The tacky display, the selfish disregard for rites due the deceased whom each claimed to honor, angered people, and they said so. What they did not say was how delighted they must have been by the graveside entertainment featuring beret, bonnet, and helmet. Yet in that moment, by tearing Heed’s silly hat off, uncrowning the false queen before the world, May became clarity at its most extreme. As it had been when she did everything to separate the two when they were little girls. She had known instinctively the intruder was a snake: penetrating, undermining, sullying, devouring.
According to May’s letters, as far back as 1960 Heed had begun to research ways to put her in a rest home or an asylum. But nothing Heed did—not spreading lies, inventing outrages, seeking advice from psychiatric institutions—could force May out. With L watching and without an accomplice, Heed failed. She was forced to put up with the dazzling clarity of the woman who hated her almost as much as Christine did. May’s war did not end when Cosey died. She spent her last year watching in ecstasy as Heed’s grasping hands turned slowly into wings. Still, Heed’s solution to her problems with May had been a good one, and a good idea directed at the wrong person was still good. Besides, L was gone. Hospitals were more hospitable. And now, with a little coaxing, there might just be an accomplice.
Poor Mama. Poor old May. To keep going, to protect what was hers, crazy-like-a-fox was all she could think of. Husband dead; her crumbling hotel ruled by a rabid beach rat, ignored by the man for whom she had slaved, abandoned by her daughter to strange ideas, a running joke to neighbors—she had no place and nothing to command. So she recognized the war declared on her and fought it alone. In bunkers of her own industry. In trenches she dug near watch fires at ocean’s edge. A solitary misunderstood intelligence shaping and controlling its own environment. Now she thought of it, Christine’s own disorganized past was the result of laziness—emotional laziness. She had always thought of herself as fierce, active, but unlike May, she’d been simply an engine adjusting to whatever gear the driver chose.
No more.
The ocean is my man now. He knows when to rear and hump his back, when to be quiet and simply watch a woman. He can be devious, but he’s not a false-hearted man. His soul is deep down there and suffering. I pay attention and know all about him. That kind of understanding can only come from practice, and I had a lot of that with Mr. Cosey. You could say I fathomed his mind. Not right away, of course. I was just a girl when I went to work for him—a married man with a son and a sick wife who needed care every minute of the day and night. He said her name, Julia, so soft you could feel his tenderness as well as his apology. Their son, Billy Boy, was twelve when Julia Cosey passed, and even though I was only fourteen, it was the most natural thing in the world for me to stay on and look after the two of them. Only a wide heart like his could care that much for a wife and have so much room left over. When Julia Cosey died, Mr. Cosey transferred all of what he felt to his son. Lucky for him, the boy had that insight smart children use with grown-ups in order to stay important. Not by doing what they say, but by figuring out what they really want. A daddy can say “Fend for yourself, boy” when he means “Don’t show me up; hurry up and fail.” Or he can say “I’ll teach you the world,” meaning “I’m scared to death of you.” I don’t know what Mr. Cosey said to his son along those lines, but whatever it was, Billy Boy understood it to mean “Be something I can get up for in the morning; give me something to do while I paddle along.” So it didn’t matter much if he was a very good son or a really bad one. He only had to be interesting. Just by luck, I suspect, he chose goodness. Mr. Cosey was pleased with everything Billy Boy did and said. He lavished money on him and took him everywhere. With his hair parted in the middle and a cap just like his father’s—what a pair they must have been. One getting a trim in the barber’s chair, the other one lounging with customers on the bench; sitting in the bleachers at Eagle games, on campstools at sing-out competitions, at narrow tables in country joints where the most gifted musicians played. They slept in rooming houses or just knocked on a door. Mr. Cosey said he wanted Billy Boy to see men enjoy the perfection of their work, so they went to Perdido Street for King Oliver, Memphis for the Tigers, Birmingham for the Barons. They watched how cooks examined market produce, watermen sorted oysters, bartenders, pool-hall rascals, pickpockets, and choirmasters. Everything was a labor lesson from a man proud of his skill. Mr. Cosey said it was life’s real education, but it looked to me like truancy from his own father’s school. A way to flunk the lessons Dark had taught him.
Besotted attention didn’t spoil the boy. He knew his duty and splashed in it, could smile even as his father bragged about him in front of yawning friends. Bragged about his arm with a ball, his cool head in an emergency. How he had extracted a bent nail stuck in a little girl’s cheek better than any doctor could have. I saw that one myself. I’d brought the lunch they wanted one day while they wasted time on the beach—knocking pebbles into the sea with baseball bats. Down a ways, a girl, maybe nine or ten years old, was casting into the waves. For what, who knows. Nothing with scales swims this close to the shore. At some point, the wind turned and the homemade fishhook hooked her. Her fingers were dripping red when Billy Boy got to her. He was deft enough and she was grateful, standing there cupping her face without a tear or a moan. But we took her back to the hotel anyway. I sat her in the gazebo, cleaned her cheek, and spread aloe gum and honey on the wound, hoping she was too strong for lockjaw. Over time, as usual, Mr. Cosey plumped up the story. Depending on his mood and his audience, you would have thought the child was about to be dragged into the water by a swordfish if Billy Boy hadn’t saved her. Or that he had removed a hook from a little baby’s eyeball. Billy smiled at the fat, cherished lies, and took his father’s advice in everything, including marriage: to wed a devoted, not calculating, girl. So Billy Boy chose May, who, as anybody could see, would neither disrupt nor rival the bond between father and son. Mr. Cosey was alarmed at first, not being privy to his son’s selection, but was made easy when the bride was not only impressed with the hotel but also showed signs of understanding what superior men require. If I was a servant in that place, May was its slave. Her whole life was making sure those Cosey men had what they wanted. The father more than the son; the father more than her own daughter. And what Mr. Cosey, widower, wanted in 1930 should have been impossible. That was the year the whole country began to live on Relief the way Up Beach people did—if they were lucky, that is. If not, they killed themselves or took to the road. Mr. Cosey, however, took advantage. He bought a broke-down “whites only” club at Sooker Bay from a man honest enough to say that although he swore to God and his pappy he would never sell to niggers, he was happy as a clam to break his vow and take his family away from that bird-infested sidewalk for hurricanes.
Who would have thought that in the teeth of the Depression colored people would want to play, or if they did, how could they pay for it? Mr. Cosey, that’s who. Because he knew what a harmonica player on a street corner knew: where there was music there was money. Check the churches if you doubt it. And he believed something else. If colored musicians were treated well, paid well, and coddled, they would tell each other about such a place where they could walk in the front door, not the service entrance; eat in the dining room, not the kitchen; sit with the guests, sleep in beds, not their automobiles, buses, or in a whorehouse across town. A place where their instruments were safe, their drinks unwatered, their talent honored so they didn’t have to go to Copenhagen or Paris for praise. Flocks of colored people would pay to be in that atmosphere. Those who had the money would pay it; those who didn’t would find it. It comforts everybody to think of all Negroes as dirt poor, and to regard those who were not, who earned good money and kept it, as some kind of shameful miracle. White people liked that idea because Negroes with money and sense made them nervous. Colored people liked it because, in those days, they trusted poverty, believed it was a virtue and a sure sign of honesty. Too much money had a whif
f of evil and somebody else’s blood. Mr. Cosey didn’t care. He wanted a playground for folk who felt the way he did, who studied ways to contradict history.
But it had to be special: evening dress in the evening; sport clothes for sport. And no zoot suits. Flowers in the bedrooms, crystal on the table. Music, dancing, and if you wanted to, you could join a private card game where money changed hands among a few friends—musicians, doctors who enjoyed the excitement of losing what most people couldn’t earn. Mr. Cosey was in heaven, then. He liked George Raft clothes and gangster cars, but he used his heart like Santa Claus. If a family couldn’t pay for a burial, he had a quiet talk with the undertaker. His friendship with the sheriff got many a son out of handcuffs. For years and without a word, he took care of a stroke victim’s doctor bills and her granddaughter’s college fees. In those days, the devoted outweighed the jealous and the hotel basked in his glow.
May, a sweet-tempered daughter of a preacher, was bred to hard work and duty, and took to the business like a bee to pollen. At first the two of us managed the kitchen, with Billy Boy tending bar. When it became clear that the queen at the stove was me, she moved to housekeeping, bookkeeping, provisioning, and her husband booked the musicians. I think I deserve half the credit for the way the hotel grew. Good food and Fats Waller is a once-in-a-lifetime combination. Still, you had to admire May. She was the one who arranged everything, saw to the linen, paid the bills, controlled the help. The two of us were like the back of a clock. Mr. Cosey was its face telling you the time was now.
When we were just the two females, things went along fine. It was when the girls got in the picture—Christine and Heed—that things began to fray. Oh, I know the “reasons” given: cannery smell, civil rights, integration. And May’s behavior did go strange in 1955 when that boy from Chicago tried to act like a man and got beat to death for his trouble. Mississippi’s answer to desegregation and whatever else that wilted their sex. We all shivered about what they did to that boy. He had such light eyes. But for May it was a sign. It sent her to the beach where she buried not just the deed but a flashlight and Lord knows what else. Any day now some Negro was going to rile waiting whites, give them an excuse to hang somebody and close the hotel down. Mr. Cosey despised her dread. I guess it was too close to home. Having grown up the son of a stooge, he danced all the harder. Whether the place thrived or didn’t, the decline started way before 1955. I foresaw it in 1942 when Mr. Cosey was making money hand over fist and the hotel was a showplace. See that window over there? It looked out on paradise, one me and May made, because when Billy Boy died, Mr. Cosey bought the barber chair the two of them used to take turns in and, for a year or so, just sat in it. Then suddenly he revved back up, ordered some fine silverware, and joined us in keeping the hotel the hot spot folks enjoyed. Handsome dog. Even in those days, when men wore hats—and a man in a hat looks so good—he was something to see. Women trailed him everywhere and I kept my eyes open for who he might pick. The hooked C’s on the silverware worried me because I thought he took casual women casually. But if doubled C’s were meant to mean Celestial Cosey, he was losing his mind. Still, I was knocked out of my socks in 1942 when he did choose. Word was he wanted children, lots of children, to fill the mirror for him the way Billy Boy used to. For motherhood only an unused girl would do. After playing around awhile, Mr. Cosey ended up in the most likely place for making babies and the least likely for a virgin. Up Beach, where every woman’s obituary could have read “Death by Children.” It was marrying Heed that laid the brickwork for ruination. See, he chose a girl already spoken for. Not promised to anyone by her parents. That trash gave her up like they would a puppy. No. The way I see it, she belonged to Christine and Christine belonged to her. Anyway, if he was hoping to change the blood he once tried to correct, he failed. Heed never gave him a tadpole, and like most men, he believed the fault was hers. He waited a few years into the marriage before going back to his favorite, but back to Celestial he went. You’d think since one of his women had a stroke after rooting with him in the sand, he’d avoid the beach as a setting for fun. But he didn’t. He even spent his wedding night there, which proves how much he liked it. Good weather or foul. Me too.
Mosquitoes don’t like my blood. Once I was young enough to take offense at that, not understanding that rejection could be a blessing. So you can see why I liked walking the shore route home however muggy the weather. The sky is empty now, erased, but back then the Milky Way was common as dirt. Its light made everything a glamorous black-and-white movie. No matter what your place in life or your state of mind, having a star-packed sky be part of your night made you feel rich. And then there was the sea. Fishermen say there is life down there that looks like wedding veils and ropes of gold with ruby eyes. They say some sea life makes you think of the collars of schoolteachers or parasols made of flowers. That’s what I was thinking about one hot night after a postponed birthday celebration. Off and on, whenever I felt like it, I stayed in my mother’s house in Up Beach. I was on my way there that night, tired as a dog, when I saw Mr. Cosey with his shoes in his hand walking north back toward the hotel. I was up at the grass line, hoping to catch a breeze strong enough to get the smoke and sugar smell out of my uniform. He was further down, sloshing through the waves. I raised my hand and started to call out to him, but something—the way he held his head, maybe, or a kind of privacy wrapped about him—stopped me. I wanted to warn him but, weary and still out of sorts, I kept on walking. Down a piece I saw somebody else. A woman sitting on a blanket massaging her head with both hands. I stood there while she got up, naked as truth, and went into the waves. The tide was out, so she had to walk a long time for the water to reach her waist. Tall, raggedy clouds drifted across the moon and I remember how my heart kicked. Police-heads were on the move then. They had already drowned the Johnson boys, almost killed the cannery girl, and who knew what else they had in mind. But this woman kept on wading out into black water and I could tell she wasn’t afraid of them—or of anything—because she stretched, raised her arms, and dove. I remember that arc better than I remember yesterday. She was out of sight for a time and I held my breath as long as she did. Finally, she surfaced and I breathed again watching her swim back to shallow water. She stood up and massaged her head once more. Her hair, flat when she went in, rose up slowly and took on the shape of the clouds dragging the moon. Then she—well, made a sound. I don’t know to this day whether it was a word, a tune, or a scream. All I know is that it was a sound I wanted to answer. Even though, normally, I’m stone quiet, Celestial.
I don’t deny her unstoppable good looks—they did arrest the mind—and while how she made her living saddened me, she did it in such a quiet, reserved way you would have thought she was a Red Cross nurse. She came from a whole family of sporting women although, unlike them, she had not understood the fatal attraction of gold teeth. Hers were white as snow. When Mr. Cosey changed—well, limited—her caseload, neither could break the spell. And the grave didn’t change a thing.
I can watch my man from the porch. In the evening mostly, but sunrise too, when I need to see his shoulders collared with seafoam. There used to be white wicker chairs out here where pretty women drank iced tea with a drop of Jack Daniel’s or Cutty Sark in it. Nothing left now, so I sit on the steps or lean my elbows on the railings. If I’m real still and listening carefully I can hear his voice. You’d think with all that strength, he’d be a bass. But, no. My man is a tenor.
5
LOVER
Sandler admitted he could have imagined the look but not the glisten. That was definite. Vida credited neither. The proof, she felt, was in her grandson’s walk. Whatever the sign, both agreed that Romen was seeing someone, maybe even going with someone. They liked those terms—“seeing,” “going with”—suggesting merely looking, accompanying. Not the furious coupling that produced the unmistakable look Sandler believed he had detected and a moist radiance he recognized at once. But Vida was right about the walk. Romen had de
veloped a kind of strut to replace his former skulk. Of Sandler’s feelings—resignation, pride, alarm, envy—he chose to focus on the last, trying to summon the memory of adolescent heat, its shield of well-being created by the accomplishment of being spent. He remembered his own maiden voyage (free of embarrassment, now) as a ferocity that had never mellowed into routine pleasure. Romen’s entry might be as cherishable as it was enviable, and although it would probably end in foolishness or misery, it seemed unfair to cut off the boy’s swagger when it was fresh. He believed toppling him now—introducing shame along with sound advice—was more likely to pervert future encounters without stopping them. So he watched the new moves, the attention to hygiene, the knowing smile replacing guffaws and sniggers, the condescension in his tone when he spoke to Vida. Most of all he savored the skin beauty as well as the ripple Vida noticed in his walk. Also, he appreciated the fact that Romen had stopped swinging his leg and grabbing his groin every minute in that obnoxious way that signaled more “want” than “have.” Let him preen awhile, thought Sandler. Otherwise he might end up dog-chasing women his whole life. Forever on the prowl for a repeat of that first first time, he might end up like Bill Cosey had, wasting hours between the elbows of women whose names he couldn’t remember and whose eyes he avoided. Except for one. Other than her, Cosey had said, he never felt connected to a woman. His adored first wife thought his interests tiresome, his appetite abusive. So he chose the view he saw in the eyes of local women, vacationers, slightly tipsy vocalists whose boyfriends had not joined them on the tour. Thus buoyed up and simmered down, he had released his wife from class, given her the hall pass she wanted. Or, in Cosey’s own words, “when kittens sleep, lions creep.”