It was as though the four walls of the kitchen watched her, and the skillet hanging on the wall was a watching round black eye. The piano-tuning was for a minute silent. Berenice sat with her head bowed, as though she was in church. And John Henry had his head bowed also, but he was peeking. F. Jasmine stood at the foot of the stairs and placed her left hand on her hip.
"Oh, how pretty!" John Henry said.
Berenice raised her head, and when she saw F. Jasmine her face was a study. The dark eye looked from the silver hair ribbon to the soles of the silver slippers. She said nothing.
"Now tell me your honest opinion," F. Jasmine said.
But Berenice looked at the orange satin evening dress and shook her head and did not comment At first she shook her head with short little turns, but the longer she stared, the longer these shakes became, until at the last shake F. Jasmine heard her neck crack.
"What's the matter?" F. Jasmine asked.
"I thought you was going to get a pink dress."
"But when I got in the store I changed my mind. What is wrong with this dress? Don't you like it, Berenice?"
"No," said Berenice. "It don't do."
"What do you mean? It don't do."
"Exactly that. It just don't do."
F. Jasmine turned to look in the mirror, and she still thought the dress was beautiful. But Berenice had a sour and stubborn look on her face, an expression like that of an old long-eared mule, and F. Jasmine could not understand.
"But I don't see what you mean," she complained. "What is wrong?"
Berenice folded her arms over her chest and said: "Well, if you don't see it I can't explain it to you. Look there at your head, to begin with."
F. Jasmine looked at her head in the mirror.
"You had all your hair shaved off like a convict, and now you tie a silver ribbon around this head without any hair. It just looks peculiar."
"Oh, but I'm washing my hair tonight and going to try to curl it," F. Jasmine said.
"And look at them elbows," Berenice continued. "Here you got on this grown woman's evening dress. Orange satin. And that brown crust on your elbows. The two things just don't mix."
F. Jasmine hunched her shoulders and covered her rusty elbows with her hands.
Berenice gave her head another quick wide shake, then bunched her lips in judgment. Take it back down to the store."
"But I can't!" said F. Jasmine. "It's bargain basement. They don't take back."
Berenice always had two mottoes. One was the known saying that you can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear. And the other was the motto that you have to cut your suit according to the cloth, and make the best of what you have. So F. Jasmine was not certain if it was the last of these mottoes that made Berenice change her mind, or if she really began to improve her feelings about the dress. Anyway, Berenice stared for several seconds with her head to one side, and finally said:
"Come here. We'll make it fit better at the waist and see what we can do."
"I think you're just not accustomed to seeing anybody dressed up," F. Jasmine said.
"I'm not accustomed to human Christmas trees in August."
So Berenice took off the sash and patted and pulled the dress in various places. F. Jasmine stood stiff like a hat-rack and let her work with the dress. John Henry had got up from his chair and was watching, with the napkin still tied around his neck.
"Frankie's dress looks like a Christmas tree," he said.
"Two-faced Judas!" F. Jasmine said. "You just now said it was pretty. Old double-faced Judas!"
The piano tuned. Whose piano it was F. Jasmine did not know, but the sound of the tuning was solemn and insistent in the kitchen, and it came from somewhere not so far away. The pianotuner would sometimes fling out a rattling little tune, and then he would go back to one note. And repeat. And bang the same note in a solemn and crazy way. And repeat. And bang. The name of the piano-tuner in the town was Mr. Schwarzenbaum. The sound was enough to shiver the gizzards of musicians and make all listeners feel queer.
"It almost makes me wonder if he does that just to torment us," F. Jasmine said.
But Berenice said no: "They tune pianos the same way in Cincinnati and the world over. It is just the way they do it. Less turn on the radio in the dining room and drown him out."
F. Jasmine shook her head. "No," she said. "I can't explain why. But I don't want to have that radio turned on again. It reminds me too much of this summer."
"Step back a little now," said Berenice.
She had pinned the waist higher and done one thing and another to the dress. F. Jasmine looked in the mirror over the sink. She could only see herself from the chest up, so after admiring this top part of herself, she stood on a chair and looked at the middle section. Then she began to clear away a corner of the table so she could climb up and see in the mirror the silver shoes, but Berenice prevented her.
"Don't you honestly think it is pretty?" F. Jasmine said. "I think so. Seriously, Berenice. Give me your candy opinion."
But Berenice rared up and spoke in an accusing voice: "I never knew somebody so unreasonable! You ask me my candy opinion, and I give it to you. Then you ask me again, and I give it to you. But what you want is not my honest opinion, but my good opinion on something I know is wrong. Now what kind of way is that to act?"
"All right," F. Jasmine said. "I only want to look good."
"Well, you look very well," said Berenice. "Pretty is as pretty does. You look well enough for anybody's wedding. Excepting your own. And then, pray Jesus, we will be in a position to do better. What I have to do now is get John Henry a fresh suit and figure about the outfit I'm going to wear myself"
"Uncle Charles is dead," John Henry said. "And we are going to the wedding."
"Yes, Baby," said Berenice. And from the sudden dreaming quietness of her, F. Jasmine felt that Berenice was carried back to all the other dead people she knew. The dead were walking in her heart, and she was remembering back to Ludie Freeman and the long-gone time of Cincinnati and the snow.
F. Jasmine thought back to the other seven dead people she knew. Her mother had died the very day that she was born, so she could not count her. There was a picture of her mother in the right-hand drawer of her father's bureau: and the face looked timid and sorry, shut up with the cold folded handkerchiefs in the drawer. Then there was her grandmother who had died when Frankie was nine years old, and F. Jasmine remembered her very well—but with crooked little pictures that were sunken far back in her mind. A soldier from that town called William Boyd had been killed that year in Italy, and she had known him both by sight and name. Mrs. Selway, two blocks away, had died; and F. Jasmine had watched the funeral from the sidewalk, but she was not invited. The solemn grown men stood around out on the front porch and it had rained, there was a gray silk ribbon on the door. She knew Lon Baker, and he was dead also. Lon Baker was a colored boy and he was murdered in the alley out behind her father's store. On an April afternoon his throat was slashed with a razor blade, and all the alley people disappeared in back doorways, and later it was said his cut throat opened like a crazy shivering mouth that spoke ghost words into the April sun. Lon Baker was dead and Frankie knew him. She knew, but only in a chancing kind of way, Mr. Pitkin at Brawer's Shoe Shop, Miss Birdie Grimes, and a man who had climbed poles for the telephone company: all dead.
"Do you think very frequently about Ludie?" F. Jasmine asked.
"You know I do," said Berenice. "I think about the years when me and Ludie was together, and about all the bad times I seen since. Ludie would never have let me be lonesome so that I took up with all kinds of no-good men. Me and Ludie," she said. "Ludie and me"
F. Jasmine sat vibrating her leg and thinking of Ludie and Cincinnati. Of all the dead people out of the world, Ludie Freeman was the one F. Jasmine knew the best, although she had never laid eyes on him, and was not even born when he had died. She knew Ludie and the city of Cincinnati, and the winter when Ludie and Berenice had gone together
to the North and seen the snow. A thousand times they had talked of all these things, and it was a conversation that Berenice talked slowly, making each sentence like a song. And the old Frankie used to ask and question about Cincinnati. What exactly they would eat in Cincinnati and how wide would be the Cincinnati streets? And in a chanting kind of voice they talked about the Cincinnati fish, the parlor in the Cincinnati house on Myrtle Street, the Cincinnati picture shows. And Ludie Freeman was a brickmason, making a grand and a regular salary, and he was the man of all her husbands that Berenice had loved.
"Sometimes I almost wish I had never knew Ludie at all," said Berenice. "It spoils you too much. It leaves you too lonesome afterward. When you walk home in the evening on the way from work, it makes a little lonesome quinch come in you. And you take up with too many sorry men to try to get over the feeling."
"I know it," F. Jasmine said. "But T. T. Williams is not sorry"
"I wasn't referring to T. T. He and me is just good friends."
"Don't you think you will marry him?" F. Jasmine asked.
"Well, T. T. is a fine upstanding colored gentleman," said Berenice. "You never hear tell of T. T. raring around like a lot of other mens. If I was to marry T. T., I could get out of this kitchen and stand behind the cash register at the restaurant and pat my foot. Furthermore, I respect T. T. sincerely. He has walked in a state of grace all of his life."
"Well, when are you going to marry him?" she asked. "He is crazy about you."
Berenice said: "I ain't going to marry him."
"But you just now was saying—" said F. Jasmine.
"I was saying how sincerely I respect T. T. and sincerely regard him."
"Well, then—?" F. Jasmine said.
"I respect and regard him highly," said Berenice. Her dark eye was quiet and sober and her flat nose widened as she spoke. "But he don't make me shiver none."
After a moment F. Jasmine said: "To think about the wedding makes me shiver."
"Well, it's a pity," said Berenice.
"It makes me shiver, too, to think about how many dead people I already know. Seven in all," she said. "And now Uncle Charles."
F. Jasmine put her fingers in her ears and closed her eyes, but it was not death. She could feel the heat from the stove and smell the dinner. She could feel a rumble in her stomach and the beating of her heart. And the dead feel nothing, hear nothing, see nothing: only black.
"It would be terrible to be dead," she said, and in the wedding dress she began to walk around the room.
There was a rubber ball on the shelf, and she threw it against the hall door and caught it on the rebound.
"Put that down," said Berenice. "Go take off the dress before you dirty it. Go do something. Go turn on the radio."
"I told you I don't want that radio on."
And she was walking around the room, and Berenice had said to go do something, but she did not know what to do. She walked in the wedding dress, with her hand on her hip. The silver slippers had squeezed her feet so that the toes felt swollen and mashed like ten big sore cauliflowers.
"But I advise you to keep the radio on when you come back," F. Jasmine said suddenly. "Some day very likely you will hear us speaking over the radio."
"What's that?"
"I say very likely we might be asked to speak over the radio some day."
"Speak about what, pray tell me," said Berenice.
"I don't know exactly what about," F. Jasmine said. "But probably some eye-witness account about something. We will be asked to speak."
"I don't follow you," said Berenice. "What are we going to eyewitness? And who will ask us to speak?"
F. Jasmine whirled around and, putting both fists on her hips, she set herself in a staring position. "Did you think I meant you and John Henry and me? Why, I have never heard of anything so funny in my whole life."
John Henry's voice was high and excited. "What, Frankie? Who is speaking on the radio?"
"When I said we, you thought I meant you and me and John Henry West. To speak over the world radio. I have never heard of anything so funny since I was born."
John Henry had climbed up to kneel on the seat of his chair and the blue veins showed in his forehead and you could see the strained cords of his neck. "Who?" he hollered. "What?"
"Ha ha ha!" she said, and then she burst out laughing; she went banging around the room and hitting things with her fist. "Ho ho ho!"
And John Henry wailed and F. Jasmine banged around the kitchen in the wedding dress and Berenice got up from the table and raised her right hand for peace. Then suddenly they all stopped at once. F. Jasmine stood absolutely still before the window, and John Henry hurried to the window also and watched on tiptoe with his hands to the sill. Berenice turned her head to see what had happened. And at that moment the piano was quiet.
"Oh!" F. Jasmine whispered.
Four girls were crossing the back yard. They were girls of fourteen and fifteen years old, and they were the club members. First came Helen Fletcher, and then the others walking slowly in single file. They had cut across from the O'Neils' back yard and were passing slowly before the arbor. The long gold sun slanted down on them and made their skin look golden also, and they were dressed in clean, fresh dresses. When they had passed the arbor, their single shadows stretched out long and gangling across the yard. Soon they would be gone. F. Jasmine stood motionless. In the old days that summer she would have waited in the hope that they might call her and tell her she had been elected to the club—and only at the very last, when it was plain that they were only passing, she would have shouted in angry loudness that they were not to cut across her yard. But now she watched them quietly, without jealousy. At the last there came an urge to call out to them about the wedding, but before the words could be formed and spoken, the club of girls was gone. There was only the arbor and the spinning sun.
"Now I wonder—" F. Jasmine said finally. But Berenice cut her short:
"Nothing, Curiosity," she said. "Curiosity, nothing."
When they began the second round of that last dinner, it was past five o'clock, and nearing twilight. It was the time of afternoon when in the old days, sitting with the red cards at the table, they would sometimes begin to criticize the Creator. They would judge the work of God, and mention the ways how they would improve the world. And Holy Lord God John Henry's voice would rise up happy and high and strange, and his world was a mixture of delicious and freak, and he did not think in global terms: the sudden long arm that could stretch from here to California, chocolate dirt and rains of lemonade, the extra eye seeing a thousand miles, a hinged tail that could be let down as a kind of prop to sit on when you wished to rest, the candy flowers.
But the world of the Holy Lord God Berenice Sadie Brown was a different world, and it was round and just and reasonable. First, there would be no separate colored people in the world, but all human beings would be light brown color with blue eyes and black hair. There would be no colored people and no white people to make the colored people feel cheap and sorry all through their lives. No colored people, but all human men and ladies and children as one loving family on the earth. And when Berenice spoke of this first principle her voice was a strong deep song that soared and sang in beautiful dark tones leaving an echo in the corners of the room that trembled for a long time until silence.
No war, said Berenice. No stiff corpses hanging from the Europe trees and no Jews murdered anywhere. No war, and the young boys leaving home in army suits, and no wild cruel Germans and Japanese. No war in the whole world, but peace in all countries everywhere. Also, no starving. To begin with, the real Lord God had made free air and free rain and free dirt for the benefit of all. There would be free food for every human mouth, free meals and two pounds of fatback a week, and after that each able-bodied person would work for whatever else he wished to eat or own. No killed Jews and no hurt colored people. No war and no hunger in the world. And, finally, Ludie Freeman would be alive.
The world of Beren
ice was a round world, and the old Frankie would listen to the strong deep singing voice, and she would agree with Berenice. But the old Frankie's world was the best of the three worlds. She agreed with Berenice about the main laws of her creation, but she added many things: an aeroplane and a motorcycle to each person, a world club with certificates and badges, and a better law of gravity. She did not completely agree with Berenice about the war; and sometimes she said she would have one War Island in the world where those who wanted to could go, and fight or donate blood, and she might go for a while as a WAC in the Air Corps. She also changed the seasons, leaving out summer altogether, and adding much snow. She planned it so that people could instantly change back and forth from boys to girls, which ever way they felt like and wanted. But Berenice would argue with her about this, insisting that the law of human sex was exactly right just as it was and could in no way be improved. And then John Henry West would very likely add his two cents' worth about this time, and think that people ought to be half boy and half girl, and when the old Frankie threatened to take him to the Fair and sell him to the Freak Pavilion, he would only close his eyes and smile.
So the three of them would sit there at the kitchen table and criticize the Creator and the work of God. Sometimes their voices crossed and the three worlds twisted. The Holy Lord God John Henry West. The Holy Lord God Berenice Sadie Brown. The Holy Lord God Frankie Addams. The Worlds at the end of the long stale afternoons.
But this was a different day. They were not loafing or playing cards, but still eating dinner. F. Jasmine had taken off the wedding dress and was barefooted and comfortable in her petticoat once more. The brown gravy of the peas had stiffened, the food was neither hot nor cold, and the butter had melted. They started in on second helpings, passing the dishes back and forth among themselves, and they did not talk of the ordinary subjects that usually they thought about this time of the afternoon. Instead, there began a strange conversation, and it came about in this way:
"Frankie," said Berenice, "Awhile back you started to say something. And we veered off from the subject. It was about something unnatural, I think."