where he’d slid out looking red and sly just like his dad.
“Ramona,” Mae called up the stairs from where she stood in the middle of the living room, her bags surrounding her where she just let them lay where she’d dropped them. Her black and gray tweed coat was dropping off the back of her shoulder, her flowered scarf over her red wig was slightly crooked, and her lazy eye, the left one, which drooped and seemed to stare straight ahead, was more pronounced now; it always drooped more when she was tired. And tired she was after that long bus ride from Buffalo, after carrying the heavy bags to get on the el, then the waiting for the G bus, then trying to keep up with Addison and his long, fast steps. She was almost sweating, even as the cold March air was rushing in the opened door behind her and wrapping her up. She stood in the midd
le of the floor now and called for her only natural child.
“Ramona,” she said again, “get on down here and help me with my bags, please, Lord Jesus, am I ever tired.”
“Ma’am?” Ramona called from upstairs. “You here already?” Then her voice got closer as she ran down the steps; she gripped the banister so she wouldn’t slip and fall down the blue-bordered plastic runner that protected the new carpet hugging the stairs.
“What happened? Is Auntie better? Why you back today instead of Tuesday?” she asked as she walked straight past Mae to push the front door shut.
“Lord Jesus, child, quit with the questions and help me outta this coat. So tired I can’t hardly stand up.” Then a smile crossed her lips, and she said, “That Addison got such long, quick legs, my, has that boy grown, couldn’t hardly keep up with him after we got off the G bus.”
“Addison!” Ramona shrieked, stopping like stone with Mae only half out of her coat.
Mae shook her arms impatiently. “The coat, child, just get me outta this coat; then we can talk about Addison.” She pulled one arm out, then the other, used to Ramona helping her in this way. Then she tilted her head so Ramona could untie the scarf under her chin. “Yeah, my baby boy, Addison,” she said as Ramona tried to work the knot out. “I told him to go on and stop off at Smitty’s and play the jukebox or the pinball machine and relax hisself for a bit. Poor child been through a lot. Little heifer gets herself in a family way and then try to pin it on him. So I told him come on back to Philadelphia with me, ain’t nobody gonna hurt him or be saddling him with something they can’t even prove he did.”
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