Ann Petry

by Ann Petry

  “I came to see my son,” she said. She drew the stiff white paper from her pocketbook. “He was brought here yesterday.”

  He gestured toward a waiting room just off the hall. It was a large room filled with people, and the instant she entered it she was assailed by the stillness in the room.

  The gray-haired woman behind a desk marked “Information” asked for her name and address, riffled through a thick card file.

  “His case comes up Friday,” the woman said. “If you care to wait, you can see him for a few minutes this morning.”

  Lutie sat down near the back of the room. It was filled with colored women, sitting in huddled-over positions. They sat quietly, not moving. Their patient silence filled the room, made her uneasy. Why were all of them colored? Was it because the mothers of white children had safe places for them to play in, because the mothers of white children didn’t have to work?

  She had been wrong. There were some white mothers, too—three foreign-looking women near the door; a gray-haired woman just two seats ahead, her hair hanging in a lank curtain about the sides of her face; a tall, bony woman up near the front who kept clutching at the arms of her fur coat, a coat shiny from wear; and over on the side a young, too thin blond girl holding a small baby in her arms.

  They were sitting in the same shrinking, huddled positions. Perhaps, she thought, we’re all here because we’re all poor. Maybe it doesn’t have anything to do with color.

  Lutie folded her hands in her lap. Fifteen minutes went by. Suddenly she straightened her shoulders. She had been huddled over like all these other waiting women. And she knew now why they sat like that. Because we’re like animals trying to pull all the soft, quivering tissue deep inside of us away from the danger that lurks in a room like this, and the silence helps build up the threat of danger.

  The room absorbed sound. She couldn’t hear even a faint murmur of traffic or of voices from the street outside. As she waited in the silent room, she felt as though she were bearing the uneasy burden of the sum total of all the troubles these women had brought with them. All of us started with a little piece of trouble, she thought, and then bit by bit more was added until finally it grew so great it pushed us into this room.

  When the guard finally escorted her to the small room where Bub waited, she had begun to believe the silence and the troubled waiting that permeated the room had a smell—a distinct odor that filled her nose until it was difficult for her to breathe.

  Bub had grown smaller. He was so little, so forlorn, so obviously frightened, that she got down on her knees and pulled him close to her.

  “Darling,” she said softly. “Oh, darling.”

  “Mom, I thought you’d never come,” he said.

  “You didn’t think any such thing,” she said, patting the side of his face. “You know you didn’t really think that.”

  “No,” he said slowly. “I guess I really didn’t. I guess I knew you’d come as soon as you could. Only it seemed like an awful long time. Can we go home now?”

  “No. Not yet. You have to stay here until Friday.”

  “That’s so long,” he wailed.

  “No, it isn’t. I’ll be back tomorrow. And the next day. And the next day. And then it’ll be Friday.”

  Then the guard was back, and she was going out of the building. She hadn’t asked Bub anything about the letters or if he’d been frightened. There were so many things she hadn’t said to him. Perhaps it was just as well, because the most important thing was for him to know that she loved him and that she would be coming to see him.

  There was a whole day to be got through. And once she was back in the apartment, time seemed to stretch out endlessly in front of her. She scrubbed the kitchen floor and cleaned out the cupboards over the sink. While she was working, she kept thinking of all the reasons why Boots might not have the money for her tonight.

  She started to wash the windows in the living room. She sat on the window sill, her long legs inside the room, the upper part of her body outside. At first she rubbed the panes briskly and then stopped.

  It was so deadly quiet. She kept listening to the silence, hoping to hear some sound that would destroy it. It was the same kind of stillness that had been in the waiting room at the Shelter.

  She polished one pane of glass over and over. The soft sound of the cloth did nothing to disturb the pool of silence that filled the apartment. She turned to look at the blank windows of the apartment houses that faced her windows. They revealed no sign of life. In the distance she could hear the faint, tinny sound of a radio. The sky overhead was dark gray. A damp cold wind rattled the windows, tugged at the sleeves of the cotton dress she was wearing.

  Suppose that for some reason Boots didn’t have the money for her tonight? Doubt grew and spread in her, alarming her so that she stopped washing the windows, went inside the room. She collected the window-washing equipment, poured the water out of the enamel pan she had been using, and stood watching it go down the sink drain. It was black and syrupy, thick with the grime and dirt from the windows. She put the window cloths to soak in the set tub.

  He would either give her the money or he wouldn’t. If he didn’t, she would have to figure out some other way of getting it. There was no point in her worrying about it. And as long as she stayed alone in these small rooms, she would worry and wonder and the knot of tension inside her would keep growing and her throat would keep constricting like it was doing now. She swallowed hard. Her throat felt as though the opening were growing smaller all the time. It was smaller now than it had been this morning when she tried to drink the coffee.

  If she went to the movies, it would take her mind away from these fears that kept closing in on her. But once inside the theater, she was abruptly dismayed. As her eyes became adjusted to the dimness, she saw that there were only a few seats occupied. She deliberately sat down near a little group of people—a protective little group in back of her and in front of her.

  And the picture didn’t make sense. It concerned a technicolor world of bright lights and vast beautiful rooms; a world where the only worry was whether the heroine in a sequined evening gown would eventually get the hero in a top hat and tails out of the clutches of a red-headed female spy who lolled on wide divans dressed in white velvet dinner suits.

  The glitter on the screen did nothing to dispel her sense of panic. She kept thinking it had nothing to do with her, because there were no dirty little rooms, no narrow, crowded streets, no children with police records, no worries about rent and gas bills. And she had brought that awful creeping silence in here with her. It crouched along the aisles, dragged itself across the rows of empty seats. She began to think of it as something that was coming at her softly on its hands and knees, coming nearer and nearer to her aisle by aisle.

  She left in the middle of the picture. Outside the theater she paused, filled with a vast uneasiness, a restlessness that made going home out of the question. There was a beauty parlor at the corner. She would get a shampoo that she couldn’t afford, but she would have people around her and it would use up a lot of time.

  Walking toward the shop, she tried to figure out what was the matter with her. She was afraid of something. What was it? She didn’t know. It wasn’t just fear of what would happen to Bub. It was something else. She was smelling out evil as Granny said. An old, old habit. Old as time itself.

  It was quiet in the beauty shop except for the noise that the manicurist made. She was sitting in the front window, chewing gum, and the gum made a sharp, cracking sound. It was the only sound in the place.

  The hairdresser, normally talkative, was for some reason in an uncommunicative mood. She rotated Lutie’s scalp with strong fingers and said nothing. It was so quiet that the awful stillness Lutie had found in the Shelter settled in the shop. It had followed her in here from the movies and it was sitting down in the booth next to her. She shivered.

&n
bsp; “Somep’n must have walked over your grave”—the hairdresser looked at her in the mirror as she spoke.

  And even under the words Lutie heard the stillness. It was crouched down in the next booth. It was waiting for her to leave. It would walk down the street with her and into the apartment. Or it might leave the shop when she did, but not go down the street at all, but somehow seep into the apartment before she got there, so that when she opened the door it would be there. Formless. Shapeless. Waiting. Waiting.

  Chapter 18

  * * *

  IT WAS BEGINNING TO SNOW when Lutie left the beauty parlor. The flakes were fine, small; barely recognizable as snow. More like rain, she thought, except that rain didn’t sting one’s face like these sharp fragments.

  In a few more minutes it would be dark. The outlines of the buildings were blurred by long shadows. Lights in the houses and at the street corners were yellow blobs that made no impression on the ever-lengthening shadows. The small, fine snow swirled past the yellow lights in a never-ending rapid dancing that was impossible to follow and the effort made her dizzy.

  The noise and confusion in the street were pleasant after the stillness that hung about the curtained booths of the beauty shop. Buses and trucks roared to a stop at the corners. People coming home from work jostled against her. There was the ebb and flow of talk and laughter; punctuated now and then by the sharp scream of brakes.

  The children swarming past her added to the noise and the confusion. They were everywhere—rocking back and forth on the traffic stanchions in front of the post-office, stealing rides on the backs of the crosstown buses, drumming on the sides of ash cans with broomsticks, sitting in small groups in doorways, playing on the steps of the houses, writing on the sidewalk with colored chalk, bouncing balls against the sides of the buildings. They turned a deaf ear to the commands shrilling from the windows all up and down the street, “You Tommie, Jimmie, Billie, can’t you see it’s snowin’? Come in out the street.”

  The street was so crowded that she paused frequently in order not to collide with a group of children, and she wondered if these were the things that Bub had done after school. She tried to see the street with his eyes and couldn’t because the crap game in progress in the middle of the block, the scraps of obscene talk she heard as she passed the poolroom, the tough young boys with their caps on backward who swaggered by, were things that she saw with the eyes of an adult and reacted to from an adult’s point of view. It was impossible to know how this street looked to eight-year-old Bub. It may have appealed to him or it may have frightened him.

  There was a desperate battle going on in front of the house where she lived. Kids were using bags of garbage from the cans lined up along the curb as ammunition. The bags had broken open, covering the sidewalk with litter, filling the air with a strong, rancid smell.

  Lutie picked her way through orange skins, coffee grounds, chicken bones, fish bones, toilet paper, potato peelings, wilted kale, skins of baked sweet potatoes, pieces of newspaper, broken gin bottles, broken whiskey bottles, a man’s discarded felt hat, an old pair of pants. Perhaps Bub had taken part in this kind of warfare, she thought, even as she frowned at the rubbish under her feet; possibly a battle would have appealed to some unsatisfied spirit of adventure in him, so that he would have joined these kids, overlooking the stink of the garbage in his joy in the conflict just as they were doing.

  Mrs. Hedges was leaning far out of her window, urging the contestants on.

  “That’s right, Jimmie,” Mrs. Hedges cried. “Hit him on the head.” And then as the bag went past its mark, “Aw, shucks, boy, what’s the matter with your aim?”

  She caught sight of Lutie and knowing that she was home earlier than when she went to work, immediately deduced that she had been somewhere to see Bub or see about him. “Did you see Bub?” she asked.

  “Yes. For a little while.”

  “Been to the beauty parlor, ain’t you?” Mrs. Hedges studied the black curls shining under the skull cap on Lutie’s head. “Looks right nice,” she said.

  She leaned a little farther out of the window. “Bub being in trouble you probably need some money. A friend of mine, a Mr. Junto—a very nice white gentleman, dearie——”

  Her voice trailed off because Lutie turned away abruptly and disappeared through the apartment house door. Mrs. Hedges scowled after her. After all, if you needed money you needed money and why anyone would act like that when it was offered to them she couldn’t imagine. She shrugged her shoulders and turned her attention back to the battle going on under her window.

  As Lutie climbed the stairs, she deliberately accentuated the clicking of the heels of her shoes on the treads because the sharp sound helped relieve the hard resentment she felt; it gave expression to the anger flooding through her.

  At first, she merely fumed at the top of her mind about a white gentleman wanting to sleep with a colored girl. A nice white gentleman who’s a little cold around the edges wants to sleep with a nice warm colored girl. All of it nice—nice gentleman, nice girl; one’s colored and the other’s white, so it’s a colored girl and a white gentleman.

  Then she began thinking about Junto—specifically about Junto. Junto hadn’t wanted her paid for singing. Mrs. Hedges knew Junto. Boots Smith worked for Junto. Junto’s squat-bodied figure, as she had seen it reflected in the sparkling mirror in his Bar and Grill, established itself in her mind; and the anger in her grew and spread directing itself first against Junto and Mrs. Hedges and then against the street that had reached out and taken Bub and then against herself for having been partly responsible for Bub’s stealing.

  Inside her apartment she stood motionless, assailed by the deep, uncanny silence that filled it. It was a too sharp contrast to the noise in the street. She turned on the radio and then turned it off again, because she kept listening, straining to hear something under the sound of the music.

  The creeping, silent thing that she had sensed in the theater, in the beauty parlor, was here in her living room. It was sitting on the lumpy studio couch.

  Before it had been formless, shapeless, a fluid moving mass—something disembodied that she couldn’t see, could only sense. Now, as she stared at the couch, the thing took on form, substance. She could see what it was.

  It was Junto. Gray hair, gray skin, short body, thick shoulders. He was sitting on the studio couch. The blue-glass coffee table was right in front of him. His feet were resting, squarely, firmly, on the congoleum rug.

  If she wasn’t careful she would scream. She would start screaming and never be able to stop, because there wasn’t anyone there. Yet she could see him and when she didn’t see him she could feel his presence. She looked away and then looked back again. Sometimes he was there when she looked and sometimes he wasn’t.

  She stared at the studio couch until she convinced herself there had never been anyone there. Her eyes were playing tricks on her because she was upset, nervous. She decided that a warm bath would make her relax.

  But in the tub she started trembling so that the water was agitated. Perhaps she ought to phone Boots and tell him that she wouldn’t come tonight. Perhaps by tomorrow she would be free of this mounting, steadily increasing anger and this hysterical fear that made her see things that didn’t exist, made her feel things that weren’t there.

  Yet less than half an hour later she was dressing, putting on the short, flared black coat; pulling on a pair of white gloves. As she thrust her hands into the gloves, she wondered when she had made the decision to go anyway; what part of her mind had already picked out the clothes she would wear, even to these white gloves, without her ever thinking about it consciously. Because, of course, if she didn’t go tonight, Boots might change his mind.

  When she rang the bell of Boots’ apartment, he opened the door instantly as though he had been waiting for her.

  “Hello, baby,” he said, grinning. “Sure glad you got her
e. I got a friend I want you to meet.”

  Only two of the lamps in the living room were lit. They were the tall ones on each side of the davenport. They threw a brilliant light on the squat white man sitting there. He got up when he saw Lutie and stood in front of the imitation fireplace, leaning his elbow on the mantel.

  Lutie stared at him, not certain whether this was Junto in the flesh or the imaginary one that had been on the studio couch in her apartment. She closed her eyes and then opened them and he was still there, standing by the fireplace. His squat figure partly blocked out the orange-red glow from the electric logs. She turned her head away and then looked toward him. He was still there, standing by the fireplace.

  Boots established him as Junto in the flesh. “Mr. Junto, meet Mrs. Johnson. Lutie Johnson.”

  Lutie nodded her head. A figure in a mirror turned thumbs down and as he gestured the playground for Bub vanished, the nice new furniture disappeared along with the big airy rooms. “A nice white gentleman.” “Need any extra money.” She looked away from him, not saying anything.

  “I want to talk to you, baby,” Boots said. “Come on into the bedroom”—he pointed toward a door, started toward it, turned back and said, “We’ll be with you in a minute, Junto.”

  Boots closed the bedroom door, sat down on the edge of the bed, leaning his head against the headboard.

  “If you’ll give me the money now, I’ll be able to get it to the lawyer before he closes his office tonight,” she said abruptly. This room was like the living room, it had too many lamps in it, and in addition there were too many mirrors so that she saw him reflected on each of the walls—his legs stretched out, his expression completely indifferent. There was the same soft, sound-absorbing carpet on the floor.

  “Take your coat off and sit down, baby,” he said lazily.

  She shook her head. She didn’t move any farther into the room, but stood with her back against the door, aware that there was no sound from the living room where Junto waited. She had brought that awful silence in here with her.