Then as I resumed my walking, her voice caught up with me. “Patty, you mean to tell me that nobody has talked you out of your trip yet?”
Without slowing my step, I called back. “No, ma’am, nobody has.”
Before Ruth saw me, I saw her just sitting out on her front porch trying to capture what puny little breezes there were with the help of a paper fan.
“Hello, Ruth,” I said, walking up the three front steps to sit on an aged ladder-backed chair next to her.
“How you doing, Honey Babe?” she asked while smiling just enough to let me know how glad she was that I was there, but not enough to let me know how unusual she considered my coming.
Honey Babe? Honey Babe. It seemed such a long time since Ruth had called me that. Such a long time since I had been both little and worthy enough to deserve being called that. Hearing those words, sitting there on the porch, I knew exactly what I was there for. Nothing less than for the whole world to stop, back up, and let me be, at least for a little while, five or six again.
Little enough so it would be okay if she put her arms around me and big enough so I could understand what it was she was saying when she said, “No matter what it is that folks say, they ain’t saying the truth when they say bad about you, Honey Babe. ’Cause you ain’t bad. The good Lord knows ... you ain’t bad.”
Lots of times I guess I’ve wanted to hear Ruth say that, but now with all the anguish this trip is causing my parents, I think I need to hear it. Why should I be ashamed of it? I’ve heard that Catholics of all ages stand in line for a little absolution. And aren’t Baptists always dropping to their knees at the sight of salvation?
Maybe I can accept that. Say that I can. There’s still one thing about my being here which isn’t at all acceptable. Ignoring Ruth for all this time and now sneaking (yes, sneaking!) around here because of my selfishness ... because of my need for her.
She gave herself quiet waves from her fully extended accordion-style fan. “Rain could sure do a heap of good for folks and their crops.”
“I know,” I said. “Everybody in town today has been complaining. Got a garden growing this year?”
“Claude planted tomatoes, okra, collards, and sweet corn and I planted the peonies, sweet Williams, and forget-me-nots.”
“How come you’re not growing gardenias? I remember you used to sometimes wear them pinned to your dress ... always said they made the world smell sweet.”
“’Cause gardenias are perennials so they don’t require no annual planting by me.” Then Ruth looked me over closely and smiled. “You done got yourself one of the best memories I ever did see.”
I laughed. “There’s nothing very special about my memory. You just happen to like it ’cause it’s your words that I tend to remember.”
“That’s sure enough right.” Ruth laughed appreciatively as though it hadn’t been her vanity, but somebody else’s that had just been exposed. After a thoughtful silence, she spoke again. “I hears that you is soon going overseas.”
“Guess everybody has heard that. My train leaves for New York tomorrow morning at a quarter to seven and on Thursday, I sail for France.”
“Lord-dy! I hopes you finds what you has so long been looking for. I hopes the Bible makes good its promises.”
“Its promises?”
“Why, right there in the Psalms where it says: ‘Weeping may endure for a night, but joy ... joy cometh in the morning.’ ”
I felt a rush of pain for the morning that had been so long in coming. And even more for the sorrows that had been so long in going. “Thank you for wishing me that. And you know, Ruth, that you have given me so much, and I ... I have given you so little. And I wish that weren’t true.”
“Awl ... I have cast my bread upon the waters and I have found it after many a day.”
“What was it you found, Ruth?”
With one snap, the extended fan folded as compactly as a ruler and there on the spine of the fan, I was able to read the print: Wiggins Funeral Home.
“What I tried to give you,” she said, “you done paid back with a heap more interest than they pay down at the Rice County Bank.”
“Did I?” I asked, while already trying to commit myself to Ruth’s more generous vision of me.
“As long as you live, Patty Babe, something of Ruth will live on too, ’cause, you know, that you is part me.”
I found myself nodding in the twilight.
She went on talking and I was grateful that talk wasn’t required of me because I strongly suspected that my voice wasn’t up to verbalizing.
“For a spell, even I didn’t know how it was. Miz Bergen, I reckon she was the first to know. I knowed for sure she was the first to bring it to my attention. Once, long before you ever started to school, your ma was all fired up over some something you done did wrong and I tried to help you out. And that’s when she said it to me. Looking straight at me, she said, ‘Please stop thinking that you’re the mother, Ruth, because you ain’t. I’m the mother and you ... you’re only the maid.’
“ ‘Reckon I don’t never need no remind of that, Miz Bergen,’ I told her, but truth is, I knowed that I did. After that, I tried doing for you only what I was paid to do. You ate good nourishing meals every day at the same hour. Your clothes were washed and ironed to a fare-thee-well, while I all the time told myself that this was the way it oughta be. Miz Bergen—she was right ’cause it ain’t one bit natural to love somebody else’s child as much as I loved you.
“Well, it wasn’t much more’n a week, maybe two, later that something done come along to change all that. You came to the breakfast table looking for the world like you was going to continue your sleeping right there.
“Your pa looked up from his newspaper to say something to you—to this day I don’t know what it was—but I heard your answer clear enough. It was, ‘Uh uh ... uh uh,’ and with my own eyes, I seen him light out of his chair like his tail was afire to give you a whack across your face that was never meant for no child. No, sir! It was never meant for no child.”
Her great mulatto head dropped against the back of her wicker rocking chair and her eyes closed, more than closed. They seemed tightened as though resisting something as unrelenting as the direct rays of the sun. That’s the way it seemed, only at this time there was no sun, only twilight.
For the first time, I noticed how much noise the squeaks and creaks of the floorboards made under the weight of her rocking chair, and the next thing I noticed was how very quiet everything really became as soon as Ruth gave up talking.
I began to wonder about her. At her age, this kind of talk coming at the end of a working day would wear an old lady out. Maybe that’s why she stopped talking, so that I would whisper goodbye and then quickly and silently leave her be.
With her eyes closed, I allowed myself another more leisurely look at her face. The day’s remaining light highlighted those rounded cheekbones and I thought now, as I have so often thought in the past, how very beautiful she is.
I stood up, reached down, and for a few moments touched the back of her hand. “Goodbye, Ruth,” I said, thinking how that didn’t even begin to express it. With all the reading I’ve done—the great poets, novelists, and three progressively difficult dictionaries—shouldn’t I have something better than words so inadequate that they’re barely worth the saying? Goodbye, Ruth. Pass the salt. How do you do. The grass is green. Inadequate!
She opened her eyes. I watched them register first surprise and then disappointment. “Sit for a spell longer, if you can spare the time.”
I felt enormously pleased that she still wanted me and relieved that for at least a little while longer I didn’t have to go back home, but could stay here in Nigger Bottoms with her. That’s what I felt, but that wasn’t anywhere near what I heard myself answer: “Well, I guess I could spare a little more time,” I told her.
Once again I thought about the inadequacy of my words, and then it came to me that maybe my words were taking a bum rap. Th
ere’s nothing wrong with my instrument—I use the language as well, probably better than most everybody else from around these parts. So the poets, the novelists, and maybe not even Noah Webster failed me.
I may have failed myself, though. I know there’s a real inadequacy, but I don’t think it’s because I lack words, but because I lack courage. Enough courage to tell this old Negro woman that I love her.
Ruth had continued talking. Some of it I may have missed, but it had to do with that slap my father gave me and how, once he and my mother had left for the store, she found me missing.
“I looked for you high and I looked for you low. The house, the garage, the field. And every single place I could think to call, I’d call, asking if you’d done wandered down there and I had to listen to everybody tell me the same thing: We ain’t seen no hide nor hair of Patty.
“Well, noontime came and noontime went and I had plum run out of places to look so I set myself down on the back steps and told myself that I ain’t got no choice in this world, but to call your daddy. Looked like nothing less than a search party organized by the sheriff of the county was going to find you. Then it came into my head! The good Lord must have put it into my head that there was one last place needed looking.
“So fat old Ruth went around to the side of the house, bent down at that little wood door opening to the crawl space between the house and the bare ground and just a-called out, ‘Honey Babe ... oh, Honey Babe, is you is or is you ain’t in there?’
“Well, sir, it was too dark for seeing and there was no-nothing for hearing, but just the same it was still growing in my head, growing stronger than ever that you was there. Just a-lying there on the hard dirt ground. So I sat down at the opening and began singing to the darkness, ‘I looked over Jordan ... And what did I see-e ... A-coming for to car-ry me home ...’
“Before long, I heard something, but I didn’t stop, kept right on singing, ‘A band of angels ... Coming after me-e ... Coming for to car-ry me home ...’
“Then bless the Lord, I heard the scraping and then I saw you come crawling out on your elbows. And for the first time since I knowed you, you wasn’t wearing nothing on your face. Looked to old Ruth like all those expressions you use to show had been slapped clear away.
“And so I sets you down on my lap and I commenced telling you what it was that I knowed to be true. Don’t go feeling sorry for yourself, Honey Babe, thinking that you is some motherless child. ’Cause you ain’t! You ain’t never gonna be motherless ’cause you done gone and acquired ... me!”
Europe
13
AS I WATCHED wave after sun-splashed wave break against the ship, I tried to find one that was an identical twin to another. Either my eyes couldn’t capture the infinite variations or my memory couldn’t record them. Probably both. Either way I knew, knew as clearly as if I’d been born to wave watching, that there never has been and never could be any such thing as one wave perfectly mirroring another. The thought pleased me enormously. If grains of sand, snowflakes, and ocean waves are allowed their differences, then why not people? Why not people! I wondered if my parents could have benefited from an extended period of ocean watching.
Could they have then come to my conclusion that because people are at least as different as ocean waves, their needs can’t be satisfied with anything less than a custom job?
Here on this ship of strangers, I felt less like a stranger than I ever did on Main Street in Jenkinsville, Arkansas, or at Iris Glazer’s not-quite-open open house back in Hein Park, Memphis, Tennessee, U.S.A.
And so all this air, sky, and endless water belonged to us all. I was no longer an intruder because I have finally found a place that is for more than Baptists only. Only five days from home, I was really beginning to believe what I had before only hoped was so: that this world is vast enough and varied enough for me to find “some little space that could become my space.” But that phrase was stolen from Katherine Anne Porter.
Before the Ryndam left sight of the Statue of Liberty, the word was out that the novelist was occupying one of only six staterooms in first class. I was sharing the same sea air with the creator of Flowering Judas and Pale Horse, Pale Rider.
I envisioned dozens of circumstances which would practically compel Miss Porter to leave, at least for a little while, her first class accommodations for our more egalitarian tourist class.
Once while deck-walking early in the morning, I spotted a lady whose face showed such strength and beauty that I was convinced that it could belong to nobody else on this earth, but her! I reversed course and began following her, terrified that her immense perceptive apparatus would immediately signal to her what was happening. Yet, I couldn’t not follow.
Her brown linen purse, which bore initials in fancy script, bounced from a shoulderstrap against her back. If I could get a little closer, I would be able to confirm the K.A.P. that had to be there. But the distance, the bounce, and the whimsical route of the letters made it difficult to be completely certain.
Then from a modest distance, a man in a deck chair also took note of her approaching figure and called, “Selma, did you bring my Coppertone?”
After that I decided that I was such an unreliable judge of what Miss Porter looks like that I might as well give up looking. Well, I didn’t actually give up looking, but I did give up believing that my looking would succeed. Then, out of the blue, Arlene Hollander told me to scout up somebody to fill in for her at bridge that afternoon. “I’m going up to first class to hear Katherine Anne Porter.”
“You are going to hear Katherine Anne Porter?”
“At two o’clock. She’s going to read some of her poetry.”
“And you got invited?”
Arlene looked at me with controlled amusement which I don’t take as any great compliment. “Would I go otherwise?”
“Well, it just so happens that Katherine Anne Porter is currently my favorite writer—how did you get invited?” I asked, hoping that it wasn’t dependent upon how many advanced degrees a person possessed. But it didn’t matter what it depended upon because I was going too. And that’s all there was to that!
With a presence commanding enough to make a West Pointer envious, Katherine Anne Porter looked at the twenty or so mostly young people who formed a crescent around her. “Anniversary in a Country Cemetery,” she announced in a voice so clear that I knew I would remember it all my life.
This time of year, this year of all years, brought
The homeless one home again;
To the fallen house and the drowsing dust
There to sit at the door
Welcomed, homeless no more.
Her dust remembers its dust
And calls again
Back to the fallen house this restless dust
The shape of her pain
This shape of her love
Whose living dust reposes
Beside her dust,
Sweet as the dust of roses.
After reading some more poems, some about Mexico and still others about love—or to be more specific, the loss of love—Miss Porter paused and with the last remnants of a Southern accent thanked us all.
The clapping which was loud and immediate was for the poems all right, but even more, I think it was for Miss Porter herself. Our way of collectively embracing her, as much for being art as for producing it.
That night I couldn’t sleep, so I dressed by moonlight and went to the starboard deck. The wind was pure virgin wind, never once having had to spend itself against either outhouse or mountain range. And the prickling chill was great enough to send small shocks to my senses. But being here on this ship, my freshly energized senses told me, was exactly the right place to be.
I took a bent Viceroy from the pocket of my blouse and with more luck than skill was able to light it with the first match. Maybe if I could adequately explain it to my parents, they would come to appreciate all the things I’ve learned in these few days. The wonder of the individuality of an
ocean wave, the art of Katherine Anne Porter, and the incredible fact of people who know a lot—people such as Michael Werner and Arlene Hollander—actually liking me. Me!
Ironically, the first “real” conversation that I had with Arlene almost ended our friendship. In the midst of my telling her that I can hardly believe my luck that a guy as handsome and bright as Michael would like me, Arlene twirled to gaze at me with unconcealed contempt.
“Have you looked in the mirror lately?”
“What!” It was my hair. My goddamn hair! It needed combing so badly that even my new friend found it imperative to inform me of my advanced state of dishevelment. I wanted to run away, but I felt suspended, frozen somewhere between fighting fury and disintegrating pain. I placed my finger inside my flexible watchband and twisted and twisted until the band snapped and my skin tore and then bled.
“Well, you really should take a careful look in the mirror,” said the New Yorker, “because then you’d find out what everybody else knows. You’re good looking. You tell amusing stories, and you listen to Michael with consummate interest.”
The ship’s library was quietly lit in a way that was completely compatible with the hour of 4:15 in the morning. By ten minutes after five, there were nine sheets of Holland-America stationery folded into an envelope that was addressed to Mr. & Mrs. Harry Bergen, Jenkinsville, Arkansas, U.S.A.
Just before bringing the flap to my tongue, I removed the pages for a final reading. I think—I felt—I had almost certainly written what I had set out to write. A letter so clean with clarity that it would be totally impossible for them not to understand it ... for them not to understand me.
It was that thought that I carried with me as I tiptoed back into my stateroom and fell, fully clothed, across my bed. And now waiting for me was just that quality of sleep that comes only to the very deserving.
I woke to the glockenspiel. I had slept through breakfast and now the ship’s steward was glockenspieling out the ten o’clock call for broth and crackers. It’s supposed to hold us passengers until twelve when a four-course lunch is served, but after the breakfasts the Dutch serve up, who needs to be held?