Ann Petry

by Ann Petry

  Then he said politely, “Do you live around here?”

  “No, I don’t. I live at the other end of the city. I came down here to look at the river.”

  Down? he thought. This is up from the other end of town. Don’t you know that uptown means us dark folks? That’s the second time you’ve said that. And you don’t belong around here, honey, or you’d know that simple fact, that difference. Furthermore, if you really lived in Monmouth you wouldn’t be looking at the Dumble Street end of the river at two o’clock in the morning. You’d know better. If your daddy was a doctor, as I suspect he was, he would have taught you better. To the tune of the hickory stick. That’s how they always teach the very young. Besides you lie in your teeth. You don’t live in Connecticut. You’ve got New York markers on your car. Maybe you stole it.

  5

  * * *

  THE MOONBEAM was crowded all the way back to the door. Standing in the doorway, he kept his hand on the girl’s arm, as he looked around to see if there was even so much as an inch of unoccupied space. Yes, he thought, filled with people, filled with noise, blast from the jukebox, rattle of dishes, clink of silver, roar of voices; filled with smells, too, beer, cigarette smoke, cheap perfume, and smells from the kitchen, greasy dish water, unwashed icebox, strong yellow soap. Quite a mixture. Not too much light in the place, bluish pinkish light from the wall lamps, so dim it barely illuminated the big room, gave it the effect of a cave. Waiters hurried through the cave, bumping into the chairs, the tables, the customers, beer slopping over on the trays, the tables. They all drank beer because it was cheap and if you drank enough of it, you could get a slight jag on and if you got a slight jag on, the little floosey you’d picked up over on Franklin began to look like Marlene, and the thin straight legs began to look like Marlene’s legs, and the toobig stuckout can began to look like Marlene’s. Roar of voices again. People had to talk too loud, to shout, to make themselves heard over the racket made by the fans. They kept the fans going all the time, winter and summer, had to or the customers would suffocate from the smell, smells they brought in with them, smells indigenous to the place. Noisy fans. Noisy exhaust in the dirty kitchen.

  It was a little too early for a fight to start, the boys really hadn’t got enough beer under their belts. After you drank enough beer you would get a jag on and if you got a jag on you could convince yourself you packed a punch like Old Man Louis had when he was young and you said Joe and people knew who you were talking about. But Old One-One ran The Moonbeam and he could stop a fight before it really got started. He had been a wrestler and a stevedore and a weightlifter, or so people said, anyway he looked like Gargantua and he got his name from the fact that he had never been seen anywhere, any time, any place, with a woman. One of the Geechie boys from South Carolina named him Old One-One explaining that where he came from that’s what they called the red-wing blackbird—the males and females gathered in separate flocks in the fall and winter, so that the male was always found without a female, only he was strictly obscene about it.

  Old One-One was a dirty fighter so that even with a jag on, even having convinced yourself that you were Old Man Louis, but young and fast, a part of your mind would tick off a warning, reminding you of the stories about Old One-One, how he’d grab a bottle and smash it on the bar and go for you with the jagged end, or get out his blackjack, or trip you and once you were down, do his damndest to kick your teeth down your throat, so that even though you were fogged up with beer, once you saw Old One-One plowing toward you through the crowded noisy Moonbeam, you quit believing you were Old Man Louis and left by a side door, because part of your mind remembered all the business about smashed skulls and ruptured kidneys and ruined testicles.

  The Moonbeam Café. It belonged to Bill Hod, like a lot of other places, though Link hadn’t known it in the days when he was what the law calls a minor, and had sneaked in for a glass of beer, thinking Bill would never know about it. Old One-One belonged to Mr. B. Hod, too, like a lot of other people.

  Link suddenly thrust out an arm, stopping one of the hurrying waiters, “Hey, Bug Eyes,” he said. “Where can I find a place to sit?”

  “In the back, Sonny. Go all the way in the back. All the way in the back. I’ll squush some of ’em out of the way with a table.”

  Bug Eyes moved off, having barely looked up, balancing his tray, high up, arm bent stiff, hurrying toward the back of the Moonbeam, toward the bar. By the time Link and the girl squeezed through the crowd, avoiding tables, stepping over legs, Bug Eyes had a table in place, and two chairs, close to each other. “What’ll you have, Sonny? What’ll you have?”

  “Well?” Link looked at the girl.

  “Rye. With soda.”

  “Okay, Bug. Two. Double rye. Soda.”

  “Gotcha, gotcha.” Bug Eyes was already hurrying away as he said it.

  “What’s your name?” the girl asked. She had been looking around, at the people sitting close by, now she looked at Link and her expression changed.

  “Link Williams.” What’s the matter with her now? She looks scared out of her wits. If she’s got the nerve to wander around on the dock at two in the morning what the hell is there in The Moonbeam to scare her. All good sociologists study the critters at first hand, and true the place is noisy, and true the stink in here is terrific—but these are The People.

  “Link?” she said it with an obvious effort. “Is that a nickname?”

  “Yeah. A contraction of Lincoln.” The Emancipator with the big toobig bony hands, the sad deepset eyes, the big bony hands almost always resting on the outsize knees, an outsize man with outsize ideas. Man of the people. Something wrong with his glands. Overdeveloped? Underdeveloped? All men free and equal pursuit of happiness—words on paper and he believed them. Emancipation Proclamation Williams. Named after him. Why? The women name the children, reward for services rendered, award for valor, for the act of birth, the act of creation. So the creator names the child. What did my mother mean? What was it? Act of gratitude? A way of saying thank­you? Or perhaps some of the males in her own family had been named Lincoln and so she, without thought, without real purpose, simply gave the name to her male child. Lincoln Williams. The name handed on without the trace of a recollection of who or what or how or why, no special meaning, forgotten, long since. Perhaps never known?

  He was about to ask her what her name was, though he would have been quite willing to go on calling her Honey, but sometimes the female preferred, or at least pretended to prefer, to retain some trace of the amenities by saying I’m so-and-so, who are you, though what the hell difference it made, only a female would know. But Bug Eyes came toward them just then, moving slowly. He always ran. Link forgot all about the girl’s name, wondering what had slowed Bug Eyes down.

  It was the girl, the girl with the silky pale yellow hair. Bug was looking at her, looking at her in the most curious fashion, a covert, all-embracing, analytical stare that transferred itself elsewhere so quickly that Link would have been unaware of this swift appraisal if he hadn’t been watching him. Almost immediately his eyes went blank, curtained, but something very like hostility showed in his face.

  Link looked at the girl too, critically, analytically, and saw then what Bug had seen and wondered why Bug had seen it so quickly and he hadn’t. He had talked to her, walked at least two blocks with her, entered The Moonbeam with her, consulted her about her choice of drinks, without seeing what Bug had seen in one swift glance. He studied her face. If it hadn’t been for that wary immediate knowledge in Bug’s eyes, there one minute and blanked out the next, would he, Link, have known that she was white? No. Why did the knowledge come to Bug at first glance and to him only now at second hand? Bug hadn’t looked at the girl when they came in the place, or when they sat down. Bug was older, more experienced. Nuts. Because? Well, Bug had been born in the South, had lived in the South where his wellbeing, yea, verily, his life would depend on his ability to rec
ognize a white woman when he saw one.

  But how could he or Bug or anybody else be certain? He’d seen colored girls with hair as blond and silky, with eyes as blue and skin as white, as this girl’s. The colored ones, the Vassar-Wellesley-Bennington colored ones talked just as glibly about crime and bad housing as this little female he had taken in tow.

  Take Mamaluke Hill’s mother, that is if you wanted to take something for some reason, she was just as blond and blue-eyed as the girl sitting beside him in The Moonbeam. She was the wife of the Franklin Avenue Baptist minister. When the Hills first came to Monmouth, first took over the Franklin Avenue Baptist Church, there was enough energy used up in head shaking and eyebrow raising to run a Diesel motor as people asked: Is she or isn’t she? Mamaluke was a skinny brown boy and when Mamaluke’s blue-eyed mother showed up at the grammar school on Parents’ Visiting Day, the entire school was thrown into shock, because it didn’t seem possible or reasonable or logical that she could be the mother of Matthew Mark Luke John Acts-of-the-Apostles Son-of-Zebedel Garden-of-Gethsemane Hill, known as Mamaluke Hill. For short. Mamaluke’s pappy was a big black man who sweated easily, and shouted easily, too, you could hear him all up and down Franklin Avenue, every Sunday morning, shouting in a voice like thunder, about hell fire and damnation and the Blood of the Lamb, getting louder and louder as he worked up to a climax, and just before he got there, he took his coat off, stopping right in the middle of the preaching to take his coat off, telling the sisters and the brothers that he had just broken out all over in a good Baptist sweat. Hallelujah!

  Mrs. Ananias Hill was colored but her skin was as white as the skin of this little frightened one staring at the glass of whiskey on the table in front of her. He thought, What in hell does she see in here that makes her look as though she were drowned in fear? She was staring at the people who were packed in around the bar and he looked too. Nothing to see but a lot of young men and young women draining beer glasses.

  “What’s the matter?” he asked. Because she was now staring at him in the same way. If she’d been under water for a long time, a month or so, and then slowly floated to the surface, she couldn’t look more drowned than she does at this moment. “Are you all right?”

  She nodded, apparently unable to speak, and he frowned. What the hell will I do with her if she passes out in here? Where can I take her? How explain her? And then—Is she or isn’t she? How can I decide? How know? Mrs. Hill? Dumble Street said that Old Hell and Damnation Hill didn’t know himself whether his wife was white or colored and snickered, playing endless variations on a theme—she was white as the Lamb and the Reverend Ananias was black as the pit itself. Abbie made up her mind about Mrs. Hill when Mamaluke was christened. F. K. Jackson went to the christening and came back and told Abbie about it.

  F. K. Jackson: They christened him Matthew Mark Luke John Acts-of-the-Apostles Son-of-Zebedel Garden-of-Gethsemane Hill.

  Abbie (long silence): No question about it. She’s colored. (another long silence) What will they call him for—well, for everyday use?

  F. K. Jackson: His basket name is Mamaluke.

  Abbie (absolute outrage in voice): Basket name? What’s that?

  F. K. Jackson: A kind of pet name that they give an infant until such time as he’s baptized and his christened name is officially fastened to him. They use the pet name lest an evil spirit learn his real name and turn him into a changeling.

  He studied the girl again. White? Colored? Her hair had a wonderful shimmer but—so did Abbie’s. He wondered what that pale yellow hair would feel like to touch. Was she or wasn’t she? She had slipped off her coat and the dress she wore was made of some kind of dark velvetylooking stuff. She had a long thin senseless scarf about her shoulders, pale green in color, shot through with metal threads that glinted in the dim light. He wondered whom she belonged to and where she had been going in the longskirted coat, with that thin flimsy scarf around her shoulders. So he asked her.

  “I was going to a dinner party and I changed my mind. I drove all the way to New York and then I changed my mind.”

  “Oh.” Her voice, on the dock, had been frightened, her breathing a kind of gasping, but now, she was panic-stricken, there was a frantic hurried note in her voice, she kept repeating words and phrases, didn’t seem to be able to stop talking.

  “When I got in Monmouth I kept driving thinking I would find some place—where I could see the river—and then the fog kept getting thicker—the fog—thicker and thicker—I got out of the car at the dock and walked through some of the streets—and I read the street signs and I decided to look around—look around—but I didn’t see anything much—the streets looked like the streets in any other city—then I came back to the dock and the fog was so thick I couldn’t see—but I kept hearing—kept hearing—that funny noise—and it kept getting closer and closer—and—” Her voice broke, as though she were about to cry.

  “Cut it out. Here, finish your drink and let’s get out of here.”

  She picked up the whiskey and soda and her hand was trembling, and she tried to steady it and spilled part of the drink on the table, and then drank quickly, obviously not liking it, because she made an involuntary face, as though her throat rejected the taste of the stuff. And he, watching her, wondering about her, said, “Shall we go now?”

  Outside, on the sidewalk, she said, “Oh!—the fog. It’s still foggy,” and the gasp was back in her voice. “Which way—I can’t even tell which way we came—”

  “I could walk it blindfold. Put your hand on my arm.” He guided her through the fog, and he thought, She could be purple or blue in this fog, in this can’t-see-your-hand-before-your-face fog. All cats are gray in the dark. B. Franklin. The cat would eate fish but would not wet her feete. When all candles bee out, all cats bee gray. John Heywood. White women is all froze up. Weak Knees. Quote from L. Williams? No comment. No quotes. L. Williams shared J. Heywood’s opinion: When all candles bee out—

  He said, “We turn here. This is Dumble Street.”

  “I thought it would lift, that the fog would lift, while we were inside. It’s even thicker—what’s that?” She jumped and looked back over her shoulder.

  “Nothing but the foghorn. Car on Franklin Avenue.”

  She kept looking back as though she expected to see Cat Jimmie behind her, not see him but hear him. How the hell was she going to drive, drive through this damn fog, shivering and shaking? I can’t go off and leave her sitting in that car on Dock Street, she’d be dead of hysterics by morning.

  She said, “The fog—” And stopped.

  He thought, the fog, the fog, the fog. She sounds like a rec­ord that’s stuck. “Listen,” he said. “It’s even more upsetting when the weather or the degree of light changes while you’re inside a place.” That’s fine, my boy, keep talking, talk fast, before she starts screaming her lovely little head off. “I remember going to a movie when I was a kid. I’d never been to one before. When I went inside the theater it was daylight and when I came out it was dark. It seemed all wrong. I thought time should have stopped while I watched the movie. But it hadn’t. It got dark just as it always does.”

  When he opened the door of her car, she made no effort to get in. She said, “Would you—would you—like to go for a ride?”

  “Not especially.”

  “I can’t drive through this horrible fog—alone. I keep seeing that thing on the little cart, keep hearing its breathing, keep wondering if I’ll be able to run any more—”

  “All right.” She started to get in the car, behind the steering wheel and he put his hand on her arm, thrusting her aside, suddenly bored with the whole thing, the girl, the car, the fog, the hysterics, Cat Jimmie, Dumble Street. “I’ll drive.”

  He let her get in by herself, let her close the door on the other side by herself. Then he turned the car around, went through Dumble Street, past The Last Chance, dark now, turned into Fra
nklin Avenue, went past The Moonbeam, still lighted.

  “You’ve driven one of these before.”

  “Yeah.” One of these, nice way to put it. Oh, you’ve held a tennis racket before, oh, you’ve worn shoes before, oh, you’ve used a toothbrush before. Bug Eyes is a weisenheimer but he was right. The lady is white. That surprised condescension in the voice is an unmistakable characteristic of the Caucasian, a special characteristic of the female Caucasian. The funny thing is they don’t even know they do it.

  Yeah, he’d driven one of these before and damn near smashed it up. When he was sixteen. That one belonged to Mr. B. Hod. Then when he finished college, Abbie gave him the Major’s solid gold watch and the Major’s diamond stickpin, reward for finishing, reward for the Phi Beta Kappa key that he had never worn; and Mr. B. Hod presented him with a brandnew shiny Cadillac convertible. Special Job. Bill said, “I didn’t think you’d make it. Mark of respect, Sonny.”

  Abbie stood on the front steps and frowned at the car when she saw it, obviously not liking its size, its shape, its color, its make. Sun shining on the car, making the dark red finish glisten. “It looks like a gambler’s car,” she said.

  “It is,” F. K. Jackson said and sniffed, snorted, and the thick-lensed glasses glinted in the sunlight.

  And now here with him, beside him, in the same make car, a female smelling of something exquisite. Flowers. Which flowers? The nightblooming stock that Abbie grew in her garden. At dusk the backyard was—well, not filled with the scent because there was always the smell of the river, but if you walked close to the flower border on a hot night in August the smell arrested you, challenged you, made you stand motionless, sniffing the air in disbelief. Your heart beat a little faster. Your breath came a little faster. Because you evoked images in your mind, of women, not short, not plump, not tall, not bony, but the height just right, the bone structure perfect, the amount of flesh covering the bones absolutely right, absolutely perfect. And for a moment, only for a moment, and it was, of course, an illusion, an illusion wrought of the moonlight, the white light, curious, unreal, mysterious light of the moon and the sweet thick incredible smell of the stock, you believed that if you reached out your hand you would touch a woman, not short and plump and erect and full of pride and untouchable because of morals and religion and impossible standards of cleanliness and righteousness and not tall and bony and nervous and too astute and alert, too logical and too masculine, but a just right, soft to the touch, sweetsmelling, beautifully put together female, with all the parts in the right place, never the look as though if touched, the bone that lay just beneath the skin would reject the hand because of the unyielding quality of the bone or that the flesh would reject the hand because of the righteousness, the pridefulness of the flesh.