Ann Petry

by Ann Petry

  Midway in the block she stopped and looked back toward Franklin Avenue, wondering why it should take Frances so long to buy three lemons. Then she stood still, waiting for Frances. She glanced toward the river, then at the redorange neon sign in front of The Last Chance.

  While she was standing there, a man came out of The Last Chance. She got the impression that he had been backing out. When he reached the sidewalk, he headed toward the dock and the river, moving quickly, and then turned around with such speed that he almost lost his balance, and came toward her. He wasn’t running but he looked as though he were. He kept mopping the back of his neck, his forehead, with his handkerchief, and he was constantly turning his head, glancing hastily behind him, as though he expected to be followed, or thought he was being followed.

  As he came nearer she recognized the striped pants and cutaway coat of Howard Thomas, Frances’ assistant. She assumed that he was intoxicated, and, not wanting to listen to the meandering conversation of a drunken man, she continued to stand still, confident that he would pass her without recognizing her.

  He went past her, muttering to himself, “Chinaman’s chance. Not a Chinaman’s chance,” and then turned around again, looked back over his shoulder, then hastened on his way, almost running toward Franklin Avenue. Either he didn’t see Frances, or if he saw her he couldn’t control his movements, anyway he walked right into her, almost knocking her down.

  Abbie heard Frances say, “Well—really—”

  “Oh—” he said, “Sorry, Miss Jackson. I didn’t see you—wasn’t looking—”

  Frances peered at him through the thicklensed glasses. “How funny you look. What have you been doing?”

  “I have,” he said, “I did,” he said. “I’m going to— What am I saying anyway?”

  “I really don’t know. Have you been drinking?”

  “No, no, no, Miss Jackson. I just came out of The Last Chance but I haven’t been drinking. Ha-ha-ha, but I’m going to. If I live that long, what am I saying? I’m going straight home and drink three lunches and four dinners, in fact, ha-ha-ha, all my meals for the week, all at once, right now.”

  There was a tremor in his voice, and Abbie, listening, thought, It’s as though his voice, too, was constantly looking behind it, mopping its forehead, its face, the back of its neck. And his fear, his terror, whatever it was that was making him perspire and tremble, communicated itself to her so that she, too, looked back over her shoulder, half expecting to see someone behind her, threatening her, looked back over her shoulder and saw only that redorange sign, vivid now in the dusk. She thought of Bill Hod’s face and shivered, and turned and watched Howard’s progress, rapid, erratic, as he went on up the street, watched him go in a drugstore at the corner of Franklin Avenue. The door had barely closed behind him, when he was out on the street again, then he turned around and came back down Dumble Street.

  Abbie said, “Frances, what on earth’s the matter with him? Why he’s gone back in the same drugstore he just came out of. Do come along. I can’t bear to stand here and watch him.”

  Frances didn’t move, didn’t answer. She was staring at the front door of The Last Chance, staring and frowning.

  Abbie said, “Did you get the lemons?” and touched her arm, lightly.

  “Of course. It took forever. Mamie Powther was in Davioli’s doing some last-minute shopping, and I thought she’d never finish. Davioli was in there by himself, so I waited.” Frances cleared her throat, hesitated, said, “Here, you take the lemons. I’ll be along in a minute. I think I’d better go in that drugstore and see what’s the matter with Howard. You can start the tea. I won’t be gone very long.”

  “All right,” she said, and took the little paper bag, three lemons in it. As she walked along the bag made a rustling sound and she thought, Bag, bundle, what’s in the bundle, lady. How they must have hated him. She shook her head, remembering the pictures in the newspapers, picture of Mrs. Treadway sitting near the dock, face immobile, pictures of the dock, of the car with its curtains drawn, of that bundle, open on the dock and its awful contents revealed, exposed, and pictures of the crowd of people that collected there, the bobtail, ragtail, flotsam and jetsam from The Narrows and the waterfront.

  When she opened the door of Number Six, the little paper bag rustled because she pushed the door open with it in her hand. She turned the hall light on, stood still for a moment listening, wondering if Mamie Powther were home yet. She wished they’d move. She couldn’t bear having them in the house any more. A woman with that kind of blowsy face and figure, all that toosoft flesh, didn’t belong in any wellkept home. When Mrs. Powther walked down the street men turned to look at her, turned to watch the rippling movement of hips and thighs. She was always half smiling as she walked, as though she experienced some inner pleasure from the motion of her own hips.

  As she stood there in the hall, she felt old and defeated, because she started thinking about Link and the Major, remembering the fog in the street that night she pushed the blond girl out into the hall, down the front steps, remembering the sound of Link’s laughter when he said, “The female fruit fly,” and then went out of the house whistling that tune of Mamie Powther’s, I’m lonesome, I’m lonesome.

  It was Mamie Powther’s fault, she thought. I’m sure of it. Mamie Powther in that purple coat with brass buttons down the front, a double row of them, coat selected to accentuate the grossness of her bosom, could and would upset the pattern of anybody’s life. It wasn’t her fault. Not really. It was that girl with the blond hair, and her mother, and her husband. She wondered what it was like inside that great stone mansion now. Milelong driveway. Lake with swans in it. And a park. And a picnic every Fourth of July. Perhaps it was little Mr. Powther, too. The Treadway butler. Perhaps it was his entry into my house which precipitated this, perhaps he was the one who out of some awful hideous weakness set the wheels in motion. Then she thought impatiently, It was all of us, in one way or another, we all had a hand in it, we all reacted violently to those two people, to Link and that girl, because he was colored and she was white.

  Why should Link be dead, and that girl, that girl with the pale blond hair, be left alive? It didn’t have to end that way. The girl was here in my house with him, lying beside him, naked, obviously in love with him, and then two months later, not much more than that, she accused him of attacking her. Why?

  She took off her hat and coat, turned on the lights in the sitting room, and in the kitchen, and set about getting supper. She filled the big nickelplated teakettle with water, lit the stove, started to set the table in the kitchen, and decided that it would be pleasanter to eat in the sitting room, and so put a white cloth on the Pembroke table. While she was arranging the silver, she thought about Howard walking at that hurried erratic pace, looking back over his shoulder, mopping his forehead, his face, with a wadded-up handkerchief; thought of that blond girl, intoxicated, and driving a car too fast, running over a child; and then thought of J. C. Powther sitting on the stairs, of his round head emerging from the wreckage of the Major’s silk hat.

  The teakettle made a hissing sound and she went into the kitchen, turned the fire low under the kettle, rinsed the big brown teapot with boiling water, then sat down at the kitchen table, waiting for Frances, and thinking of Link and that girl. Warmth and affection when her thoughts turned toward Link. A coldness and a fury when she thought of the girl.

  Who would ever know what happened between them, or why it happened. Then she thought, But I can guess, conjecture, because of that house next door, that old frame house, where the Finnish people used to live. They were the only white people on Dumble Street, for five or six years. It was a rooming house then, just as it is now, and the men who lived there were almost always intoxicated. On Sunday mornings she saw them staggering home, and there was an iron fence, an ornamental iron fence, in front of the house, and the men would lean on the fence, clinging to it, and from her
windows, upstairs, they looked as though they had been impaled on those iron pickets.

  During the course of the years, she got to know the Finnish woman who was landlady and janitor in that rooming house. On winter mornings, the woman emptied the ashcans, pouring the contents in the driveway, wind blowing the fine gray stuff back into her face, wind blowing strands of rough uncared for gray hair across her face, and she thrusting it away with impatience. Even on the coldest days her arms were bare, reddened from the cold, and she wore no hat.

  Abbie got to know most of the tenants, just by watching them come and go. She knew what time they got up, and what time they went to work. A thin young man, and a thin young woman, occupied the front bedroom on the second floor. In the summer when the windows were open, Abbie could hear them quarreling, and toward dusk she would see the young man stumbling home. Sometimes late at night, she could hear him say, voice thickened, “Aw, I got a right, what’s the matter with you,” could hear the girl crying, and then the man’s voice, again, “Aw, shut up, whatsamatter with you, I got a right.”

  The girl worked in the Five-and-Ten on Franklin Avenue. Abbie went in there once to buy something, saw the girl standing behind one of the counters, wearing a white blouse, open at the neck, revealing the bones in her neck, the hollows at the base of her throat, and felt embarrassed, and hurried out of the store, because she knew so much about this girl, yet had never seen her closeto before, though she had heard the nighttime quarrels, heard the sound of her weeping.

  The thin young man did not work at all. He got up about noon. Abbie could see him moving back and forth in that front room, whose windows were so near her own bedroom windows, looking at himself in the mirror, knotting his tie, putting on his jacket, adjusting and readjusting his hat brim, finally lighting a cigarette, turning to study his profile, making another minute adjustment of his hat brim, and then a few minutes later, she would see him outside on the sidewalk, moving at a slow, leisurely pace.

  One day she noticed that the girl no longer lived there. She never saw her coming home whitefaced, exhaustedlooking, any more. The woman who ran the rooming house began quarreling with the thin young man. She was always shouting at him, shaking her fist, as she said he was no good, no damn good, that he didn’t work, that he had never worked, no, she wouldn’t give him any money, all he’d ever done was sit on his can all day, day in day out.

  His clothes got shabbier. The widebrimmed light gray hat was streaked with dirt, lost its shape. Late one afternoon, Abbie saw him coming home. It was raining but he had no coat on. He couldn’t get in the house, and he stood on the steps rattling the door, then he kicked against it, then he stood outside on the sidewalk, looking up at the windows, and finally walked away.

  Finally, she had asked the Finnish woman about the girl. The woman said the boy, she called him the kid, half contemptuously, was no good, he lived off the girl, and the girl was crazy about him, so crazy about him that it would make anybody sick to watch her, to listen to her, and the girl believed in him, stood behind a counter all day, stood on her feet, earning a little bit of money the hard way, and the kid was always drinking up and gambling away the money the girl earned.

  Abbie, puzzled, had said to the woman, “But if she was so crazy about him why did she leave him?”

  The woman had stared at her, the blue eyes, hard and cold, the red roughened hands on the hips, the mouth compressed as she said, “She find out he got another woman. Nobody stay after that. Nobody. If I find my man got another woman, I leave, too. But I got strength, see? So I break up everything first. Everything. This girl got no strength. She just go.”

  Abbie thought, That’s what that girl with the yellow hair and the beautiful feet and hands, that’s what that girl did. She had strength and so she destroyed Link. Because he had fallen in love with someone else. But he hadn’t. Then she thought, How do I know? How would anyone know?

  She stopped thinking about it because she heard Frances knocking at the front door, knew it was she because the knocker sounded against the door quickly, lightly, three times in succession and then there was a pause and the knocker hit the door twice. Frances always knocked like that so she would know who it was, had been doing it ever since the Major died, ever since those days when the thought of a stranger at the door filled Abbie with a senseless fear, afraid to open her own door.

  She opened the door with a flourish. “I’ve got everything ready for supper,” she said. “You might as well eat here and have tea at the same time.”

  Frances said, “I’d love to. But I’ll have to phone Miss Doris.”

  While Frances used the telephone, Abbie heated the soup, a thick meaty soup, practically a meal in itself, and then made a salad, fixed the tea, and then filled the soup plates.

  Frances came into the kitchen, “Can I do anything?” she asked.

  “Just sit down at the table.”

  They ate slowly, and when they had finished, they stayed at the table, talking.

  Abbie said, “Was Miss Doris angry?”

  “Oh, no. It took her forever to answer the telephone. She was listening to a news broadcast, so she didn’t say much of anything, sort of grunted, and then said, ‘I were listening’—and hung up.” Frances stirred the tea in her teacup, vigorously, and then said, “Abbie, why don’t you come and live with me? Rent out this place. I’ve got that great big house and there’s nobody in it, really, or at least not enough people in it to fill it up.”

  She toyed with the idea for a moment, Miss Doris would look after both of them, there would be no more household cares, never come home to a dark house, people always around, yes, and Miss Doris didn’t like cats, especially didn’t like tomcats, and there would be no comfortable cushions for Pretty Boy to lie on in a house which Miss Doris managed, no house plants, so the geraniums and the cyclamen and the African violets, would be left behind, or given away; and Frances was just as dictatorial as Miss Doris, and between them one Abbie Crunch would rapidly disintegrate into a doddering old woman.

  She said, “Thank you very much. But I’m not that old, or that feeble. I’ll be all right. If the time ever comes when I feel I can no longer live here alone, why I’ll let you know.”

  “You’ve been wonderful.”

  Abbie thought, She’s trying to find out why, and changed the subject. She said, “By the way, what is a Chinaman’s chance?”

  “A Chinaman’s chance? What on earth made you think of that?”

  “Well, when Howard Thomas passed me, fairly running along the street, he muttered something about a Chinaman’s chance. That reminds me, did you find him? And what was the matter with him?”

  “I don’t think he knew himself. Or if he did he didn’t tell me. He said he’d lost his wallet, and then proceeded to take it out of his back pocket right in front of me. I said, Why there it is, and he said, Why so it is, ha-ha-ha, Miss Jackson, why so it is. So I walked off and left him.”

  “But a Chinaman’s chance,” Abbie persisted. “Whatever was wrong with him must have had something to do with that. He kept repeating it, ‘Not a Chinaman’s chance,’ and looking back over his shoulder as he said it.”

  Frances was sitting in one of the Hitchcock chairs, and when she leaned back in it it made a creaking sound, and she moved again, farther back, and said, “Ha!” and smiled and her glasses glittered as the light struck them. “That’s the chance a China­man has when he’s wrapped up in a burlap sack, tied up, with the stones, the necessary stones to weight him down, when he’s to be smuggled across the border, in a boat. I have heard it said that Bill Hod used to bring them in over the Canadian border. Years ago. At a thousand dollars a head. If the border patrol stopped him, challenged the great god Hod, why he dumped the Chinese overboard. That is a Chinaman’s chance.”

  Abbie thought that Frances was waiting for her to say something, at least she was looking directly at her. Abbie avoided her gaze. She gla
nced at the African violets blooming in the bay window, at the Boston rocker, and the marbletopped table, at the little Victorian sofa by the fireplace, and the card table drawn up in front of it, books and magazines on it, ready for the evening of quiet reading, saw none of these things, saw instead Bill Hod’s face, the hooded eyes, the cruel thinlipped mouth, as plainly as though he were there in the room. She experienced a moment of prescience, in which she foresaw that Bill Hod would never permit that girl with the blond hair to stay alive, unscathed, in the same world in which he lived. And Howard Thomas—

  “Well?” Frances asked. “Have you figured it out?”

  “No,” Abbie said, lying, deliberately lying. “And I don’t want to.”

  I could be wrong, she thought. Perhaps Hod’s face is deceptive, perhaps I have always misjudged him. Impossible. He has always taken an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth. It is written all over him. There is no reason to believe that he has changed, or would, or could change. Miss Doris said, It were purely like a snowball, everbody give it a push. So Bill Hod must have arranged to give this dreadful business a final push. And Howard Thomas knows it. Has somehow discovered it.

  Shortly afterwards, Frances went home. Abbie went to the door with her, patted her arm, kissed her lightly on the cheek. She stood in the doorway watching Frances’ tall bony figure until it was out of sight, and not meaning to, not wanting to, she glanced across the street at the brilliant neon sign in front of The Last Chance.

  She could go to the police and say—say what? Say that a man who appeared to be frightened came out of The Last Chance, that he went into a drugstore, that she believed he wanted to telephone to the police, meant to, but he was too frightened, too afraid of Bill Hod, therefore she had become convinced—and they would laugh at her, not laugh, they would listen politely but they would not believe her. She had no evidence to offer.

  Stepping back into the hall, she closed the front door quickly, shutting out the sight of that vivid neon sign, thinking, Even if I knew, even if I could offer irrefutable evidence that Bill Hod was planning to destroy that blond girl I would not do anything about it. I would not try to stop it.