by Ann Petry
Barber grunted by way of reply.
8
* * *
HE LAY FLAT on his back, eyes half closed; half awake, half asleep; he was aware of a sense of expectancy that was quickening the beat of his heart, causing a slow increase in the pressure of his blood; he deliberately prolonged this moment in which his conscious mind had not yet analyzed, explained, whatever it was that had not yet happened, but was about to happen. Wonderful whatever the thing was. Indefinably wonderful.
Then he remembered. This was Sunday. He had a date with Camilo Williams.
He took a shower in the expensive bathroom that Bill Hod had paid to have installed, in what had once been a big closet, in the front parlor, in Abbie’s house. Same front parlor where the Major’s coffin had stood all those years ago. After Abbie and F. K. Jackson got him out of The Last Chance, they turned the parlor into a bedroom for him; and it continued to look like a front parlor until Bill Hod paid an interior decorator to do the room over. It was still a good room. Though Abbie would never think so.
He had almost finished dressing when he heard a peculiar scrambling sound. It came from his bedroom. He frowned, listening. Oh, damn that cat, he thought. Anyone would think Abbie was an old maid all of whose latent passion, emotion, affection, suppressed sexual desires were hung around the neck of a tomcat—even to the name, Pretty Boy.
Taking his shoes in his hand, he opened the door that led into the bedroom. I’ll brain him, he thought, flatten him out. He’s having a wrestling match with the stuff I left strewn around on the top of the desk.
It wasn’t the cat. It was J. C. Powther. He was not scrambling around in the stuff on top of the desk, he was going through the top drawer, methodically, and yet quickly, his round head almost inside the drawer, his small behind bobbing up and down in the most tempting fashion as he reached farther and farther inside the drawer.
Link said, “Hey! Get the hell out of there.”
J.C. turned, looked at him doubtfully, obviously estimating the degree and the strength of Link’s wrath but one hand stayed inside the drawer, feeling, clutching, and discarding, continuing the investigation, while the rest of his body drew itself together in preparation for flight or counterattack.
J.C. said, “You got a penny?”
Link handed him a nickel. “Here. Go buy yourself an ice cream cone. And choke on it while you’re eating it.”
J.C. gave him a black and venomous stare. He did not move away from the desk, simply reached for the nickel and knotted his fist around it, saying, “They costs six cents now.” Having dismissed Link as a source of danger, he turned his attention back to the drawer.
“Here’s a dime. It’s blackmail but like all other victims of blackmailers I hope it’s insurance. Anyway, you stay out of my room. If I catch you in here again I’ll cut you up in little pieces and boil each piece separately in oil.”
J.C. grabbed the dime and started backing toward the door. “I’m goin’ get me some Kool-Aid.”
Link glared at him. “You get yourself some arsenic, old man. You trot down to the candy store right now, six-fifteen in the ayem and you kick on the door until Mintz opens it at six-thirty and you say, ‘Mintz, I want me a half-pound of arsenic.’”
“Mintz don’t run the candy store.”
“No?”
“Miss Dollie has the candy store. She don’t open until near nine o’clock.”
“Well, well, well. Is Miss Dollie colored or does she belong to the same race as the Great White Father?”
“She’s cullud.”
“Ah! That accounts for the late opening. In my day the candy store on the corner of Franklin and Dumble belonged to a gentleman named Mintz and a man could refresh himself with a soda pop or an ice cream cone at six-forty-five in the ayem if he were so minded. Mintz opened up early and closed up late. Your Miss Dollie’ll never get to be a millionaire opening up at nine. Anyway when she does get the joint opened, you go right down there and order up a half pound of arsenic from her and you eat some every morning at this hour and—”
“Yah!” J.C. paused in the doorway. “You don’t know your ass from your elbow,” he shouted and ran up the front stairs, his feet making a soft thud on the carpeted stairs.
Link yelled after him, “I catch you in here again, you little bastard, and I’ll guarantee you’ll know yours because it’ll be the part you can’t sit on for a month.”
Abbie came out in the hall. “What in the world—”
“Good morning,” he said. “I was just telling my little friend to batten down his hatches. I trust I did not unduly disturb you with my bellowing. I hope I did not rudely thrust you forth from the arms of Morpheus—”
“Arms of—arms of—whose arms?” she asked. “Was he in your room? Link you confuse me so. You do it on purpose. Why don’t you talk like other people? Was J.C. in your room?”
“Yes, ma’am. I ejected him. Verbally. Not forcibly. It was the threat of force that you heard.”
“Arms of—whose arms—what were you talking about?”
“I meant that I hoped I didn’t get you out of bed, Miss Abbie. But you were up, weren’t you? Come on, I’ll help you get breakfast. Sunday morning. Special breakfast.”
He could tell by her eyes that she was surprised by this unexpected offer. Whatever she thought or felt was instantly revealed in her eyes—fine eyes; the expression, on the whole, one of valor. Yet she wasn’t valorous. Or was she? She was afraid of everything under the sun, storms, strange dogs, tramps, drunks, any unexpected sound. Too much imagination, that was all. She could visualize disaster, see it, feel it; and had never liked it because he refused to share her fears. But she had survived a personal disaster, a big one; and that accounted for the valor in her eyes. He thought, as he looked down at her, smiling, We might have been friends, if you had had a slightly lower set of standards, if your judgments of people had been less unkind, less critical; if that outer layer of pride had not been so prickly, so impenetrable.
Abbie said, “Help me? Why, I suppose you could. But you—somehow you’re different this morning. What’s happened to you?”
“It’s the time of year,” he said solemnly. “I always act like this in the fall. I shed my hair and get a brandnew crop of hair, and it—well—it stimulates me. Preparation for winter. You know, like a cat or a dog or a woodchuck or a squirrel. Makes me brisk. Ho! Leave me make the coffee.”
“Link! You’re barefooted. Go put your shoes and your socks on.”
“Not me, honey. That’s due to the change in the seasons, too. My feet cry out for freedom at this time of year. That’s the native African in me. Come on. Leave us brew up the coffee and fry up the bacon and scramble up the eggbeggs.”
They had just started to eat, he and Abbie, when he heard Mamie Powther’s voice, voice lifted in song, voice ascending and descending the outside back stairs, voice increasing in volume, voice diminishing, almost disappearing, so that he found himself listening, straining to hear as though something important depended on his not losing the sound. Then it slowly increased again, increasing, increasing, as she came down the stairs until finally it seemed to be right beside him, not just the voice but the woman, too. Sometimes at night he’d heard her singing, the voice sounding faint, faraway.
Abbie had opened the kitchen windows. No matter how cold the morning, she always aired the kitchen out, always said the same thing as she flung the windows up, “Colored people’s houses always smell of food, ham and fried chicken and greasy greens. Sometimes I think they’re all stomach and no mind.” He was always tempted to say, “But Miss Abbie, that’s not possible. Aren’t you colored, too?” and never did.
With the windows open Mamie Powther might just as well have been standing right beside him, as she sang:
Same train carry my mother;
Same train be back tomorrer;
Same train, same tr
ain.
Same train blowin’ at the station,
Same train be back tomorrer;
Same train, same train.
He supposed that it was a song about death and it might have been a spiritual originally though he’d never heard it before, but that smooth warm voice singing it now turned it into a song about life, about man and his first fall, about Eve and all the wonders of her flesh, about all the Eves for generations back and generations yet to come. She may have been singing about a female who rode on a train, a train that would come back again tomorrow, but the texture of the voice, the ripeness of it told you that there must have been a male aboard that train.
Abbie said, “She never remembers to bring down all the things she’ll need. She keeps going up and down the stairs, to get clothespins, to bring down clothes that she’s forgotten, and then goes back again after a clothesline. She always washes on Sunday just as though it were any other day in the week and then hangs the wash out. I asked her not to. There’s something about clothes hanging on lines on Sundays that—well, it’s slovenly and it’s outrageous. But then she has children and I suppose—”
She got up and looked out the window. “I should think she’d be cold. Nothing on her head. Her arms practically bare—”
Link got up to pour himself another cup of coffee and glanced out of the window on his way back to the table, and stood, coffee cup in hand, watching Mamie Powther. A cold morning, early, so that the sunlight was thin, pale, and Mamie Powther wore a cotton dress, and a red sweater, the sweater accentuating the big breasts, the sleeves rolled up, revealing the forearms, dimples in the elbows. All of her vigorous, elemental—the arms, the breasts. Softfleshed. Smoothskinned. Brown.
Mamie Powther leaned way over, back toward the house, no stockings on, bare leg exposed, part of thigh exposed. Highheeled red shoes on her feet.
Abbie said again, “I should think she’d be cold. Her arms are practically bare.”
“She’s probably got her love to keep her warm,” he said. Arms practically bare—ha—well, everything else was practically bare, too. Abbie could look smack at the woman’s behind, and either not see it, refuse to see it, or see it, and something, some part of her mind, would not admit having seen it, so she spoke of the arms.
That’s what’s the matter with me, he thought, it’s that woman out there bending over a clothes basket. Who the hell could live under the same roof with Venus Powther and not make a pass at the lady, especially when the lady practically waves it in your face, when the lady is built for it, when the lady knows, and I would take an oath on it, I would swear on the Book that the lady knows that at this early morning hour I am always about to lay my lip over a cup of coffee.
That’s what’s the matter with me. I’m not in love. It’s MamiePowtherChinaCamiloWilliams that has me by the throat. She is what all men chase and never capture, some one man finally touches her with the tips of his fingers and then spends the rest of his life with his hand outstretched, reaching for the warm soft flesh, and all the other women that he chases and finally captures are not what he really wants, he only pursues them because of some real or fancied resemblance to MamiePowtherChinaCamiloWilliams: tone of voice or turn of head, line of throat or—It’s MamiePowtherChinaCamiloWilliams that has turned me into a mooncalf, aware of sunrises and sunsets, staring at the bare branches of The Hangman grayblack against the morning sky, staring in the same astonished fashion at the brass knocker on the front door of this house just last night before I put the key in the door, standing, arrested, looking at a knocker I have seen a thousand-and-one times, admiring its size and shape, thinking that it looked like pure gold gleaming in the light from the street lamp; looking back at Dumble Street, Dumble Street at night, lights in the houses, voices, sound of laughter, the tempo of the street increasing, night concealing the broken pavement, shadows softening the stark upanddown shape of the buildings, shadows lengthening the street, widening it, transforming it, no longer bleak, downattheheels, overcrowded, but all light and shadow, all murmur of voices and ripple of laughter.
By four o’clock he was at the dock. There was a pink-and-redorange glow across the western sky. The river was redgold along the edges, the windows of the buildings on Dock Street, and what could be seen, at an angle, of Dumble Street were redgold, too. He walked up and down, up and down, impatient, restless, thinking, All I need is a tight little bouquet of flowers, field flowers, daisies and buttercups, wudged together in my hot little hand, and a volume of poetry, limp leather binding, and inside the small book all the monologues and soliloquies about love: My dust would hear you and beat; come live with me and be my love; make me immortal with a kiss; it was the lark; her lips suck forth my soul; I will make thee beds of roses and a thousand fragrant posies. Frankie and Johnnie. He was dressed for the part too; he had shaved again; he had bathed again; he had changed all of his clothes again—clean from top to toe, head to foot. Did he believe that business—my dust, my soul, my love. No. And never would. Was absolutely incapable of the kind of total and complete immersion in another human being that was necessary before one could think in phrases like that. Yet he would never be able to quite forget this girl, this Camilo Williams, not the face, not the figure, but the impression she gave of absolute innocence, of laughing innocence.
He had been looking at the river, and he turned because he heard footsteps on the dock, the girl was walking toward him, smiling. He thought of Mamie Powther singing “Same Train,” of China, leaning in the doorway of the hall in that house on Franklin Avenue, incredibly fat, no longer young, treacherous as a snake. Why did this girl in a black suit, white gloves on her hands, dark brown fur around her shoulders, fur reaching to the knees, girl with a walk like a ballerina’s, with the straight back and the long neck of a ballerina, girl with a look of elegance, air of innocent gaiety, girl smelling of nightblooming stock under an August moon, why should she make him think of China, of Mamie Powther? There was absolutely no resemblance. They might have come, all three of them, from different planets, and yet—there must be something, an emanation, an aura, something that made him bunch them together. He decided it was the facial expression: part challenge, part expectancy, part invitation.
Camilo said, “Link! How wonderful. You came early, too,” smiling, standing close to him.
He nodded. “The early bird—”
“Do I look like a worm?”
“You look—” he said, and couldn’t finish the sentence. She was standing too close to him—all of her too close to him: eyes, mouth, hair.
“I look like what?”
“Like an angel.”
“Have you ever seen one?”
“No,” he said. “But when Gabriel lets loose that great big final blast on his horn and Peter checks the record and then opens the gate for me, he will be surrounded by lovely winged creatures all of whom will take one look at me and say, ‘Link, how wonderful,’ and sound as though they meant it. That is the Williams version of heaven.”
“Golly! That’s what you were supposed to say but I didn’t know it could sound like that.”
“Good?”
“Like a poet.”
“That’s because I was thinking ‘come live with me and be my love.’ It was in the back of my mind. There’s something contagious about the stuff.” She stiffened as though from an electric shock and he wanted to grin, and didn’t; instead he said, slowly, carefully, so that she could not be certain whether he was issuing an invitation or whether he was idly quoting, “Make me immortal with a kiss.”
He thought, Honey, your back can’t get any straighter, if it does it’ll break. You’ll have to duck out of this some other way, indicate your displeasure by boxing my ears, or by saying, Sir, how dare you. If you didn’t expect me to give some indication of interest in you, why did you come back here?
She said, coolly, “Now that we’ve got that out of the way, I want to make a sugge
stion.”
He said, “‘Her lips suck forth my soul.’” Voice soft, voice caressing.
She skipped that one. “I thought—”
“Is it the necktie? I spent two hours selecting this tie. I thought it was a pretty good job. Sort of enhances the beard. Gray tie. Gray beard.”
“They’re both beautiful. That’s not the suggestion. I came early because I thought it might be fun to drive to New York, see a movie, and then go somewhere and eat.”
“To New York?” He thought, Lady, you go so fast. You should have been an executive. The female doesn’t usually direct the movement of the troops, at least not right out in the open. The female normally deploys her forces from ambush in order that the beginning of the attack shall be concealed.
“Why not? Two hours going. Two hours coming back. Why should we waste our Sunday afternoon costumes, your tie, your beard, my wings, and my halo, on The Moonbeam—”
“Okay.”
When they reached the car, he said, “I’ll drive.”
“Why? Don’t you trust my driving?”
He waited until he had started the car before he answered her. Then he said, “To be truthful, no. You drive too fast. You ignore the intersections. You act as though you were driving a royal coach, with outriders clearing the way. The peasants, taking the air on the Merritt Parkway, heading for New York, in their Fords and Chevrolets, might not recognize the royal coach, might not know they were blocking the royal route. Therefore, I will drive.”
“Why did you say that?” she said sharply, frowning.
“I have watched you drive off in this crate. Twice. Both times you made my hair stand on end. I do not like to have my hair stand on end and my hair does not like to stand on end because it knows that human hair is not supposed to do that. My scalp is outraged by the unnatural action of my hair and cries, Halt, Stop, Cut it out.”