Ann Petry

by Ann Petry

  “Have you been gambling?” she said, sharply.

  “No. Nor wenching. Nor drinking. Nor contracting bad debts. Wait a minute,” he said, thoughtfully. “Maybe it’s the debts. No. That’s not true.” Lietruth. Truthlie. “I’ll be goddamned if I know how my path crossed the path of the piper.” He thought of Jubine, saying, “The price you paid,” of Jubine saying, “You’re a poor peon and you ache to be a rich peon.”

  Lola said, “Pete, has this got something to do with Mrs. Treadway?”

  “Sure, it’s got something to do with Mrs. Treadway,” he said, glaring at her, thinking, All marriages are like this. The component parts are contempt and irritation because we know each other by heart, by rote; we’re all graduates of the blab school for double harness. Then he looked at the redgold hair, the sweet curve of the mouth, and thought, Truthlie, because marriage is more than that. It’s part hate, part love. It’s remembered agony, and remembered delight.

  “Sure,” he repeated, leaning forward, lowering his voice, “Didn’t you know that I raped Camilo? But I wore a black mask and used a bow and arrow instead of Popeye’s corncob.”

  He leaned back in his chair, watching her, waiting for her to say, “I don’t know why I go on living with you,” because that’s what she always said when she was angry. This time she didn’t say anything, simply turned away from him, and went out of the room. He sat still, for a moment, listening to the rustling sound of her brocaded skirt, thinking of the way she looked when she first woke up, how the freshness of the morning seemed to be reflected in her face, in her eyes, and he got out of the chair quickly, and followed her out into the hallway, and put his arms around her.

  Two weeks later, he sat in his office, frowning. He had been looking at copies of the Chronicle, all the issues, for the past two weeks, trying to determine why this crusade (If you could call it that, he thought) against crime in The Narrows had influenced his own thinking so that he had done something, finally, that he was ashamed of. His secretary had stacked the newspapers on his desk, in a neat pile, and he had crumbled them up, one by one, and tossed them on the floor.

  He searched through these crumpled papers until he found Tuesday’s paper, and reread the story about Miss Eleanora Dwight. On Monday night, Miss Dwight, an old maid schoolteacher, retired, was walking toward the rooming house where she lived. It was dusk, and the street was filled with shadows. She saw a man, a Negro, emerge from an areaway. She said it was as though a part of the night came toward her, a moving piece of darkness. The man knocked her down. Before he could harm her, she was rescued by a passer-by. Her assailant disappeared. Miss Dwight said, “He seemed to vanish, seemed to go right back into the blackness of the night.”

  This story, which had nothing to do with the dock or The Narrows, had been placed on the front page. Bullock’s orders. No good reason for putting it there (a thirty-thousand-dollar reason). No good reason for not putting it there (a thirty-thousand-dollar reason). It should have been buried on an inside page where it would have been read with amusement, and dismissed as the wishful thinking of an old woman, and so forgotten. Instead—he shrugged. There was something poetic and disturbing and unforgettable, about that phrase, “a moving piece of darkness.”

  Wednesday’s paper was of no importance. He didn’t bother to look for it. It had the usual front page story about a crime committed in The Narrows. A robbery.

  But Thursday’s paper was very important. So was Friday’s. He found both papers, smoothed them out, put them on his desk. On Wednesday night, a prisoner escaped from the State Prison. Thursday morning’s paper said that all Monmouth knew about his escape. Because of the wail of the siren that stood atop the gray stone walls, because of the lights, the searchlights, because of the sudden frenzied activity of the guards, who were stationed along the length of the wall. The siren sounded about six o’clock. There was a dense fog and so the foghorn was sounding at the same time. The sound of the siren and the bray of the foghorn mixed, mingled, but the siren was always louder, stronger, more terrifying, symbol of disaster, of death.

  The convict, a big heavily built Negro, knocked a man down, and took the man’s clothes, and thus was able to leave his prison garb behind, on the road. He headed toward Monmouth, straight toward Monmouth, running with his head down. Dogs sensed his passage and barked, and he kept going, almost unseen, because of the fog. A dangerous man, a brute, a murderer. He disappeared.

  Bullock read the story twice, thinking, There’s nothing to be ashamed of here. It’s overly dramatic but it is all true.

  He picked up Friday’s paper, with reluctance. He was ashamed of this one. This one told the story of the convict’s end, and it carried his picture, a front page, blownup picture of the Negrovillainconvicthero.

  He thought, I did this myself, no one told me to. It had nothing to do with Mrs. Treadway or that goddamn institutional advertising. The headline is bad enough. It ought to be on a billboard. They use the same kind of type on ’em. The picture is infinitely worse. But it’s been done before. It’s an ugly, senseless thing to do but not unforgivable. It’s the story itself. It is the outrageous lie that I deliberately put in there.

  But by next week, the convict would be forgotten. People would be talking about something else. Besides it was the kind of story that didn’t harm anyone. It couldn’t.

  He started reading Friday’s paper. It said the convict disappeared. The next day hunger drove him out into the open. He circled around a solitary farmhouse, waited outside for half an hour, crouched down in the shrubbery near the house. There was no car in the barn that was now used as a garage.

  He went nearer, looked in through the kitchen windows, saw a woman, alone, fixing food, and opened the kitchen door.

  “Food,” he said. “I want food.”

  The woman screamed and he put his hand over her mouth, grabbed a dish towel, and made a gag, stuffing it in her mouth, snatched up some food, and was gone. The woman was lying on the floor when her husband found her, and when the gag was removed, she began screaming, and couldn’t stop.

  They caught the brute, the murderer, the escaped convict, the Negro, on the edge of the city. All the roads leading into and out of the city, leading to and from the prison, were patrolled.

  Though why, Bullock thought, rereading this story that he had written himself, why any sane escaped convict would head toward those gray walls from which he had emerged, after God-knows-what struggle, God-knows-what weeks, probably months, of planning, nobody would know. But the readers of this story would not stop to question a matter of phrasing, they would shiver with horror and fright, and there would be, also, a certain delicate enjoyment, pleasure, mixed with it, because the convict was dead.

  The policemen, detectives, guards from the prison, National Guard, had patrolled the roads, the streets of the city, so that everywhere you went you saw armed huntsmen, peering, walking, patrolling.

  Ah, what the hell, he thought, as he threw the newspaper down on the floor of his office. He wasn’t responsible for this. This had happened all by itself. Or had it? How did he know whether this man, this convict, had not somehow been influenced by the stories in the Chronicle? How did he know what word had seeped back inside the walls of that gray stone prison, so near the city that you could see it, yet so far away that you could easily forget that it was there, except when the siren sounded. Anyway, the man was dead. He’d been shot, riddled with bullets, the story said.

  It had damn near backfired, too. Because that thin, grayhaired, overworked housewife had refused to say that the convict had tried to attack her.

  The Chronicle’s reporter said that she had stubbornly repeated the same words, over and over again. “He didn’t do nothing to me. I hollered because I didn’t know he was there in the kitchen. He spoke up and I didn’t know there was nobody there but me until he spoke up and it scared me and I hollered. I didn’t know he was no convict. He was a big
black man and the sight of him there so sudden and so unexpected in my kitchen scared me. I’da hollered the same way if he’da been a big white man showing up so sudden and so unexpected in my kitchen. He didn’t do nothing to me except stuff the dish towel in my mouth, and then stuffed some food in his own mouth, and grabbed up some more food and run out the door. He didn’t do nothing to me.”

  Her husband kept saying, “Shut up, you’re nervous, you’re upset, you don’t know what you’re talking about—”

  The wife, the thin overworked past-middle-age wife, said to the reporter, “Young man, don’t you write down that he bothered me. He didn’t do nothing to me. All he done was—”

  So Bullock wrote down simply, and untruthfully, that the black convict, the brute, the escaped murderer, had attacked the frail housewife when he found her alone in the big farmhouse. And put the convict’s picture on the front page.

  It was a picture which showed the convict not as a man but as a black animal, teeth bared in a snarl, eyes crazy, long razor scar like a mouth, an open mouth, reaching from beneath the eye to the chin, the flesh turned back on each side, forming the lips of this dreadful extra mouth. Bullock knew that everyone who saw that picture would remember it, and wake up in the middle of the night covered with sweat, because this terror, this black terror, had a shape, a face; and they would remember the headline NEGRO CONVICT SHOT in boldface type, headline that took up the center half of the paper, and they’d think Yes, the crazed black animal with the mutilated face is dead, but what about the others, there are others who are still alive, who are just as dangerous. White women not safe. Not safe in Monmouth.

  What the hell, he thought, if it hadn’t been this it would have been something else. No matter how you looked at it, it was a nervous time in which to be alive, a nervous year, what with high prices, and all the little wars that threatened to become big wars; what with people fumbling for, reaching for security, and looking over their shoulders at insecurity.

  Even the State Department was acting like a harried housewife, searching out the hiding place of mice and cockroaches and bedbugs, any of the vermin that from time to time invade a house, searching carefully under beds and in bureau drawers, and on closet shelves, in cellars and in attics, peering inside ovens, and sugar bowls, looking in every likely and unlikely place for communists and socialists, for heretics and unbelievers, and uncovering so much dust, so much of what Bullock’s maiden aunt, the one with the sharp vulgar tongue, called slut’s wool, so much of the dirty traceries of moths, so many cobwebs that the whole country shuddered.

  So what difference does it make, he thought, whether we here in Monmouth hunt down Negroes or whether we hunt down Communists. We? You mean you and Mrs. Treadway. And there is a difference, though at the moment it escapes me.

  That picture of the Negro with the mutilated face—that wasn’t, I shouldn’t have. It is the one thing I regret. The rest of it isn’t important. But I had to. I had to offset that other picture, Jubine’s picture of that arrogant nigger with the Barrymore profile. I had to. I had to offset, counterbalance, outweigh that dirty counting gesture made with index finger and thumb that had become an unspoken byword, a symbol for the Chronicle. I had to.

  But on Monday he was going to tell Mrs. John Edward Treadway to take her goddamn advertising and stick it because he was going all out in another direction. He would—

  But by Monday it was too late.

  21

  * * *

  MALCOLM POWTHER sat in the back seat of Captain Sheffield’s car, on Dumble Street, and listened to the soft sound of the motor, soft sound of the motor, and the windshield wiper kept it saying, Scupper, scupper, scupper, scupper, just the one word, over and over, and it made a sound in the car, which was good, and the foghorn was sounding at intervals, Whodid, whodid, on two notes—and it made a sound outside, which was good, because they were sitting there silent, all of them, waiting.

  The Madam, and that had surprised him, was in the car too, sitting in the front seat with the Captain. And the two young men, who were friends of the Captain’s, were in the back seat. Waiting.

  He wouldn’t let himself think about why they were waiting. Though bits and pieces of the reason would float up to the surface of his mind. He approved of the rain. The early dark. Otherwise there would be more people on the street, and they would have turned to look at that parked car, people sitting in it, seemed to be a lot of men in it, and the engine running.

  Last winter Al kept saying, “Whyn’t she divorce Bunny?” That was before any of this had happened. He had told Al, “It’s kinder. What she’s doing is really kinder. When a man, all of him, is involved with a woman, I don’t think the man really cares whether she has affairs with other men. So long as she doesn’t leave him. He cares, yes, that is, he doesn’t like it. It hurts him. But it would hurt worse if she left him. And Miss Camilo is a very kind person. A lovely person. She knows that it would ruin the Captain if she left him. It’s not a perfect situation for her or the Captain. But Miss Camilo is a very great lady and perhaps she feels it’s her fault that the Captain is so dreadfully in love with her, so she stays with him. She can’t bring herself to hurt him, the way it would if she left him.”

  That was before all this other business. The Captain must have known he would have rivals. Yes, but had he been able to foresee one the size and shape—and color—of Link Williams?

  Scupper. Scupper. Scupper. Link Williams. Mamie tore that picture of him out of that New York paper. It was on the kitchen table, one night when he came home. He said, “What’s that there for?” not wanting to ask, but having to, afraid to know, but having to know, actually believing that she would say, “Because I got a heat on for him, sugar.”

  She never talked about love, always about somebody having a heat on for somebody else, and he expected her to say that, standing there in the kitchen, wearing a new red-and-white-striped dress, with no sleeves in it, and the neckline cut so low you could see the dividing line of her breasts. And the kitchen filled with the toosweet smell of her perfume, and J.C. standing there barefooted, looking at both of them, licking raspberry Kool-Aid off the palm of his hand, no expression on his face, just that bovine licking of the palm of his hand, and his tongue a brilliant poisonous red, and the acidulous smell of the stuff competing with the smell of Mamie’s perfume.

  Mamie laughed. She said, “That’s one goodlookin’ nigger, Powther. Look at him standing there on that dock, just like he owned it, and would throw anybody in the river who said he didn’t. That’s why I cut it out. Because he looks like he owns everything in sight. That’s why.”

  She didn’t say a word about Miss Camilo’s accident with the car, and that dreadful picture of her on the front page of that New York tabloid, and the talk, the talk, everywhere, so much of it, and so filthy, that he finally asked Al to drive him home nights because he couldn’t bear to listen to what people said on the Franklin trolley. Listening to the servants at the Hall was bad enough, but it was worse, infinitely worse to have to listen to strangers bandying Miss Camilo’s name around, just as though they knew her and had the right, had been given the right, to discuss her. He tried to figure out why people were so malicious, why they showed such delight in saying horrible things about a young woman they’d never seen. He supposed it was the same thing that had, for years, sent thousands of people to championship fights when Joe Louis was fighting. Sure they all thought he was wonderful, was a great fighter, had the heart of a champion, but they wanted to see him knocked out. People like to see a king uncrowned, like to see a thoroughbred racehorse beaten when he’s running at the top of his form and has outrun everything in sight. They wanted to see demonstrated right before their eyes that there was no such thing as invincibility, wanted to see that the king, the top dog, the best man, has a flaw, can be beaten like them, is vulnerable like them, can be defeated, unfrocked, uncrowned, knocked down, and thus brought right down to their l
evel.

  Scandal in a wealthy, important family like the Treadways served to bring the Treadways right down to the level of the trolley car conductor, the bootblack. It showed they could be hurt, wounded, ruined, just like other people.

  He sighed, impatient with the waiting, wishing that some one of them would say something. As soon as he got out of the car, he would hurry across the street, go in through the front door, up the carpeted staircase, ears straining with listening, trying to determine in that dark upstairs hall whether Mamie was home, still there, or did the darkness and the silence mean that he had been too late, that she had gone off somewhere. He didn’t use the outside back stairs any more, hadn’t since all this crime had been going on in The Narrows, couldn’t bring himself to walk around the side of Mrs. Crunch’s house, head into the darkness at the corner of the house. He’d tried it and it seemed to him that his shoulder blades started to itch, in anticipation of a knife blade plunged into his unprotected back. He explained to Mrs. Crunch why he came in through the front, and she had said, “Mercy, yes, Mr. Powther. I keep expecting we’ll all be murdered in our beds. I move a bureau in front of my bedroom door every night, and I’ve got new locks on the windows, and I still wake up frightened. What ever has happened to these people? Why are they acting like this?”

  Someone came out of The Last Chance, and he leaned forward. No. It wasn’t. How much longer would they have to wait?

  Sunday and a quiet rain, April rain, falling in the street. Umbrellas, rubbers, raincoats. And the interminable swish of the windshield wiper, a mechanical thing, but it ought to be tired. Not time for evening church services to start, dinner mostly in the early afternoon, this was a kind of winding down of the day, of Sunday. Very few people on the street, an occasional passer-by, intent on his or her own business. No sound of voices.

  He became aware of the beating of his heart, unpleasant, wanted to count it, noticed that it was not synchronized with the whodid of the foghorn, the scupper, scupper of the windshield wiper, his heartbeat faster, than the other two, and the windshield wiper faster than the foghorn, irritating, listening to, waiting for three different sounds occurring at different intervals. A car passed, and then another one, and they all shrank back, drew back, the sudden illumination of the headlights disturbing.