by Steven Clark
She closed the bathroom door and I took off my coat. She groaned from behind it. The toilet flushed and Margot reentered, sighing deep.
“Are you in pain?” I asked.
“I can stand it.” She waved and I took off her robe, helping her to slide back into bed.
“But the weakness. Everything is exhausting, even thinking.” She sighed. “At least remembering is … almost pain-free.”
I offered her a pill for nausea. She took it and leaned back, nodding to a soft melody on the radio. I think it was Rosemary Clooney.
“It sounds like something Ike and I danced to one night. Some hot spot in the county. Back then everything was so rural. Now it’s all one big housing tract.” She sank back into the pillows. “Lanterns were lit up on a patio. You could smell hay from a farm across the road. Other barnyard scents, too, but everyone laughed about it. When you’re young, there’s always somewhere to escape to, isn’t there?”
Margot closed her eyes.
“I dreamt about Ike. Then I was alone and falling. In my dreams, I always fall. Why is that, Lee? Please don’t tell me it’s Freudian.”
“It’s common in dreaming,” I said as I smoothed her blankets. “Doc told me it’s because we were primates, when we lived in trees. Climbed them, jumped from tree to tree. Our worst enemy was gravity. The primate brain grew larger to coordinate hand-to-eye movements, but there was always the fear of falling. When we dream of falling, it’s that old fear in our subconscious coded into our minds.”
Margot was attentive, her eyes direct and unblinking.
“Doc believed this primal fear was eventually manifested in religion. He said almost all religions and mythologies have falling as a form of punishment. Lucifer thrown out of heaven by God, Icarus and the sun. We always fall from grace. Ancient sailors feared falling off the edge of the world. Rock A Bye Baby? ‘When the bough breaks, the cradle will fall.’ And so on and so forth.”
I almost bit my tongue at another seeping of erudition, rather tactless when one considered the crucifix on the wall, but Margot folded her arms and puckered a smile.
“You know so much, Lee. So much wisdom. It does make some kind of sense.” She sighed. “Doc must have been quite a guy.”
“He was.”
“But there’s almost a kind of thrill in falling. I remember Ike told me when he parachuted out of a plane, how you have this rush of fear but also joy speeding down, then you feel the pull of gravity when the parachute blossoms. Oh, Lee. Your father’s eyes gleamed at that. At everything he told me about flying. Didn’t Lindbergh feel the same way?”
“Lindy thought the threat of the chute not opening was part of the adventure, putting everything you had on the line.”
She looked at the ceiling. “Did you ever fear Ike would crash? I know I did.”
“No.” I shrugged. “I was little and he was like a superhero. My dad the pilot. He was indestructible.”
Margot’s expression was dreamy. “What a family we would have been.”
I smiled back, remembering Ike as my father, the dutiful bread winner, coming home to play with me, crowning me queen of the cockpit. Like most fighter pilots I’ve known, their real love is the sky. Ike was no different. Men who served with him, when I talked to them some years later, said his eyes lit up when talk went to flight patterns, testing new jets, home and hearth immediately forgotten. It was Wolfe’s The Right Stuff all over again. I sensed what Margot had been avoiding was now coming forth.
“Lee,” she said in whispered determination, “I haven’t much time. It will start soon, and I’m prepared.” Her finger pointed to the rosary on her bed stand. “When I … started tracking you down, I was afraid, but not anymore.”
“No,” I said, “there’s no reason to be afraid. I’m here.”
“Then, Lee—” She winced. I guided her hand to squeeze more painkiller, but she shook her head. “My first little baby. One I did a great wrong to.”
“Don’t say that.”
“If you had been by my side all these years.” Her voice cracked. “Instead of those two. Lucas. My little Lucas …”
I rubbed her shoulder. “It’s all right. Margot … Mom … please. I will be here with you.”
Margot sighed and nodded, appeased. “I don’t want a nurse. I never did. I want my daughter. I want my baby.”
“You have her.” I kissed her forehead.
Margot nodded and sighed with sad approval. “Was it so hard to say that? To do it as your duty? As a nurse? As a daughter?”
I thought: Yes, it is hard to call you “Mother.” It’s goddamned hard.
I stayed with Margot until eleven, then drove home in the fog. When I parked and trudged down the hall, it came to me that I couldn’t love her, not that way, the way she wanted. Our relationship was fundamentally one of nurse and patient, and there were dark corners there.
Yul’s meowing was heard twelve feet from the door. He always sensed my arrival and was no doubt famished, and whatever cat depression he’d had made him yearn for a lap to cozy in. What do they say? A dog sees his master as a pack leader, a cat a mother. I took out my key.
The door across the hall opened, and Kenyatta glowered, his troll-at-the-bridge mood. “Hey,” I muttered.
“You and me got to have words about Finicky Morris. Kept yowing all evening.”
“Okay, I’m sorry. He’s hungry. I’m late, I suck as a tenant, and it’ll never happen again.”
“Yeah, until next time. You know, lady, I’m trying to do improvs and Sylvester J. Pussycat messes up my rhythms.”
I sighed. “Oh, back off. I’ve had a long, pissy day.”
Ken’s lips pursed as his eyes widened. “What? Helping to crank out pamphlets for that smartass kid of yours?”
“Have a nice day,” I glummed, then whisked into the door as Ken muttered. I dumped my purse on a chair and went for a can of Purrbytes (‘Give Your Best Friend These and You’ll Hear the Purrin’), but Yul would have none of it, and already was attacking the ’Nduja. I thought the hell with it, sliced off a thick crescent and dumped it into his dish, then poured a deep glass of wine and sunk into my easy chair.
I kept the lights low and switched to the jazz station. A smooth ballad moved from the speakers like fingers gliding on polished stone. Why wouldn’t I accept Margot as my mother? The nurse thing? Yes, but I was never into high Momhood when Jama was around. She was trouble. It made me feel like a crappy mother. Maybe Childe Fantastical was the chablis-and-brie way of saying fuck-up.
I drained the bottle as Yul hopped on my lap and purred quite well without Purrbytes.
I stroked his fur, struck by its beauty. Its touch, and comfort. He sniffed my glass, flinched and glowered, wondering why I didn’t imbibe milk like any rational species, and nestled in. Almost napped, then methodically began to groom. His body’s warmth comforted, as did the wine. As did the jazz. I wanted a phone call. I wanted Pierce.
“Jackal,” I whispered.
Early in the morning, the phone rang. I blinked, fished for it, not turning on the messages because Margot might need help. “Hello?” I sighed.
“Nurse Lee.” It was Vess, confident and serene. “I know I woke you, and I’m sorry about that, but we need to talk.”
“Talk?” I echoed. “What now?”
“I think the sooner the better. It concerns a great many things. Meet me at Euclid. By the antique shop. You know which one, don’t you? Near one of your favorite drinking spots.”
“How do you know?” I shook my head. “Of course you’d know, wouldn’t you?”
“Be there in a half-hour. Alone.”
It was at the corner of Euclid where the bust of Tennessee Williams stood, our jaded poet laureate visible in the heavy fog. The neighborhood had its own dirty laundry. Back in the day, several discreet houses of ill repute were nearby. Two doors down once held The Mitzi Shop, an expensive women’s dress shop where many of the local ladies of the evening bought wares, rubbing shoulders with matrons
and daughters of the upper class. Its owner, Nellie Muench, had trouble follow her like a string of tin cans around the neck, going from stealing to kidnapping and babynapping. She was gracious, played piano to her husband’s violincello, and eventually did time. It was well Tom’s bust was nearby. He was a guardian angel of the seedy, and was in the right place. Today, the corner had a sour smell, a vestige of the old St. Louis smog. Sometimes the Mississippi catches it. It came from all the factories, coal used for heating, the Mississippi Valley sponging up the smoke. This was the smell I remembered when I visited the city with Aunt Mary and Spud. In the old days, it was said St. Louis had moonlight at noon, a white ball barely breaking through the fog. In 1940, it was so bad it killed forty people.
T.S. Eliot wrote about this fog. “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock?”
The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes / Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening …
St. Louis fog, but because Eliot turned fancy Englishman, he made it English. English fog is always tonier, my dear Watson.
I turned, and behind me, a shiny Taurus pulled up. Its mirrored window rolled down. Vess smiled.
“Lee. Good to see you out and about.” The passenger door opened. I stared, not moving.
“We can talk here.”
Vess’s laugh was gentle, like an old blanket. “You been watching too many movies.”
I looked around, sighed, and got in. I pulled the door closed and off we went. Before Vess powered the window back up, Tom seemed to give me a bronze wink.
Vess’s car turned north. We passed the stately churches of Holy Corners as I watched his pleasant but masking smile for some kind of clue. His eyes aimed out the window.
“Funny about this fog.” He shrugged as we turned and passed into the frontier of the ghetto: barred storefronts, boarded-up windows of gray and warped wood, old row houses wearing desperation like a penitent does his sackcloth. “My granddaddy, he used to sell coal from a wagon. You see, they’d burn pots of it to show it was high grade and flammable. So you’d get your money’s worth.” He let this sink in, and continued.
“Coal smoke killed people. Dozens just before the war. It took that to get the city to clean up. People like the Desouches … they owned the coal, Lee. They had their Veiled Prophet while they poisoned the air. While the air they poisoned killed people. People like my granddaddy.”
I saw a hand-painted sign advertising the Klara Mohammed School. The Moorish Science Temple of America.
Vess sunk into his soft leather seat. “Lee, look around you.”
I did as the fog scrolled away to roof top level, among trees that humped over, scarred from fires set or weak branches straight in the air, like they were the receiving end of a stickup. Dick Gregory Lane had a bleakness that melted into Vandeventer and Cote Brilliante, to a mural of Joe Johnson and Mohammed Ali. I am the Greatest, it boasted. Its paint was flaking off. Vess kept staring out.
“This is what Juneteenth Towne will change. I want the bread to get rid of this shit. I’ll never be mayor. But I can get things done.”
“Your rep means there’s dirty tricks somewhere.”
“To be black is to be criminal? Look Lee, crime is what is committed against us. Crime is subjective. If there is no law, there is no crime. If there’s no justice, then crime is a matter of self-defense. Has there really been law in this country? For everyone?”
We drove past the Bee Jazzy beauty parlor, the only functioning business on the block, not counting the quartet of men scoring in front of a sign on a blackened, splintered door: No Drinking or Loitering on the Premises. There was no house behind it.
“You want to save what is wrong,” Vess said in deep judgment. “The mansion’s going to go.”
“Damn it, Vess, we don’t have to be enemies. Saul wants to help, he wants to plan something organic to the neighborhood—”
“I’ll decide what its needs are.” Vess was a king, remote and cold. “Terri and Pierre are with me, and you’re going to be locked out. When the old lady’s gone, the war starts.”
My anger began to tingle, but Vess shrugged my concern away as he looked out, perhaps beyond the blight into his own past. “When I was a kid,” he said, “me and my pals got peashooters. When that VP parade rolled down the street, back in the days when it was held at night, a torch-light parade for the Prophet wearing his sheet. A little bit of KKK jazz there, hmm?” He narrowed his eyes. “We’d aim at the Prophet and his lovelies. My aim was pretty good.”
“I always thought the plastic sheet they had around them was like a jewel box.”
“Sure, nurse, you’d think that in your TV world. That plastic there was because of me.” The smile almost forming at the end of his lips was warming.
“Stop the car.”
We were at Cote Brilliante, the odd French name in the middle of a slum more known for reports on police blotters than its namesake, the mound that in the old days was said to shine brighter than the sun when the light hit it. Vess’s stance almost seemed royal, resting on a long-denied throne. Another king in exile, like Saul; two men with blocked visions.
“Sonia told me about Cote Brilliante,” he said. “I never realized all of this was once sacred ground built by Native Americans. So, Lee, why can’t Juneteenth be sacred?”
I sensed a slight pain in Vess that maturity barely covered, making him a man with no yesterday or today, only tomorrow. Inside his girth and weary face, the little boy with the peashooter was there, ready to keep up the fight for … the dream? Nightmare?
“I will remake this city,” he said, “and I want to help raise Corn Mother. Like Sonia. Like your kid.” His pleasantness, the wistful tone of power denied, ended. “I’d hate to see something happen to her.”
A cold chill bit my spine. “What do you mean?”
His laugh was sly. “I’ve spoken to Rasheed. It’s all going to be nice and legal when he bundles her off, and there’s not a thing you can do. We have the winning cards. Look, when I was shot, you helped me get back on my feet. I remember that. Now, I’m returning the favor. Make a deal. Do that, and maybe I can help Jama. Use some pull with Rasheed. That’s my therapy for you.”
“What kind of pull do you have?”
“A hundred thousand dollars worth.”
It made me take a deep breath. I restated the terms. “Margot and her children must end their hatred.”
Vess’s eyes probed and pitied. “This is one time the angel loses. Thirty percent of the estate. That’s what they say. And that mansion has to go. Also, you know Rasheed will do his shit and no one’s going to stop him. Go along, and it doesn’t have to have a dark ending. I mean it.”
The car stopped. Vess smiled, reached over, and opened the door. “Gotta go. Don’t worry.”
Vess waved, and a cab pulled up, its muffler choking like a bronchial infection, smoke puffing, probably like the old pot of burning coal Vess’s grandfather peddled. He motioned at the driver. “He’ll get you back to where all the white folks are. It’s on the house.”
I got out. Vess closed the door and drove off. After a quick look at the dismal present of Cote Brilliante, I climbed into the cab.
A deepening anger boiled inside me as I told the cabbie to take me past the abandoned shops and weed-strewn parking lots with their cracked asphalt to downtown. I got out at Post Office Square. It’s the last real city square, streets like arteries flowing to the heart of the old post office. Built in 1884, it’s a gray fortress in French Second Empire style, with pillars, massive wooden doors, and a defiant eagle at its crown. Like most St. Louis architecture that is stately, inspiring, and worthy of admiration, it almost became a parking lot. In the Civil War, Union troops took over the Customhouse and moved all government money there and used it as a rallying point in case the South wanted round two. The Post Office was built with that in mind, being a point of resistance, almost a fort with moats and steel window shutters. Being built as a fortress probably saved it from the wrecki
ng ball. It’d take a nuke to bring it down.
When the federal government moved out in the mid ’60s, mayors couldn’t wait to pull it down. ‘A useless pile of architecture,’ cawed the St. Louis Globe-Democrat, our conservative rag that got dumped instead of the old P.O. which was saved, but remained empty for decades. Olmutz, one of the residents I worked back in the old days, suggested the Department of the Interior declare the Old Post Office a national pigeon sanctuary. But there was a happy ending for the building. Offices were filled by the bureaucracy, a local college, and the city library put a branch inside.
As I entered the building, I was prepared to take on the attorneys from Terri and Pierre’s law firm. Dick Goetz is a man with a moderately convincing hair weave and sharp eyes that looked me up and down with a twinkle, nodded at my entrance. I smelled carryout Chinese in an adjoining conference room. A corporate lawsuit was in high gear, and it was a working lunch.
“I can guess why you’re here,” Dick said. “Why don’t we step outside?”
“Afraid I’ll go bonkers?”
“I’d say postal,” smiled Dick. “In keeping with the theme of historical preservation.
“Of course.” My smile was immediate. For a legal eagle, Dick was approachable. His shirt striped, tie sedately gray. Our steps made echoes on the vast wooden floor of the parterre. To one side was the original eagle, its slowly rotting limestone now saved by being indoors. Above us a glass skylight with crossbar girders looked like a caged aviary. I folded my arms.
“I want to see them. Now. Tell me where they are.”
“Any business between you and your siblings,” Dick paused, “must be done with me present.”
I looked around. A young woman in a tight skirt and even tighter sweater, probably one of the legal secretaries, walked through. “I was hoping we’d be done with hall monitors.”
Dick was good natured. “Not this semester.” A regretful shrug made Dick’s shoulders rise. “They won’t agree to a meeting unless it’s to sign over the mansion.”
“Oh, for heaven’s …” I stared at the parterre. Four people paced around, all having intense cell phone chats, complete with gestures. It reminded me of exercise time in the psych ward. “This is ridiculous. What do they think I’m going to do?”