by Ann Petry
He couldn’t prove that Mamie had a lover, or that if she had one, it was Bill Hod. For all he knew, Hod might really and truly be her cousin. But he had to find out. So he took to playing that most dangerous, most hazardous, of all the games that husbands and wives play with each other. He had to find out, to make sure, he had to know, could not live without knowing, so he finished his work at the Hall as quickly as he could, arriving home at unexpected hours, entering the house quietly, unannounced.
Sometimes Mamie was alone in the house, sometimes she was not there at all. Once he found Bill Hod sitting in the kitchen, drinking milk, sleeves of the white shirt rolled up, collar of the white shirt open at the throat, and Mamie was seated across the table from him, drinking coffee and eating doughnuts.
Mamie said, “Have one, Powther. Weak Knees made ’em. He’s the cook at Bill’s place.”
Powther ate one of the doughnuts, drank a cup of coffee, moving nervously back and forth, in front of the kitchen sink, thinking, There’s something about him, what is it, it’s not just the face, it’s more than just the face, I don’t know what it is, but I’m afraid of him. His hands began to shake so that he put the unfinished cup of coffee down in the sink, afraid he would drop it, and nibbled at the doughnut, not really conscious that he was eating, and yet aware that the doughnut was incredibly good, better than any he had ever eaten, and that on the strength of those doughnuts, Weak Knees, whoever he was, could cook in the White House. Though the best cooks sneered at the White House as a place to work, prestige, yes, but a pinchpenny kind of place, you couldn’t really let yourself go there as you could in, say, the kitchen of any millionaire in the country.
He glanced in the dining room to see how near finished they were. And then went all the way inside and started removing plates. The Madam and the Captain were about to start another argument about politics.
The Madam: Oh, Bunny, you talk such nonsense. If all the wealth in this country were divided up, in less than a year’s time the same people would be rich and the same ones would be poor.
The Captain: I doubt it. Because—
Miss Camilo (she gave the Captain another one of those long-lingering caressing glances that Powther was certain were not directed at the Captain but inspired by someone else and therefore directed at the other man even though he was not there): Let’s drive north for eighty miles and then go east for twenty miles and see what we find.
Miss Camilo had changed the subject, so abruptly, so quickly, Powther didn’t see how the Madam and the Captain could possibly bring it up again. He could tell by what the Madam had been saying that she and the Captain were heading straight for one of those long unpleasant arguments about Roosevelt. No matter where they started they always ended up arguing about Roosevelt, and the Madam always managed to call the Captain a fool.
Powther served the dessert, brought in the coffee service. They were talking about the projected ride again.
The Madam: Did you ever find anything wonderful that way?
Miss Camilo: You’d be surprised at the things you find when you’re just out riding and don’t know where you’re going. Even here in Monmouth.
The Captain: You’re right. Monmouth’s full of surprises. Especially if you follow the river.
The Madam: What kind of surprises?
The Captain: Views of the river. Maybe it’s because of the mural in the entrance hall, perhaps the mural made me really see the river. But you can catch the most marvelous glimpses of it, looking down some of the side streets, and then when you actually come to it, and follow its course, you feel as though you had made a personal discovery, come on a secret that no one else has ever found.
Miss Camilo: That’s the way I feel about it, too. It’s almost as though you had finally found something you’d been hunting for all your life without really knowing that you’d been looking for it. And then you see that it’s there, the thing you’ve been hunting for is there, in the river.
Powther passed the coffee cups as the Madam filled them. He was a little surprised when Miss Camilo again urged the Madam to go for a ride with them.
Miss Camilo: Mother, you come with us. It’s such fun to go somewhere, not knowing where you’re going or what you’ll find when you get there.
The Captain, quickly: We’ll all go exploring. Do come and play hunt-the-inn with us, Mrs. Treadway. Each and every-man-Jack of us will be Christopher Columbus. No. You can be Cortez, he was a better man than the rest of them. Cammie will be Ponce de León. I’ll be, well, I’ll just go along for the ride, and keep the log.
The Madam gave Captain Sheffield a funny sharp look. Powther looked at him, too, and couldn’t decide whether the Captain was joking, teasing the Madam and Miss Camilo in some fashion that he, Powther, could not understand or whether he was angry, anger born of fear that the Madam would ignore the fact that three’s a crowd and go with them, and so was being sarcastic.
The Madam: Thank you for asking me but I really can’t go with you. Besides even if I could, I don’t like the idea of hunting for a place to spend the night. I honestly prefer my own bed in my own room, or a bed that’s equally as comfortable in a hotel room that’s been reserved for me in advance.
Miss Camilo: Well, we tried, didn’t we, Bunny?
The Captain: You’ll go with us some other time, won’t you?
The Madam: Not when you’re going to play hunt-the-inn. But some time when you know where you’re going, and you let me know beforehand, I’d love to go along.
Miss Camilo: Okay, Bunny, we’ll start as soon as I can get a toothbrush in a bag.
Al backed the car out of the garage. He said, “Camilo musta took her Cadillac. I didn’t see her get it.”
Powther said, “She and the Captain are going away for the weekend.”
“Camilo and Bunny?” Al said, and he sounded surprised.
“That’s right.”
“You mean they went off together some place?”
“That’s right.”
Al was strangely silent. Powther glanced at him a couple of times. He seemed to be thinking about something, puzzling over something. When they reached the car line, Al slowed down, then said, “Ah, what’s the differ? I’ll drive you all the way, Mal. I ain’t got nothing else to do.”
At one point Al got stuck behind a trolley car, and was forced to follow it block after block, going slowly through the streets, unable to pass it, because of all the Sunday traffic. Because of Miss Camilo and the Captain, Powther kept thinking about the day he rode on a trolley car from early morning until late at night. It was a hot day, too, it had started off hot, early in the morning, and the Madam suddenly decided to go to Newport to visit friends for a long weekend.
As soon as he had organized the Hall for the day, and conferred with Mrs. Cameron as to who would be off and when, he hurried home. He kept mopping his forehead with a handkerchief, trying to hurry the trolley car along, and the effort he put into it, the hurry, hurry, hurry, made him feel hotter and hotter. He was still going home at unexpected hours because he had to find out whether Bill Hod was Mamie’s lover, or whether he was her cousin just as she said.
He entered the apartment house quietly, tiptoeing up the stairs, though he knew that there was no reason to move quietly in the hall, but the moment he entered the street door he began to feel like a spy, a conspirator, and so he walked on tiptoe up the stairs of that old building where they had lived before they moved into Mrs. Crunch’s beautifully kept, fine, old brick house on Dumble Street.
He had been in and out of that building hundreds of times, but for some reason, perhaps because he was extra sensitive to everything that day, the heat was dreadful, he was sweating, the hall impressed him as being singularly ugly. He paused on the second floor, just standing there, on the landing, thinking, Why couldn’t whoever painted this hall have made it two-thirds green and one-third tan, or three-quarters green a
nd one-quarter tan? His eye kept following the dividing line between the two colors, hunting for some break in the evenness. It was so damn monotonous and he was under some peculiar and inexplicable compulsion to touch the design stamped in the metal of the wall, his fingers kept seeking it out. It was repeated over and over again, at the exact same interval, the metal cool under his hands, his hands hot, too hot. He tried to figure out what the design was. A leaf? A fleur-de-lis? Just a conventionalized pattern, senseless, unrecognizable. But repeated, repeated, repeated.
Ordinarily when he walked up the stairs he chose the side next to the wall, avoiding the banister, for fear he might brush against it, it was always greasy. He had never stopped to study the wall. His heart was beating faster and faster, and he thought, There’s something wrong upstairs. Perhaps Mamie isn’t there. Perhaps she’s left me.
He kept reaching toward the wall, his fingers seeming to find some sort of satisfaction in verifying the distance between the designs stamped in the metal. He drew his hand away, and it would reach out again, apparently of its own volition, as though something in his hand needed to find this senseless pattern always in the same place, the place where it ought to be.
Mrs. Adams owned this building, he thought. She was responsible for this ugly hallway. She must be seventy and yet she had only a few gray hairs, and the effect of the black thick woolly hair above the face with the dark brown skin, deep lines at each side of the mouth, was all wrong. One eye went off at an angle, so that he was never certain whether she was looking at him or something over his head or to his right.
Mrs. Adams had a silly kind of manner. When she wasn’t whispering, she talked in a thin whining voice. An arch and silly manner. He was certain the pearl earrings she wore were real ones, and he had thought she would verify this when he admired them. But she didn’t. She arched her long neck, and bridled, and said, “They belonged to my Grandmother Williams.” And that was all.
Whenever he thought of her, he thought of the pocketbook she carried. She never let it out of her hand, out of her arm, actually, because not only did her hand rest on it, but it was always tucked under her arm as well. She never put it down, no matter what she was doing. She collected the rents herself, counting the money carefully, and then opening the pocketbook just wide enough to push the bills and the coins inside and then snapped it shut, the whole thing done awkwardly, the bony hands clutching and fumbling with the powerful clasp, because she never really let the pocketbook get out from under her arm all the time she was opening and closing it.
She was thin all over, arms, shoulders, legs, feet, long lean feet. But she had a tremendous, pendulous, belly, the sag and sway of it suggested a big tumor inside. She walked with a slow, stiff-legged gait, as though her legs were brittle, and she had to plan each step in advance lest one of them snap.
Right after he and Mamie moved into the apartment, he met Mrs. Adams in the hall, just coming in, pocketbook clutched under her arm, hand resting on the clasp, and he told her that he’d like to have the apartment painted.
“Everything’s so high, Mr. Powther,” she had said, leaning toward him. Her manner became highly confidential. She began to whisper. “What it costs me to keep this place heated, and a new furnace last year, and now they’ve just made me buy new garbage cans. The Board of Health made me buy them and the old ones was perfectly good except the covers was gone. Those little niggers runnin’ through the street all the time, steals all the covers off the garbage cans. The big niggers steals the handles to use as blackjacks, and the little niggers steal the covers, for what I don’t know. And what it cost me to buy those new cans I could have put that money by for a rainy day, and it woulda carried me for a long time to come. And then I bought chains and chained the covers on. I told that man from the Board of Health, ‘Listen, I’m just a poor black woman and a widow, and I can’t throw money around like that,’” she paused, sighed, moved a little closer to Powther. “Well, it didn’t do any good.”
The eye that wandered seemed to find something of interest behind him, on the stairway, halfway up, anyway it focused there and the other eye seemed to be studying the top of his head. Dear God, he had thought, why did I ask her anything about paint? Why did I ask her anything at all?
Mrs. Adams moved a little closer, and her great belly brushed against him, soft, huge. She smelt old and musty, and most unpleasantly of some kind of perfume. He moved away, and her belly followed him, pressed against him.
“As for paint. Well, I rent these apartments as is, Mr. Powther. I can’t pay out a single penny for paint. Not one penny. You might as well say I’m the janitor for all the good I get out of this place.”
So he paid the painters himself, hired them himself, and then right after that had new plumbing fixtures put in the bathroom, though he knew if he and Mamie ever moved, Mrs. Adams would get double the rent for it because of the money he’d spent improving it.
He didn’t know why he should have thought about Mrs. Adams, didn’t know why he was standing motionless, on the landing, the second floor landing of Mrs. Adams’ rundown house. He’d done everything for Mamie, given her everything, let her do exactly as she pleased. He didn’t have to live in this colored slum. If it hadn’t been for Mamie, he would have lived at the Hall, in his own quarters, as fine a setup as any man ever had. But Mamie wouldn’t have fitted in with the life there. It was bad enough to come home and find Bill Hod in his house, it would have been unbearable to have found Rogers, the gardener, Al, the chauffeur, the French chef, the men he worked with every day on intimate terms with Mamie.
Besides, Mamie was always saying, “Powther, there is things about white people that I never will understand. And to tell you the God’s honest truth, I don’t intend to try. I am a hell of a lot more comfortable, and it gives me a lot more honest-to-God pleasure just to write ’em all down as bastards and leave ’em strictly alone. Live and let live is what I say. I don’t bother them and they don’t bother me, so we get along fine. If they say the same about me, it’s perfectly all right. That means we’re even Steven.”
Then she’d start to sing, and you couldn’t talk, couldn’t argue with her when she was singing, you had to listen. Perhaps that was why she sang, it meant he couldn’t discuss anything with her that she didn’t want to discuss. She began to sing that song he didn’t like. He thought it was a spiritual, but she made it sound like the kind of song they banned on the radio, banned on records:
Same train carry my mother;
Same train be back tomorrer;
Same train, same train.
Same train blowin’ at the station,
Same train be back tomorrer;
Same train, same train.
If it hadn’t been for Mamie, his life would have been as tranquil and as satisfactory as anybody’s life could be. He was doing the kind of work he loved. He did it superbly and knew it, he was well paid for it, all the help liked him, respected him. So did the Madam. She even confided in him. Not even her personal maid had as much of the Madam’s confidence as he had. When he first went to Treadway Hall he was certain she had qualms about him, wondered if she hadn’t made a mistake, she’d never had colored help before so he supposed it was understandable. He could tell by the way she watched him, something skeptical in her gaze. But by the end of that first year he had turned in such a magnificent performance, that she forgot all about his being colored. Finally, she told him that she had never known how beautiful the house could be, until he took it over.
Yes, everything would have gone smoothly without Mamie. But he couldn’t live without her. He would die. He would shrivel up and die if she left him. He had felt suddenly old, horribly old, and so sorry for himself that for a moment he thought he was going to cry. It’s this goddamn hallway, he thought. It’s just like Mrs. Adams’, it’s enough to depress a saint. He started tiptoeing up the stairs again, going quickly.
Once inside the apartment, he
found out what he had already known, deep inside him, found out because he saw the evidence there in the bedroom he shared with Mamie, Mamie, Mamie.
He had furnished the room with simple, unadorned, soundly constructed furniture made of good wood, carefully finished. Mamie had slowly replaced it with overornate imitations of period furniture, horrible, cheap stuff, not cheap in price, they charged enough for it, but it was the kind of furniture that was despised by people who really knew fine things, the sort of stuff sold in poor neighborhoods to Italians and colored people and Puerto Ricans. The bed was a copy of a copy of a Louis Something-or-Other, the wood, God knows what the wood was, stained and varnished and the headboard and footboard covered with cupids and doves and flowers, all turned out by machine and glued on.
Mamie and Bill Hod lay there, side by side, in that fake Louis Something-or-Other bed. Mamie asleep. Bill Hod, lying on his side, back to the door, something in his position suggesting that he was not asleep. Both of them naked. Hod’s body bore absolutely no relation to his face, his body was young and beautiful and with no knowledge of evil.
Powther told himself that he was a coward, that he was a fool. He tried to think of more searing descriptions of himself and couldn’t, as he went down the stairs, softly, afraid of being heard, afraid of Bill Hod, of Mamie, of himself, half blind with fear, and with rage, and something else, something that made his eyes fill with tears. He couldn’t see where he was going, and his throat was filling with mucus, so that he couldn’t swallow, thickness in his throat.
He got on a trolley car, more by instinct than because he actually saw the car coming and decided to board it. Anyway, there he was, standing in the front of the car, dropping money in the coinbox and he did not remember how he got there. He rode to the end of the line, and paid another fare and rode to the center of the city, and got a transfer and boarded another trolley, going in another direction.