The captain pulls the car up in the driveway. He nods instead of saying good night to her, hisses, “You must get lonesome up there. Or do you take in a man now and then yourself?” His face is purplish in the dark, his cheeks high up, shining like two bulbs.
“I have no interest in this grunt work called sex. I’m no punch-hole to be punched.” She opens the door, gets out, slams it.
The captain’s men are lined up, waiting for him, some chatting up the girls who look down from the porch. He calls to her, “It’s a shame, there, Alma, to let all that go to waste!”
She stomps up the steps, aware of the swish of her backside, unable and unwilling to try to contain it. She tells the girls to get inside. She says over her shoulder, “Show’s over.” She shuts the door.
The girls, five or so, bustle around her. “Are you okay?” “What did he make you do?” “That fat old son of a bitch.” She hates the close-knit circle. She can feel the heat off their bodies, their breath in her face. She turns away and spots Charlie Holman sitting on the love seat. His drunk, dull eyes rove slowly around the room, one strap of his overalls unhitched, a frayed hat in his lap. He’s one of Delphine’s regulars. An old miner who suffered a stroke, he’s usually carried in on somebody’s back and set down like a sack. Roxy is often the one who carries him upstairs to Delphine’s room when he’s had enough to drink, although it’s clear Roxy despises him. One side of the old man’s face is still alive with nerves, puckering, tightening and untightening, as he works at a wad of chewing wax, while the other is slack, soft, a silent gentleman, a jowly banker, perhaps, who should be wearing a boutonniere on the lapel of a dark suit. His face reminds Alma of the half-man—half-woman at the carnival. The outfit a suit and dress sewn together, one set of eyelashes, one half of a thin mustache. Her mind is a wheel that churns without her say. And it’s worse when the old man talks. Just now, he says, “I don’t see how I’m going to make it home this evening.” Half of his mouth moves with a cinched tightness, hard-working lips, stitching that draws them up and loosens them into words, and the effort always makes Alma think of her father with his clipped tongue. She tries to avoid Charlie Holman because he flares the recollection of her missing father.
“Hopefully one of the boys will come back for you. Or you could pay to stay on,” she offers.
“Do you have any more horse liniment, Miss Alma?”
“I don’t think you need another drop. You’re lit up like a store window. You’re nearly burning with a blue flame.”
He hiccups, gives a small belch. His eyes water. She hopes he doesn’t throw up or start to cry. The men do that sometimes, get drunk and dissolve into a fit of tears.
She turns to the girls. “The night’s over. You can go on home now.” She thinks quickly of the farmer who used to call in his cows at the end of the day. The farmer has since sold off all but one, and it’s skinny with sores, a dry coat, sunken eyes. It pains her to see it in the field, stark and lonesome, a frail ghost of the buttery herd that once was. Alma sees something of herself in it still. Once she’d been fit to spill over, she was so full of something, and now there’s this single sickly cow. The girls have started to shift, gather things up. Some head upstairs to collect their things. Others shamble toward the door. “Where’s Delphine?”
One of the girls, an ugly one whom the men seem to favor, points upstairs. “She went to her bedroom and shut her door.”
Alma knows this means she’s taken out her bamboo pipe and is setting to smoke as many pills as she needs. Alma has imagined how Delphine got hooked on hop, lounging in Chinatown’s opium dens, a young starlet whore. Sometimes Delphine talks about the sweet smoke, how she was taught to burn each pill, the gob hardening, and how she was smart then. She could see the intimate clicking of each tiny creature bustling to create the entire world. She could hold onto that one thought even while she was having sex with some gangster. Alma likes to listen to Delphine talk. She doesn’t want to smoke, but she understands weakness. She knows what it is to want to give in, and she lives her life in some small resistance. To what, exactly, she isn’t sure. Part of it is Henry’s dogged presence. She isn’t sure how someone can be more present because of their absence, and yet she finds Henry everywhere, a cupboard he nailed shut as a quick fix, the laggardly squeak of his closet door, the closet now filled with Lettie’s drop-waist dresses and swishy crinoline, the dip in the yard where he buried the bear, a mound that has collapsed, and their bed, the dull singular clank of the metal headboard as she lowers herself, a podgy weight, onto it. Mostly, when the house is quiet, she imagines his loping through another room, on the other side of a wall, just having slipped past a doorjamb. But Henry is only a painful symptom of something deeper that she fights moment to moment.
Alma sets to make sure that Lettie is nowhere near Delphine now that she knows she’s smoking. She doesn’t mind the way Roxy and Delphine have taken up like husband and wife. There’s no need to protect Lettie from something as pure as love and devotion, even if it isn’t the standard fare. Alma’s Aunt Faye, who was so frail, had fallen in love with her teacher, an older woman, or so Alma’s mother said. Faye became bookish because of her. The teacher then moved away and left Faye, with her sickly heart, one that Alma’s mother thought to be corrupted by the romantic notions in books. Aunt Faye never married and died young, shortly after Alma’s mother took the two of them to the beach, and Aunt Faye was so unnerved by the screeching gulls. It never bothered Alma that a woman could love a woman or two men, for that matter, one white and one black. (Had her mother ever really loved her father?) It seemed so miraculous that people could fall in love and stay together, so mysterious, why bother with the details once it’s happened? But Alma doesn’t like Lettie to see Delphine high. And she hated it when Irving was still living in the house, because he admired Delphine so, was in love with her, she guesses. And now he’s got his own whore in that little Lucy. It’s Alma’s fault. How could it not be? He grew up in this house long enough to wear a soft spot for these loose, tireless hustlers, with their weak eyes and thick-muscled hearts. His picture sits on the mantel, so cocky one foot’s on the laundry truck’s runner, wearing his delivery suit, chalked white whenever it was smudged. He has missed Sunday dinner. She wonders when she’ll hear from him with his well-practiced excuse. He always has a good one, often Lucy with her headaches. Even if it’s not true, she appreciates the attempt. Willard is gone, for the better, certainly. And Irving has left her, too. Sometimes Alma knows it was not purely her desire to keep food on her children’s plates that urged her to be a madam. It was something closer to spite. She likes to think it was only for them, a sacrifice, but her heart knows better; it kicks up, sputters like a gasoline engine.
Alma hopes that Roxy is there in the room with Delphine. “You seen Roxy?” she asks Pearly, the sentimental one with the mean husband who takes her money and then slaps her for being a whore.
“She’s up with Delphine.” Alma can tell Pearly is hoping there will be a story—she’s a blatherskite who loves to pass things around—she should know she won’t get a tale from Alma.
Alma heads upstairs, knowing that Lettie is probably still under the bed. Fifteen and she hasn’t yet outgrown her girlhood nervousness. Alma shouldn’t have ever gone off and left her as a child. She shouldn’t have ever agreed to go to Miami after a trunk, in the first place. But for all the good that the orphanage did for Willard—who now tends an entire garden that stretches the length of the building—it did as much damage to Lettie. As Alma walks up the stairs, she can hear the bustle below her, the hush above, and she can feel herself bleeding into the house. She becomes a division of rooms, some raucous, some solemn. The toilet’s gushes of water, the tug of light-switch chains, the faucet’s drip wearing away at the sink’s rust spot. Mottled walls, dust, clatter, moths tinking bulbs. She can locate the parlor in her chest, the sun passing through it on an afternoon when no one is there to see it. She closes her eyes a minute, trying to blink the notion
from her mind. She has no idea where her notions come from and why they are so stubborn. She thinks deliberately of the predicament of Charlie Holman on her love seat. She wonders how much she will charge him to spend the night there. She wonders if Roxy would be willing to haul him out to the car and drive him home and how much she might charge for that. She thinks of her stacked money, the sorting of how much she needs to live on and then the extra that she divides three ways for her children so they will always have enough even if she catches consumption and dies. She often thinks of her death, afraid of how it would set her children loose in the world. She left them once, and she never wants to do it again. Her love for her children is so sharp, a constant pang of worry. She attempts to cast it off casually, but it must be apparent. She feels afire.
When Alma nears her bedroom door, she thinks she hears Lettie’s voice, a hushed whisper. She opens the door and Lettie ducks in the window so fast she knocks the back of her head. Lettie rubs the sore spot. The money piles are a mess, Alma’s coins scattered all over the desk and floor.
“What happened here?”
“I got nervous,” Lettie said. “I knocked it with my hip and it fell to pieces like that.”
“It did, did it? Were you talking to someone?”
“No.”
Alma doesn’t want to think her daughter is lying to her. She doesn’t want to think that there may have been a boy below her window. She refuses to think of her adoration of Henry at Lettie’s age, having sex between rows of her mother’s corn. But everything changes. Time trudges. Her mother’s corn, for example, no longer ends in rows next to an old wooden derrick. There’s a tank field now, newly built, shaped like silos, but giant, wrapped in stairways, squatting in a field that once was barley. It all becomes too complicated if she entertains the notion that her daughter is turning into a woman in a house like this. Alma can feel her life rising up for new consideration, but she prefers the way she has been for years now: A morning goes by and then an afternoon. Eventually there’s evening. She sleeps. She is within it all, desperately so, and she doesn’t have to think beyond it. Sometimes at night, falling asleep, she’s aware of the trunk beneath her bed, still filled with junk, woolens, and swollen, faded books, and she has added the clothes Henry left behind. It is a heavy, dense relic of loss, but even then she has learned to sleep above it. She is proud of how close it is and how she has learned to ignore it. She is strong. Each moment demands her attention, and she gives it more than it deserves, so she doesn’t have to step back, outside, and watch. She was a woman on a dock in Miami, a woman who was aware of everything, and it did her no good. Now she is a woman surviving. She prefers to work in the details of that survival, never to enlarge, never to see something like the passage of time. Lettie is just a child still, Alma thinks, just a foolish girl who gets scared when the police come to the door, so scared and foolish she can knock into a desk. Alma doesn’t want to look at her standing there. She’s too tall, her breasts filling out, becoming plump on her chest. Her face is thinning, lengthening into a woman’s face.
“Well, help me gather them up.” And the two of them kneel, plucking coins from the floor.
* * *
Delphine is preparing her ceramic bowl, her bamboo stem, her lamp, needle, and knife. She feels good and thinks that if she could always have days like this, where the men come and go and she doesn’t seem to feel too much, holding onto the warm-chestedness of opium, then she could be generous. She could love each one of them, in a way, the men and the other girls here, too, everyone, even Herbert C. Hoover, for God’s sake. But there are other days, dark, her soul clustered with meanness, and even when she feels good, almost kind, almost clean, she knows it won’t last. Sometimes there are voices. Sometimes she feels ghostly, as if her clothes are no more than things hung on a line, wind-kicked, and the voices are more real than she is.
Roxy, on the other hand, is very real, her body a solid mass, as thick, in parts, as a tree. She sits on the edge of the bed, her elbows on her high-up knees, and when she’s in that pose, it makes Delphine think of her daddy, head hung low, worrying. He used to have rituals, too, before preaching, almost like this. Delphine lights the lamp, starts to sing “Nearer My God to Thee,” which always recalls a certain gangster she loved, who could make a horn sing. Once when he was in jail, a Salvation Army band came along to play its lurching hymns, the women in those ghastly black bonnets and the men in their military caps, “soldiers for Christ.” He said, “I been saved. I feel I can play that horn. I feel God inside me.” And the Christian gave it to him, and he blew the ass off of “Nearer My God to Thee.” Last she heard, he’d made friends with the paid prison cook so that he could get his hands on the juice runoff from the canned fruit to ferment and get a liquor ring going. She misses him. It starts up. It’s enough to churn her stomach, to cause her mind to race. It’s summer now, and everything should be bursting forth, the whole world, flowering toward some colossal outpouring of—what? Love, almost, something like it. But these days, since the droughts, the crash, there’s an odor of death always hanging in the air. It was there before, a hint, but now it’s grown with the conviction of documented disaster. The gangster is probably dead by now, but she aches for the old dens in Chinatown, a bustle of wrongheadedness, bad decisions, glorious lies. Sharpers, pool-hall hustlers, gamblers, failing actors, young gangsters as sweet of face as he was, wires, yeggs, and women, like her. Not immoral or bereft, not just these whores here in this house with their douches who hope nothing slips by their Dutch caps, whores because there’s nothing else for them to be. No, she misses those who see life swelling right in front of them and who can’t be orderly and polite about living. Those in need of something more than the deliberate world with its truth, with its workaday tedium. She’s always despised the gainfully employed, with their pride and their contented lunch breaks—her father, for example, tidying the pews Sunday afternoons, and her sister, Eloise, a schoolteacher, grading papers late into the night. Without it, they jump out of windows, just like last fall, droves of them! As if the world weren’t enough, just to be in it.
Her mother, well, her mother is more like her, although she won’t admit it. Her mother calls it nerves, but really it’s her aching soul that seems to contain her knowledge that the earth is more important than heaven, if there is such a thing at all as heaven, and here her mother sits just wasting time when she could be—what? Fucking and singing, pulling fruit from trees. And her mother must act just so. She must wear her gloves and hat, her girdle, but there’s nothing to contain her soul, except her medications, so precious. Delphine understands that. She and her mother are just alike. If her mother could allow just one transgression, then her life would unravel, and she knows it. They both do. And couldn’t her mother easily find herself a grateful whore in this odd house in love with this gargantuan woman, this oversize saint?
Sometimes her mind prattles on like this, a tumble of words. Has she been talking out loud? There’s the memory of a whisper in her throat, but she isn’t sure what she’s said or whether she’s just been singing softly. Roxy is quiet, thoughtful. She’s a tender soul who will sometimes put fresh flower petals in Delphine’s pillowcase to make it smell sweet. She doesn’t smoke. She tried it once—threw up and swore off it. “You lack the necessary determination to be a good hop addict,” Delphine told her.
Roxy lets her go on and on, lets her give her little speech to the men who come to her. “I’m the Grand Arms Hotel. Always open. Always a vacancy.” She lets her smoke as many pills as she wants. “It’s the sweetest birth control in the whole wide world, Roxy. I haven’t bled in years!” Delphine would love company, but she knows Alma would throw her out if she so much as offered some to one of the girls. Delphine doesn’t like to do it alone, and so she asks Roxy just to sit with her, to watch and talk. She knows she’d be better off if she switched to morphine, like so many fiends. Shut herself up in a room. There’d be no need for all of this preparation. Only a delivery boy from
the drugstore on a bike. Her needles, $1.25 a box, shipped to the doorstep by Sears and Roebuck. But she prefers the old Chinaman’s wife, nodding and shuffling. Broken English and an exchange. She likes all of the things she must care for in the process, a tenderness for the act, a sacredness. Nothing so barren, so sterile as a pinch in the arm.
Delphine dips the needle into the bottle, then tries to steady the glob over the lamp. Her hands are shaky. They’ve been shaky for as long as she can remember. As the opium bubbles, swells, doubling and tripling in size, she recalls dropping her mother’s butcher-wrapped meat off a trestle bridge over the coal-clouded Monongahela. It was iced over. The meat skidded, leaving a pink trail of blood. Her mother made her climb down through the iced reeds to retrieve it. Her mother, her scarf wrapped around her throat to hide the goiter, nearly as large as a baseball, at the side of her throat. The ice cracked, splintered. The river’s jaws opened and set to swallow her whole. Her dress and coat ballooned for a moment. Her legs froze, instantly, the water inching up her coat. She clawed at the ice, and then saw her mother, who’d been so angry before, now terrified, coming at her on her belly like a seal. She grabbed her hand and pulled her back, the toes of her boots digging in behind her. Was Eloise there? She must have been, looking down on it, perhaps from the end of the bridge, thinking, even then, that it’s unfair how the careless ones get more desperate love.
“I’m as devout as a Turk, as well-practiced as a Chinaman. It’s been a long day. Don’t you think? Are you happy, Roxy? Are you mad with me again? Don’t be. Don’t be always mad with me. I don’t like the way you look at me sometimes.”
Roxy shakes her head. “I don’t have to say it again.”