by Ann Petry
“Where are you going?” she said.
“Don’t you know, hasn’t anyone ever taught you that you’re not supposed to ask a gentleman who is leaving, who is taking a runout powder, where he’s going?” He put his hands in his pockets, leaned against the door jamb. “So you won’t waste any time hunting for me or worrying about me—would you worry I wonder—I’m going to get myself about five fast drinks, and then get on a train for Monmouth.”
He went downstairs to the bar in The Hotel, drank whiskey and soda, not wanting it, kept drinking it though the stuff tasted like hell, and he felt as though he were already drunk and had been drunk for days. But he had accomplished something, he had finally achieved understanding of this bar. You have to be on the offside of a binge to understand it, he thought. They come in here to drink, come in here with memory perched on their shoulders, memory pecking at their vital organs, and after they drink enough of this amber-colored stuff, pour enough of it down their throats, they get the critter hooded and chained as though it were a falcon.
Hooded and chained? That toofat female over there, just five people down from me, same color as China, same kind of skin, yellowish, about fifty pounds lighter though, comes in here to get a hood on the falconmemory, tell by her eyes—the whites bloodshot, eyes swivel on an axis which eyes should not do, the good clean line of the jaw obscured by rolls of soft fat.
The woman said, “Mike,” to the bartender and pushed her empty glass toward him.
The bartender reached for a bottle of brandy, filled the glass. “You getting a head start, Mrs. Cumin.”
“I need it.”
Her voice was harsh, flat, with a forced tone, unpleasant to the ear. She emptied the glass quickly, and shoved it toward the bartender again, and Link thought, Mrs. Cumin, I wonder if you know what you’re doing drinking brandy at this hour in the afternoon, you already have most of the symptoms of a lush and one of these days they’ll call the wagon for you and your spotted dress and your small shortfingered plumpfingered grubby little hands and your small and very nice feet will enter the wagon first. Feet first. He looked at the woman’s hair, dyed a queer redbrown, and thought of Camilo, no spare flesh and yet not bony, the hair clean, fragrant, silkysoft, the cleareyed innocence of her.
He thought, Maybe I’m wrong. No. I couldn’t be. He could remember exactly how it went. They were going to have dinner with Wormsley and his wife, and the conversation went like this:
Camilo: I forgot your tie.
L. Williams: Tie? I’ve got one on.
Camilo: Not that one. This one. I had it made for you. It matches my dress.
L. Williams: My God! I can’t wear that. I’ve never worn a green tie in my life.
Camilo: But it matches my dress. And I had it specially made for you.
Total identification, he thought. I wore white shirts when I was fifteen because Bill wore white shirts. So I had to wear a green necktie because she was wearing a green dress—but how could she—
L. Williams (looking in mirror, after the tie was knotted around his neck, she having knotted it): Honey, I sure must love you an awful lot to let you do this to me. I look exactly like a goddamn pansy.
Camilo: You do not.
L. Williams: Well I feel like one. Same thing.
He thought, Necktie, green necktie, made of the same stuff as a fullskirted dinner dress, or wear white shirts because the enthroned one wears white shirts, or put a black man in the family tree, like Lena Wormsley, make him up, and put him in the family tree, because Wormsley is black. Total identification—that’s what he thought, then and now—now—kept man—toy—plaything—
Camilo (in the hotel, after the dinner party): I wish I was colored too.
L. Williams (no longer startled, having heard this before): Whyn’t you make yourself up a black grandfather like Lena Wormsley did?
Camilo (sitting up in bed): That woman! I could have killed her. She couldn’t keep her hands off you. (frowning) How do you know she made herself up a black grandfather?
L. Williams: Wormsley told me so.
Camilo: When?
L. Williams: Why the cross-examination? Oh, I see, you think that at some point Lena and I went into a huddle. No. When we two gentlemen were sitting in the dining room, English fashion, and you two ladies had gone into the good doctor’s drawing room, also English fashion—
Camilo: Why did she do that?
L. Williams: Wormsley seems to be just a fat black man but he is an Englishman at heart, an English gentleman, Victorian English gentleman, at that. So after dinner the ladies retire to the drawing room while the gentlemen—
Camilo: I’m not talking about that. I want to know why that woman claims to have a black grandfather, when she’s obviously white, obviously French.
L. Williams: Lena Wormsley? A black grandfather? (intoning) “Thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God: Where thou diest, will I die, and there will I be buried: the Lord do so to me, and more also, if ought but death part thee and me.”
Silence.
Then he had heard the wheezegroan of the elevator outside in the corridor.
Camilo: Oh, Link! (face buried in his chest; sat up) If she’s in love with Wormsley, why did she find you so irresistible?
L. Williams: Doesn’t the female always take what she wants and at the same time try to hang on to what she already has? Maybe it’s the collector’s instinct. I don’t know what it is. You tell me.
He had thought of Mamie Powther and Bill Hod. Mamie in The Last Chance at five o’clock, winter, so it was already dark, cold outside, “Bill, mix me a long tall one,” warmth of a tropical country in her voice. Same train. Same train be back tomorrer. Same train waitin’ at the station. Dusk, not yet dark, the light of the day fading, fading. L. Williams about to leave The Last Chance stopped and watched Powther, a small hurrying figure in his creased pants and shined-up shoes, scuttling through Dumble Street, watched him, convinced that he’d take a watch out of his waistcoat pocket and mutter, “Oh dear! Oh dear! I shall be too late!” just before he disappeared down the rabbithole.
Bill, mix me a long tall one.
Same train.
The female wasn’t complicated, it was the male who was complicated. The female was simple, elemental, direct, primordial.
L. Williams: Honey, haven’t you ever kept your pretty little left hand on the lead rope you’d put around the neck of one male while you put your pretty little right hand to work fastening a lead rope around the neck of another male?
She had blushed. Deep rosyred color had suffused her face, her neck. He could have sworn that all of her body changed color, turning faintly pink.
Camilo: I love you, love you, love you (silky perfumed hair on his chest, under his chin).
And now Camilo was saying, “What are you drinking?” She put her hand on his arm, and he felt himself assailed, defeated, by the clean lovely line of her, by the smile, by the sweet smell of her.
“Whiskey and soda. Want one?”
The fat yellow woman in the tootight purple dress glanced at him, at Camilo, at him again, and then turned her back, deliberately, and he saw by the motion of her hand, the backward tilt of her head that she had drained the glass in one long swallow. He heard her say, “Mike,” and thought, Fat lady in the purple dress you must have had complications, too, at some time in the past, the not toodistant past. Mr. B. Hod and Mr. B. Franklin are in many ways right. There are degrees, however. Degrees.
“Not at this hour, thank you,” Camilo said. Then softly, a coaxing note in her voice, “I want to talk to you, sweetie.”
Wifely admonition. “Not at this hour.” They can’t help it. Gentle, wifely admonition.
He shook his head. “If we talk, we’ll fight. And I don’t, and it’s funny, I don’t want to fight with you and ten minutes ago the one thing in the world I wanted to do was beat t
he bejesus out of you. And if we go back upstairs to that, that suite—I am afraid I will forget all the reasons why I shouldn’t do it. Because you will say something that will make me forget.”
“Come on,” she said, and took the whiskey glass out of his hand, set it down on the bar, tucked his arm in hers, and led him, unresisting, out of the bar, into the lobby.
“I see you found him, Mrs. Williams,” the elevator man said, grinning, exuding friendliness.
Mountebank, Link thought, bought and paid for, paid to grin, will stand on head, will wave feet in air, will make noises like a human being for one quarter, for one dime, for one penny.
“Well, of course,” Camilo said, and grinned back at John-RolandJoseph and his long line of bought and paid for ancestors, as friendly and unselfconscious as though all her life she had been looking for men, black men, big black men—plantation bucks (stud) look at his thighs, look at that back, look at his dingle-dangle—as though all her life she had been looking for colored men to whom she was not married, to whom she would never be married because she was already married to a nice young white man, as though all her life she had told uniformed monkeys who pulled elevators in rundown colored hotels, in Harlem, that she couldn’t find, had lost, misplaced, a gentleman of color named Williams.
“They say that if you keep working at it, you’ll always find what you want. So—knowing I’d find him, there he was, in the bar, looking into a tall tall glass of whiskey and soda.” She laughed. Light, musical, gay sound of laughter. “Besides, you said he’d gone toward the bar.”
All of it good clean fun. Lighthearted. Gay. The elevator man JohnJosephRoland, and his long line of bought and paid for ancestors, was still laughing, showing all his teeth, including two gold ones in the lower jaw when he brought the elevator to a stop at the eighth floor, dead-level stop on the first throw.
Having closed the door of the sitting room, he stood with his back against it. Checker game, he thought, it’s your move. But there’s one thing in all this that puzzles me. How can you look so innocent? How can your eyes still retain that expression of absolute honesty, of purity? Perhaps I wasn’t one of a long line of muscle boys, maybe the line is just forming, and I’m only the third or fourth. Or maybe I’m wrong. Maybe you don’t live with Captain Bunny Sheffield any more. Maybe you’ve divorced him. I wouldn’t know that either. The checker games they play on the mink circuit aren’t likely to come to my attention.
“I’m going to know right now what this is all about,” she said.
“It’s about you. You and your money. You and who you really are.”
“My money?”
“Yeah. The Treadway billions or whatever the total is. I’m running out on it, or quitting, doing whatever it is that a merry-go-round does when it can’t be wound up any more.”
“There isn’t anything I can do about the money, Link. It isn’t my fault. It isn’t anything I can help or that I planned.”
“Of course not. You’re just a fashion expert, and you work for a living, don’t you? And you’re in love with me, aren’t you?”
“Yes, I’m in love with you,” she said quietly. “As for the money, well, once people find out that I’m a Treadway, they don’t see me any more. All they see is money. They either hate the money or love the money but not me. It’s just like being covered with a solid gold sheet, nobody cares what’s under it, because they can no longer see that there’s anything there in front of them but gold.”
She waited for him to say something, and when he didn’t, she said, “You’re doing the same thing. But it doesn’t usually make people angry when they find out who I am. They may hate me but they’re not angry. I don’t understand that. Why are you angry? I’m the same person. I’m really and truly in love with you. I always will be. What’s changed? Oh, Link, let’s not—”
He interrupted her. He said, “You’re not married either, are you? Just for the record, honey, why do you still live with him? What do you do, take notes on us—for Kinsey?”
“You’re horrible,” she said.
So she was still married to him, still living with him.
“I haven’t finished—”
“Well, I’m not going to listen to you.”
“You will—” he said.
But she moved too fast. She went into the bathroom and slammed the door, and he heard the click of the lock.
He went down in the elevator, listening to the asthmatic wheezing, thinking, Even the bathroom, she could fix anything, change anything, buy anything. The water was always boiling wherever they were. The thin worn towels had been replaced by thick big ones. Nobody would believe it was the same place, everything changed, everything fixed up.
Leave it all behind you, the silk pajamas and the brocaded dressing gown, the china and the silver, the pigskin suitcases, and the television set that replaced the putinaquarter and get a neatly, exactly apportioned piece of listening-time radio, leave it all behind, the grinning doormen and the bellboys and the elevator men, the one who peddled numbers and this one of the gold teeth who keeps an apple and a pear on a little shelf, just over his head, this one who was a goddamn fruit eater.
On his way through the lobby, he stopped at the desk, to get one final piece of information.
“Let me take a look at the record for a minute, honey,” he said to the girl behind the desk, girl with slant eyes and mascaraed eyelashes, brown girl wearing a crisp white blouse, very white, virginal-looking blouse, girl obviously no virgin, couldn’t be.
He stood right beside her and started hunting up the record for himself.
“The guests aren’t supposed to go through the account book, Mr. Williams,” the girl said, standing up, reaching toward the record book.
“It’s okay, honey. Here,” he fished a five dollar bill out of his pocket. “You buy yourself some nylons for your lovely legs the next time you’re downtown.” The girl smiled at him and located the Williams’ account in the record book for him, and he smiled right back at her thinking, You can buy any of ’em, they’re a dime a dozen.
At the 125th Street railroad station, he had to wait half an hour for a train to New Haven. He stood on the platform, above the street, listening to the foul, noisome racket of New York, car horns blasting, roar of airplanes overhead, rumbling of passing trains, thinking, It’s a wonder the people who live here don’t have a continual vibration going on inside their heads. They do but they don’t know it. Camilo lives here, in New York. So her head is filled with vibrations too. That’s what’s the matter with her. There’s nothing the matter with her. It’s me.
Some of Abbie’s oldfashioned morality spilled over on me, a long time ago, and I’ll never be able to wipe it off. Nuts. It’s the husband, it’s the continuing continued relationship with Captain Bunny Sheffield and with me at the same time that puts a label on me—MECHANICAL TOY. Put a quarter in the slot and it’ll dance for a half-hour.
She paid for that suite in The Hotel by the month. She has been paying for it, by the month, ever since we started going there in December. I thought I paid for it at so much per day. Will stand on head, will wave feet in air. For one dime.
I used to dream about her on the nights when I didn’t see her, dream that she was lying beside me, the soft warm naked flesh, the curves, the sweet, sweet curves, within hand’s reach. Will make sounds like a human being for one penny.
Captain Bunny Sheffield probably dreamed the same thing, on the nights when he didn’t see her.
In New Haven, he had to wait another half-hour for a train to Monmouth, and went in a bar and had three more drinks, one right after the other.
I get a little farther along in it each time I take a drink, he thought. True, Abbie’s morality, some of it, spilled over on me, but the portion of it that I retained isn’t exactly like the original stuff. It changed a little when it hit me. If I ever get so I really understand all of th
is, I’ll be too drunk to know it. Mr. B. Hod is going to be voluble and vulgar on the subject of one of his hired hands showing up well on the way to being soused to the gills.
He ignored the taxis at the Monmouth Railroad Station. Taxis were for the rich, the filthy rich, the rich who had pale yellow hair and wore mink coats and cheated at cards. He boarded a Franklin Avenue car, the same car he rode on when he worked for the Valkills, those other fine rich people he had known when he was very young. The streetcar put him where he belonged, back with the poor, the peons, the poor, black peons.
17
* * *
“I WANT de pretty-pretty,” J.C. said. “You give me de pretty-pretty. Mamie, you give me dat pretty-pretty.”
“What’sa matter with you, J.C.? Come in here waking me up like this.” Mamie Powther stretched, yawned, sat up in bed, thinking, Pretty-pretty, he means Link’s cigarette case. She looked around the bedroom to see what it was that had made him remember it. Sometimes she could figure out what made him remember a thing, and sometimes she couldn’t. Sunlight in the room, on the rug. It was the sunlight. He had been sitting on the floor, in the sun, playing with the cigarette case, when she took it away from him.
“You give me—” he began.
She leaned back against the pillows, sank deep into the pillows. “You don’t get out of here and leave me finish my sleep out I’ll give you whatfor.”
“I want de pretty-pretty,” he whined.