Lettie also hesitates to ask her mother about her own room, because she wonders if she would truly want to sleep by herself. She remembers clearly the night her mother came home alone from Florida, the night they found her grandmother dead, how Lettie fell asleep on her mother’s lap, and she didn’t dream of the awful hand, the body drowning beneath it, but only of the smell of sheet cake, a picnic spread out in the grass. At the convent, she’d dreamed of the hand every night. She remembers that she’d never seen the dock before, but she must have. She must have seen the dock and then tailored the dream to it. Now and then, especially when her mother stays up late—helping one of the girls after a fight with their boyfriend, their lousy husband, or after a drunk spell or, as with Delphine, worse than drunk—Lettie goes to sleep alone and the dream returns. Even though her mother’s body is a heavy magnet in the dream, Lettie is drawn away from her dense calves and rump, the cake, away, to the dock. Sometimes she bends over the guardrail and the hand is there, pleading with its outstretched fingers, begging her to stay, just to stay and be with it. It is needy, after all, desperate, and Lettie understands that.
The house is full tonight. Her mother doesn’t like there to be too many girls. It just runs into trouble. Lettie figures there are four or so girls downstairs who take turns hustling men up, and Delphine stays in her own room. And there may be ten men, now. Not all of them come for sex. There are a few regulars who come to drink around the kitchen table and just have the girls sit on their laps while they play cards. Lettie can hear the men downstairs where Roxy serves them drinks, sometimes enough so that they can’t really have a date upstairs. They can’t even find their way to one of the rooms. Roxy does this best, goading them into drinking, twenty-five cents for one charred shot. It’s her way of protecting Delphine, though everyone knows Delphine doesn’t want to be taken care of.
Below, someone is pumping the player piano, “Mistress Mumbo Jumbo Jijjiboo J. O’Shea.” She misses the show people who could play what you asked them to. Not the same rote songs again and again. “In My Sweet Little Alice Blue Gown” makes Pearly, one of the girls, cry every time. And how many times can you sing along to “K-K-K-Katy” and “Blues My Naughty Sweetie Gives to Me”? High heels clatter down the hall. A door slams. A headboard is banging against a wall. It’s noisy, the low chatter, the stark rising giggle, all darkly lit. The house smells of perfume—Gardenia and Evening in Paris—the men’s bay rum aftershave, alcohol, of some deep earthiness. The women, their bare arms, languid, or jittery, their full bodies shift under their thin dresses. It’s sensuous, full, wet, bluish, shrill, and humming—that’s what Lettie thinks of it all. If she could eat the house, it would taste too sweet, a fruit loose in its skin, fat and soft with bruises.
She says to her mother, “Irving had his own room before he left. It was hot as a box, but it was his own! Why can’t I have my own?” Irving has been on his own for two years, running a laundry truck, diapers and damp wash. When he lived in the house, he was allowed to come and go as he pleased, usually opting to bang out the front door before the first john showed up. None of the children have been able to escape the tense interior that they’ve inherited from their mother. Irving can be somber, shy, but has an intensity, as if there’s a hive within him, a soul as complexly drilled as a honeycomb, sweet and deeply buzzing. Even Willard, who is supposed to be too childlike to have concerns, grows edgy with nerves, picks at his scalp when the clouds hunker, doomed to rain. And Lettie is the most nervous. But the boys have been lucky—both have been allowed to step out of this house as easily as a man shrugging off a wet overcoat. Lettie is a scared girl in a fetid, bawdy house, who is sent upstairs at night to cower and fume in her dark room.
“Irving was the man of the house,” her mother says.
“I thought Roxy was the man of the house.” Roxy stopped, a long time ago, trying to pattern her own dresses and now wears the clothes that she can buy in her size, overalls, work shirts.
Her mother doesn’t look up, doesn’t say a word. She doesn’t talk about Roxy’s business, her heated relationship with Delphine, or anyone’s, for that matter.
Lettie keeps on. “Or is it you? Are you the man of the house now?” She once caught her mother wearing her father’s clothes, the ones she’d packed away in the dank trunk and shoved under the bed. Lettie woke in the middle of the night and watched her step inside of his pants, his shirt. It was a weakness, she could tell. It was a softness, the way she held herself in the shirt, the sway and rock of her body. It was years ago, maybe around the time they’d heard about the hurricane, but before they got the postcard, the only one they’ve ever gotten. It said simply, “I’m still alive in Miami. I hope you are alive, too.” And an H for his name. That was the only thing about it he wrote himself, Alma told her children, because she knows his handwriting, not this frilly, curly lettering. He’d gotten someone else to write it for him, and who could that have been? The H was his.
“Say your prayers and go to sleep.”
Lettie flops back into bed with a huff. But she doesn’t have time to drift off. There’s a sharp knock at the front door, such a rap of knuckles that it rings through the house. It sends a sick pang to her stomach.
Her mother stands up heavily, mustering her strength, and then clips out of the room to head the police off at the front door, where she’ll try to hold them by carrying on. Lettie hates the law, the riotous energy they create, the way they stir up the house into a tight, boiling frenzy. She can hear the johns scattering, the back screen door slamming, urgent voices racing off into the field behind the house, the jingle of a belt buckle, like someone’s lost calf. The women are clamoring in the bathroom, pouring liquor down sink drains, out open windows.
Lettie is supposed to help, but she never does. She crawls beneath the bed, as usual, and stays there, her elbows propped against the hard wood, and breathes lightly. The trunk is there, too, under her mother’s side of the bed. It smells old and musty, the scent she’s come to associate with Miami.
Tonight the bedroom door opens, as it often does, and the small clots of dust shift from the abrupt gust of air. She watches the shiny black shoes, their heels, as the officer rummages through drawers. Usually, it’s only for show. They don’t intend to find anything. Most of the officers like her mother, are customers here from time to time themselves. Twice they returned the liquor to her the next day. They are generally an idle, pompous group who find it too much effort and too demeaning to check under the bed. But this officer is nervous. His narrow shoes clip across the floor. They are tightly laced, new and polished. He rushes around the room, moves the desk, the dresser out from the wall. Suddenly he’s back at the bed, the two tips of his shoes. He kneels down, and his face appears inches from Lettie’s, which causes her to gasp, sharply. He jumps back.
“Get out from under there,” he says.
She shuffles to the side of the bed, rolling out from under the dust ruffle. She stands, brushing dust from her nightgown.
“What the hell were you doing under there?” he asks. “Are you a prostitute? Have you reason to hide like that? Are you a drunkard?”
She looks up then and she recognizes the face, the slight jaw-jutted underbite, the scrabble of hair, sticking up despite being combed and pasted down with some tonic. “I know you,” she says.
“No, you don’t.”
She looks at his bare arms and makes out small scars, white and raised. “You’re Sir Lee’s boy.” The last time she saw him, it was raining. Sir Lee had come to find Delphine and take her back. He pulled up wildly onto the front yard, blew his horn, and started yelling that Delphine was a dirty bitch, a whore, and that Alma owed him money. Lettie watched from an open upstairs window with some of the girls. Delphine yelled that she wasn’t going to come. And all the while, Smitty was there in the rain-streaked car, his narrow shoulders hunched up, his eyes wide with fear. Irving walked up from work with his apron over his head to keep the rain off. He heard what Sir Lee was yelling. Irv
ing charged him, his head down and fists wheeling. Sir Lee laid him out with a hard slap, his ring cutting open Irving’s lip. Roxy cursed him from the porch. And Sir Lee said, “Call off your dog, Delphine. Call off your ugly dog!” And that sent Roxy out, and they fought, mud-soaked and bleeding. Lettie remembers her mother shooting the shotgun off into the sky. Her mother was wearing only her nightgown, clinging, wet, her gun now poised on Sir Lee. And he got in his car and disappeared. And her mother covered her mouth, a stretched intake of breath, and then she started to laugh. She cradled the gun in her arms, and tilted back her head, with the rain coming down on her.
Irving said Sir Lee probably went to California, maybe with Smitty, but a year later Irving said he saw Smitty, downtown, shoving around in a crowd of boys. And now here he is again. Grown into a man, an officer, no less, with a belt of bullets and a gun in a leather case, and his shiny new shoes.
“I’m not Sir Lee’s boy. Do I look like a boy to you?”
“No,” Lettie says. And now she realizes that she’s wearing only her nightgown. She’s aware of the rise of her breasts beneath it. And she doesn’t wear underpants to bed. All the girls believe in letting your parts air in the night. They’ve taught Lettie many things about the body. She crosses her arms, smooths her hair. She usually rats it on top to give her height, but now it’s flat. Her hair is mousy and thin, a pale brown. She touches the ends and then batts them back over her shoulders. “But don’t you remember? Sir Lee and his car in the rain that night?”
Smitty pulls out his billy club, turns, and cracks it down on her mother’s desk. The coins jangle from their piles; some fall down to the floor. He keeps an eye on Lettie as he does it. She jumps at the loud noise. He smiles. “Let’s not talk about things such as that.” He’s soft now. “What do you say? Huh? What do you say, doll?”
He isn’t like anyone she knows. It’s like the bear, when he’d show his giant teeth, and she’d shudder and draw back and then realize it was only putting on a show, was about to put on his top hat and start dancing for her. He is a wayward boy who has made his way back to this reversed orphanage, fatherless, like she is. She feels heat across her chest, a blush rising in her cheeks. “Okay,” she says. “All right.”
The captain takes Alma out for a drive. Once, in the beginning of it all, she let him lie on top of her, rub up against her, in the back of the police car. He grunted, hefting his big body, thrusting his belly with the muscles in his shrunken buttocks until he came, lurching, breathless, on the folds of her hitched-up dress. And then he was embarrassed by the way she lay there, regarding him listlessly. He tucked in his penis, snaillike, a little slick and shrunken, a soft nub of okra, and tightened his belt.
But she was younger then, just a slip of a thing. Now she has extra padding, a certain toughness. If he were on top of her again, she figures she wouldn’t quite feel it somehow. Hopes, at least, that that would be true. But honestly, it would never happen again. It’s clear. He wouldn’t dare try anything beyond his coarse come-ons, all talk. He still likes to make a show, and so every now and then there is this ritual. The road twisting in the headlights, his hand resting on his hard belly, then spread on the seat between them. And there’s always the foul flirtation at the end of it all. She knows to wait for it.
Tonight he begins this way, neighborly: “I like you, Alma. I always have. And I know about your past, of course I do. I’m in charge around here. Your husband is most likely just another bindle stiff by now, riding blind baggage. And I knew your daddy before he left. Hell, I even knew the nigger.” He has a sweaty chin, and he scratches at it. “And I’m here to tell you, Alma, it doesn’t need to be like this. I’m here to tell you that you can track down that husband, divorce him, and marry an upstanding citizen of this good state of ours. You are still an attractive woman. You don’t want to become an old worn-out bawd. Do you hear what I’m saying?”
She doesn’t respond. She knows she’d be no good at wifery anymore. She likes to think she’s outgrown it, but really she’d be forever suspicious, always keeping an eye out for the beginning of the end, questioning the full tank of gas, the reason why he came home from the opposite direction. She has imagined Henry settled down with the woman who wrote the postcard for him to sign with his turdy little H, a stiff-legged letter, narrow as a rickety house. An educated woman who perhaps takes care of him, who knows vaguely about Alma and the kids. Maybe she is the one who insisted he send the card, who whispered, I can’t imagine wondering if you were alive or dead. Alma pictures, too, how he might arrive in the yard one night, call up to her bedroom window. She would pull the trunk from under the bed, push it out the open window, and watch it shatter into splintered boards nearly missing his head, and then, after almost killing him, she would take him in. And how she would make him pay and pay until the very air between them was cluttered with promissory notes, too much for him to ever be able to afford. Still, truthfully, she expects him back. It is this ugly, hated hope, this unshakable conviction that he will appear in the yard, call to her window. And no matter how much attention and work her life requires, each moment that slips without him is a small disappointment, a water-worn hollow inside of her that the Monongahela swells into, shrinks from, and then immediately refills with hope. His absence has a force, this constant river of hope and disappointment in her heart, ignorant of her levees, locks, and dams. She is always attempting navigation. Sometimes, for example, she’ll wake up and expect his hand to curve over the soft dip of her stomach. She wonders if his body forgets where it is while he sleeps, and if his muscles and bones don’t hold a deeper memory and are shocked not to rise up next to her warm backside. But she tries not to think these thoughts. She veers from them, sets her mind to the task before her. In winter, she puts her two feet on the cold floorboards and strides to the basement, opens the furnace’s heavy latched door, to stir the dull glowing coals, to shovel new lumps into the smoldering fire, to open the damper to let the house warm. In summer, she dresses to tend the garden before the sun kicks in. An oversize hat, thick cloth gardening gloves, and then back to start breakfast, a pan slick with grease, the eggs whitening, firming, snapping at their edges. And always she is consumed by her children. Once she’d imagined them circling, hands held, like an open mouth, but now she has stepped into it. In fact—how could she have ever imagined this?—she dove. She has let her children consume her, and she is forever falling, headfirst, down their collective gullet.
The captain says, “I don’t abide that indolence! I expect you to say yes, sir when I’m talking to you. I could put you in jail, and you know that. You know that!” He’s getting worked up, spitting as he talks. Digs at his wet chin. “I know what you all do. And I know there’s a need, and you are filling that need. Taking a burden off the good women of these parts sometimes, the way I see it. Keeping them from getting too worn out by these pruny men, always rollicky with lust. They come out shouting, ‘I’m a curly-tailed wolf with a pink ass and this is my night to howl!’ I’ve seen enough of them. One of these days, you and your girls are going to get into trouble. It’s just a fact. And I am not going to help you out of it! I will sit back, mark my words, and I will say that I told you to get out while you could. I told you that, Alma. Do you hear me now?”
She wants to tell him there are families starving out on the farms, ghosts stalking their own dusty land, mines closing down, to leave their scarred, blackened men to skitter, and here he is getting after her, and the few men who can still afford to pinch one of her girls. Her house is a good one. If the men want something dirty, they can head out to Sugar Hill. She keeps things in line. She’s often thought that if her father knocked at the door one day, older, a little oiled from the bottle, battered by some long other life, she would pretend not to recognize him, and she would be happy to send him upstairs with Pearly—sweet, sappy, chatterbox Pearly—and he would be taken care of, gently, lovingly, his deformed tongue politely ignored. She profits from men’s weaknesses. It seems better than the
other options: simply enduring, or ignoring, or falling prey to them. “Yes, sir,” Alma says, flatly. “Yes, sir, I do, sir.”
He pretends not to notice her tone, taking the words for what they are. “Well, now that we have it straight.” He turns the car around to circle back now that he has won her agreement.
Alma has no patience for him—or for any man, really. There’s only one kind, the itchy kind, even her own Irving—so sweet and good, he’s still a man, and there’s nothing she can do about it; he’s taken up with that hussy, Lucy, gone—and Willard … well, he will remain a boy. That’s his blessing and curse. Captain can say what he wants, but she isn’t interested in marrying a good citizen of this state of ours. She prefers to be called a housemaid and proprietor. She scrubs out the sheets, the bloodstains drinting under the press of cold water. She wipes boot-tracked dirt off the floors on her hands and knees. She beats the rugs, Vaseline smeared on her nostrils to keep the billowed dust from clogging her nose. She keeps her books, tidy rows of numbers and dates. Yes, she’s a whisper sister, and a good one, who always checks the liquor’s beading, who isn’t above slipping in a dash of cola syrup to make it look charred, selling it for more. And she’s a bawd. She’s taken two girls, knocked up, to Dr. Sevras’s back room in the middle of the night to get scraped. Slinking, the girls call it, too soft a word, Alma thinks. The nurse, too smiley, dauncy in her little cap, saying, “Keep your dobbers up. It’ll be over soon.” Alma’s life is ugly sometimes, but simple and consuming. She has learned to despise men and their urgent needs. She has always remembered the Mule-Faced Woman, has often thought of the Mule-Faced Woman’s mother, who—according to the tiny woman who took her nickel for the show—was forced to have sex with a mule. Then, it was shocking, but not now. She believes it to be absolutely true, easily true. She’s heard of worse. And she would no sooner give her body to a man now than to a mule.