by Ann Petry
Next to the sofa there was an overstuffed chair and she drew her breath in sharply as she looked at it, for there was a woman sitting in it, and she had thought that she and the dog and the Super were the only occupants of the room. How could anyone sit in a chair and melt into it like that? As she looked, the shapeless small dark woman in the chair got up and bowed to her without speaking.
Lutie nodded her head in acknowledgment of the bow, thinking, That must be the woman I heard whispering. The woman sat down in the chair again. Melting into it. Because the dark brown dress she wore was almost the exact shade of the dark brown of the upholstery and because the overstuffed chair swallowed her up until she was scarcely distinguishable from the chair itself. Because, too, of a shrinking withdrawal in her way of sitting as though she were trying to take up the least possible amount of space. So that after bowing to her Lutie completely forgot the woman was in the room, while she went on studying its furnishings.
No pictures, no rugs, no newspapers, no magazines, nothing to suggest anyone had ever tried to make it look homelike. Not quite true, for there was a canary huddled in an ornate birdcage in the corner. Looking at it, she thought, Everything in the room shrinks: the dog, the woman, even the canary, for it had only one eye open as it perched on one leg. Opposite the sofa an overornate table shone with varnish. It was a very large table with intricately carved claw feet and looking at it she thought, That’s the kind of big ugly furniture white women love to give to their maids. She turned to look at the shapeless little woman because she was almost certain the table was hers.
The woman must have been looking at her, for when Lutie turned the woman smiled; a toothless smile that lingered while she looked from Lutie to the table.
“When you want to move in?” the Super asked, holding out the receipt.
“This is Tuesday—do you think you could have the place ready by Friday?”
“Easy,” he said. “Some special color you want it painted?”
“White. Make all the rooms white,” she said, studying the receipt. Yes, he had it figured out correctly—balance due, nineteen fifty. He had crossed out his first attempt at the figures. Evidently nines were hard for him to make. And his name was William Jones. A perfectly ordinary name. A highly suitable name for a superintendent. Nice and normal. Easy to remember. Easy to spell. Only the name didn’t fit him. For he was obviously unusual, extraordinary, abnormal. Everything about him was the exact opposite of his name. He was standing up now looking at her, eating her up with his eyes.
She took a final look around the room. The whispering woman seemed to be holding her breath; the dog was dying with the desire to growl or whine, for his throat was working. The canary, too, ought to be animated with some desperate emotion, she thought, but he had gone quietly to sleep. Then she forced herself to look directly at the Super. A long hard look, malignant, steady, continued. Thinking, That’ll fix you, Mister William Jones, but, of course, if it was only my imagination upstairs, it isn’t fair to look at you like this. But just in case some dark leftover instinct warned me of what was on your mind—just in case it made me know you were snuffing on my trail, slathering, slobbering after me like some dark hound of hell seeking me out, tonguing along in back of me, this look, my fine feathered friend, should give you much food for thought.
She closed her pocketbook with a sharp, clicking final sound that made the Super’s eyes shift suddenly to the ceiling as though seeking out some pattern in the cracked plaster. The dog’s ears straightened into sharp points; the canary opened one eye and the whispering woman almost showed her gums again, for her mouth curved as though she were about to smile.
Lutie walked quickly out of the apartment, pushed the street door open and shivered as the cold air touched her. It had been hot in the Super’s apartment, and she paused a second to push her coat collar tight around her neck in an effort to make a barrier against the wind howling in the street outside. Now that she had this apartment, she was just one step farther up on the ladder of success. With the apartment Bub would be standing a better chance, for he’d be away from Lil.
Inside the building the dog let out a high shrill yelp. Immediately she headed for the street, thinking he must have kicked it again. She paused for a moment at the corner of the building, bracing herself for the full blast of the wind that would hit her head-on when she turned the corner.
“Get fixed up, dearie?” Mrs. Hedges’ rich voice asked from the street-floor window.
She nodded at the bandannaed head in the window and flung herself into the wind, welcoming its attack, aware as she walked along that the woman’s hard flat eyes were measuring her progress up the street.
Chapter 2
* * *
A CROWD OF PEOPLE surged in to the Eighth Avenue express at 59th Street. By elbowing other passengers in the back, by pushing and heaving, they forced their bodies into the coaches, making room for themselves where no room had existed before. As the train gathered speed for the long run to 125th Street, the passengers settled down into small private worlds, thus creating the illusion of space between them and their fellow passengers. The worlds were built up behind newspapers and magazines, behind closed eyes or while staring at the varicolored show cards that bordered the coaches.
Lutie Johnson tightened her clutch on an overhead strap, her tall long-legged body swaying back and forth as the train rocked forward toward its destination. Like some of the other passengers, she was staring at the advertisement directly in front of her and as she stared at it she became absorbed in her own thoughts. So that she, too, entered a small private world which shut out the people tightly packed around her.
For the advertisement she was looking at pictured a girl with incredible blond hair. The girl leaned close to a dark-haired, smiling man in a navy uniform. They were standing in front of a kitchen sink—a sink whose white porcelain surface gleamed under the train lights. The faucets looked like silver. The linoleum floor of the kitchen was a crisp black-and-white pattern that pointed up the sparkle of the room. Casement windows. Red geraniums in yellow pots.
It was, she thought, a miracle of a kitchen. Completely different from the kitchen of the 116th Street apartment she had moved into just two weeks ago. But almost exactly like the one she had worked in in Connecticut.
So like it that it might have been the same kitchen where she had washed dishes, scrubbed the linoleum floor and waxed it afterward. Then gone to sit on the small porch outside the kitchen, waiting for the floor to dry and wondering how much longer she would have to stay there. At the time it was the only job she could get. She had thought of it as a purely temporary one, but she had ended up by staying two years—thus earning the money for Jim and Bub to live on.
Every month when she got paid she walked to the postoffice and mailed the money to Jim. Seventy dollars. Jim and Bub could eat on that and pay the interest on the mortgage. On her first trip to the postoffice, she realized she had never seen a street like that main street in Lyme. A wide street lined with old elm trees whose branches met high overhead in the center of the street. In summer the sun could just filter through the leaves, so that by the time its rays reached the street, it made a pattern like the lace on expensive nightgowns. It was the most beautiful street she had ever seen, and finally she got so she would walk to the little postoffice hating the street, wishing that she could get back to Jamaica, back to Jim and Bub and the small frame house.
In winter the bare branches of the trees made a pattern against the sky that was equally beautiful in snow or rain or cold, clear sunlight. Sometimes she took Little Henry Chandler to the postoffice with her and she couldn’t help thinking that it wasn’t right. He didn’t need her and Bub did. But Bub had to do without her.
And because Little Henry Chandler’s father manufactured paper towels and paper napkins and paper handkerchiefs, why, even when times were hard, he could afford to hire a Lutie Johnson so his wife could play b
ridge in the afternoon while Lutie Johnson looked after Little Henry. Because as Little Henry’s father used to say, “Even when times are hard, thank God, people have got to blow their noses and wipe their hands and faces and wipe their mouths. Not quite so many as before, but enough so that I don’t have to worry.”
Her grip on the subway strap tightened until the hard enameled surface cut into her hand and she relaxed her hand and then tightened it. Because that kitchen sink in the advertisement or one just like it was what had wrecked her and Jim. The sink had belonged to someone else—she’d been washing someone else’s dishes when she should have been home with Jim and Bub. Instead she’d cleaned another woman’s house and looked after another woman’s child while her own marriage went to pot; breaking up into so many little pieces it couldn’t be put back together again, couldn’t even be patched into a vague resemblance of its former self.
Yet what else could she have done? It was her fault, really, that they lost their one source of income. And Jim couldn’t get a job, though he hunted for one—desperately, eagerly, anxiously. Walking from one employment agency to another; spending long hours in the musty agency waiting-rooms, reading old newspapers. Waiting, waiting, waiting to be called up for a job. He would come home shivering from the cold, saying, “God damn white people anyway. I don’t want favors. All I want is a job. Just a job. Don’t they know if I knew how I’d change the color of my skin?”
There was the interest to be paid on the mortgage. It didn’t amount to much, but they didn’t have anything to pay it with. So she answered an advertisement she saw in the paper. The ad said it was a job for an unusual young woman because it was in the country and most help wouldn’t stay. “Seventy-five dollars a month. Modern house. Own room and bath. Small child.”
She sat down and wrote a letter the instant she saw it; not telling Jim, hoping against hope that she would get it. It didn’t say “white only,” so she started off by saying that she was colored. And an excellent cook, because it was true—anyone who could fix good meals on practically no money at all was an excellent cook. An efficient housekeeper—because it was easy to keep their house shining, so she shouldn’t have any trouble with a “modern” one. It was a good letter, she thought, holding it in her hand a little way off from her as she studied it—nice neat writing, no misspelled words, careful margins, pretty good English. She was suddenly grateful to Pop. He’d known what he was doing when he insisted on her finishing high school. She addressed the envelope, folded the letter, and put it inside the envelope.
She was about to seal it when she remembered that she didn’t have any references. She couldn’t get a job without them, and as she’d never really had a job, why, she didn’t have any way of getting a reference. Somehow she had been so sure she could have got the job in the ad. Seventy-five dollars a month would have meant they could have saved the house; Jim would have got over that awful desperate feeling, that bitterness that was eating him up; and there wouldn’t have been any need to apply for relief.
Mrs. Pizzini. That was it. She’d go to Mrs. Pizzini where they bought their vegetables. They owed her a bill, and when she explained that this job would mean the bill would be paid, why, Mrs. Pizzini would write her out a reference.
Business was slow and Mrs. Pizzini had plenty of time to listen to Lutie’s story, to study the advertisement in the paper, to follow the writing on Lutie’s letter to Mrs. Henry Chandler, line by line, almost tracing the words on the page with her stubby fingers.
“Very good,” she said when she finished reading it. “Nice job.” She handed the letter and the newspaper to Lutie. “Me and Joe don’t write so good. But my daughter that teaches school, she’ll write for me. You can have tomorrow.”
And the next day Mrs. Pizzini stopped weighing potatoes for a customer long enough to go in the back of the vegetable store and bring the letter out carefully wrapped up in brown paper to keep it clean. Lutie peeled off the brown paper and read the letter through quickly. It was a fine letter, praising her for being hard-working and honest and intelligent; it said that the writer hated to lose Lutie, for she’d worked for her for two years. It was signed “Isabel Pizzini.”
The handwriting was positively elegant, she thought, written with a fine pen and black ink on nice thick white paper. She looked at the address printed on the top and then turned to stare at Mrs. Pizzini in astonishment, because that part of Jamaica was the section where the houses were big and there was lawn around them and evergreen trees grew in thick clusters around the houses.
Mrs. Pizzini nodded her head. “My daughter is a very smart woman.”
And then Lutie remembered the letter in her hand. “I can’t ever thank you,” she said.
Mrs. Pizzini’s lean face relaxed in a smile, “It’s all right. You’re a nice girl. Always known it.” She walked toward her waiting customer and then, hesitating for the barest fraction of a second, turned back to Lutie. “Listen,” she said. “It’s best that the man do the work when the babies are young. And when the man is young. Not good for the woman to work when she’s young. Not good for the man.”
Curiously enough, though she only half-heard what Mrs. Pizzini was saying, she remembered it. Off and on for the past six years she had remembered it. At the time, she hurried home from the vegetable store to put the precious reference in the letter to Mrs. Henry Chandler and mail it.
After she had dropped it in the mail box on the corner, she got to thinking about the Pizzinis. Who would have thought that the old Italian couple who ran the vegetable store would be living in a fine house in a fine neighborhood? How had they managed to do that on the nickels and dimes they took in selling lettuce and grapefruit? She wanted to tell Jim about it, but she couldn’t without revealing how she knew where they lived. They had a fine house and they had sent their daughter to college, and yet Mrs. Pizzini had admitted she herself “couldn’t write so good.” She couldn’t read so good either, Lutie thought. If she could find out how the Pizzinis had managed, it might help her and Jim.
Then she forgot about them, for Mrs. Chandler wrote to her sending the train fare to Lyme, telling her what train to take. When she showed Jim the letter, she was bursting with pride, filled with a jubilance she hadn’t felt in months because now they could keep the house. And she need no longer feel guilty about having been responsible for losing the State children that had been their only source of income.
“How’m I going to look after Bub and him only two?” he asked, frowning, handing the letter back to her, not looking at her.
Even on the day she was to leave he was sullen. Not talking. Frowning. Staring off into space. He came into the bedroom where she was putting carefully ironed clothes into her suitcase. He stood in front of the window and looked out at the street, his back turned to her, his hands in his pockets as he told her he wouldn’t be going to the station with her.
“We can’t afford that extra dime for carfare,” he explained briefly.
So she went by herself. And feeling the suitcase bump against her legs when she walked down the long ramp at Grand Central to get on the train, she wished that Jim had been along to carry it. So that she could have kissed him good-bye there in the train shed and thus carried the memory of his lips right onto the train with her—so that it could have stayed with her those first few days in Lyme, helping her to remember why she had taken the job. If he’d come to the train with her, he would have lost that pretended indifference; the sight of her actually getting on the train would have broken down the wall of reserve he had built around himself. Instead of that quick hard peck at her forehead, he would have put his arms around her and really kissed her. Instead of holding his body rigid, keeping his arms hanging limp and relaxed at his sides, he would have squeezed her close to him.
As the train left the city, she stopped thinking about him, not forgetting him, but thrusting him far back in her mind because she was going to a new strange place and she d
idn’t want to get off the train wrapped in gloom, and that’s exactly what would happen if she kept on thinking about Jim. It was important that Mrs. Henry Chandler should like her at sight, so Lutie carefully examined the countryside as the train went along, concentrating on it to shut out the picture of Jim’s tall figure.
There was low, marshy land on each side of the train tracks. Where the land was like that, there were very few houses. She noticed that near the cities the houses were small and mean-looking, for they were built close to the railroad tracks. In Bridgeport the houses were blackened with soot and smoke from the factories. Then the train stopped in New Haven and stayed there for all of ten minutes. She looked at the timetable and saw that it was a scheduled stop for that length of time. Saybrook was the next stop. That’s where she was to get off. And she began to worry. How would Mrs. Chandler recognize her? How would she recognize Mrs. Chandler? Suppose they missed each other. What would she do stranded in some little jerk-water town? Mrs. Chandler had said in her letter that she lived in Lyme, and Lutie began to wonder how she could get to Lyme if Mrs. Chandler didn’t meet her or missed her at the station.
But almost the instant she stepped on the platform at Saybrook, a young blond woman came toward her smiling and saying, “Hello, there. I’m Mrs. Chandler. You must be Lutie Johnson.”
Lutie looked around the platform. Very few people had got off the train, and then she wanted to laugh. She needn’t have worried about Mrs. Chandler recognizing her; there wasn’t another colored person in sight.