Her dancing teacher is going to give her a solo in the soiree. I feel like I got to push Baby all I can. Because the sooner she gets started on her career the better it’ll be for both of us.’
‘Motherogod!’
‘You don’t understand. A child with talent can’t be treated like ordinary kids. That’s one reason I want to get Baby out of this common neighborhood. I can’t let her start to talk vulgar like these brats around her or run wild like they do.’
‘I know the kids on this block,’ Biff said. ‘They’re all right.’
Those Kelly kids across the street--the Crane boy--.
‘You know good and well that none of them are up to Baby’s level.’
Lucile set the last wave in Baby’s hair. She pinched the kid’s little cheeks to put more color in them. Then she lifted her down from the table. For the funeral Baby had on a little white dress with white shoes and white socks and even small white gloves. There was a certain way Baby always held her head when people looked at her, and it was turned that way now.
They sat for a while in the small, hot kitchenette without saying anything. Then Lucile began to cry. ‘It’s not like we was ever very close as sisters. We had our differences and we didn’t see much of each other. Maybe it was because I was so much younger. But there’s something about your own blood kin, and when anything like this happens--’ Biff clucked soothingly.
‘I know how you two were,’ she said. It wasn’t all just roses with you and she. But maybe that sort of makes it worse for you now.’
Biff caught Baby under the arms and swung her up to his shoulder. The kid was getting heavier. He held her carefully as he stepped into the living-room. Baby felt warm and close on his shoulder, and her little silk skirt was white against the dark cloth of his coat. She grasped one of his ears very tight with her little hand.
‘Unca Biff! Watch me do the split.’
Gently he set Baby on her feet again. She curved both arms above her head and her feet slid slowly in opposite directions on the yellow waxed floor. In a moment she was seated with one leg stretched straight in front of her and one behind. She posed with her arms held at a fancy angle, looking sideways at the wall with a sad expression.
She scrambled up again. ‘Watch me do a handspring. Watch me do a--’
‘Honey, be a little quieter,’ Lucile said. She sat down beside Biff on the plush sofa. ‘Don’t she remind you a little of him--something about her eyes and face?’
‘Hell, no. I can’t see the slightest resemblance between Baby and Leroy Wilson.’
Lucile looked too thin and worn out for her age. Maybe it was the black dress and because she had been crying. ‘After all, we got to admit he’s Baby’s father,’ she said.
‘Can’t you ever forget about that man?’
‘I don’t know. I guess I always been a fool about two things. And that’s Leroy and Baby.’
Bill’s new growth of beard was blue against the pale skin of his face and his voice sounded tired. ‘Don’t you ever just think a thing through and find out what’s happened and what ought to come from that? Don’t you ever use logic--if these are the given facts this ought to be the result?’
‘Not about him, I guess.’
Biff spoke in a weary manner and his eyes were almost closed.
‘You married this certain party when you were seventeen, and afterward there was just one racket between you after another.
You divorced him. Then two years later you married him a second time. And now he’s gone off again and you don’t know where he is. It seems like those facts would show you one thing--you two are not suited to each other. And that’s aside from the more personal side--the sort of man this certain party happens to be anyway.’
‘God knows I been realizing all along he’s a heel. I just hope he won’t ever knock on that door again.’
‘Look, Baby,’ Biff said quickly. He laced his fingers and held up his hands. ‘This is the church and this is the steeple. Open the door and here are God’s people.’
Lucile shook her head. ‘You don’t have to bother about Baby. I tell her everything. She knows about the whole mess from A to Z.’
‘Then if he comes back you’ll let him stay here and sponge on you just as long as he pleases--like it was before?’
‘Yeah. I guess I would. Every time the doorbell or the phone rings, every time anybody steps up on the porch, something in the back of my mind thinks about that man.’ Biff spread out the palms of his hands. ‘There you are.’ The clock struck two.
The room was very close and hot. Baby turned another handspring and made a split again on the waxed floor. Then Biff took her up into his lap. Her little legs dangled against his shin. She unbuttoned his vest and burrowed her face into him.
‘Listen,’ Lucile said. ‘If I ask you a question will you promise to answer me the truth?’
‘Sure.’
‘No matter what it is?’
Biff touched Baby’s soft gold hair and laid his hand gently on the side of her little head. ‘Of course.’
‘It was about seven years ago. Soon after we was married the first time. And he came in one night from your place with big knots all over his head and told me you caught him by the neck and banged his head against the side of the wall. He made up some tale about why you did it, but I want to know the real reason.’
Biff turned the wedding ring on his finger. I just never did like Leroy, and we had a fight In those days I was different from now.’
‘No. There was some definite thing you did that for. We been knowing each other a pretty long time, and I understand by now that you got a real reason for every single thing you ever do. Your mind runs by reasons instead of just wants. Now, you promised you’d tell me what it was, and I want to know.’
‘It wouldn’t mean anything now.’
‘I tell you I got to know.’
‘All right,’ Biff said. ‘He came in that night and started drinking, and when he was drunk he shot off his mouth about you. He said he would come home about once a month and beat hell out of you and you would take it. But then afterward you would step outside in the hall and laugh aloud a few times so that the neighbors in the other rooms would think you both had just been playing around and it had all been a joke. That’s what happened, so just forget about it’ Lucile sat up straight and there was a red spot on each of her cheeks. ‘You see, Bartholomew, that’s why I got to be like I have blinders on all the time so as not to think backward or sideways. All I can let my mind stay on is going to work every day and fixing three meals here at home and Baby’s career.’
‘Yes.’
‘I hope you’ll do that too, and not start thinking backward.’
Biff leaned his head down on his chest and closed his eyes.
During the whole long day he had not been able to think of Alice. When he tried to remember her face there was a queer blankness in him. The only thing about her that was clear in his mind was her feet--stumpy, very soft and white with puffy toes. The bottoms were pink and near the left heel there was a tiny brown mole. The night they were married he had taken off her shoes and stockings and kissed her feet. And, come to think of it, that was worth considerable, because the Japanese believe that the choicest part of a woman--Biff stirred and glanced at his watch. In a little while they would leave for the church where the funeral would be held.
In his mind he went through the motions of the ceremony. The church-riding, dirge-paced behind the hearse with Lucile and Baby--the group of people standing with bowed heads in the September sunshine. Sun on the white tombstones, on the fading flowers and the can--was tent covering the newly dug grave. Then home again ‘ --and what? ‘No matter how much you quarrel there’s something about your own blood sister,’ Lucile said.
Biff raised his head. ‘Why don’t you marry again? Some nice young man who’s never had a wife before, who would take care of you and Baby? If you’d just forget about Leroy you would ma
ke a good man a fine wife.’
Lucile was slow to answer. Then finally she said: ‘You know how we always been--we nearly all the time understand each other pretty well without any kind of throbs either way. Well, that’s the closest I ever want to be to any man again.’
‘I feel the same way,’ Biff said.
Half an hour later there was a knock on the door. The car for the funeral was parked before the house. Biff and Lucile got up slowly. The three of them, with Baby in her white silk dress a little ahead, walked in solemn quietness outside.
Biff kept the restaurant closed during the next day. Then in the early evening he removed the faded wreath of lilies from the front door and opened the place for business again. Old customers came in with sad faces and talked with him a few minutes by the cash register before giving their orders. The usual crowd was present--Singer, Blount, various men who worked in stores along the block and in the mills down on the river. After supper Mick Kelly showed up with her little brother and put a nickel into the slot machine. When she lost the first coin she banged on the machine with her fists and kept opening the receiver to be sure that nothing had come down. Then she put in another nickel and almost won the jackpot. Coins came clattering out and rolled along the floor.
The kid and her little brother both kept looking around pretty sharp as they picked them up, so that no customer would put his foot on one before they could get to it The mute was at the table in the middle of the room with his dinner before him.
Across from him Jake Blount sat drinking beer, dressed in his Sunday clothes, and talking. Everything was the same as it had always been before. After a while the air became gray with cigarette smoke and the noise increased. Biff was alert, and no sound or movement escaped him.
‘I go around,’ Blount said. He leaned earnestly across the table and kept his eyes on the mute’s face. ‘I go all around and try to tell them. And they laugh. I can’t make them understand anything. No matter what I say I can’t seem to make them see, the truth.’
Singer nodded and wiped his mouth with his napkin. His dinner had got cold because he couldn’t look down to eat, but he was so polite that he let Blount go on talking. The words of the two children at the slot machine were high and clear against the coarser voices of the men. Mick was putting her nickels back into the slot. Often she looked around at the middle table, but the mute had his back turned to her and did not see.
‘Mister Singer’s got fried chicken for his supper and he hasn’t eaten one piece yet,’ the little boy said.
Mick pulled down the lever of the machine very slowly. ‘Mind your own business.’
‘You’re always going up to his room or some place where you know he’ll be.’
‘I told you to hush, Bubber Kelly.’
‘You do.’
Mick shook him until his teeth rattled and turned him around toward the door. ‘You go on home to bed. I already told you I get a bellyful of you and Ralph in the daytime, and I don’t want you hanging around me at night when I’m supposed to be free.’
Bubber held out his grimy little hand. Well, give me a nickel, then.’ When he had put the money in his shirt pocket he left for home.
Biff straightened his coat and smoothed back his hair. His tie was solid black, and on the sleeve of his gray coat there was the mourning band that he had sewn there. He wanted to go up to the slot machine and talk with Mick, but something would not let him. He sucked in his breath sharply and drank a glass of water. A dance orchestra came in on the radio, but he did not want to listen. All the tunes in the last ten years were so alike he couldn’t tell one from the other. Since 1928 he had not enjoyed music. Yet when he was young he used to play the mandolin, and he knew the words and the melody of every current song.
He laid his finger on the side of his nose and cocked his head to one side. Mick had grown so much in the past year that soon she would be taller than he was. She was dressed in the red sweater and blue pleated skirt she had worn every day since school started. Now the pleats had come out and the hem dragged loose around her sharp, jutting knees. She was at the age when she looked as much like an overgrown boy as a girl.
And on that subject why was it that the smartest people mostly missed that point? By nature all people are of both sexes. So that marriage and the bed is not all by any means. The proof? Real youth and old age. Because often old men’s voices grow high and reedy and they take on a mincing walk. And old women sometimes grow fat and their voices get rough and deep and they grow dark little mustaches. And he even proved it himself--the part of him that sometimes almost wished he was a mother and that Mick and Baby were his kids.
Abruptly Biff turned from the cash register.
The newspapers were in a mess. For two weeks he hadn’t filed a single one. He lifted a stack of them from under the counter.
With a practiced eye he glanced from the masthead to the bottom of the sheet. Tomorrow he would look over the stacks of them in the back room and see about changing the system of files. Build shelves and use those solid boxes canned goods were shipped in for drawers. Chronologically from October 27, 1918, on up to the present date. With folders and top markings outlining historical events. Three sets of outlines--one international beginning with the Armistice and leading through the Munich aftermath, the second national, the third all the local dope from the time Mayor Lester shot his wife at the country club up to the Hudson Mill fire. Everything for the past twenty years docketed and outlined and complete. Biff beamed quietly behind his hand as he rubbed his jaw. And yet Alice had wanted him to haul out the papers so she could turn the room into a ladies’ toilet. That was just what she had nagged him to do, but for once he had battered her down. For that one time.
With peaceful absorption Biff settled down to the details of the newspaper before him. He read steadily and with concentration, but from habit some secondary part of him was alert to everything around him. Jake Blount was still talking, and often he would hit his fist on the table. The mute sipped beer. Mick walked restlessly around the radio and stared at the customers. Biff read every word in the first paper and made a few notes on the margins.
Then suddenly he looked up with a surprised expression. His mouth had been open for a yawn and he snapped it shut. The radio swung into an old song that dated back to the time when he and Alice were engaged. ‘Just a Baby’s Prayer at Twilight.’
They had taken the streetcar one Sunday to Old Sardis Lake and had rented a rowboat. At sunset he played on the mandolin while she sang. She had on a sailor hat, and when he put his arm around her waist she--Alice--a dragnet for lost feelings. Biff folded the newspapers and put them back under the counter. He stood on one foot and then the other. Finally he called across the room to Mick.
‘You’re not listening, are you?’
Mick turned off the radio. ‘No. Nothing on tonight.’ All of that he would keep out of his mind, and concentrate on something else. He leaned over the counter and watched one customer after another. Then at last his attention rested on the mute at the middle table. He saw Mick edge gradually up to him and at his invitation sit down. Singer pointed to something on the menu and the waitress brought a Coca-Cola for her. Nobody but a freak like a deaf-mute, cut off from other people, would ask a right young girl to sit down to the table where he was drinking with another man. Blount and Mick both kept their eyes on Singer. They talked, and the mute’s expression changed as he watched them. It was a funny thing. The reason --was it in them or in him? He sat very still with his hands in his pockets, and because he did not speak it made him seem superior. What did that fellow think and realize? What did he know? Twice during the evening Biff started to go over to the middle table, but each time he checked himself. After they were gone he still wondered what it was about this mute--and in the early dawn when he lay in bed he turned over questions and solutions in his mind without satisfaction. The puzzle had taken root in him. It worried him in the back of his mind and left him uneasy. There was so
mething wrong.
3
MANY times Doctor Copeland talked to Mr. Singer. Truly he was not like other white men. He was a wise man, and he understood the strong, true purpose in a way that other white men could not. He listened, and in his face there was something gentle and Jewish, the knowledge of one who belongs to a race that is oppressed. On one occasion he took Mr. Singer with him on his rounds. He led him through cold and narrow passages smelling of dirt and sickness and fried fatback. He showed him a successful skin graft made on the face of a woman patient who had been severely burned. He treated a syphilitic child and pointed out to Mr. Singer the scaling eruption on the palms of the hand, the dull, opaque surface of the eye, the sloping upper front incisors. They visited two-room shacks that housed as many as twelve or fourteen persons. In a room where the fire burned low and orange on the hearth they were helpless while an old man strangled with pneumonia. Mr. Singer walked behind him and watched and understood. He gave nickels to the children, and because of his quietness and decorum he did not disturb the patients as would have another visitor. The days were chilly and treacherous. In the town there was an outbreak of influenza so that Dr. Copeland was busy most of the hours of the day and night. He drove through the Negro sections of the town in the high Dodge automobile he had used for the past nine years. He kept the isinglass curtains snapped to the windows to cut off the draughts, and tight around his neck he wore his gray wool shawl. During this time he did not see Portia or William or Highboy, but often he thought of them. Once when he was away Portia came to see him and left a note and borrowed half a sack of meal. There came a night when he was so exhausted that, although there were other calls to make, he drank hot milk and went to bed. He was cold and feverish so that at first he could not rest. Then it seemed that he had only begun to sleep when a voice called him. He got up wearily and, still in his long flannel nightshirt, he opened the front door. It was Portia. ‘The Lord Jesus help us, Father,’ she said. Doctor Copeland stood shivering with his nightshirt drawn close around his waist. He held his hand to his throat and looked at her and waited. ‘It about our Willie. He been a bad boy and done got hisself in mighty bad trouble. And us got to do something.’ Doctor Copeland walked from the hall with rigid steps. He stopped in the bedroom for his bathrobe, shawl, and slippers and went back to the kitchen. Portia was waiting for him there. The kitchen was lifeless and cold. ‘All right. What has he done? What is it?’