Ann Petry

by Ann Petry

  Bill said, unimpressed, “Want to bet?”

  So it was cigarettes against a desk. And the payoff date was marked on the calendar, a big calendar, new one sent out every year by some packing company in Chicago, brilliantly colored picture of a couple of heavyweights mauling each other in the ring, same picture every year, hanging on the wall near the stove. Fifteenth of January marked on the calendar, recorded there as the payoff date.

  October to January of the year I was fifteen I read all the time, and went to school, and kept up in all the rest of the stuff, played football, and as the fall turned into winter, played basketball. Can remember reading during the lunch hour, gulping the food down, book propped up on the table against the water glass, and Abbie staring at me, frowning at me, finally asked what I was reading and why I was reading at the table.

  When I explained that I was making a rather specialized, but very brief, study of slavery and the Civil War, she looked even more disapproving. Her frowning disapproval spurred me on. It was a race against time but I told myself I’d win it. There wasn’t literally, wasn’t enough time to win in, but I’d win anyway.

  And I did. I handed the finished paper to Bob White on the morning of the fifteenth of January. And said, “Could you read this sometime today, Mr. White? And give me a letter or just a note, that I can show to a friend of mine, so he’ll know I read these books in three months’ time. We had a sort of bet about it.”

  He still had the letter somewhere, knew some of its phrases by heart because it was the first time anyone, other than Weak, had ever praised him, wholeheartedly, no reservations, no if’s: “a flair for history,” “What amounts to genius,” “you write with eloquence and yet simply and clearly,” “heartiest congratulations,” and then, “finest monograph ever written by one of my students during the ten years I have taught history in this high school.”

  All part of the education of Link Williams.

  When he returned those books to Bob White, he had felt self-conscious, awkward.

  Bob White said, “Did you win your bet?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I’m curious. What did you win or rather what were the stakes?”

  “A carton of cigarettes against a desk.” Bob White had looked blank and he said, “If I’d lost, I would have bought my friend a carton of cigarettes. He smokes Camels.” Unnecessary piece of information, and it sounded as though Bill was a chain smoker and he wasn’t, and it wasn’t what he wanted to say, but he didn’t quite know how to put it, and then blurted it out. “I didn’t intend to read those books, Mr. White. But my friend was so—well, he said I couldn’t do it, not in that length of time. A couple of times I didn’t think I’d make it. But I did. And then you wrote the letter and now I’ve got a desk—a real desk.”

  And still had it. The same desk. It was that good. He had thought about it, while he was standing there talking to Bob White. The drawers worked like they were oiled, and the top was covered with dark red leather, handtooled along the edge, and the smell of it was wonderful, a clean, new, leathery smell, like new shoes, and he ran his fingers over the surface every time he went near it, sheer pleasure in the feel of it, smoothsoft.

  Bob White had said, “A desk,” thoughtfully. “I thought you were going to say a tennis racket or a set of golf clubs. But you’re too young for golf. A desk. I see.”

  “Are you going to college?”

  “I want to.”

  “I went to Dartmouth. It’s one of the best. Not too big. Not too small. Superior faculty.”

  “Is it expensive?”

  “All of them are,” Bob White had said. “But there are scholarships. What do you plan to do after you finish college?”

  “I don’t know, sir. I’m pretty good at chemistry.”

  Bob White pushed three more big books toward him. “Don’t hurry with these. Take your time.”

  That winter he lost interest in chemistry. He stopped carrying out the experiments that had made Abbie turn up her nose and say, “Those horrible smells. I don’t think it’s safe. Anything that smells like that couldn’t possibly be safe.”

  Further education of Link Williams completed by Miss Abbie. King Hod and Miss Abbie. What a combination. Have to include Weak Knees and F. K. Jackson. And Bob White. And an heiress.

  Go back to Miss Abbie’s final part in the education of L. Williams.

  Dust settled on the test tubes and the Bunsen burners and the beakers and the little bottles of acid and alkali, on the packages of chemicals and the filter papers. Abbie complained because he didn’t go near the small laboratory he’d set up in the cellar.

  “All that expensive equipment,” she said. “Don’t you use it any more?”

  “I haven’t had time lately.” An evasion. He didn’t want to tell her that he was no longer interested in chemistry, that he spent every penny for history books.

  “Why not?”

  “I’ve been reading history books.”

  “They don’t have anything to do with medicine.”

  “I’m going to be a historian.”

  She was startled into silence. Then she said, “I thought you were going to be a doctor.”

  “I changed my mind.”

  “Oh, Link! One minute you’re going to be a doctor, and you litter up the house with bandages and splints and borrow books from Dr. Easter and don’t return them—”

  That was when he was fourteen.

  “Then you’re going to be a cook, and you waste flour and sugar and butter and eggs and burn things up—”

  That was when he was eleven. He had burned things up, sure, but he was a better cook than Abbie would ever be.

  “Then you’re going to be a chemist and for weeks the house is filled with the most horrible smells and I don’t know how much money you spent for all those little tubes and bottles and packages and now it’s history—”

  Everywhere she looked, in his room, there was evidence of the change in the direction of his thoughts, his desires; the notebooks, the growing line of books on the bookshelves, indicated it clearly. History books. He’d been buying them brandnew until Bob White found out, and gave him the address of a place in New York where he could get them secondhand for one-third the price of new ones. The shelves were filling up faster and faster. Abbie didn’t like the room anyway, never would like it. It was an offensive comment on her taste in decoration, and it was due to Bill Hod’s interference, because the room had to be done over to get the desk in. She always looked around with an air of disdain. The black walnut bedroom set had been discarded and the Brussels carpet taken up, and this barelooking room was the result, all bookcases and desk and peculiarlooking bed with no headboard or footboard.

  He didn’t listen to what she said because he’d heard her preach this sermon before. He caught a familiar phrase here and there: “inability to stick to anything,” “Negroes are incapable of concentrating on a long-term objective,” “constantly changing jobs, changing moods.”

  Then her voice went up in pitch, grew louder, caught and held his attention. She said, “Whoever heard of a colored historian?” Head up. Eyes flashing with anger.

  He was bewildered and hurt in a funny kind of way. He had looked at her thinking, Why should you who are colored try to destroy me, discourage me, and why should the history teacher who is white, encourage me, keep telling me I can do this thing? Why do you want to hurt me? How can you say that and then turn around and quote your father, “The black man can do anything if he sets out to do it, if he’s willing to work at it, night and day, can do anything, can do anything.”

  All right, he thought, I will do the impossible. I will be the impossible. Because of you. I wasn’t certain I could, I had doubts about it, but not any more. It’s like those books Bob White handed to me, that I never intended to read, and if it hadn’t been for Bill’s amused, I-knew-it-all-the-time, gambler-bett
ing-on-a-sure-thing, fifteenth-of-January-ha-ha-ha attitude, I would never have read them, never have written the paper.

  When he went to Dartmouth, he majored in history. He thoroughly enjoyed the closed off, artificial, kindly, paternal world that composed that particular college. His faculty advisor approved his choice of a career, praised his ability, took it for granted that he would be what he wanted to be.

  After four years of Dartmouth he ended up with a Phi Beta Kappa key, the Major’s diamond stickpin and the Major’s solid gold watch, and a brandnew Cadillac, special job, that had never belonged to anyone else. “Mark of esteem, Sonny, I didn’t think you’d make it.”

  In less than two months after he graduated, he was in the Navy. After four years in the Navy, Abbie no longer loomed on his horizon like a dreadnaught. Didn’t loom at all. When he was discharged, he headed for The Last Chance.

  Weak Knees said, “Boss, Boss, Boss, come quick. Sonny’s back. Sonny’s home,” and his eyes were filled with tears.

  “Jesus Christ,” Bill said. “What’d they feed you? You look like Louis the night he knocked out Carnera,” and patted his shoulder, grinning at him.

  Not too long afterwards he told Bill that he wanted a job.

  “Yeah?”

  “Here. Days. Behind the bar.”

  “Why here?”

  “Because like everybody else, I have to earn a living but I don’t want to have my mind all cluttered up with somebody else’s business when I sign off for the day.”

  He didn’t tell Abbie that he was working on a history of slavery in the United States, and therefore found it convenient to work for Bill Hod because the pay was good, and the hours were short, and that nowhere else would he have so much leisure in which to do the necessary research for the books he wanted to write. He simply said that he had taken a job as day man behind the bar in The Last Chance.

  Abbie went off just like a firecracker. He had grinned at her, enjoying the expression of outrage on her face, the crackle in her voice.

  “A bartender? What did you go to college for? It was a waste of time and money. A bartender—in that place?”

  Off and on ever since.

  Everything was fine until that night the fog spewed a girl with pale blond hair smack into the middle of his life. Even now I’m not sure that I was right. Maybe she was in love with me. Maybe I know too much about the various hells the white folks have been cooking up for the colored folks, ever since that Dutch man of warre landed at Jamestown in 1619 and sold twenty “Negras” to the inhabitants, just as though they were cows or horses or goats, to be able to accept a gift horse, even if it was a palomino, without a microscopic examination of the teeth.

  Blame it all on China, with her tremendous buttocks, and big breasts, the layers of fat under the smooth yellow skin of the arms and throat, and the skin on the face not the same, swarthy, coarse-pored, and the hair not gray but brown and probably would be until she died. She couldn’t say, Run along, kid, or you’ll get in trouble. Not even that second time when I went back anyway. It took me about six months to figure out that she called Bill up both times and told him I was there. She couldn’t say, Kid, Bill owns a whole string of whorehouses and this is one of them, couldn’t say, Bill owns a whole string of whores and I am one of them, so you run along. No. She said, Wait right here, and went and called up Bill and then stood in the doorway and pushed that dark green curtain aside when she heard him come in so she could have a front row seat from which to view the kind of trouble I was in.

  Come spring and the time of the singing of the birds, and the Treadway Gun and the black barkeep will be united in the bonds of holy matrimony. I believed that one, too.

  You wait here in the hallway.

  You black bastard.

  I should have laid one on her jaw—for luck.

  19

  * * *

  MALCOLM POWTHER laid a copy of the Monmouth Chronicle down flat on one of the long wide counters, under the cupboards in the butler’s pantry, placing it there as carefully as if it had been an old illuminated manuscript. Putting on a pair of hornrimmed spectacles, he leaned over the paper, one elbow resting on the counter, and using his forefinger as a guide, went down one column and up the next, in a rapid scanning of the front page.

  His posture, the hornrimmed glasses, the quick co-ordinated movement of finger and eyes gave him the appearance of a middle-aged accountant who was rapidly reviewing the financial report of a bank. His clothing would have been suitable for such a role, too: the sharply creased trousers, starched white shirt, carefully knotted black necktie, highly polished black shoes suggested conservatism, neatness. Even though he was alone in the pantry, he was wearing a coat.

  When he finished with the front page, he straightened up for a moment, thinking that the news didn’t vary much from day to day, from year to year. There was a stalemate in the war in Korea. The Democrats were peevishly blaming the Republicans for the state the country was in; and the Republicans were peevishly blaming the Democrats for the same thing. As far as he was concerned, this was just another case of the pot calling the kettle black; but political parties preferred to hurl the words venal and stupid at each other. Another airliner had crashed in the Midwest, in a mountainous area, which was only to be expected. After all, it was March and high winds and big snowstorms made flying hazardous. And that bony lady manufacturer whom the Madam had entertained at a dinner party last fall, the night Captain Sheffield made a scene at the table, was still waging her private war with the Treasury Department. He doubted that he’d ever get the details of it straight in his mind, but a story about her was always featured somewhere in the Chronicle.

  He turned the page, slowly, carefully, because this was the Madam’s copy of the paper, and he prided himself on the delicacy with which he handled it, intending to go up and down the columns again, just as he had on the front page. But a story far over to the right on page two seemed to come at him, leap at him, so that he began reading it at once, not reading, absorbing it, frowning, not believing it.

  He read the story again, his mouth slightly open, the frown deepening between his eyebrows. A mistake, he decided. A stupid mistake. The newspaper had transferred Miss Camilo’s name and her New York address, from some other story, so that it appeared here in this short item where it did not belong. Mistakes like this happened so often in newspaper offices that he was convinced they were due to malice rather than carelessness.

  Having finished with the first section of the paper, he refolded the whole thing. The second section wasn’t worth bothering with. There was never anything in it but sports news and inch-high stories about Ladies’ Aid meetings and church suppers, accounts of weddings and funerals that had taken place in the little towns all over the state.

  He placed the Chronicle on top of the New York Times on the Madam’s breakfast tray. When the Madam got through with the newspapers they would be carefully folded, the pages all in order, as they were now, but after Rita, the Madam’s personal maid, read them, they would look as though they had just blown in from the city dump, crumpled, the pages mixed up.

  How could he most effectively annoy Rita on this gray, windy morning? She couldn’t keep the resentment out of her eyes, her face, when she saw the Madam’s breakfast tray. He enjoyed varying the china, the silverware that he used. Yesterday had been warm, so he’d used the Lowestoft because it had a cool, fresh look. But this cold morning called for warmth. He decided that the English bone china with the rose-colored decorations would offer a cheerful contrast to the weather. And there were just two white roses in the icebox, and he’d put them in a small crystal and silver vase, and he’d use some of that thin finely woven Belgian linen, not white but cream-colored, the napkin and place mat embroidered in white. A combination that should make Rita’s nose go straight up in the air, as though she’d received a personal affront.

  What a pity that Miss Camilo’s
name should have appeared in the paper like that, he thought, as he plugged the percolator in. She had been staying at the Hall for the last two weeks, dining with the Madam every night. He didn’t think she was very well. She was too quiet, almost depressed, and drinking more than any young lady should. Just recently he had noticed that when she wasn’t smoking a cigarette, or holding a glass of liquor, her hands were clenched tight, the fingers enfolding, covering the thumbs. It had startled him when he noticed how her thumbs were enclosed by the fingers, because that was a sign of a depression deep enough to be interpreted as a death wish in a grownup. When he saw the telltale position of the thumbs, he decided that her lover had left her, though he could not imagine how or why it could have happened.

  Picking up the Chronicle again, he laid it flat on the counter, turned to page two, and reread the story. The Captain was in New York, so he wouldn’t see it. The Madam wouldn’t necessarily see it, and even if she did, she would recognize it for what it was—a mistake in the name and address.

  It was a queer story. Link Williams, twenty-six-year-old Negro of Number Six Dumble Street, had been accused of attempted attack by a Mrs. William R. Sheffield of Park Avenue, New York City. Incident occurred at the corner of Dock and Dumble Street, about midnight. Names of the arresting officers. Link Williams out on bail. That predatory young nephew of Mrs. Crunch’s must have been drunk or temporarily out of his senses, to attack a woman, almost on his own doorstep.

  Sometimes he and Mamie tried to figure out, just from a short item like this, what had really happened, just for the fun of it. That is, when life was normal and she wasn’t on a diet, and the house was a comfortable, warm place to be in, and she was laughing and singing and telling jokes. Though he basked in this after-supper warmth and gaiety, he was uneasily aware that Bill Hod’s visits had a direct connection with Mamie’s obvious sense of well-being, but not dwelling on it because it was better not to. She didn’t do much reading but she liked a magazine called True Crime, and she was quite clever about figuring out ways in which a crime might have been committed. She was always saying that the way a detective solves a crime is to make himself think like somebody else, put himself in somebody else’s shoes. She knew a lot about it because she was always going to movies that had to do with murder and detectives. She couldn’t stand the ones that had to do with love.