When he left for work, Ruth daily scanned him by their front door. She often ordered him—looking down at himself, huffing, mystified—right back up to his room, to change, this very instant.
Ruth and Bobby, en route to Florida by car in 1949, stopped at a tourist camp. Around 4 a.m., they smelled smoke, sat up to find the motel mostly on fire. A stunning wordless teamwork took over as she ran left, he adrenalined right—as they pounded and kicked on each door, waking every guest. Only later, by the glow of flames, by the fire trucks’ raking red lights, did others (then my grandparents) slowly recognize: one old ribby gent and his bosomy partner were and had been totally naked all during. Bobby grinned. “Well, what do you know?” Blankets embroidered with the motel’s name settled over himself, his wife—a Pitt and therefore unperturbed by flames, strangers, frontal nudity.
Unusual for their generation, these two slept bare-assed and bragged about it. When, years later, Ruth got rushed to the hospital, her daughters-in-law ransacked dresser drawers, then phoned the best store in town, ordering what might’ve been the old woman’s first nightie ever—ivory-colored satin worthy of a bride. “Romeo and Juliet,” my father said of his own parents; but under his irony ran an envy we all felt—even the kids did.
MY PARENTS hated Grand’s calling their Bryan “Willy.” Ruth shamed Grand for it. “People will think you don’t know better, Little Bobby, and him your own flesh and blood.” She considered this a possible first hint of galloping senility. She seemed to revel in Grand’s early memory goofs. “I’m afraid you’re really slipping now. What shall we do with you?” and she touched his splotchy hand. Mentioning her husband’s several faults, Ruth would corner anybody, black or white, friend or stranger. He sat right there all during, sat still and smiling. Little Bobby looked up at her, raucous with squint-eyed love as she admitted his frequent lapses. Ruth claimed he’d once owned every fashionable section of Falls, till roughly two months before it became fashionable, at which point he sold it at a dreadful loss. “Didn’t you?” A gentle blinking nod. “Also, what’s far worse, I fear—you all see that gentleman over there, the one with the exceptional hearing? in 19 and 19 he went and peddled our 650 shares of Coca-Cola stock for something like a dollar forty per share. Now, didn’t you, Bobby? Fess up and get this part over with,” and she wandered to his chair, brushed white hair off his forehead. He nodded, grinning, scratching at sunburned cartilage. “Ruth, honey? Believe it was—dollar ten a share.”
I am thirty-nine years old. (I can’t accept how aged I’ve become. My mother, who’ll turn seventy this May, is glad, since misery loves company—my ex-wives are probably unsurprised and might consider my being upset as just more typical vanity. Only I feel stunned and lonely, hearing the Niagara of forty roaring just ahead.) Now, in trying to recall the few perfect couples I have known, my grandparents seem about the most contented. At best, it’s a fairly short list. Around 12:15 a.m., after an evening of whining about our love lives, my friends sometimes say, “Well, who-married do we even know that’s really happy?”
“Now, when you say ‘happy,’ how do you mean it? I guess you mean …?”
“Happy. Just really happy, ever heard of it? … It used to be a concept.”
MY GRANDFOLKS WERE. What they mostly did: buttonhole anybody nearby—service-station men, hotel maids, family—and bad-mouth one another.
He called her a Gibson girl debutante run to seed; she said he was the most shiftless thing still half alive. And all during, they aimed sleepy, narrowed smiles at one another. I know it’s now unfashionable, one person saying, “I own you and you own me.” But I swear, theirs was the curt dreamy look of sovereign ownership. Maybe such love can occur only during the heyday of a rustic capitalist society.
In their household crowded with kin, you’d see the pair retreat to some corner, conferring about supper. Speaking, faces hovering unsentimental inches apart—one of them would idly lift a white hair off the other’s gray-worsted shoulder; next, a straightening of the other’s overbright tie. Soon their fingers were all over each other, efficient. Watching, you understood: they didn’t even know they were in contact. If you pointed this out, they would loudly deny it. After sixty years of married days, their separate bodies had become that mutual, that pooled. Fondest strokings always started as sharpest criticism.
“Just look at you,” she’d say, he’d say.
RUTH DIED before he did. I can tell you, she never meant to. Among the few wishes Ruth Eder Pitt Grafton was not granted: outliving Little Bobby. I once heard the woman, alone in the kitchen, cutting a first large piece of cake for him, explaining to no one, “Should anything ever happen to me …” Many spouses say this. We heard her but never quite believed till later.
The day before Ruth died, Grand drove a Packard-load of grandkids to the hospital. Nobody under twelve was allowed to visit. Our grandfather led us up a fire-exit side entrance, pausing for breath on each landing. Grand quietly told us he would take the full official blame. We just had to see her a last time. If the rules aren’t fair—he said—if there’s no time left to change the rules, a person broke them, a person had to.
I was twelve, the oldest kid present. (I later discovered that many of Bobby’s grandkids felt they were his all-time secret favorite. This actually upset me briefly, but I still believe I was and am.) The batch of us, ages five to twelve, kept silent for a change. A hospital stairwell echoes so. I remember somebody’s terry-cloth slipper (one only) was resting on a landing. It had three drops of blood across its top, like a design. “Yisch,” my youngest girl cousin whispered, prodding it with the toe of her blue Ked.
We were herded toward a doorway. We felt pretty nervous at maybe being caught on the third floor, nervous about seeing Grandmother. It would be our very first viewing of Mrs. Ruth, our lifetime hostess, as somebody out of control. I stood in her half-open doorway surrounded by curly blond younger cousins, mostly girls. I felt scared by this hall’s alcohol smell, by two different kinds of serious coughing nearby. I dreaded stepping into the room but felt I couldn’t hold back now and disappoint Bobby Grafton.
She looked strangely small in a large, high bed. I’d never seen her with her hair unbraided. It uncoiled long as a witch’s, and though I hated myself, to me it looked obscene all over the pillows like that. No discipline.
Even then, modern medicine was working those miracles that jab tubes into every outlet of the dying. Such help renders departing souls just conscious enough to be aware of this foreground indignity, it annoys them just enough to distract from Last Things. Right in my wallet here I’ve got a card telling authorities to withhold any such assistance from me, no way. I’m not yet forty but have learned from my poor loved ones’ polluted exits.
“Come in,” Grand called. I didn’t want to step into that room. I saw clear hanging sacks and tubing. But I was scared that if I didn’t cross the threshold, my little cousins might mutiny, turn back. So, dutiful, I took a breath, I stepped right in. I have always been dutiful. It is the thing about myself I hate the most. It is the thing about myself I love almost the most. How do you figure it?
Grand wanted us to see this woman dying. Another form of storytelling, showing her now—Bobby, born middleman at other people’s dramas. This happened in winter. The heating system beat throughout the ward. One radiator against her room’s far wall now rocked in place, clanging like a metal seizure chained near the bed. I stood, my thin arms drooped over the shoulders of plump little cousins gathered against, around, below me. “Uck,” one whispered. “What’d they do to her? That’s not her.”
“Come closer.” The old man waved, smiling from the bed, “Ruth’s hair, look, her hair has always been this long. So fine. Brown when I met her. It got blonder before turning silver, then white, like it is now. Happened in less than six months. There’s still a lot of brown in it if you know what color to look for. Started out the shade of clover honey. Look at her. Come on in, do.” Our group’s spoiled youngest just said, “No.” She st
omped one foot, she wouldn’t budge.
Some kids had edged nearer the bed, most remained half huddled in the hall, holding on to the doorjamb as if the sight of our grandmother might make a great gust that’d blow us all back down the stairs. Nurses began noticing us here. Nurses didn’t want to be bothered. They’d surely seen other grandchildren file into the hall for other enforced death watches. To keep officials from trudging down here and complaining, I must now get my cousins into this room.
Grand acted upset over the little ones’ hanging back. But he turned our way, grinning anyhow. “You’re scared is all. And you’re damned smart to be. Still, I guess you can see her okay from out there. Here’s your grandmother. She’s why you’re here.”
I watched him try to help the woman. He lifted a glass and water pitcher; he poured some, spilling. She was beyond drinking from a glass; he tipped wet against her lips anyhow, it ran all down her chin, darkening her ivory nightie. He did this with the heavy-handed earnestness his stories showed.
Grand touched her forehead, pressed the hair back. “You kids want to leave, probably. And who can blame you, seeing her like this?” The corners of his mouth went up as for a smile, but it wasn’t one. His hand tested her for fever. Grand acted possessive even of Ruth’s dying.
He just shook his head. “You children don’t like it now, but you’ve seen enough so you’ll pretty much remember. Yeah, this woman here, this old woman here …”
And he picked up a hairbrush from the bedside table; he made a few swipes at her yard-long hair. The man grinned like a salesman demonstrating. “Ever seen such hair?”
Maybe he hoped to show us that this was beautiful, that she was still beautiful. But to me, it was not. She was not.
I can’t bear recalling this next part but—as Grand predicted—I do … do remember. Some white hair lifted by his brush got tangled in the clear tubes leading to her nose. Then I reached for some support not there, I had to lean against the doorjamb. My cousins noticed. Since I was the oldest, dutiful and all … I didn’t—but I’d come close to fainting. It was the smell of her room, the scorched steam heat; it was seeing how long a person’s hair had always secretly been. It was all the sweetish flowers everywhere. I told myself, Grown-ups use flowers to mean this, too.
AT A RED LIGHT three blocks from the hospital, he reminded us, already bickering in back, glad to again be loud spoiled Grafton brats, “Your grandmother came from money. Not like my people. Money always made her particular. She scolded me something fierce, remember? Yeah, I could always count on Ruth for that. Merciless, she was. Merciless, hard, lovely woman. You had to admire her. I never stopped admiring her to pieces. She always kept herself so nice … Ruth.” Then we watched Grand fall across the steering wheel.
At first I thought, He is having an attack. You are the oldest. Run. A hospital’s just blocks away. Go fast. They’ll help. “Attack”—that was all I knew about old people dying: attacks so often got them. Hers’d happened in the garden, then she crawled, on all fours, up toward the porch; but her attack, it found her there.
Us kids slowly figured: Grand was only weeping. We probably felt more embarrassed about the man’s sobbing than if he’d perished at the wheel. “He’s crying,” our fussy youngest said. “He’s crying like you would, Sandy.” “Would not.” “Would so.” But nervousness soon hushed them.
He made sounds like a child doing poor animal imitations. The traffic light changed three times. It being un-rush hour in downtown Falls, North Carolina, only four cars had gathered behind us. The first tried pulling around without even honking (it was that long ago), but the car needed more room. So finally the driver hit her horn once, wincing, lifting her shoulders.
My youngest, sulkiest girl cousin—who’d said “No” and “Yisch” at the hospital—now sulked. “We’re blocking things. We’re messing up everything. I hate this part.” Though her sassiness shamed me, I understood: its bossy tone (inherited?) might just reach him now.
“Well.” Grand struggled to sit, wiping his eyes on the roof of either hand. “Mustn’t do that. Don’t want anybody complaining about their Little Bobby.” Us kids looked at each other. Four child hands touched his shoulder, touched the lined, glazed neck. Our Packard lurched forward just as the light turned red. A screeching bread truck swerved to miss us. Sidewalk shoppers covered their upper faces. “Joyride,” Grand explained to the dashboard. His eyes were locked straight ahead. In back, we kept very still, not exactly holding hands (it was not that kind of family) but feeling comforted by all the cousinly little legs and shoulders pressing against our legs, our shoulders.
WITH HER GONE, everybody saw how much she’d really done for him. Meaning: everything. It was just unbelievable. Things you couldn’t even name except by saying, “Something’s off, something’s wrong. Did he have two shoes on today?—probably, but something … else.” His driving grew wilder. It got so when locals saw his Packard Skipper in motion, their cars pulled right to the roadside, as if honoring a funeral. People new to town complained, not having the full history. Our sheriff’s parents had once enjoyed six months’ free rent in 1931 in a toolshed behind my grandfather’s garage. Sherriff Wilks refused to give Grand so much as a warning. “Mustn’t embarrass Mr. Grafton,” half our two-man police force told strangers. “Mr. Grafton has a lot on him just now.”
Folks new here snapped back, “Your Mr. Grafton is a menace to society and I dearly hope it’s your squad car he totals.”
The dark Packard now seemed everywhere, in sudden need of washing. It quickly filled with litter, proof that Grand ate, against his daughters-in-law’s wishes, fast food out on the strip by our mall. “You mustn’t let him go near that highway,” Mother scolded my father. “Once he’s on 301, it’ll probably mean instant death for him and many others.”
“But how can I stop him? A court injunction, what?” Dad asked us all. “He’s my father. How can I stop him?” We heard: Dad really wanted advice, even from us kids. We all sat quiet at dinner, thinking of the world’s hazards, traps set everywhere for babies, animals, old people.
You started wondering. Had she washed the Packard all those years, a woman so intent on not knowing how to drive? “You think Mother went out there at 2 a.m. with a hose and sponge? Maybe she wore some of his flashier old clothes. Can’t you just picture her?” Dad smiled. I could. (I’d felt so shamed by Grand’s weeping in the rar, I never told my folks.) To me at twelve, his relying so on Ruth seemed unmanly, disappointing. Scary how a man can need one woman. Ruth had warned us all those years. We thought it was just another part of their cross-with-each-other routine.
For the first time in memory, my own mother began to speak fondly of my bossy, edgy late grandmother.
FATHER HIRED a cleaning woman to live in and cook for Grand. Three quit in one month. Two ladies claimed he followed them around all day, they felt observed. Even while they vacuumed as loudly as possible, Grand shouted gory Falls sagas their way. Bank robbers, understandable hangings, infant lockjaw. One woman complained, “The old gentleman keeps hounding me with stories about the dead, and they don’t go anywhere, they’re just endless. Besides, he made certain … I think they were … advances.” By now I was being sent away to school. I remember marveling that anybody would quit to avoid Grand’s tales. But then, of course, I was safely someplace else. I was a year past thirteen; I now resisted Sunday visits to Grand’s. If forced to go, I stayed on the porch with my opinionated aunts and suddenly-not-bad-looking girl cousins. He shuffled out and gave me wounded, amused looks—made more unbearable by their basset-hound forgiveness. Older, safe at school, I could afford to be sentimental about the man’s repeated “good ones.” I felt myself to be more sophisticated than he and so decided Grand was, like the folk music then in vogue, colorful.
My Northern roommate grilled me, Wasn’t Little Bobby really just your basic “slum lord?” Didn’t he lease to the white merchants who overcharged blacks?
At school, around 2 a.m., stoned illegally, I
tried ignoring this, tried telling my suitemates the story about Lancaster’s mule. Before I even got near the punch line, my pals walked out. “Guess … you had to’ve been there,” I explained to an empty dorm room. Maybe turns-of-speech involving mules didn’t cut the mustard after 1962, didn’t translate beyond Falls’s city limits. Maybe Little Bobby Grafton would remain an acquired taste. I now considered him remarkable, but my own reasons might be genetically determined, too simple to quite name or recognize. Maybe Grand’s charms could never be explained by a college-bound “Bryan”? Only some Willy could tell the plain and salty truth of “Ears” Grafton, loving witness to others’ wit, the not-pretty poor kid who lived in trouble, who met and wooed a downed lady worthy of satin sheets. A sharecroppers’ kid who, though often crossed, never ever snitched, not once.
For the month after her funeral, he refused to leave their house. He seemed afraid Ruth might return and not find him waiting. Then we heard how Mr. Grafton had paid unannounced social calls on two recent widows. These handsome women were confused when he sat beside them on settees, saying little while glaring hard at their wrists, their necks. Maybe Bobby planned to appear amorous. He first looked peeved, then dangerous. He slid onto one knee, tried kissing a lady’s hand the way some foreign baron might. She yelped, set her pug dogs barking, showed him out. Hoping to lighten things, Grand smiled. “I guess you know why everbody says ‘tighter’n Lessie Poland’s boot,’ huh?”
“Why you say what?” (She was new here.)
When he turned up at my folks’ place, Grand wasn’t wearing mourning black. He arrived in plaids-over-stripes. Knotted around his neck, one unclean polka-dotted bow tie. Most of a piece of blueberry pie was crusted on it, the archaeology of a good meal. My mother first tried teasing him, hoping the indirect approach might work. “What?” He stared at his own ragamuffin outfit. “Myself, I can’t see it, Helen. To me it’s all just clothes. Lucky to have them. They cover you, they come in different colors, so what?”
White People Page 18