Hallie saw light however faintly.
“What happened exactly?”
“Exactly? Exactly what happens when a man is having a girl, exactly. And I’ve never been able to make it any other way since.” He laughed in the watery light. “Exactly.”
Hallie waited.
“That was when I was ten. She died when I was twenty-one. And the day she died, the last motion she made was to give me a backhanded slap on my bottom. To let me know she had understood all along.” He put his hand to his forehead. “I’m terribly tired, I don’t know why.”
“She must have been grateful for your care,” was all Hallie could think to say. For it came to her that this wasn’t a monster of the nastier sort: but only a boy playing commander with his nose still running.
“She was. As I’m grateful today for her. Who else but Mammy ever felt I was worth human care?”
“Mister,” Hallie told him quietly, “you don’t need a girl. You need a doctor.”
“There aren’t any doctors for black-mammy freaks,” he explained dryly; as though he’d tried looking one up in the city directory.
“Then just try to rest,” Hallie told him. “I’ll do what I can.”
“There’s money in my wallet. It’s in my coat,” he instructed her.
She took the coat off the chair and found the wallet. “I won’t take it all,” she assured him.
He didn’t look interested in her count.
He looked stricken.
Fast as she could pin, Hallie began preparing Mama for a great impersonation.
“You don’t think he stole his ship’s money, do you?” Mama had to know. “He isn’t going to get us all in trouble, is he?”
“You never made an easier dollar your whole enduring life,” Hallie reassured her. “He’s just a green boy kept on black titty too long. All you got to remember is he keeps getting in your way. Don’t hit him too hard—just hard enough. Make it look good. Getting whupped by his old black mammy is what he come here for—turn around so I can pin you.” She began stuffing a small pillow into Mama’s bosom. “The more you stick out in front the more you stick out behind. I’ll have you sticking out so far you’ll look like Madam Queen.”
“Girl, I was born in this country. You won’t catch me hitting no member of our armed forces.”
It was plain Mama hadn’t caught the play.
“Mama,” Hallie pleaded, “forget the man’s uniform. I’m trying to tell you he isn’t like other men.”
Mama stiffened like a retriever. “Honey, he ain’t one of them O-verts? I won’t cater to them. Not for no amount.”
“If he were, he’d be better off,” Hallie reassured her, “now turn around.” And pinned skirt over skirt till Mama, weighted down, sank heavily into a chair.
“Honey, I’m starting to sweat,” she complained.
“Sweat till you shine,” Hallie encouraged her, “but don’t show your face till I give you the sign.” And stepped through the portiere.
Beneath the ruin of the commander’s gold-braid hat, the King of the Indoor Thieves had collapsed at last; his undershirt tangled about his throat as if someone had tried to improve his manners by finishing him off altogether. He snored till his toes were spread; he stretched till he creaked in dreams. Dreams of some final assault for an earth about to be his for keeps.
“All of you stop talking out of the comers of your mouth like you were Edward G. Robinson and everybody was in the can,” Hallie quieted the women. “You’ve got a guest tonight that means gold from way back. Try to show manners.”
For down the stair with an admiral’s tread came the hero of sea fights as good as won. Looking like the dogs had had him under the house. With a gin glass latched to his hand.
Hallie crooked one finger toward the portiere and Mama came forth with forehead shining, bandana and broom; all sweat and Aunt Jemima in a peppermint apron that hung like candy.
The second he saw her, Commander dropped his glass. “I didn’t mean to do that,” he apologized immediately, and began trying to clean the floor with his sleeve, glass, splinters, and all, immediately making a worse mess than before.
Mama seated herself across from him in her preposterous gear. The girls exchanged looks; part fear and part wonder.
“I’m a Protestant by birth but a Catholic by descent.” Mama felt it was time to explain the curious no-man’s land of her faith. “I’ve shod the horse all around.” Meaning she had had four husbands. “So I’m not acceptable to the Church. But if I can’t die sanctified I do hope to die blessed.”
His elbow touched Floralee’s glass. It tottered; he reached as if to keep it from tipping and knocked it over instead. The girl pushed back her chair and he began mopping it up with a silk handkerchief; although all he was doing actually was swishing the handkerchief around in it. “Go on with your story,” he told Mama, “I’m sorry to be so clumsy.”
Mama had lost the thread. All she could remember was that she’d shod the horse all around.
“Three of them were thieves and one was a legit man—I’d never marry another legit man. Do you know that you’re safer living with a man who kills for hire than with a man who has never killed? That’s because one knows what killing is; the other don’t.”
“Why,” Commander remarked, “in that case, ill-fame women ought to make better wives than legitimate girls.”
Nobody knew what to say to that.
“Navy, I think that’s the nicest thing I’ve heard anyone say since I’ve been in the trade,” Hallie said at last.
His elbow tipped Mama’s glass into her lap.
“Now don’t tell me that ‘just happen,’ ” Mama scolded him in earnest now. “Mister, my frank opinion is you done that a-purpose.”
“Honest I didn’t, Mammy,” he lied patently.
“Don’t whup him, Mama,” Floralee pleaded for him.
“I’m sure he won’t do it again,” Hallie defended him, too.
“Give me one more chance, Mama,” he whimpered.
“Only out of respect for your uniform,” Mama issued final warning, “and one more is all you gets.” She turned to shake out her skirts, somebody tittered and somebody honked and she whirled just in time to catch the Commander with two fingers to his nose. Mama scarcely knew what to feel.
“Why, that isn’t the least bit nice, a man of your background to have such manners—”
“He didn’t mean anything, Mama,” Hallie was sure.
“Don’t whup him,” Floralee begged.
“Cross my heart I didn’t mean anything,” Commander swore in that same unbearable small-boy whine that in itself entitled him to a thrashing.
“Oh, he meant it all right,” Kitty informed, “I seen him with my naked eye. And I have a very naked eye.”
“I will try to do better, Mammy,” he promised too humbly. “Oh, I will try to behave. Oh, I will be a good boy, cross my heart ’n hope—” Standing up to cross himself, his hand caught the tablecloth and brought cloth, bottles, decanters, ashtrays, Cokes and a centerpiece of artificial pansies crashing to the floor.
In the silence everyone heard a small clock saying “sick-sick-sick.”
Then Mammy went even blacker with rage as he went whiter with fright. Now she went at him with no pretending, and he flung his two hundred and fourteen pounds under the table in true fear.
“Don’t whup me, Mammy,” they heard him pleading. “Please don’t whup me just this one time.”
Hallie tried to hold her and Floralee helped, because Mama could do murder when out of control. Reba fastened onto Mama’s waist to hold her back. Kitty stood to one side not caring particularly who got killed so long as blood was spilled.
“Beat him blue!” Big Five joined Mama’s forces. “If you can’t do it, I will!” and dove right for him.
“He’s Mama’s date, not yours,” Hallie hauled Big Five back and held her until she calmed down—holding a strip of gold-braided blue serge in her hand ripped from the officer’s sleev
e.
“I’m just a little boy,” they heard somebody under the table whine, “please don’t hurt me.”
“Now he’s really asking for it,” Kitty commented.
Just as the apprentice pimp showed up at last, complete in sombrero and boots newly shined. He was the only one capable of holding Mama in a true rage and Mama herself knew this. When he got both arms around her, she ceased to struggle and began to cry. He and Hallie got Mama into a chair; where she daubed at her eyes with his big bandana.
Big Five got hold of one of the commander’s silken ankles and Floralee the other. Between them they succeeded in pulling him forth.
He lay on his stomach, rump elevated to invite kicks, eyes closed with rapture. Big Five pushed him onto his side. Then, by inserting one toe underneath him, rolled him over like lifting a great drugged cat onto the flat of his back.
He lay face up, his eyes still shut.
“He got no right to lay around so loose, without being drunk or sick, either one,” Big Five expressed her disgust, “somebody get some water.”
“I don’t have any water,” Floralee reported in her light sweet voice and a white pitcher in her hand—“Wouldn’t beer do as well?”—and emptied it full in the officer’s face.
Then, looking down into her pitcher, the girl saddened: “Now it’s empty.” And she looked ready to cry.
“You could use Cokes,” Hallie told her.
Now who but Hallie Dear would have thought of that? Floralee gathered the half-finished bottles standing on ledge and divan, and in no time at all had her pitcher refilled. But this time she poured it down the front of the Commander’s shirt.
“That was fun,” she reported hopefully to Hallie, and lifting his legs and holding them, began to sing—
Don’t throw bouquets at me
Don’t laugh at my jokes too much—
while all the while the commander lay licking his big ox-tongue like a Coke-dripping Lazarus too languid to rise.
“I’ve been everywhere God got land,” Hallie told him, “but you are the most disgusting sight yet seen—you can drop his legs any time,” she told Floralee. Who promptly let both legs fall at once.
“I had a very strong hankering to go to sea at one time myself,” the apprentice pimp recalled, kicking the big man lightly: “Get up, officer.”
But nobody really knew what to do with this hero of sea fights yet unfought.
Except the King of the Indoor Thieves. He always knew what to do.
“I do it back,” he repeated. And with no further ado, straddled the fallen leader and began urinating upon him with solemn delight. “I’m a sonofabitch,” he explained, “I do do it back!” And fluttered his lashes above the torrent.
“Why!” Mama came suddenly to herself in a burst of sunrisen pride, “Why! Listen to that! A child of six using the language of a child of ten! Hear this! Hear this! Salute the Atlantic fleet!”
“Mama,” Hallie sought to calm the older woman, “I respect the Atlantic fleet as much as the next person, but I do feel this child is going too far.”
Mama came to attention, eyes straight forward, put her palm to her forehead in the hand-salute and began the Pledge of Allegiance. The King brought his own hand up to his forehead and stood at attention as well as he could while continuing to urinate.
The big man on the floor looked up. He opened his eyes so blue, so commanding. “That was the nicest party I’ve had in eleven years,” he announced, rising at last.
Someone handed him his crushed hat and his soiled coat.
At the door he smiled; but no one smiled back.
Mama lowered herself, inch by inch in all her finery, onto a divan. She felt like the real thing in black mammies. But all she did was sigh. Just sigh.
Outside, she heard the night’s last drunk pause as if listening for a friendly voice; then cry out: “God forgive me for my sins! Empty saddles in the old corral!”
And passed on toward the breaking day.
Half in wake and half in sleeping, Mama heard the jukebox weeping—
From all of society we’ll stay aloof
And live in propriety here on the roof
When the juke began to bark, she wakened. Down the stairs the poodle dyed pink came bounding and barking all the way. Behind him came the girl who owned him, crying to Heaven: “Heavensent! Heavensent!”
And behind her, holding the banister with one hand, Bag-of-Sand came feeling his way down.
If he’d been out of shape when he went upstairs, he was really disheveled now. He came down like a man fearing to break his neck at every step. And when he made it all the way down, he found himself facing the apprentice pimp; who seemed to have grown in size somehow.
“Are you for action or aren’t you, buddy?” the would-be pimp wanted to know.
Bag-of-Sand got past him and stood in the middle of the parlor boggling blindly about.
“I can sing like a damned bird,” Floralee told him, ‘‘only how did I fly in here?”
Bag-of-Sand turned slowly away. But at the door he turned.
“Good-night, girls,” he told them. “Someday I’ll tell you about the time I reviled the Virgin for fifteen minutes.”
And he passed, like the commander had passed; through a dark door-way into a darker dream.
“Go out and get the morning papers,” Mama instructed Floralee, “I want to see what the white folks are up to.”
PREVIOUS DAYS
FURLONGS away from those bright-red arrows directing horse-players to the daily-double windows, every racetrack has one shadowy cage identifying itself begrudgingly as:
PREVIOUS DAYS
After the $20-on-the-nose sure-thing that broke stride; after the $15-across-the-board shot that went wide; after all the tips that came straight from the barn have run out, Previous Days is where Yesterday’s Bettor goes to cash a $3.80 place ticket: thus redeeming the follies of all his yesterdays.
And Remembrance being but a sequence of bright changes that broke stride (Recollection itself having run a bit wide), I recently found myself shuffling through a handful of memories like so many dead tickets that once had been certain winners: discovering several still redeemable. Within the shadows of previous days.
I remember taking a shortcut through an alley, when I was about ten, and seeing three women leaning, as though fascinated, across an alley gate; they were held fascinated by something in that backyard. I looked, too.
Somebody had trapped a huge rat, in a circular trap of frying-pan size. The trap had fastened the rat by its nose. It was bleeding and trying to pull free. The women didn’t know what to do.
A Sunday-morning iceman, tongs resting across his shoulder, straw hat on his head and toothpick in teeth, looking ready for anything, came up and took command.
“A bucket of water!” he issued the orders of the day.
One of the women raced into the house and came out with a mop bucket so full that it spilled a bit when she put it down beside the rat. Mr. Ready-for-Anything flung trap, rat and all into the bucket. We crowded around to watch the brute drown.
It didn’t even sink. The trap was of wood and supported it like a buoy. Around and around it went, bleeding as it swam; while we stood waiting for it to bleed to death. Now not even the iceman knew what to do.
A small girl, wearing a white communion veil, skipped up, banged the rat behind one ear with a housebrick, waited just long enough to see it sink, then went skipping off down the alley with the brick still in her hand.
Some iceman.
Any kid looking for battle could get it just by tapping you on your shoulder and saying, “There’s your carty.” If you didn’t accept the challenge, all he had to do was say, “Well, I gave you your carty,” and walk away. And though you later succeeded greatly and he failed miserably, he remained, all your life, because of your cowardice that day, your superior.
A variation of this challenge was once offered me by a kid named Walter Dinnerbell. (That was his real name and
he was smaller than I was.) He came up to me in the schoolyard of the Park Manor School and warned me, “I can change you into a cat.”
I scoffed.
“Do you dare me?”
I thought it over carefully. I was almost certain he couldn’t. But then you could never be absolutely certain.
“No,” I decided not to take the chance, “I don’t dare you.”
Many times since then I’ve wished that I had that chance over again. “Yes,” I’d say firmly, “I do dare you.”
On the other hand, why take unnecessary risks?
A kid called Vinnie was perfect hell on substitute teachers. One day a young girl introduced herself as Miss Leibowitz, our substitute music teacher. What move would Vinnie make this time? We wondered.
For starters he did nothing but make funny noises.
“Who is making that animal noise?” Miss Leibowitz asked gently. She was a gentle girl and a rather pretty one. “Have we a little animal in our class?”
Nobody snitched on Vinnie. The girl turned to the piano and sang as she played:
Soft o’er the fountain
Gently falls the Southern moon
* * *
She had a nice voice. When she nodded at us we all joined in:
’nita, wah-ah-ah-’nita
Comes the day too soon —
Vinnie was ready. I sensed it.
“That was awright, Teach,” he assured her in his high nasal voice. “Now how about a couple bars of Jew-roos-alum de Golden?”
At thirteen my sister was a film buff. She’d seen every Saturday-afternoon film that had shown at the Park Manor Theater since she’d been eleven. Had theaters already begun giving away dishes in 1915? I don’t know. All I know is that every soup and cereal dish—yes, and some dessert dishes also—that we owned, had the face and autograph of a film star stamped upon them. I’ve eaten oatmeal off the lovely lips of Viola Dana and spooned gravy from the doomed brow of Wallace Reid.
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