It was Tamara who saved her, in the end. Tamara, whose distant oracle eyes were enough to quiet Mrs. Grundy. Tamara, running down the steps and into the garden and embracing Phyllis as tightly as she could from behind. The hands smacked her and struggled, but the body that held them wasn’t as strong as it used to be. Tamara could endure it.
“Leave me!” Phyllis gasped. “Before they hurt you!”
Tamara just squeezed harder. Phyllis sighed and then tilted her head back into the embrace. After half a minute, the chokehold did its work and Pea slumped into unconsciousness.
* * *
The night Tamara decided to leave the Pelican hadn’t seemed particularly notable to start.
Oh, sure, Clyde and Dev were off in the war, the cards were as mute as a dead soldier, Pea was pregnant and strange as the queen of diamonds. Victor was dead. For all that Walter was an able mob boss, he didn’t have the social panache of his predecessor; or maybe it was that Tammy was mourning Vic after all, the sadistic ofay shit, who had, in spite of it all, given her free rein with the best little gin joint in the whole world.
Whatever the case, Tamara had been gloomy as she made herself up for the first Wednesday jazz night at the Pelican since the events that had led to its temporary closure and change in management. She’d had to buy Charlie four steak dinners at Frank’s (Five dollars a pop! No wonder half the time they were the only black folks eating, and in the middle of Harlem.) to sweet-talk him into his grand return. Charlie played in mob joints when they wanted his music, but unlike Tamara and Phyllis, he’d just as soon leave them for something poorer and safer. The Pelican, she had cajoled Charlie, was something special, it wasn’t just a paycheck, though of course she’d double his pay (she knew she’d had him then, it just took two more trips to Frank’s for him to admit it).
Pea had met her that night in a cab out in front of her apartment, bundled up in a mink that Tamara didn’t recognize. It wasn’t Dev’s style, though it might have been Walter’s. It didn’t seem like the kind of thing that Pea bought for herself, but you never knew these days with the new Phyllis; nobody’s angel still carried her knives.
She smiled when Tamara got into the cab, but she had been impassive a moment before, not so much as a wrinkle between her eyebrows.
“Something wrong?” she asked after Tammy slammed the door.
“I just don’t like this feeling,” Tammy said. The cards in the band of her brassiere seemed as heavy as stones.
“What feeling?”
Tamara’s lips twisted. “Things are changing feeling.”
At that Phyllis’s smile surfaced, more natural than before. “Things are always changing, baby.”
“Not like this. Not so fast.”
Phyllis just raised her eyebrows and put an arm around Tammy’s rounded shoulders. There was a crowd trying to get into the Pelican, which had gained some notoriety after recent events. The police had closed the joint and Walter had paid significant sums of money to significant people to get it opened again. She had tried to thank him, but he had waved her off with a large hand and a curt, “Cost of business, Tammy. You just keep making her the kind of place that people spend money in.”
She had been buoyed by the sentiment, but now all of that optimistic joy had drained out of her. Everything was changing, everyone good was gone; Clyde had fought with her again before he left and now wrote her with some farmboy actor’s idea of chivalry that made her want to swim the Atlantic just to tell him where to put it.
Still, some old pleasures endured. She and Phyllis climbed out of the cab right in front of the Pelican’s velvet rope. Everyone was out in their finest duds, even if for some that meant combed cashmere coats and for others suits in bright colors with shoulders wide enough to sit on. Whispers followed them like eager puppies as they sailed past the line and through the swinging double doors.
Pea gave her coat to the doorman and turned to Tamara with a very hard smile, the kind that had both scared and attracted her when they first met. Now, it dared someone to say something about her dress, whose silk pleats seemed designed to accentuate the distinct curve of her belly.
Tamara’s only thoughts came up in a wave of longing and jealousy and a fear so bright she squinted. What if Clyde didn’t come back? What if she never had his baby?
She came out of it when Pea chafed her hand between hers, barely any warmer. “You’re still fixing on that letter?” she said, quiet.
Tamara sighed. “Forget Clyde.” And then, grudgingly, “You look beautiful.”
She lost track of Phyllis for a while amid the laughter and admiration, the sheer rush that nights at the Pelican always gave her. This time Tamara didn’t even have to keep an eye open for Victor, lurking by the bookshelf entrance to his office, awaiting his obeisance. It was Walter, instead, who put a warm hand on her back and then Charlie’s shoulder and toasted competently to the Pelican’s return. “It’s been an interesting few weeks, but I’m grateful to see so many familiar faces here once again. Here’s to another decade of the Pelican, the only place in the Village you’d find us all sharing our liquor together—entirely legally acquired, Detective, I can show you the papers in the back—” Laughter. The detective, a white man so firmly in Walter’s pocket he had his own billfold, gave a terse smile and lifted his glass. “Now, let’s get back to what we do best: listening to the latest bebop courtesy of the master here”—a nod to Charlie, making as if he didn’t think much of the hoopla, but sucking it down like good reefer—“and sharing the funny little bits of ourselves that won’t fit anywhere else on this benighted island.”
Whistles and hollers, laughter and cheers and the wind chime percussion of clinking glasses. Phyllis came to her attention all at once, as though a spotlight had swerved and stilled at the edge of her sharp, freckled cheeks, the smooth curve of rose silk over her belly. The crowd surrounded her, but she held herself apart with a stillness that perhaps only Tamara could recognize as fear, even shame. Pea’s eyes darted to the bar, and Tammy felt alongside her the shivering vertigo of realization, that he wasn’t there, that nothing would be the same for any of them, not ever again.
A familiar hand settled on her shoulder and she jumped. He didn’t feel anything like Victor, but old defenses were hard to lay down. “How are you two holding up? How is she?”
Walter pointed his chin with admirable subtlety at Phyllis, staring out at nothing, drinking a glass of something amber and chilled with two precise cubes of ice, seated like a dowager queen at the center table just as Charlie and his boys were getting started.
“She’s—well, I don’t know, Walter. We’re fine, really—”
“That bad, huh?”
“We’re fucking miserable. This war…”
“This war,” Walter agreed.
They shared a tight smile and allowed the room to distract them. Tamara drifted from table to table, sharing jokes, sampling the best Mexican reefer, even kissing a few of the boys who asked for it. She sat at Victor’s old table near the back, empty even now, out of respect or superstition, though the place was packed. Feel it, she told herself, feel it, ’cause it’s all yours now. But that hazy distance held her back. It was Victor, Tammy could swear it, that old juju of his even now spreading its greasy fingers across the gleaming chrome of his precious club. She took in a sharp breath. The cards, tucked inside the band of her brassiere, were in her hands in a heartbeat. “Well?” she whispered to them. “Well?”
A simple shuffle and cut: the king of diamonds. Suicide king, axe in hand, here for revenge. She sucked in a breath. There was more, but she didn’t want to hear it. Instead, she did what she should have done from the first; she went to relieve Pea from a little of the burden of her loneliness.
Pea smiled with an arch knowledge when Tammy sprawled in the chair beside her.
“Having fun?” she asked. Her eyes were going glassy. Tammy wondered how many thumbs of whiskey she’d drunk here alone tonight.
“Not even a little. You?”
/>
“Just remembering. So, that would be a no. The cards tell you anything?”
Those eyes didn’t miss much, even wet with liquor. “Nothing useful.”
Pea seemed paler than usual; she wiped her forehead with a handkerchief and avoided Tamara’s eyes. It was probably the baby. That child of two saint’s hands was apparently able to give her mother visions, sights either inexplicable or better unexplained.
The hour got later, Tamara went backstage to ready herself. Charlie kept playing. The haze of reefer clung to walls like a soft blanket as she started her set, lifting poor old Georgie over her head like a barbell, while he seemed to look back at her reproachfully. At some point the spirit took her, and Tamara started dancing among the tables, stomping her feet to the esoteric rhythms of the bass. They felt her and she felt them, folding her into the improvisation as smoothly as that pellet of yellow color folds into white margarine. She let Georgie wend his tired way around her neck and shook so that her breasts twirled in opposite directions and the tassels on her pasties glittered in the stage lights. They all watched her, but no one hollered or even smiled. Tamara was present, at last, in this place that had been her refuge for so long. But she couldn’t seem to pretend anymore. Not about Victor, not about Walter, not about Phyllis. Not about whatever she might be herself—
The trumpet swooped up and she arched back, fingertips brushing the sticky floor.
Someone was swinging from the ceiling.
A slow back and forth, like a mother rocking her baby’s cradle.
The legs twitched, one foot bare and the other in a bloody boot. With a wrench of effort that her belly would make her feel later, Tamara flipped upright.
The swinging changed direction. The rope groaned against the tree limb, and the man didn’t make a sound. A cool breeze brushed past; it smelled of creek mud and cut grass and, very faintly, of blood and urine.
Charlie put down his trumpet. “Is that blood?” he asked, and she was surprised, because that meant that they could all see the ghost of Pete Williams, who’d been lynched outside of town the year before she left Virginia.
A flash of silver—and then Victor sat in the empty chair across from Phyllis, lounging in a suit of narrow gray pinstripes and a navy-camel hat. He bared his gleaming teeth, said something Tamara couldn’t hear, and blew a long puff of smoke. It formed the shape of a gun and discharged a billowing bullet at Pea’s bowed head.
“Call a doctor! She’s fainted!”
Pea was slumped against the table, her glass in pieces on the wet floor. Blood dripped down her legs and mixed with the urine that she couldn’t hold back as the child turned in her belly, and saw and saw.
3
The doctor insisted on bed rest, on peace and quiet somewhere in the country. Pea hadn’t even asked; Tammy had looked at her huddled on that hospital bed and told her she’d be coming along.
Now they were here, too late and too cold for second thoughts, both haunted by ghosts that had no business following them so far up the Hudson.
Tamara and Mrs. Grundy between them managed to carry Phyllis upstairs. She came to silently, her eyes so full of pain that Tamara distracted herself with fluffing pillows and spreading an extra quilt. Those hands were, for now, quiescent. Mrs. Grundy proved to be a sober and unflappable companion in emergency, and Tamara found herself grudgingly grateful for the older woman’s presence. When the housekeeper produced a dark-green bottle of laudanum from her pocketbook, Tamara actually smiled. The drops, expertly administered by Mrs. Grundy, sent Phyllis into a quick and deep sleep.
“And the baby?” Tamara asked, entirely too late. She was breathing hard, as though she had finished her second stage show of the night. She did not look at Phyllis’s face, but her hands, limp against the blue-and-red quilt.
Mrs. Grundy slid the bottle back into her bag with fussy efficiency and regarded Tamara for several seconds longer than necessary. “I took it through all my pregnancies, and my sisters as well.”
It had been years since the last time Tamara had seen a laudanum dropper; they were generally the preference of a woman of a certain age and arthritic condition back in Lawrenceville. She wondered what other intoxicating substances Mrs. Grundy kept in that pocketbook, but she didn’t ask.
“And how old are your children now?” Tamara tried instead.
Mrs. Grundy sniffed. “Twenty-five and twenty-seven, the two who survived. May our Savior grant at least one of them comes home after this war.”
Tamara spared a wish for Phyllis, that she were well and here to squeeze her hand in warning and then bust out laughing when they were finally alone. Imagine—this was Phyllis’s voice in her head—all of us cooped up in this house all winter, and this white lady’s another one for the Club of Interminable Waiting. It explained why Dev had hired her, though.
They went to the basement, where Mrs. Grundy shoveled more coal into the stove, checked the pipes, and informed Tamara that she would return at noon to make luncheon and supper. Tamara did not attempt a repeat of the handshake, merely nodded like the highest-in-her-hat Richmond miss.
Tamara shook her head as she left. “And Mom wonders why I left the country,” she muttered.
Alone, she helped herself to the pot roast and gratin potatoes that Mrs. Grundy had left in the oven. Then Tamara pulled up a chair to the potbellied stove, still warm from the remains of the fire, and pulled out her cards. Even covered by the handkerchief, they felt warm to the touch, busting for revelation.
“Sorry, sweeties,” she whispered to them, “I had a busy day.”
The cards, one could say, knew more of Tamara than any lover or friend. They always would—that’s the fate of an oracle, to know the numbers and be known by them. The cards jumped in response to her touch, slid into elegant waterfalls and showed their bellies like lonely dogs, eager to please her after a long day of silence. The deck had belonged to her great-aunt Winnie, felled by a winter flu five years back. It was Aunt Winnie—and not the Baton Rouge conjure woman Tamara had invented to bolster her reputation—who had taught her great-niece the tricks of the cards: the shuffles, the deals, the sleights of hand, and, most important, the numbers. Aunt Winnie said her own mother had taught her, a New Orleans quadroon who sold her body to pious white men every Sunday afternoon to buy herself and her children out of slavery a few years before the war.
The role of the oracle is to see, not to change: Tammy’s quadroon great-grandmother had foreseen the war and got her children as far north as Virginia before bounty hunters ripped up their free papers and sold them all back again to a Richmond plantation. Her aunt Winnie, a week before she passed, had called Tamara to her room, though she didn’t seem very sick at all, and gave her the deck and the ivory handkerchief. It was monogrammed with a simple “P.,” but the knowledge of what that initial had meant to her ancestor was now all locked in the earth.
The deck itself was unmarked by any identifiable branding. Its heavy satin-finish paper had yellowed with age, and the embossing on the face cards had faded to a ghostly blue, such that in the low light of the fire, the queen and king of diamonds looked like African royalty, her ancestors before they were captured and dragged across an ocean to pick cotton. The face cards weren’t mirrored—the jacks and the kings even had legs like little drumsticks—and there was meaning in whether they laid themselves out upright or upside down. On the back of each card were two hands, one outlined blue and the other red, one closed fist and the other palm up. A wreath of brambles spiraled out from their central image. Sometimes Tammy read for card sharps, and sometimes just for interested boys who came to the club and passed their time with her. Some of them noted the deck, and a few of them tried to convince her to hock it. She left those schemers behind real quick. She knew the deck was a strange specimen. She felt its strangeness beneath her fingers; she didn’t need some antiques collector with a magnifying glass to tell her its value. These cards had been made for the same force that animated the dreams, and the uncanny luck that tra
iled behind them.
She wasn’t always good to the cards. Sometimes, she shied away from the dark stories in suits and numbers, and told pretty lies instead. She was good at pretty lies; no one had ever noticed but the cards, who stung her fingertips spitefully the next time she brought them out. She remembered Aunt Winnie’s voice, sharp and tired, “You think you can flirt and pretend your way out of any trouble, Tammy? You have a duty, and you’ll be old before you know it.”
She grimaced and poured a glass of wine. “Well, Aunt Winnie,” she said, “here I am, doing my duty, for all the good it’ll do me.” That word again. She tried to do good, she tried. But Tamara also wanted fine liquor and fur coats and long nights of jazz and conversation with anyone willing to bring a bit of themselves to the table, and why should she have had to choose between them? When Victor had offered her that chance, she took it, knowing full well what he was. And so had Phyllis—damn her for deciding she couldn’t handle the life anymore.
Still, some kind of grudging loyalty had made Tamara turn in her dancing shoes, get Phyllis into Dev’s old car, and bring them up here to wait out the winter. It was more than she’d done for anyone else in her life, a kindness so new it still felt stiff and scratchy against her skin. Giving a cousin someplace to stay for a few weeks was one thing; for Pea, she’d given up the Pelican, the city. She couldn’t regret the choice, but faced with the stark reality of this small house with its peeling wallpaper and old-fashioned furniture and antiquated heating, she comforted herself with liquor. At least she could use her cards for good here. Someone had to; those hands needed taming.
After midnight, she poured a third glass of wine and started a very specific reading. Not for Phyllis, which Tamara had done dozens of times before, but for her hands.
She’d never thought to do that before. The oracle judged her own lack of imagination.
One card, cut, second card, cut, third card.
Trouble the Saints Page 24
